Chapter 33

It was close to eleven when I awoke. Larry was already up and gone. If he’d been out partying last night as usual, then he had remarkable recuperative powers. Perhaps I should ask him for lessons, ‘cause I was still exhausted. In a good way.

I felt better after I’d showered and changed, and went to get something to eat. It was too late for breakfast, so I had lunch instead.

“Mister Carter. How was your weekend?”

I looked up, the sandwich still in my mouth. I held up one finger telling him to wait, and chewed the bite in my mouth until I was able to speak without spewing bread crumbs all over the table.

“Hello, Al. It was fine, thank you. I went to a movie.”

He asked about the movie, interested. Apparently movie-going had been a big part of Alfonso’s youth, but had tapered off as he approached secondary school graduation and his parents impressed upon him how important grades were going to be.

“I should start going to the movies again,” he told me. “I think they might help me to become more comfortable with the language.”

“It might at that. The movie I saw was in French, with subtitles, but I was trying to hear it only in the French language. I told you I’d lost some of my ability with it because I have no chance to speak it anymore.”

“Well, it is good to meet someone who has some of the same problems that I do. English is still something of a struggle for me.”

“What did you do with your weekend if you didn’t go to the movies?”

He smiled and right away I knew the answer.

“Ah, yes. I met a new friend. We spent some time together. You may have seen her, if I remember right. You walked past us when we were talking in the quad. Do you recall?”

I did. The smitten young coed who had shyly passed him her phone number on a piece of paper. I nodded.

“Lovely young woman. Patricia, her name is. We spent some time together Friday evening. We had such a good time that it continued all day Saturday into the evening.”

“And you are still able to walk?”

He looked at me, then burst out laughing. Heads turned. He had a full, joyful laugh, nothing false about it at all, and it made people look around to see what was so amusing.

“Carter, you make a jest. You are very funny. Yes, I can still walk. I am not quite sure about Patricia.”

And that made me smile. I wrote myself a mental note to keep an eye out for Patricia, see if she walked differently somehow.

We parted ways, and I went back to the dorm and started on a research paper that would be due in a couple of weeks. I sketched it out on a lined yellow legal pad and when I had it roughed out I booted the PC so I could transcribe it more legibly.

But the PC dinged indicating that there was an email waiting.

Hi, Tom.

Nothing much new to report from the front lines, I just wanted to take a break. Usual unrelenting barrage of homework and papers and problem sets and tests. It seems like I never have a spare moment. I know I’m exaggerating, but it feels like that somehow.

Prof. Connolly cornered me in the halls and said the project I’d worked on is coming up on the next phase she thought I could help with. She asked me to make an appointment when I had an hour free so she could go over it with me. If feels nice to be involved with something like this, something beyond normal class work. It makes me feel closer to the part of CS that I want to be more involved with. I mean applying my knowledge to a real-world problem, finding a solution. I know I’m just a little cog in that machine, but it’s how you get recognized and considered for larger projects.

I told you about signing up for that non-credit course in web programming, didn’t I? It’s an hour a couple of times a week, nowhere as intense as any of my other courses and kinda fun, learning how to make your site interact with the user, validate inputs, like that. I’m putting together a little website to try out some of these ideas. The instructor will critique them at the end of the semester.

Remember when I wrote you about spending time at Martina’s place in Beverly Hills over the break? And the party we attended with the extracurricular activities in the back bedroom? So last weekend, when the pressure was off for a little while, we bought some wine and chips and had a party in one of the dorm rooms. I don’t drink that much, you know that, but a lot of the others do.

Some of them are like the way you describe your roommate, Larry. You know, get as drunk as you can so you can tell everyone the next day how great it was, while you self-medicate with lots of coffee and aspirin. A few passed out. Martina, to my surprise, likes her wine. A lot. She got very giggly and happy, telling stupid jokes, singing pop songs loudly. She can’t really sing.

Anyway, it occurred to me that this might be the right time to ask her about that party we went to over break. She’d made a cryptic reference to being able to avoid it if she wants. So I started reminiscing about what a good time we’d had over break. And how surprised I was at how open-minded her friends were.

She laughed and said, in a loud whisper, “Yes, some of them get really open-minded every weekend.” Then she laughed so hard at her joke she almost spilled her wine on the rug.

She was in the right mood, so I asked her straight out, “And did you get open-minded like them?”

Martina looked at me, barely able to talk for giggling, and said, “Sweetie, there was a time in high school when I was open to everything! God, I had guys lined up. ‘Course, I was young and stupider than I am now. I was a little self-conscious, and wanted to be popular, accepted, and I found I could get guys to pay attention by making myself available.

“So that’s what I did,” she said, “I made myself available. There were parties like those all over the valley, my friends would throw them when their folks would be out. Damn, there were naked people screwing everywhere. I’m surprised we all didn’t get the clap or worse. Well, we may have been young and stupid, but we knew enough to insist on condoms.”

She went on to say that by the time she was sixteen she’d done threesomes, orgies, even participated in a blowjob contest. She was a little disappointed that she’d only placed second.

I hear stories like this and think, “How did I get started so late?” I feel like I’m not keeping up somehow.

--K

She ended it there, and I confess I started to panic a bit. She was joking, of course, but what if she suddenly decided that she had to make up for lost time and began hooking up with some of those hot California guys?

I corralled my panic and told myself to answer her normally, calmly, and tell her that it wasn’t a contest and you didn’t win anything by racking up sexual wins. You should do only what’s comfortable for you.

And at the same time I was counseling her in my imaginary reply, I had that annoying little voice in my head telling me what a hypocrite I was, telling her one thing while I was out there screwing anyone who piqued my fancy. I should have tee-shirts printed: “Ask me about double standards”.

After my invigorating afternoon bout of self-recrimination, I settled down to work on my paper and some other upcoming assignments. The beginning of March was just around the corner, which meant that midterms weren’t that far off. I still had that tendency to put things off because there was other fun stuff I could do to take the pressure off.

Which was Larry’s cue to throw open the door and flop on his bed, looking very bright-eyed considering the long party night he probably had.

“Jeez, Carter, you’re giving me a complex here, always at work. I tell you, Dr. Krugman has the prescription you need. The Sigma guys threw a party last night you wouldn’t believe! They had two bands, one downstairs in the basement, and another upstairs. And women everywhere! It was awesome, man.”

“Did you score, Larry?”

“Well, no, but I got close. I had about talked this pretty young thing from Forbes into going upstairs, but her girlfriends dragged her off ‘cause they had to drive one of their crew who’d passed out back to their dorm. Got her number, though.”

“Seems like a lot of time and effort for a phone number, Larry.”

“It’s like selling encyclopedias door to door, you keep trying till you make a sale.”

There was no telling him otherwise because he’d already convinced himself it was the only way. I let him ramble on till he’d covered all the high points to show me what I’d missed. He eventually went off to roam the halls to find others to tell his story to.

I sat there and reviewed what I had mapped out for the rest of the day. I wondered if I had perhaps unconsciously picked up some of Karen’s study habits, her tendency to hold herself to a schedule regardless of the temptations that tugged at my attention.

I hadn’t done this in high school, for the most part. I did only as much as I had to do to get by. Of course, I had the advantage of this gift of ‘borrowing’ an instructor’s understanding of a subject which helped a lot.

But here I was, second year of college, still having that gift plus some new tricks to help me memorize the text, and I still spent a lot of time hunched over my PC’s keyboard or with my nose in a book. I could probably do very well academically with little prep time, but I still found myself falling back into the grind.

I finally decided that it was the way that I assimilated what I was learning, by hashing over these details while I was writing a paper or reading the text. I was thinking about what I was learning in an attempt to understand it. I hadn’t done it in high school because the courses were mostly so tedious and superficial. Not here, though. It required a lot of thought and introspection.

I’ll have to ask Karen if that’s why she approached her classwork the way she did in high school.

Later that day, on my way back from the library, I ran into Con Doherty walking toward the dorm. He was on the same dorm floor as I, and one of the self-proclaimed ‘party animals’ of the building. He’d dragged me along to some memorable parties, where he was known and welcomed. They were usually too alcohol-fueled, loud and frenetic for my liking, but every so often I’d let him talk me into going.

“Carter, how they hangin’? Haven’t seen you around much. You missed a couple of epic parties.”

“I can only do one or two of those a semester, Con. Too much for my fragile constitution. I’ll leave it to the experts, like you.”

“Truth is, I’ve been slacking off the party circuit myself. Mostly due to the basketball schedule -- a lot of away games on the weekends. But I’ve also got a Spanish course that’s been hitting me hard. If I’m not careful I’m gonna fail the term and that’s gonna jeopardize my scholarship. It’s got me worried.”