I told her all about my new classes, and about the crazy lengths I was going to so my parents wouldn’t find out: sending them biology tests with improving scores (Dee’s and my lengthy study sessions are paying off) but also sending them my old chemistry lab partner’s tests, with my name on them. I figured she’d get a good laugh about this, but instead her voice had stayed flat, and she’d warned me about the kind of trouble I’d be in if I got caught—as if I didn’t already know that. Then I’d switched gears, telling her all about Professor Glenny and Dee and reading out loud and how mortifying I’d thought it would be to read in front of the class but how everyone does it and it isn’t so bad. I’d expected her to be excited for me, but her voice had been practically monotone, and I’d found myself getting so angry. We haven’t talked or emailed in a couple of weeks, and I’m both upset about it and relieved too.
I’d kind of like to tell Dee about this, but I’m not sure how to do it. Aside from Melanie, I’ve never had a really close friend, and I’m unclear how you make one. It’s silly, I know. I’ve seen other people do it. They make it seem so easy: Have fun, open up, share stories. But how am I supposed to do that when the one story I really want to tell is the very one I’m supposed to be wiping clean? And besides, the last time I did open up to somebody . . . well, that’s precisely why I’m in need of a tabula rasa in the first place. It just seems safer to keep it like it is—friendly, cordial, nice and simple.
At the end of February, my parents come up for Presidents’ Weekend. It’s the first time they’ve been up since Parents’ Weekend, and having learned my lesson, I go to elaborate lengths to keep up the image they expect of me. I put my clocks back out. I highlight pages in my unused chemistry textbook and copy labs out of my old lab partners’ book. I make us lots of plans in Boston to keep us off campus, away from incriminating evidence and the Terrific Trio (who now have become more of a Dynamic Duo anyway because Kendra’s always with her boyfriend). And I tell Dee, with whom I now study on weekends sometimes, that I won’t be around and that I can’t get together Friday and Monday.
“You throwing me over for Drew?” Drew is the second best Shakespeare reader in the class.
“No. Of course not,” I reply, my voice all pinched and panicked. “It’s just I have one of those trips with my ceramics class Friday.” This isn’t entirely untrue. My ceramics class does go on field trips occasionally. We’re experimenting with glazes, using different kinds of organic materials in the kiln, and sometimes even firing our pottery outside in earthen furnaces we build. I do have field trips, just not in the next couple of days.
“And I’ll probably work on a paper this weekend.” Another lie; the only class I have papers for is Shakespeare. It’s amazing how good at lying I’ve become. “I’ll see you Wednesday, okay? I’ll bring the cookies.”
“Tell your grandma to send some more of those twisty ones with the poppy seeds.”
“Rugelach.”
“I can’t say it. I just eat it.”
“I’ll tell her.”
The weekend with my parents goes decently enough. We go to the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Science. We go ice skating (I can’t keep my blades straight). We go to the movies. We take tons of pictures. There’s an awkward moment or two when Mom pulls out next year’s course catalog and starts going over class schedules with me and then asks me about my summer plans, but I just listen to her suggestions like I always have and don’t say anything. By the end of the weekend, I feel drained in the same way that I do after a marathon session of reading Shakespeare aloud and trying to be all those different people.
On Sunday afternoon, we’re back at my dorm before dinner when Dee pops by. And though I haven’t told him one single thing about my family, not even that they were coming, let alone what they believe about me, what they expect of me, he still shows up in a pair of plain jeans and a sweater, something I’ve never seen him wear before. His hair is pulled back into a cap and he’s not wearing lip gloss. I almost don’t recognize him.
“So, how do you two know each other?” Mom asks after I nervously introduce them.
I freeze, in a panic.
“We’re biology lab partners,” Dee says, not missing a beat. “We’re raising the Drosophila together.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him pronounce it correctly. He picks up the tube. “Breeding all kinds of genetic abnormalities here.”
My dad laughs. “They had us do the same experiment when I went here too.” He looks at Dee. “Are you pre-med also?”
Dee’s eyebrows flicker up, the slightest ripple of surprise. “I’m still undeclared.”
“Well, there’s no rush,” Mom says. Which almost makes me laugh out loud.
Dad turns to puts the tube back next to a cylinder of pottery I forgot to hide away. “What’s this?”
“Oh, I made that,” Dee says, picking up the piece. And then he starts explaining how he’s taking a pottery class, and this year’s class is experimenting with different kinds of glazes and firing methods, and for these pieces, they fired everything in an earthen kiln fueled by cow patties.
“Cow patties?” Mom asks. “As in . . . feces?”
Dee nods. “Yes, we went to local farms and asked if we could collect their cow manure. They actually don’t smell that bad. They’re grass-fed cows.”
And it hits me then that Dee is using another voice, but this time, the person he’s playing is me. I had told him all about the cow patties, the earthy smell, collecting them from the farms . . . though when I’d done it, he’d laughed his head off at the thought of all us rich kids at our forty-thousand-dollar-a-year school paying for a class in which we went to farms and picked up after cows. I’ve told Dee more about myself than I guess I realized. And he listened. He paid attention, absorbed a bit of me. And now he’s saving my ass with it.
“Cow feces. How fascinating,” my mother tells him.