Snarkastic

August

It's the first day of the first full week of school and you feel like you haven't slept in a month. The last days of the last summer shot by in a blur of will-we-or-won't-we-have-a-place-to-live, and before you know it you're trying to make a home out of a pristine little box on Laurel. You can see the Sunsphere from your living room, and the bell tower from your bed. You fear you'll never have internet access again, but figure that's maybe for the best, because if you posted what you're thinking when you're thinking it, there'd be an awful lot of sentences about the double yellow line and precious little else.

You'd like to think you didn't waste the end of this era. You were about to write something to that effect when you saw that someone else already said it right, and you couldn't improve on it, so you moved on. You caught a show of the Manchurian Candidate remake with the other two-thirds of your unholy triumvirate, and enjoyed seeing Liev Schreiber in an above-the-title capacity, even though the film disappointed you more than you let on. Your 'school friends' returned a few at a time from the far corners of the earth, and the night before your first day of classes they descended on your new place, and it felt like they'd never left.

But it's that time again, and you head off to your last year. You wrangle a schedule out of the dark labyrinth of Circle Park Online, yell at your landlord when you come home to another day without the inter-web, and resign yourself to hearing your stomach protest all the time, since it doesn't appear they'll ever reactivate your diners' club card. Pretty immediately, you chicken out, once and for all, of auditioning for Into the Woods, when circumstances beyond your control reduce the likelihood of getting cast from slim to ridiculous, and you cross your fingers and pray for those classmates of yours who deserve to see their names on the list. You get thrown out of directing lab almost as immediately, along with another graduating senior, ostensibly to bring the class under the enrollment cap, and this is where you start to lose it. You have your suspicions, but you keep your condemnations to yourself. Almost as painful is the realization that you have to drop Rules of War & Terrorism. You end up with Russian, this year's Life of the Mind class on documentary film, Shakespeare, history, and four seminars. And it wouldn't be August without being threatened with legal action by a person barely unable to count on their fingers with both hands and a flashlight.

You find yourself writing everywhere you can - on the bus, walking up the Hill, in the car balancing your folio on the steering wheel - as the story threads begin to twist themselves together. The first company meeting is notable not only for sheer volume, but for marking the extension of your streak in "People we should avoid At All Costs" into the new year. For those keeping score at home, this makes you one for one on the semester and eight for eight overall. The only times you really feel like you're In College are during your Shakespeare class or your history class. You sit cross-legged on the Lab stage and listen to your professor talk about having reverence for the text, and silently thank your stars you picked the right major. You get paired with a friend for the last round of exercises, and neither of you can go more than a few seconds without wiggling your nose and doubling over in silent hysterics.

Then it's Saturday, and Saturday means the Clock Show and the kickoff party. You overextend your shopping binge with your roommate, bolt in and out of the shower, and barely have time to don your cherry skirt and fishnets before you have to be in your seat. The show exceeds your expectations, and you shriek and twist with glee upon hearing the personal shout-outs two cast members have written into their sketches, one of them a line you wrote in Malta. You fling four new ACT babies into your car and careen off to the Skull, and the throwdown that ensues will be one for the history books. Your right knee collapses on you in the basement, which is what you get for running on pile carpet in stocking feet. You have a long heart-to-heart with a friend who was sexually assaulted by one of your worst enemies. Kids you haven't seen in months turn up, castmates from your summer show turn up, and things get a little blurrier. You race one of your boys to kiss one person of every sexual orientation and win. There's dancing, shots with old enemies-turned-friends, and duelling musical tastes. You bury the hatchet, sort of, with an old adversary, though when it comes right to it you'd still prefer to bury one in his back. You limp and flit around collecting headshots for the yearbook project, learning names as you go. One of your classmates who'd been AWOL turns out to have been hospitalized with pneumonia, and still manages to make a cameo. There's a hard moment of flashback to early summer when you're standing on the master bedroom balcony, and a harder one a few minutes later, when you think back to February and remember sprawling in this very room, clutching your dearest and belting "Giants in the Sky". You wonder for a moment if anything could have been done then to change things, but there's no time to dwell on it, because while being introduced to a new cluster of underclassmen, the word 'icon' gets dropped and you have to take a few steps back and stand with Joan and breathe in your new empire. For once, your reputation has preceded you in a manner that doesn't make you wish you could take it all back. You're picked up and swung 'round and there are scarce few things better than this kind of revelry for a communion junkie.

The morning after. Caesar shows up and the two of you hold court for a few hours in the dining room, surrounded by sleepy freshman and that one kid who's So Going On Your List. One of the new girls is in your film class. Another reminds you of yourself and Joan and Kaitlin and Elyse, and is pretty well adopted by the end of the afternoon. You get all the younglings packed home, and the rest of the day is devoted to a lazy lunch with four old friends and one new one, cleaning, and sleeping like The Dead. You wake up just in time to catch Nip/Tuck with your roommate, and fall asleep to The Adventures of Robin Hood, thinking, "Must be nice".

Then it's your first Monday morning. After half an hour of trying, you score a parking spot on the sky level of the new garage, and take a moment to admire the cityscape before embarking on a fruitless search for books in the UC. You have a coffee date with your girls and dissect the events of the weekend, pausing for Justin Gatlin updates and fake fruit jokes. You run into Eric, whom you've loved for years, and you keep your chin from shaking when he grazes his thumb across your jawline and compliments your tan, and your voice is steady the whole time he's writing his number on the back of your hand. You get the poli-sci seminars you wanted, and when you play Mafia in film class you're the first one out, but you take that as a compliment. Paul tells your class that the bus essays will be posted online, and for the first time in your life the thought of sharing one of your stories doesn't scare you.

It's Monday afternoon before you're able to cry, and you think you would've made it without if "Brothers in Arms" hadn't come on the radio. You pound the steering wheel and mourn your friends and your family and yourself and those who always lived in that between-place, and when you throw your head back and catch a glimpse of yourself in the rearview mirror, your waterproof mascara is making black tracks down your cheeks. You laugh, and laughing somehow feels worse. Right before the radio station cuts off the last minute of the song, your phone rings, and you spend the next half hour or so coming out of your long dark tea-time with the help of an old friend who doesn't know how much he's doing to soothe your head. And when you hang up, you stare at your phone screen, momentarily hypnotized by the 8-bit ocean waves, and you trace the words across the top and remember Nick typing them in, right before he left the last time, right before he kissed you. If you could live one minute of your last summer over, it would be this one, though you don't remember the kiss at all, just the sensation of your bare toes curling up in your Skechers:

"Keep on?"
"Yeah."
"Keep on what?"
"Keep on keepin' on."
"Why?"
"Someday you might need it."

Right now it doesn't help to remind yourself that it's the people, not the places, that make it home, but as you blink away your tears and pop in your Carolina CD and skip to track 20 to hear the song one more time, you imagine a day in the near future when you'll walk into the green room and be knocked off your feet by a few of your best and brightest, and you'd like to think that it'll help you change your mind.

But it's written in the starlight/And every line on your palm

Posted by Nastinchka at August 23, 2004 08:38 PM