She was so close to that 3.0, and to the end of semester. If she could only make it through the next six weeks, she’d have the summer to get her shit together, to lie low, to give the university and her dorm’s resident advisor the chance to forget any of the minor troubles she might have contributed to in her freshman-wilding stage. A summer was all she needed; it would give her time to figure out a new income source, to close the wounds with Bryan, to seek out El Virus and find the peace and contentment that would guide her, uneventfully and without threat of university probation or scholarship loss, through the remainder of her university years. Easy.
“They don’t know,” Very told Bryan, not really believing her own words. “They can’t trace it to us.”
“They can,” Bryan said. “They will. We’ve created a monster. We need to summon a meeting. You, me, Lavinia, and Jean-Wayne. Find a remote place, and figure out our escape plan.”
“Passover dinner in Safe Haven, New Haven?” Very said.
CHAPTER 5
Passover for Beginners
“You smoke?” Lavinia said upon bursting unannounced into Very’s room at Aunt Esther’s.
Very sat hugging her knees in a window seat, her bare feet and legs under her loose skirt, seemingly not bothered by the cold air coming in through the open window as she smoothly exhaled her cigarette smoke out it. She rested a cheek against her knee as she took another drag and blew out a smoke ring.
“Only when I’m here,” Very said. No matter how welcoming Aunt Esther was, being at her house, in this attic room, was stressful. Very’s casual smoking habit became a necessity here. Returning to this home that was not her own brought up sad, unsettling memories of the displacement, loss, and heartache that had been Very’s high school years. All that angst was supposed to have gone away when she moved to New York to go to Columbia, like magic.
It had not.
Very looked around the attic bedroom that had been her high school sanctuary in the period after Cat died, when she’d been taken in by Aunt Esther. Very had remembered meeting her aunt a few times as a child—mostly remembered those meetings taking place soon after eviction notices or the expiration date on one of her mother’s boyfriends came due, necessitating a cash infusion from Aunt Esther—but those meetings were always in the city, at one of Aunt Esther’s choice urban destinations: Saks Fifth Avenue, Zabar’s, the Georgette Klinger or Elizabeth Arden salon. It had been almost surprising to discover Aunt Esther’s home dwelling in New Haven for the first time and to realize that the lady lived in an actual house and not within a grand store. Her house was a nice one, too, a beautiful old Victorian with secret rooms and closets and nooks to explore throughout, smelling like a custom old-lady blend of freshly brewed coffee, lemons, and BenGay. But neither of the two bedrooms available for Very’s choice had been to her liking; she’d begged for the attic, then spent weeks clearing and cleaning it out to make it suitable as her own bedroom. She’d liked the privacy and spookiness up there. If she was going to be a motherless teenager stranded at a great-aunt’s house in New Haven, Very wanted her room to reflect her circumstances. To live in the attic was to be the damsel in distress, the prisoner in the tower.
Also, Aunt Esther, frugal spawn of the Great Depression that she was, refused to pay for an Internet connection, and the attic was the only place where Very could reliably pick up the neighbor’s wireless.
“I can’t believe I’ve lived with you all this time and not known you smoke.” Lavinia grabbed the half-burned hand-rolled cigarette from Very and deposited it in Very’s soda glass. “And if you can make your own cigarettes and blow smoke rings that efficiently, you’re obviously way too experienced with this vice.”
“Great,” Very said. “Now you’ve wasted my cigarette and my Coke. You owe me five dollars.” Cigarettes were like IMs from El Virus, Very thought. Once you started, you just wanted more more more, a physical craving embedded into your internal code whether you realized it was happening or not. But there it was: a wanting, that grew into a hunger, that grew into a burning need. Never deflating or dissipating.
“You owe me five dollars,” Lavinia reminded Very.
“Then we’re even.” The instant nicotine surge from the half cigarette she’d smoked now made Very wish she could pass the rest of this Passover thingie chain-smoking in the attic. More nicotine. More badness. More Please, El Virus, where the fuck are you?
Longing. Why did it never stop?
“And your reward is that you now have that much less chance of cancer and obesity. You’re welcome.” Lavinia turned off the small desk fan that Very used to help blow the smoke directly out the window. Advancing age might have caused Aunt Esther to lose many of her physical abilities, like climbing the stairs to the attic, but the woman could smell cigarette smoke probably even from the basement. Two things Aunt Esther would not tolerate: cigarettes and the f-word.
She also wasn’t fond of female newscasters who broadcast their cleavage along with the death and despair of the world, or weathermen generally, and more specifically weathermen with highlights in their hair. But who could blame Aunt Esther, really?
“And I didn’t hand-roll this cigarette,” Very said. “I bummed it off Hector. He makes his own.”
“Hector?”
“The janitor.” In response to Lavinia’s blank stare, Very added, “At our dorm.”
“You mean Hector the Janitor who hates all of us overprivi-leged college kids and says the girls on campus dress like putanas?”
“Yup, that Hector. Hombre rolls some tiiiight shit.”
Lavinia shook her head. “You still owe me five dollars.”
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Very sighed.
“Don’t drama-queen,” Lavinia said. “The sacrifice of a cigarette and a Coke is not that tragic. And we both know I’ll never see that five bucks again, so don’t sweat it.”
“I wasn’t planning to. I just needed to let the f-word out a few times before we go back downstairs with Aunt Esther. Get it out of my system. You brought the boys with you?”
Very had taken the early-morning train out to New Haven, ahead of her dorm friends, and ahead of the meeting with her resident advisor she’d conveniently forgotten. She told Lavinia she was heading out early to help Aunt Esther prepare dinner, but really she wanted some alone time to hunt for El Virus online. Not that Very couldn’t hunt for him online in their dorm room while students flowed in and out of it regularly; certainly no one would be the wiser. But this El Virus disappearance was getting dire. Very wanted to hunt for her private man in private. She felt like desperation might be starting to show on her face, or in the aggressive taps of her fingers on her keyboard.
MIA.
Still.
Was it possible to sue an online paramour for loss of electronic affection? Very had grown used to “seeing” El Virus on a regular basis—his status updates, his IMs, his virtual-world avatar (a monk), his naughty photos depicting him in various stages of icon fetish. To take that away from her so callously was an act of cruelty and desertion conceivably at the level of litigation.
His photos never showed his full face. He often wore a mask, so she’d seen him as a Teletubby, as Darth Vader, as Madonna (cone-breast era), as disgraced former president Richard Nixon (her personal favorite—it was E.V. holding up his peace-sign fingers that clinched it). Inspired by the Madonna shot, she’d responded in kind, sending him only cleavage shots of herself: Very in Elizabethan costume; Very in a too-small, too-tight Gap T-shirt; Very introducing her sister cupcakes, Blossom (red velvet) and Round (straight-up choc on choc). No, no, make that: boobs in Elizabethan costume; boobs in too-tight tee; delicious Blossom and Round, waiting to be monk-devoured.
Another thing. How had civilization existed before the camera phone? How did one even pass time before instant electronic gratification became imprinted into human evolution?
So many questions, for El Virus, for the universe. So few answers. None, to be precise.
Wh
ile Very had twittered at Aunt Esther’s, Lavinia had gone out to New Jersey to borrow her parents’ car and driven back into the city to pick up the boys to bring them all to New Haven for the seder with Very and Aunt Esther. Rare possession of a vehicle, all agreed, mandated a shopping trip to Target on the way home, and this almost made the excursion to New Haven seem exciting. So many dangerous experiences could be on the horizon in New Haven, outside the cozy confines of their Manhattan college campus. Target could happen. Maybe even IKEA. And, of course, the escape-route master plan—to be plotted after dinner—which would swallow The Grid and make possible the rest of their undergraduate academic careers.
Passover would also mark the first time since before Spring Break that the two sets of roommates had been together, this foursome who’d seemed inseparable until recently. Very suspected they all hoped the time together would pass over quickly. She’d commemorate the awkward feeling by programming the Passover dinner playlist with songs by famous Jews like Sammy Davis Jr. and Bob Dylan (even if she wasn’t a fan) and a bevy of Spring Break–themed beach songs cut in with forlorn “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ”–type songs.
Lavinia said, “Bryan and Jean-Wayne are present and accounted for. Your aunt asked them to go to the basement for a ladder and then go outside to replace some lightbulbs in the garage. That lady is impressive. We were barely in the door two minutes and she’d put the boys to work. What have you been cooking all day? The kitchen smells great.”
Very had been cooking a plot to skywrite the world with messages to El Virus until he showed himself back online, where he belonged. Instead, while Aunt Esther fussed in the kitchen, Very, unable to forage El Virus, had passed the day blasting heavy-metal music along with Aunt Esther–inspired Mel Tormé croon tunes while logged in to her favorite virtual otherworld, the one where her avatar was way skinnier than she’d ever be, had glorious curly red hair that never spazzed when it rained, and, most important, could fly like a superhero and ride a motorcycle like a badass. Very wouldn’t waste her energy feeling bad about not helping her aunt cook the Passover meal. Aunt Esther was a kitchen tyrant, and they’d discovered long ago that they coexisted best when the aunt cooked and the niece did the dishes after the meal.
Very grabbed Lavinia’s hand and led her down the creaky attic stairway. She sprayed air freshener along their path, then deposited the bottle at the foot of the stairs, where a prominent ring stain in the wood marked the spot upon which Very had been depositing the air freshener bottle since she’d started secretly semi-smoking (only bumming cigs, never buying, therefore not truly a smoker) at age sixteen.
Lavinia coughed. “I really don’t think your aunt can smell the cigarette smoke up here. Gosh, choke me much?”
“I just wanted to bathe you in the seducing scent of Tropical Rain Forest.”
“Bathe me in the scent of smoke-free air, please. I’ll settle for that.”
“You want to bathe with me?” Very teased. “I thought you saved that for your locker-room crew girls.”
“Only in your fantasies.”
“So if it’s not a crew girl … what kind of fantasies are you harboring about Bryan right now? Heh-heh.”
“I’m meh on Bryan now. Not heh-heh. Before, his shy awkward was kind of cute. Now, since he’s so obviously weird with you because of the Spring Break thing, he’s awkward with me, too, by extension. He doesn’t look me in the eye anymore. Doesn’t come find me for lunch. It’s not fun to try having a crush on him. My like-like liking moment for him passed, I think. Oh well.”
Lavinia’s Easy come, easy go sigh indicated no heartache whatsoever at the loss of Bryan from her crush list. Very wished her own crushes could be so nonobsessive. She wished she didn’t agonize day and night, moment to moment, about where the hell El Virus had gone. Life stuff that Very was supposed to be getting done in the meantime was not getting done because of said obsessing. Very wished she had even one iota of Lavinia’s common sense.
Lavinia added, “At least we won’t have to stock up so heavy on the Chewy Chips Ahoy! if Bryan’s not coming around so often. He was the prime abuser of those.”
Amazing. Even fiscally, Lavinia could turn what seemed like a sad situation into a happy one.
Very said, “Eh. The ‘meh,’ I understand.” As sex went, Bryan had been a disappointment. His potent sensual power was that he was an awesome cuddle buddy. It was so gay and endearing about him.
The girls rounded the stairs to the second level of the house, where they found Jean-Wayne, whose potent sensual power was that he wouldn’t turn down an elderly hostess who asked him to perform a chore before dinner. He was standing on a ladder in Aunt Esther’s bedroom, changing a lightbulb.
“How many multilingual Canadian-Chinese engineering majors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Jean-Wayne asked them.
“How many?” Lavinia and Very replied.
“Je ne sais pas, I can’t decide. But if you find another one, could you send him or her my way, because I am highly in need of a doppelganger. Ni-hao.” He paused. “And some help, please! Hand me that bulb on the bed, will you?”
Jean-Wayne’s parents, a French-Canadian artist mother and Vancouver-based Chinese businessman father, were both Francophiles and cowboy movie aficionados; they’d met in a Montreal patisserie next door to a revival house cinema where they’d both been to see a matinee showing of Stagecoach, starring John Wayne. They’d named their hybrid boy in tribute to their hybrid passions.
Bryan, whose name, alas, stood for nothing other than “Bryan,” bounded up the stairs and stood in the doorway to Aunt Esther’s bedroom. “How many Gridkeepers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” he asked the assembled team.
“How many?” Very, Lavinia, and Jean-Wayne responded in unison.
“Three, apparently,” Bryan said.
“Was that supposed to be funny?” Jean-Wayne asked.
Bryan said, “No. Just logical. Very, Lavinia, you. One-two-three. It takes all of you, apparently, to screw in the lightbulb. Jean-Wayne on the ladder, Lavinia holding the ladder still, and Very to sit on the bed, compulsively fixated on her iPhone while you two do the work.”
No one laughed.
Bryan’s unfunny-isms used to be hilarious. Or maybe they’d been too stoned.
“Logic is overrated,” Very said. She wanted to add, As are your tongue-kissing abilities, Bryan-boy. Learn the art of flutter and not of slobber, will you? She started to Google “better kissing methods” on her iPhone to pass the information over to Bryan, then decided such information gathering would not be in the best interests of keeping the group happily assembled for their religious observation. In all fairness, though, while Bryan’s kissing abilities left something to be desired, the boy knew how to work his hands. He’d probably be pleased to know that Very rated him an A-for-effort student, with a B— in ability, but with potential to improve, given the right mentor-girl. A less fickle one.
The lightbulb in place, Jean-Wayne stepped off the ladder as the group gathered around Very on Aunt Esther’s bed.
“So what are we going to do?” Lavinia asked.
“We have to take down The Grid,” Bryan said.
Problem: The Grid had gotten out of hand. What had started out as the two sets of roommates’ online diversion for John Jay Hall had spread across campus. Everyone wanted in. The Grid’s platform had gone largely unnoticed or uncared about by the university administration until the great Valentine’s Day flash-mob massacre, when approximately a hundred students—many of them not even freshmen, most not from John Jay, and some, reportedly, drop-ins from NYU and Hunter College—had chosen the university president’s speech to Wall Street recruiters and a large segment of the Columbia Business School population to spontaneously start singing “U Can’t Touch This” every time the president gestured with his microphone. The phallic symbolism had not been lost on the crowd, nor had the flash mob’s breakdancing, which, while not offensive, had just been plain bad. Very had noted
for future flash-mob events: Leave the dancing to the MC Hammer professionals of the world and just stick with song. It was only because the mob had dispersed after the second round of gesturing that the event had not gotten totally out of hand (so to speak).
“I agree with Bryan,” Lavinia said. “The Grid has gotten too big and it’s taking away from our schoolwork.” She glanced in Very’s direction. “Yours in particular, Very.”
“Disagree,” Jean-Wayne said. “I support freedom of expression. Can’t let the tyrants shut us down.”
The group paused, waiting for Very to weigh in with an opinion. But instead of Googling “better kissing methods” for Bryan, she’d done an image search of the word “fickle,” and the search results had popped up some hilarious cartoons, pornographic art, and bird-flipping angry-bitch photos, all of which were most entertainingly occupying her attention. She was aware of the conversation going on, but as background noise.
Lavinia grabbed Very’s iPhone and placed it in her jeans pocket. She told Very, “That’s time-out number one. Don’t make me have to take this away from you all night. You’ll get it back when we finish this discussion. We’re waiting to hear your opinion about what to do with The Grid.”
“Agree with Jean-Wayne’s disagree,” Very said. She loved it when Lavinia played rough. “We’ve invested way too much in developing it to let it go under now.”
“So why’d you have to go and print a newsletter advertising what’s supposed to be a covert online thing?” Bryan said to Very.
“Yin-yang,” Very said. “Every movement requires a counter-movement.”
“We’re a movement?” Lavinia said.
Jean-Wayne said, “Not a political movement. I think Very means that any flash-mob movement of cool needs a counter-movement of uncool.”