Cum Laude

  “Where’s Shipley?” Nick demanded.

  Eliza made a face. “Who cares?” She’d gotten into the routine of hating Shipley. She even hated her underwear, which looked like it was dry-clean-only, and her jeans, which she hung up on hangers. Her jeans! “I think she already went to the barbecue. She said she’d meet us there.”

  The sun hung low and hot. The Grannies, Dexter’s Grateful Dead cover band, were tuning their guitars on a small makeshift stage beside the Pond, the impressive man-made lake on the edge of campus. It was an all-male band, but each of the Grannies wore the type of flowing Indian-print skirt bought from vendors in the parking lot at Dead concerts. Throngs of students milled around on the grass eating hamburgers and hot dogs cooked on smoking charcoal grills provided by Dexter Dining Services. A few students browsed the literature stacked on tables set up along the banks of the Pond, one table for each of Dexter’s special interest groups: the Women’s Group; the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Group; the Woodsmen’s team; the Chess Club; Dexter Recycles; the Dexter Republicans; the Dexter Democrats; Dexter ROTC; the Dance Club; the Drama Club; the Ultimate Frisbee Club; Dexter Vegetarians; the Knitting Circle. Some of the upperclassmen sipped from plastic cups of Busch near a cordoned-off keg manned by a security officer holding a sign that said, “Please provide ID.” Professor Darren Rosen stood on the fringes of the crowd drinking beer with a group of sleep-deprived poetry majors wearing woolen cardigans despite the heat.

  Nick spotted Shipley almost immediately. She was registering to vote at the Dexter Democrats table, aided by that redheaded guy from the farm.

  “Democrat, Independent, or None?” Shipley wondered aloud. “My parents are both Republicans.” She wasn’t sure about her brother. Probably he didn’t vote.

  “None,” Adam advised, wishing he could touch her hair. His parents had driven him to Augusta to register on April 10, the day he turned eighteen. They were both registered Democrats, but they’d told him not to register for a party unless he was sure who he wanted to vote for in the primaries, and how could he know that if he never bothered to read the paper or listen to NPR? They had both been gaga for Jerry Brown, and had helped him win the Maine caucuses, baking brownies for fund-raisers and cheering him on at rallies, but they didn’t seem to mind that Bill Clinton had won the Democratic nomination. “Clinton gives a fabulous speech,” his mom would say. “Plus he dodged the draft. And,” she’d continue, raising her voice, “he has gorgeous hands!”

  Tom surprised himself by not liking the sight of Shipley and Adam standing so close to each other, especially not near a table with Bill Clinton’s smiling face pasted to it. His parents were both Democrats, which he thought was hypocritical as hell. His dad had gotten very rich during the Reagan years, and Bush had won the Gulf War, pretty much. Didn’t he deserve some appreciation?

  “Good to see you again, man.” Tom clapped Adam hard on the back. “All set to vote?”

  Shipley wasn’t sure how much longer she could continue to discuss the election. Her political knowledge began and ended with the Gulf War was bad news, George Bush was old and boring, Ross Perot was old and crazy, and Bill Clinton was relatively young and handsome and played the saxophone and didn’t seem to mind that both his wife and his daughter had terrible hair. She’d only followed Adam over to the Dexter Democrats table in the first place to distract herself from the note scrawled on the dry-erase board outside her room. The keys are on the tire, the note read. She’d run across the road to check, and sure enough, the car was there, right where she’d left it.

  “I’m sorry.” The man seated behind the Democrats table offered her a sheet of white paper crammed with voting information. “You can’t use a college post office box as an address to register. You’re going to have to register in your home state and request an absentee ballot that you can fill out anytime before the election.”

  “Thanks.” Shipley took the sheet of paper and stuffed it into her bag. “You’ll never guess what happened to me today,” she gushed to Tom and the others. “First my car disappeared and then I got in trouble with Professor Rosen for going to the convenience store down the hill.”

  “I gave her a ride,” Adam piped up importantly.

  Nick tried to think of something interesting to report. “I got a job in AV.”

  Tom hitched up his shorts. “What’s that stand for anyway? Actually still a Virgin?”

  Nick glared at him. “No. It’s the audiovisual department. I set up the slide projectors and VCRs and show movies in the auditorium. I even get to do the lighting for plays.”

  “What’s wrong with being a virgin?” Shipley said, blushing.

  The three boys stared at her with barely concealed excitement. Shipley was still a virgin?

  “Hey, you know that blue light on top of the chapel tower?” Tom said. “Well, I heard there’s this Dexter myth that if a virgin ever graduates, the light goes out.” He nudged Nick in the arm. “Dude, we got to get you laid.”

  Shipley smiled. “Me too, I guess.”

  “I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” Tom said, grinning.

  Adam pretended to be distracted by the music. Nick scowled down at his shoes.

  Eliza’s eyes were glazing over. Listening to Shipley flirt with every guy in sight was even more excruciating than watching her hang up her jeans. Eliza had done away with her virginity at the ripe old age of fourteen with Fabrizio, her neighbor. He was sixteen and skinny, and spoke no English, having just arrived from Genoa. Fabrizio went on to impregnate Candace, one of the cheese girls at his father’s pesto business. They married, had twin girls, and were now obese.

  As far as the election was concerned, no matter what the Dexter Democrats wanted Eliza to believe about Bill Clinton, Ross Perot already had her vote. He was a fucking renegade badass who was going to revolutionize the whole fucking process. Not everyone fit in the box. In fact, she’d had an interesting run-in this morning with someone who definitely didn’t. She was in the room alone, studying cross-sections of a smiling chimpanzee’s brain in her Psychology textbook, when the door to the room started to rattle and shake. She thought maybe it was a tremor—she’d read somewhere that even Maine had tremors—but nothing else was shaking. She decided it must be Sea Bass and Damascus, throwing their beer guts around next door as they polished off another keg. She got up and opened the door.

  A guy stood in front of her, dry-erase pen poised. Despite the sweltering late summer heat, he wore a dirty black parka with a leaky tear in the chest, dirty maroon Dexter sweatpants, and dirty work boots. His long blond hair was matted and his beard was flecked with bits of grass and other miscellaneous crap.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “Leaving Shipley a note,” he told her gruffly.

  “Figures,” she said, and slammed the door.

  “The band’s starting,” Eliza observed now with a yawn. “Let’s get some food.”

  Adam followed the group to the food line. When he and Shipley had arranged to meet at the barbecue, he’d hoped the others would stay away. But wasn’t this what he wanted? Friends? A life? His sister had practically drop-kicked him out the door. “Get the fuck out of here,” she’d said. “And don’t come back till you’ve gotten some action.”

  The Grannies were playing “Sugar Magnolia.” Clouds of charcoal smoke drifted through the warm air. A group of girls with bells tied around their ankles danced in a ring, flipping their long hair from side to side, their eyes unfocused and their wrists limp. Professor Rosen lay on the grass while someone read her palm. She appeared to be a favorite among the older students. A group of freshman girls who looked about thirteen kicked off their flip-flops and dangled their feet into the lake, arms around each other’s shoulders as they swayed in time to the music. Beyond the lake and the smoky chaos surrounding it, Dexter’s brick buildings stood poised and resolute.

  Shipley tried to take everything in, but there was too much to process. With a total population of only nineteen h
undred, Dexter was a small college in a small town, but it still felt overwhelming compared to high school.

  She pressed her lips against her roommate’s ear. “Sea Bass and Damascus are going to finagle us some beer.”

  “Good for them.” Eliza sounded unimpressed. She resented it when boys waited on girls. She was trying to turn Shipley into a feminist.

  “They’re just being polite,” Shipley would argue. “They were taught to do that by their own mothers.”

  “Yes, but don’t you see?” Eliza would point out. “The more they wait on us, the weaker we are. It’s how they keep us down!”

  Shipley didn’t have an answer for that. She knew she could push a door open herself, but it sure was nice when a guy opened it for her.

  They loaded their plates. Two cheeseburgers with everything on them, a corn dog, and a huge pile of potato chips for Tom. Nick filled up a bun with potato chips, tomatoes, cheese, lettuce, pickles, mustard, and ketchup—a vegetarian’s delight. Eliza selected a foot-long hot dog, which Shipley was sure she was only eating because it was shaped like a penis. Shipley chose a bleu cheese burger with tomato. Adam got a hot dog with ketchup just to see if he could taste the rat testicles his mom insisted they were made with.

  “She’s got everything delightful,

  she’s got everything I need.

  Takes the wheel when I’m seeing double,

  pays my ticket when I speed…!”

  The singer’s dirty blond hair hung over his shoulders in matted dreadlocks. His voice was raspy, his blue eyes wide and excited. Tom stood to Shipley’s right, wolfing down his food. Shipley was glad she’d taken the time to brush her hair and change into her pretty white sundress from Martinique. She loved how soapy and clean Tom smelled most of the time, and how big he was. She felt safe with him. Since his arrival at the barbecue she’d paid no attention whatsoever to Adam, who stood to her left, quietly munching his hot dog.

  Nick had run out of pot. He ate his condiment-filled bun with forlorn sobriety, pretending not to care that Shipley’s attention was being monopolized. If Shipley were to choose either one of the others, Nick preferred Adam, but he could tell by the way she kept looking up at Tom between her long blond eyelashes that she was smitten with him. How she could like a guy who could eat a whole sausage pizza between dinner and bedtime and burp the national anthem he simply could not understand.

  “This music sucks,” Eliza noted to no one in particular. Mustard dripped down her chin, but she left it there on purpose.

  “I like it,” Shipley told her defiantly.

  “You would,” Eliza shot back.

  “Brewski anyone?”

  Sea Bass and Damascus danced over to them and passed out plastic cups full of Busch beer. A yellow bandanna was tied around Damascus’s unruly black curls. His wobbly stomach poked out above the waistband of his jeans. Sea Bass had done something to his sideburns. Their shape was more severe now, like sled runners zooming across his cheekbones toward his nostrils.

  “Marry me?” Sea Bass asked as he handed Shipley a beer.

  “Sorry, but she’s already spoken for.” Tom reached for a cup and downed most of it in one go. It had taken him all of a week to notice what everyone had seen from the start: Shipley was the best-looking girl on campus. And it wasn’t like they had to spend a lot of time getting to know each other. They were practically from the same town. They even went to the same dentist—Dr. Green, in Armonk.

  I’ll be damned if any of these clowns is going to nab her first, Tom thought. It would only be a matter of days before she’d be burning patchouli incense out of her belly button and dancing around topless in the grass. He could think of better things to do with her topless. He dropped his plate on the ground and slipped his arm around Shipley’s waist, claiming her before anyone else could.

  “Tom?” Shipley demanded. “What are you doing?”

  Tom pulled her toward him. He liked how small she was, how neat her waist felt under her thin dress. He yanked her plate out of her hands and dropped it on the grass. The fact that Damascus and Sea Bass and Nick and Adam and Eliza and half the campus were staring at him enviously increased the size of his balls. “Kissing you,” he announced before kissing her.

  Shipley had been kissed a few times during party games in ninth and tenth grade, but as she got older and more concerned with propriety—in the face of her brother’s impropriety—she’d stopped going to parties. She kissed Tom back eagerly, even daring to press her fingernails into his back. Tom smelled so manly. Kissing him made her feel like the star of a movie, except it was better than a movie because it was real. Her first week of college and she already had a boyfriend.

  “Look how cute they are together,” Eliza commented with disgust. “I heard while I was waiting on line in the employment office today that some insane number of Dexter students wind up marrying each other. Like sixty percent. Guess there’s not much else to do here besides fall in love.” She retrieved the dirty plates from the ground and stalked off to dump them in the trash.

  Adam sipped his beer without tasting it. He shouldn’t have come. He certainly wasn’t going to get any “action,” as his sister so aptly put it. Not that he’d wanted any. He just wanted to talk to Shipley, and maybe hold her hand.

  “And it’s just a box of rain, I don’t know who put it there. Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare….” Nick sang out loud so as not to notice that Shipley and Tom were still kissing.

  “I’m totally not marrying you now,” Eliza told him when she returned.

  The Grannies finished the song and put down their instruments. Nick thought he saw one of them exchange money with another student. Scoring some pot was crucial if he was going to have to watch Shipley and Tom kissing in the next bed for the rest of the year. Even more crucial was his idea of erecting a yurt out in the woods somewhere. He would need a place to go, an escape pod, a zen retreat. He might even get credit for building it.

  “Welcome to Dexter.” Darius Booth, the first Home-born president of Dexter College, took up a microphone in his frail hands and beamed at the crowd. He was eighty-two years old and had started as a janitor at the school, slowly working his way up the ranks and to the front page of the New York Times on his inauguration day. It was just the kind of small town story the Times liked to report during the summer when there wasn’t much newsworthy news and most of the writing staff was in the Hamptons or on Cape Cod. Mr. Booth was beloved by the college faculty and staff for his devotion to Dexter and for his steadfast, by-the-book leadership. The consensus among the students was that he was a bore. “This is the second or third or even fourth barbecue for some of you, but for our first-year students this night is very special. Why don’t we lead them in a round of ‘Bravo, Dexter, Bravo’? They’re going to have to learn it sometime. I’ll give you a hint, boys and girls,” he said in his hokiest Maine accent. “The tune sounds a little bit like ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”

  The Grannies dutifully picked up their instruments and played an intro to the college’s corny anthem. As long as they humored their dotty old president, he’d never bust them for doing and dealing drugs, or stealing ether from the chemistry lab.

  “Upon this hill, through winter’s chill, Dexter so divine. Snow swirls round our heads, trees wrapped in its glistening glory. Brave men and women write their own stories. Bra-vo, Dexter. Bra-vo.”

  Everyone was so busy trying to learn the song or mock the lyrics, no one noticed the tall, beautiful, dark-haired girl stride across the grass on the opposite side of the lake. It was Tragedy, looking like she’d gotten lost somewhere between Rio and Bangor, in a yellow bikini top, a flippy white miniskirt, and bare feet. She’d come to spy on Adam and the blonde from Connecticut, getting busy, and was disappointed to find Tom getting busy with the blonde instead. Adam held up his hand, signaling her to wait. He left the group of singing, dancing, kissing freshmen and circled the water, glad to have talked to Shipley for a little while at least. Maybe s
he’d think of him in November, when it came time to vote.

  7

  And so it went. Shipley lost her virginity to Tom that night. It was a Friday night, and Root’s halls and walls thrummed with music and general insouciance. Tom’s room was in the basement, near the dorm kitchen, and the air smelled perpetually of curry. Two windows at ground level faced the woods behind the dorm. Nick had decorated the white walls on his side of the room with trippy tapestries made from the same sort of cloth as the Grannies’ skirts, and the window ledge nearest his bed was strewn with candles and incense burners. The walls on Tom’s side of the room were bare. Beneath his bed was a pile of balled-up dirty socks. The bed was made up with the plaid flannel sheets his mother had had shipped directly to him from L.L.Bean. Nick’s bed didn’t have sheets, just a red nylon sleeping bag on top of the ticking-striped mattress, and a pillow in a plain white case.

  “I’ve never done this before,” Shipley murmured as Tom slipped her white dress over her head.

  “That’s okay,” Tom said. “I have.”

  Some girls might have been grossed out. They might have begun to imagine Tom with other slutty, possibly diseased girls. They might have imagined that Tom was an egomaniacal player, roving from girl to girl, always hungry and never satisfied. Some girls might have had a creeping fear that he would use them and then toss them out. But Shipley was not like other girls.

  She slipped beneath the covers while Tom lit one of Nick’s candles and put on his favorite Steve Miller Band tape. Then he tore off his clothes, threw them onto the floor on Nick’s side of the room, and grabbed a Trojan from his toiletry kit.

  Shipley lifted up the covers to welcome him in. “I knew you were the right man for the job,” she giggled nervously as Tom took her in his arms and began the quick work of deflowering her. As is the way with all rites of passage, it seemed to be over almost as soon as it had begun. It was inelegant, thrilling, and routinely monumental.