“Hell Week? Is this, like, hazing? You’ve got to be kidding. I mean, why would you join a ‘club’ that tortured you for a week?”
“It helps you bond,” Nicole said, and Craig choked a little on his milkshake. The way she said it was so sweet, so utterly naïve. “It makes it so you’re really sisters,” she went on.
“Nicole, I thought you already did this during ‘Challenge’ Month. I mean, if having to wear the same pair of panties for four weeks didn’t cement your bond, what good will Hell Week do?”
“Come on, Craig. You promised not to joke about that.”
He nodded. He had. He’d promised up and down as a way of getting her to tell him what she was so self-conscious about in November. He’d assumed she was planning on dumping him, since every time he kissed her she found some reason to squirm away, and even in the cafeteria she sat as far from him as you could get and still be technically eating a meal with someone. He’d showed up outside the Omega Theta Tau house after one of her “secret meetings” on a Tuesday night, holding a bouquet of red roses, and she’d burst into tears and started to run away from him. By the time he finally caught up with her, half a block away, he was crying, too. He grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away and she started to beg, “Please, please, just stay away from me for a few more days.”
“Why? Nicole, I love you. What’s wrong?”
She ran a little farther, but weakly, seeming to be losing her will to run from him, until he managed to pull her into an alleyway between a liquor store and a sushi place. By this time, he’d already tossed the roses onto a park bench. He grabbed her arms in both of his and pulled her to him, and she sobbed, but she also went limp when he wouldn’t let go, and he muttered into her hair, “Please. Nicole. I’m dying here. I love you. Just tell me.”
“You’ll hate me,” she said. She sobbed. “You’ll think I’m so stupid. You’ll think I’m so, so—gross. You’ll laugh at me, or you’ll tell people. You’ll—”
“Don’t tell me what I’ll do, Nicole! There’s nothing that would make me hate you. And I’d never betray you. You’re the most precious, the most—”
“Okay! Okay! My underpants!” she shouted. Some guy walking by the alley did a double-take then, and Nicole cringed, buried her head in her hands, and said it again in a ragged whisper. “My underpants.” And again. “My underpants.”
“What?” A slideshow of brief, crazy images flashed through his mind. He saw a football team throwing Nicole’s panties around on a field, panties flown from a flagpole, panties for sale on eBay, photographs of panties tacked to bulletin boards, and then she said, “They’re dirty. You’ll just tell me how stupid I am.”
It took a long time in the alley, and a lot of tears soaked into his corduroy jacket, to get the story out. She had three more days to wear them. On Saturday she had to hand over the filthy things to the Omega Theta Tau president in some sort of ritual celebration of sisterhood. Then she could wear new ones.
Nicole sobbed, “I can smell them.”
It was hard not to laugh, but even harder not to lecture:
“This is absurd, Nicole. You’re not joining the armed forces here. You shouldn’t have to do this kind of shit just to live in a big house with a bunch of prom queens.”
“I knew you’d—!”
“Okay, okay,” Craig said, and closed his mouth by pressing his lips to her forehead.
That was back in November. Now, the first week of March, she was informing him that for Hell Week she wasn’t going to be able to leave the basement of the Omega Theta Tau house except to attend classes.
“What the hell—no pun intended—are you going to be doing down there?”
“They don’t tell you. But the girls from last year said it was mostly different projects. Stuff for events. And tests on Pan-Hellenic things, facts. The Founders.” She shrugged.
“That’s total, unadulterated bullshit,” Craig said. “Why would you need to be in the basement?”
“It’s a trial.” Nicole lifted her chin, and he could see that it was quivering. “It’s a tradition.” She lifted a shoulder, let it fall. “I actually think it sounds fun.”
“Fun?”
“You’re not in a fraternity, Craig. I don’t think you can relate to . . . to . . .”
“You got that right,” Craig said. The waitress came over to their table then and started to take Nicole’s plate away even though she’d never touched her grilled cheese. Craig put his hand out and waved the waitress away. “She’s still eating that,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” the waitress said without a shred of sarcasm, and held her hands up as if he’d tried to slap her. She was one of those infuriating middle-aged Midwestern women who used her friendliness like a weapon. Already she’d complimented everything about the two of them before she’d bothered to take their orders—I love your coat, I love your sweater, I love your hair thing, I love your ring, I love your boots. Craig had stared at the menu, imagining his mother shooing this woman away: Thanks, we love you, too . . .
But Nicole engaged the waitress exuberantly, told her that the sweater was from the Gap, that Craig’s coat was from the Salvation Army (!), that the hair thing was just a scrunchie of her sister’s, that the boots were Uggs, and the ring—Craig had given her the ring.
Here, at least, Craig quit grimacing at his menu and looked up at the waitress looking at the ring on Nicole’s right hand. Nicole held it up to her like a queen waiting for it to be kissed.
“Wow,” the waitress said, taking Nicole’s little fingertips in her own, twisting her hand so she could see the ring in better light. “Wow. It’s sap, isn’t it? There’s . . . something in it.” She bent down to look at it closely.
“A little fruit fly,” Nicole said proudly. “It could be forty million years old.”
Craig had told her this.
His science teacher in sixth grade at Fredonia Middle had kept a little collection of things stuck in amber—a spider, a frog, some mosquitoes. He’d even had a piece of amber with what looked like a long black hair floating in it, and another with two sad little ants scrambling over each other to get out before they were trapped in the stuff forever. Craig had been horrified and thrilled by the idea that, as Mr. Barfield had explained it, they’d probably stumbled in there in the first place because they were attracted to the whole sticky mess. Imagine, he’d thought, having the evidence of your fuck-up preserved for millions of years in amber.
“It’s not sap,” Craig told the waitress. “It’s resin.”
The waitress nodded then as if that were the most interesting thing she’d ever heard in her life, left their table finally, tossed the piece of paper with their order at the cook, and then disappeared, later leaving their sandwiches under the red lamps on the counter between the kitchen and the restaurant for a good ten minutes. When she finally brought them over to the table, they were stone-cold.
“Why do you have to be so negative?” Nicole asked after the waitress was gone. “What difference does it make? If you were a Greek, you’d be doing something like this, and I’d understand.”
“Look, Nicole. Hell Week, whatever. Do what you have to do—but, like, don’t expect me not to be unhappy that I’m not going to see you for a week. I mean, if you were going to Spain or something, I’d get it, but sewing doilies in a basement?”
The tears that had been pricking at the inner corners of Nicole’s eyes ever since he’d waved the waitress away turned into the real thing. When they started to run pathetically down the side of her nose, one of them even spilling over her upper lip, Craig jumped up from his seat and came around to her side of the booth, and put his arms around her, and kissed it away.
“Never mind, never mind. I’m an asshole, I’m sorry,” he said, kissing and kissing. “Do your damn doilies. Just come back to me. I can’t survive without you.” He took her face in his hands and looked at it.
Nicole inhaled a wavering, aborted laugh before she put her head on his shoulder and started to cry even harder:
“But you’re never going to understand. It’ll always be this thing between us. You’ll always be laughing at me. I just—”
“Are you saying you want to break up?” Craig asked, stiffening, trying not to shout it. He was painfully aware of the waitress hovering around behind him now, and knew she wasn’t going to go anywhere until she’d caught enough of this conversation to figure out what the problem was. He lowered his voice, and said, “So, you want to dump me for some frat asshole? Is that what this is about?” He started to pull away, and then Nicole reached out and grabbed the lapel of his corduroy jacket, bunched it up in her fist, the way a baby would, and it made him want to start sobbing, too, looking at her small soft hand clutching at his Salvation Army jacket. (She’d bought it for him. She and her sorority sisters had gone to the thrift shop to buy costumes for some carnival they were planning, and she’d seen it there. “I knew you’d look so cute in it! And it was your size!”)
“No, Craig. No. I want you, but I just wish—”
“I told you, Nicole, I’ll think about it. I can’t join this year anyway. Next year, okay? I’ll think about next year, okay?” She didn’t nod or say anything, just continued to clutch the jacket with her face against his shoulder. “Okay?”
She whimpered a little, and then she said, “No. You won’t. You’d hate it.”
Craig was about to try to deny it, but then she looked up at him and she had a little smile on her face—a wistful, regretful little smile like nothing he’d ever seen on her face before, maybe never before seen on anyone’s face.
She said it again, “You’d hate it,” and started to laugh. “I can just see you.” She was laughing really hard now, and he started to laugh, too, looking at her, looking at him, regarding him, and he realized what it was, that expression—that she was recognizing him, that she knew him for exactly what he was, and it amused her:
Despite herself, she liked what she saw.
She maybe loved what she saw.
He could see it in her eyes.
Had anyone ever looked at him that way?
Craig felt as if he were made of glass, that a note played now on a violin or a flute could shatter him into a thousand pieces. He was trembling, he realized, and he had her hair in his hands, and he was trying to keep himself from sobbing out loud, and he vowed in that moment, not for the first time, that whatever she wanted, whatever it took to keep her, for the rest of his life, for the rest of her life, he would do it.
A bitterly cold wind blew through their booth at that moment, and he instinctively turned to look at the door of the diner. Someone had come in—a silhouetted figure in the doorway, blurred in Craig’s teary eyes—and the figure stood in the threshold for a second or two before Craig, blinking, looking more closely, recognized him just as he turned quickly and walked back out the door.
Craig pulled away from Nicole, and nodded toward the door. “That was him,” he said.
“Who?”
“That guy. The EMT guy, Nicole. The fucking ambulance driver. He saw us, and he left.”
“What EMT guy?” Nicole asked, bringing her napkin to her eyes to wipe them. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve seen him, that guy, like five times at your sorority. I told you already. Remember? I told you that I keep seeing him around there. Who is he?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Craig. I don’t even know what EMT stands for.”
Craig didn’t bother to argue with her, or to tell her what EMT stood for. He watched the plate glass window to see if the guy would walk past it, but he must have gone the other way: To avoid the window? To avoid being seen by Craig?
Craig stood up, as if to follow, although he had no idea what he’d do if he caught up with the guy—and, anyway, Nicole took the sleeve of his jacket in her hand and tugged him back down to her, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him so sweetly, and for so long, that even the waitress, who’d been watching them, must have felt embarrassed, and went away.