Falling Together (2 page)

“I wouldn’t say ‘hostile,’” Pen would say.

“You were yelling,” Will would remind her. “And swearing.”

“And pushing,” Cat would add. “Although not that hard.”

“How would you know?” Pen would demand. “And I wasn’t the only one swearing.”

“I
know,
” Cat would insist. “You were hostile.
I
was cute.”

“You were terrifying,” Will would correct.

“Through no fault of your own,” Pen would concede.

“But cute,” Cat would assert, “nevertheless.”

And no one would disagree.

This was the way they told their story.

I
T WAS THE FOURTH DAY OF THE FIRST WEEK OF THEIR FIRST YEAR OF
college, immediately following a lecture on
Beowulf
.

Weeks afterward, when their friendship had become an ageless and immovable fact, Will would remark that he had noticed Pen during the lecture, specifically the way her hair had looked all of a piece, a glossy brown object hanging next to her face as she tilted her head to write.

“God,” Cat would say, grimacing, “don’t tell me you were checking her out. Don’t tell me that Pen piqued your sexual interest. Because the thought of that is just nauseating.”

“Thank you,” Pen would say.

“Nope,” Will would assure them. “It was just that hair. It was so brushed that it didn’t even look like hair. Who has hair
that
brushed?”

“No one,” Cat would reply. “No one has hair that brushed. And no one cries over
Beowulf
. No one but Pen.”

Pen had not cried exactly, not out and out cried, not during the lecture anyway. She had cried the night before when she had gotten to the part about Beowulf’s death. It wasn’t so much the death itself, since Beowulf had never, during the hours she’d spent reading the poem, felt particularly real to her. Instead, it was the moment immediately following his death, a still and private moment near the end of an epic’s worth of action and fighting, appearing suddenly and taking Pen off guard. The smoke cleared, and there was Wiglaf, the youngest of Beowulf’s warriors, exhausted and blood-spattered and out of options, sprinkling water on the face of his dead king to wake him up.

During the lecture, Pen had waited for the professor to cover this moment, its bottomless sadness, but he had not even mentioned it. Still, while he spoke in cool tones about Beowulf’s death marking the beginning of the end of an entire civilization, Pen had envisioned the boy’s cupped hands full of water and had not burst into sobs, thank God, but had felt her eyes flood with tears. Her embarrassment at displaying emotion in front of what appeared to be hundreds of strangers was compounded by the fact that she was wearing mascara for the second time in her life. Her high school boyfriend, Mitchy Wooten, had liked her lashes “plain,” but he had abruptly broken up with her fewer than twenty-four hours before they’d left for their respective colleges. Mascara was part of the new, college Pen, but as her dampened eyelashes began to gum, Pen vowed to throw the stuff away forever, a vow she would keep.

However, before its absolute exit from her life, the mascara had a role to play because when the professor ended the lecture a half hour early so that the class could break into small groups and meet with their respective teaching assistants, Pen did not go directly to her assigned classroom. Instead she wandered through the belly of the old, neoclassical, externally gracious, internally dank building in search of a bathroom in which to repair her smeary eyes. It took some time, but she found one, and as soon as she opened the door, she found Cat.

The bathroom was tiny, just two stalls, one sink, a paper towel dispenser, a trash can, and a large radiator. Lying on the scarred black and white tiles, face-up, her head jammed against the radiator, was a small girl in big trouble. Pen did not immediately identify the exact kind of trouble because the second she opened the door, the scene slammed into her senses, scattering them: a spill of black hair, limbs in terrible motion, a rigid face, a gasping, prolonged moan, a banging, banging, banging.

Pen yelped and fell back against the paper towel dispenser. For a few seconds, her hands flapped stupidly. Then she squatted down and took hold of the girl’s thin ankles. She had expected them to stop moving, but they bucked inside her hands like two animals.

“Oh, God,” Pen squeaked. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” But it wasn’t.

Pen leaped up, wheeled around, and shoved open the bathroom door.

“Help,” she said, not as loudly as she’d meant to. She saw a sweatshirt, grabbed it, and pulled it into the bathroom. Inside the sweatshirt was a boy.

“Shit,” the boy said breathlessly and with what Pen would later discover was a relatively rare display of profanity. “She’s seizing.”

“Of course she is!” Pen shrieked, even though, before the boy said it, she had not hit upon a name for what the girl on the floor was doing. “We have to call 9-1-1!”

“Wait,” said the boy.

“Wait?” squealed Pen.

“She’s got one of those bracelets.”

“A bracelet? Are you insane?”

The boy
was
insane she decided. Insane and useless. She yanked open the zipper of her backpack, fished wildly inside it, and snatched out a pen.

The boy pulled off his sweatshirt.

“Oh, great. Are you
getting warm
?” yelled Pen. “Are you a tad
uncomfortable
?” She pushed past the boy and leaned over the girl.

“What are you doing with that pen?” demanded the boy.

“You’re supposed to put something in her mouth, so she doesn’t swallow her tongue.”

To Pen’s amazement, he grabbed the pen out of her hand.

“That’s a myth, the tongue thing,” he snapped. “You’ll hurt her.”

Pen launched into a rant about the boy not being a doctor, damn it, and about how everyone knew the tongue thing was true and about how he needed to return her pen right now, this second, but the rant petered out before it really got started because what the boy did next was drop to his knees and tuck the sweatshirt under the girl’s head, placing part of the shirt on the floor, part of it between her head and the radiator. It was among the most restrained and gentle gestures Pen had ever seen.

“Look,” the boy said softly. “She’s stopping.”

Pen and the boy stayed still, waiting, and in a few seconds the noise emptied out of the room and was replaced by an opalescent quiet.

Eventually, the girl’s eyes batted open. She looked from the boy to Pen, bewildered. She turned her head to the side, looked at the base of the sink, and groaned.

“Oh, bloody hell,” she said hoarsely. “Give me a minute, okay?”

“Sure,” said the boy, and Pen added, ridiculously, like a person on TV, “Take all the time you need.”

Minutes passed. The girl might have fallen asleep, she lay so still. Her blouse was gauzy and peacock blue, scattered with yellow flowers. Pen caught sight of her own reflection in the mirror and gave a start at how haggard she looked, before she realized it was mostly because of the smudged mascara. Surreptitiously, she touched her forefingers to her tongue and rubbed under each eye. It helped a little.

When the girl opened her eyes again, she said, “So tell me who you are.”

Relief and the sudden sound of the girl’s clear voice sent Pen’s adrenaline flowing again.

“Pen,” she said. “Penelope, actually. Calloway. My grandmother’s name. Penelope, I mean. Not Calloway. She was my mother’s mother, so you know, different last name.” The words hopped out one by one,
flip flip flip,
like goldfish out of a bowl. Pen sighed.

The girl smiled, and Pen noted that the smile managed to look exhausted and sparkling at the same time. “Got it,” the girl said.

The boy wiped his hand on his gray T-shirt and held it out.

“Will Wadsworth,” he said.

The girl’s eyes widened.

“Get the hell out of here!” she cried.

Will froze for a second, then put his outstretched hand on the back of his head and rubbed. When Pen looked at him, she saw that under his tan, his cheeks were turning red. “Oh, right,” he said. “Yeah, yeah. Sure. No problem.”

He started to stand, made a slight move in the direction of the sweatshirt, still underneath the girl’s head, then seemed to change his mind.

“So, uh, I’m glad you’re okay and all,” he said and turned sideways to squeeze past Pen and head for the door.

Pen giggled, a slightly hysterical sound, and Will Wadsworth turned toward her, startled.

“What?” he said.

“I don’t think she meant for you to really get the hell out,” Pen told him, still giggling. “I think it was an expression of incredulity. Disbelief.”

“I know what ‘incredulity’ means.” Will looked at the girl on the floor. “Yeah?” he asked.

The girl smiled again. “It was the name!” she sang out. “Will Wordsworth! Like the poet!”

“Uh, it’s Wadsworth, actually,” said Will, his face relaxing. “Like the other poet.”

The girl laughed, a chiming sound, and said, “Well, you sure know how to make a first impression.”

Will crouched down next to Cat, his elbows on his knees.

“When
I
first met
you,
” he pointed out, “you were having a grand mal seizure.”

The girl laughed again and sat up, her back against the radiator. She hooked her tangled hair behind her ears with her fingers, a snappy movement.

“Tonic-clonic,” she told them, inscrutably but with great charm, her black eyes twinkling. “And I’m Cat.”

W
HEN
C
AT
, P
EN
,
AND
W
ILL EMERGED
,
IN THAT ORDER
,
FROM THE
over-conditioned air of the English-department building and stood blinking in the sudden sunlight, Pen stood and looked out at the saturated greens of the grass and trees, the white columns blazing against the red brick of the buildings, the cobalt sky stretched tight as a tarp overhead. Ever since she had arrived at the university, she had walked around, heavy (like a soaking wet pathetic tea bag, she’d e-mailed her mother) and dull, missing her parents every waking second and also in her sleep. She had watched the other new arrivals, resenting the pact of eager chipperness they all seemed to have signed. Now, standing between Cat and Will, a veil lifted; she felt engulfed by the electric beauty of everything around her. She gasped. It was a loud gasp.

“I
know,
” moaned Cat. “The
heat
! Ugh.”

“It’s like walking through Jell-O. Hot Jell-O,” observed Will, shedding the sweatshirt he had put back on only minutes before.

Pen peeled off her red cardigan sweater and said, “It really is awful, isn’t it?” But she didn’t feel awful. She tipped her face to the sun and smiled.

Will carried Cat’s backpack. He offered to carry Cat herself.

“Not to be a jerk or anything,” he said to Cat slowly, “but do you think you can make it walking? Because I can carry you, no problem.”

Cat looked at Pen and rolled her eyes. “God, that was jerky, wasn’t it? What an offer.”

Pen peered at Will. “Do you know what ‘jerk’
means
?”

Will laughed. “Okay, okay. Just answer the question. Carry or no carry?”

“No,” said Cat thoughtfully. “I used to be one of those small people who liked to be carried. Up on people’s shoulders usually. I’d also sit in laps. But I’m done with all that.”

“Gave it up for college?” asked Pen.

“Exactly.”

“I gave up not wearing mascara, but then just a little while ago, I gave up wearing it.”

“Good choice. With your kind of eyelashes,” said Cat, squinting at Pen, “mascara just muddies the waters.”

“Good choice to you, too,” said Pen, and the three of them, Will and Pen with Cat in between, set off together, amid the people, under the bright sky, and straight into the whites, greens, reds, and blues of the day.

T
HAT EVENING
,
THEY ATE A CHEESE PIZZA ON THE LAWN IN FRONT OF
Pen’s dormitory. Plain cheese was Pen’s favorite kind of pizza; she found it pure and unencumbered. But in the argument that preceded the placing of the pizza order, Pen had not advocated for cheese. As Jamie had pointed out to her for years, it was a boring preference, reflecting underdeveloped, kindergarten-like taste. So she kept quiet about cheese and let Will and Cat battle it out to a stalemate.

“Forget it,” Will finally said. “I’d rather have no toppings at all than eat anchovies.”

“She did have a little bit of a rough day,” Pen reminded him. “Maybe you could tough it out this once?”

“No chance.”

“Hatred of little fish is a reflection of a little mind,” said Cat primly. “But fine. No toppings. Cheese me, man. Let’s do it.”

They ate, slathered in citronella and sitting atop Pen’s bedspread on the cropped, prickly lawn. Late summer life—young and gold-edged—crackled around them: footballs and Frisbees cutting parabolas into the sky, club music undulating out of someone’s window into the humid air, and it seemed to Pen that she, Will, and Cat were part of the action and also separate from it, so that when Will leaned back on his elbows and laughed, the sound rang through the quiet the three of them had made at the same time that it was just another noise.