Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [39]
Shipley stood up to leave, but Professor Rosen held up her hand. “Not so fast. We’re supposed to talk about whether you like your classes or not and what you want to major in. Do you miss home, are you happy, that sort of thing.”
Shipley shrugged her shoulders. “So far I love it.”
Professor Rosen smiled. “You wouldn’t believe how rarely I hear that.”
Success!
Shipley wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but she and Professor Rosen were practically best friends now. Outside the office, she scribbled Tom’s name on the sign-up sheet for the play, ignoring the rush that coursed through her when her fingertips accidentally grazed the green A of Adam’s name.
9
November was a curious month. Some days it was warm as summer. Some days it rained. And some days the wind ripped the leaves off the trees and scattered them mercilessly all over campus. Buildings and Grounds worked round the clock to keep the quad green and leaf-free. Weekends the leaves were burned, filling the air with pungent gray smoke. The heat had come on in the dorms and hot chocolate was served in the dining halls. There was a briskness to the student body, too. Midterms weren’t far off, and after that, vacation. Of course Thanksgiving was first, but anyone who lived farther away than New York stayed on campus for the turkey buffet in the dining hall.
Now was the time when students became aware of how well they were doing in school. Tom was nearly failing Portraiture. Economics was impossible. English sucked. Geology required way too much memorization. And there was a good chance he would be replaced in Professor Rosen’s one-act play, meaning that he would fail to obtain the extra credit. Today he’d decided to try something new.
“It’s like this,” Wills explained. He tied his long platinum dreadlocks in a knot on top of his head to keep them out of the way of the hot pink ecstasy tablets he was counting out on Root’s kitchen table. “You do E every two days. On the off days you smoke pot and cook huge meals and eat like a king. On E days you chew gum—lots of it—and run around outside. Or, if you can’t get any E, you steal ether from the chemistry lab. It doesn’t last and it stinks, but man—you got to try it at least once. Between the drugs and the running around and the healthy food, your body stays in shape, and basically you’re golden.”
Each tiny pink pill had the almond-shaped outline of an eye stamped on it. Tom watched as Wills sorted the tablets into neat piles, four for each of the Grannies, and four for him. He’d agreed to purchase the E on the condition that the Grannies do it with him, in case he freaked out.
Back in Bedford, Tom had stayed away from drugs. Mostly because of sports, but also because he wasn’t sure how he’d behave. Drinking was okay. His parents drank. Everybody drank. His dad was even cool with picking him up at rugby team parties at 3 A.M. when he was stark raving shit-faced with puke on his shirt. Still, he’d always been curious about drugs, and now that he was away at college, why not? Mainly he was looking for a way to loosen up.
“Dig deeper. Go nuts. Let yourself come unhinged!” Professor Rosen had screamed at him during his first rehearsal. Then she and that quiet kid, Adam, had stood there gawking at him and waiting for him to go nuts, but all he could do was talk louder and wipe his nose a lot and apologize for being such a shitty actor and forgetting his lines.
“You will never create something that is truly yours until you let go of your inhibitions,” his painting teacher, Mr. Zanes, would murmur. Mr. Zanes was a whispering graybeard who padded around the studio in bare feet and was forever sucking on lollipops. “For my laryngitis,” he said. Apparently his work was all the rage in Prague in the early eighties, but the only evidence of his artistry was a teetering mound of lollipop wrappers in the corner of the studio.
Of course it was nearly impossible for Tom to let go of his inhibitions when the subject of every class was Eliza in all her naked glory. Eliza sitting with