(You) Set Me on Fire Read online

  “Which they probs won’t,” Mary said. “These guys never check ID. Obviously because they want young and cute chicks like us to party with.”

  “Wow. That’s so awesome,” Missy breathed, leaning in to check out my score. “It’s so much better than mine. Look. Mine looks like I got it at the 7-Eleven or something.”

  “Dude, I bought mine on the internet,” Hope added. “Whatever. As long as the hair colour matches. That’s all that matters.”

  “What did I tell you, right?” Carly smiled. “No problem. Let’s GO!”

  Jennifer Taylor’s eyes were wider apart than mine. And she had nicer eyebrows. Our hair was pretty similar, though. I gripped the ID just so, covering her face enough that her bangs framed the crescent of my thumbnail.

  “I am Jennifer Taylor.”

  Trudging up the hill to Alpha Delta Phi under a Pixarstarry sky, Carly, Missy, and I linked arms and leaned into the incline. I don’t think I’d ever linked arms with more than one person and walked any distance before. It was less cumbersome than I’d imagined. As Carly’s body jostled close to mine, I was suddenly hit with the knowledge of the most obvious element of freshman year, which is that in freshman year, you can be anything you want to be.

  That’s not exactly true; obviously, there are SOME THINGS you cannot be. Like, no, you can’t pretend to be a movie star because people will more than likely know you’re NOT a movie star. And no, obviously, you can’t pretend to be tall, or beautiful, if you’re not.

  That’s not what I’m saying.

  I’m saying that I realized, with Jennifer Taylor’s ID tucked in my back pocket, that the people I was walking with knew almost nothing about me: we knew each other’s names, and by the time we left Dylan Hall I had most of my floormates’ cell numbers in my phone and they had mine (for emergencies). On top of that, my floormates knew:

  » that I was seventeen years old

  » that I had graduated from a private girls’ school

  » that I didn’t have a boyfriend

  » and that I was an arts major.

  Beyond that, Hope knew I was a fan of both techno music and old-school rock and roll (and I knew Hope liked metal, in part because she had a “METAL” tattoo in big gooey letters on her bicep). Everyone knew I’d burned myself at one point in the summer, although no one knew how or why. I just said I’d been in an accident.

  But that’s it. my lower lip.

  So for a brief moment in time I was in the freshman threshold of opportunity: the people around me knew only what I& rel="styleshe

  THREE

  The tower of power

  College, and especially the freshman-year portion of the undergrad college career, is kind of like Europe: on the one hand it has all these associations with tradition and old buildings, culture and stuff. La la la. On the other hand there’s places like, what’s it called, Amsterdam, you know, parts of Europe where if you go people know you’re only going there to party.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  The TOWER OF POWER, held by the Alpha Delta fraternity, was not an official St. Joseph’s freshman event, but it was definitely the most popular amongst the ready-to-party freshman students.

  Legend has it the TOWER OF POWER was dreamed up by the Alpha Delta brothers after they moved into a new building with five floors of frat goodness.

  The goal of the TOWER was to make sure girls visited all five floors, giving more dudes on more floors more opportunities to score. The rules were simple. Visitors got a set of plastic shot glasses at the door and were supposed to visit each floor for a “specialty” shot (each floor was responsible for organizing a bartender and supplies). Brothers who wanted to keep party-goers happy decorated their floor to go with the theme of their shot.

  That night the menu was:

  First floor: CEMENT MIXER SPECIAL

  Second Floor: ATOMIC FIREBALL

  Third Floor: ACID DROP

  Fourth Floor: PINK PANTHER

  Fifth Floor: FRESHMAN BRAIN ERASER + beer*

  (*that’s a pretty key element to this story actually)

  Back in the day, all the shots were called, like, Blow Job and Panty Waster, with a handful of ethnic shots that had racist names no one I talked to that night could remember. I guess the fraternity council, fearing a lawsuit, said the night would be scrapped if they didn’t come up with some way to keep it sounding less XXX. So now the shots were really fruity and slightly more poetic. To avoid “excessive drunkenness,” fraternity seniors were supposed to keep an eye on younger students to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. Plus, the idea was, with a max of one shot per floor, a book in the library.T", students could avoid excessive drinking.

  Right.

  Of course, these kinds of parties are hardly ever orderly events that follow any kind of rule. By the time we lined up at the double doors of the house, word had spread that the way to avoid the one-shot rule was to grab as many shot glasses as possible while drunken frat boys made a show of (seemingly randomly) checking IDs. One guy wearing plastic goggles (like the kind they handed out in chemistry labs) even had the foresight to bring his own bag of shot glasses, which seemed a little insane and kind of nerdy to me at the time, but I guess that guy got super laid that night so there it is: foresight is sexy.

  The place was a zoo. I’m not saying that to be stereotypical and I recognize that it’s kind of a wornout metaphor for describing large crowds, but at the same time, if the shoe fits … By ten-thirty the air was thick with bodies and music as people packed around the first makeshift bar to get their little cups filled with what looked like stale latte mix poured by two super tall boy bartenders in construction hats.

  A herd of guys in navy blue ALPHA, BABY! T-shirts crushed their shot glasses against their foreheads and pounded each other on the chest.

  Crick, crack. Thump thump thump thump!

  “TO-WER of POW-ER!”

  After swallowing the first shot, everyone headed for the stairs and started scrambling up to the next floor. Girls screamed and boys hollered like unrehearsed warriors charging onto the field.

  Surprisingly, everything was going pretty smoothly for the first hour or so. Moving from floor to floor, I tried to absorb, but not get crushed by, the raging mass of students. As increasingly puffy and increasingly drunk faces zoomed into my space, I tried to make comments that were not anti-social sounding. Mostly I said stuff like, “What’s the shot here?” and “This shot is not bad actually.” I think I even had a handful of fairly lucid conversations until my impromptu crew of alcohol-swilling new friends hit the third floor, which residents had covered in neon yellow construction paper. On my fourth contraband shot of Acid Drop, my sixth shot of the night (plus beer), I felt a sudden internal loss of gravity. Lurching into the nearest room, I did a massive, somewhat projectile, lemony upchuck into someone’s Bugs Bunny garbage pail.

  Mostly into someone’s Bugs Bunny garbage pail.

  Anyway.

  By the time I found Carly and Missy and June again, I was woozy and they were on their fourth Pink Panthers. Popping her shot glass out of her mouth like it was a ping-pong ball, Carly threw her hands up in the air, sending dribbles of the leftovers from her glass flying.

  “TOWER OF POWER!” she cheered.

  “TO THE TOWER!” someone else shouted.

  “THIS LOOKS LIKE PEPTO-BISMOL!” I yelled. Pretending it was, I imagined the cool liquid coating my stomach and made a silent promise not to throw up in anyone else’s garbage can. I felt pretty guilty about the whole thing. “THIS IS NOT BAD ACTUALLY!”

  Until about ten minutes later.

  As we moved toward the stairs and the music changed from techno to rock, I caught sight of Missy out of the corner of my eye … covering her mouth.

  I’m sure you can gues things I needed to be doingCCN0s what happened next.

  So, as it turns out, the other name for the TOWER OF POWER is the TOWER OF PUKE. This is what happens to the Tower of Power when p
eople do the Tower of Power more than once, do more than one shot at each level of the tower, or drink too much beer (and do the Tower of Power).

  I think the name pretty much speaks for itself.

  The real disaster zone was the stairs.

  Missy’s Pink Panther had lasted all of five minutes before she rocket-vomited on the landing between four and five (and it wasn’t pink, surprisingly, but orange). Carly upchucked a rainbow of alcoholic delights between three and four, where we met up with several other boys and girls puking their way up and down the stairs. The movie reference, if you’re looking for one, is Steven Spielberg’s Stand By Me (a film that would be assigned in my Cultural Studies class). Fortunately for me, I’m mostly a one-time puker. Unfortunately for me, it hardly mattered, since by the time we made it outside, Carly had thrown up on me.

  “Fuuuuck,” she slurred, “iz it in yer burns?”

  “Nope,” I slurred back, “but I’m gonna go home anyway.”

  “You mean to rez.”

  “Yeah.”

  “WAIT!” Regaining her balance by leaning forward like an Olympic swimmer about to leap into a first lap, Carly huffed for a moment before righting herself and pointing down the hill. “We’re coming with you.” By “we,” of course, she meant her and Missy, although Missy was already sitting on the steps outside and curled forward like a little kid contemplating a somersault.

  “I think I need to call my boyfriend,” she whimpered and then fell forward onto her face and threw up again.

  “Fuck!” Dropping down to her knees, Carly grabbed Missy’s cell phone, carefully wiping the vomitsplashed case with her sleeve. “Just go, Allison. You should, uh, clean off your neck. We’ll see you later, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  As I slumped away from what was sounding and, I’m sure, looking like a gut-soaked version of Wild Water Kingdom, the mayhem continued. I passed herds of girls in various throwing-up poses. Dodging around a puddle of puke, I nearly fell over a blond girl kneeling on the road.

  “WATCH IT,” she snapped.

  “Sorry.”

  “Fuck. Do you see a lighter anywhere? It’s blue.”

  “Oh.” Looking down, it was pretty easy to spot. “It’s in this pile of puke,” I said, pointing.

  “Of course.” Bumping through her pockets for a spare, the girl seemed to get a good look at me. “Leave your friends at the party?” she asked.

  “I don’t have any friends,” I slurred.

  Which at the time was, technically, true. Or a leftover sentiment from high school stuck to my brain like so much old gum.

  I turned to leave and she stood up. “What’s your name?”

  “Allison.”%;text-align: justify;">OH

  Discovering another lighter in her back pocket, the girl grinned. “Goodnight, Allison.”

  She didn’aid="6LK27">Th

  FOUR

  And you are

  It took a while to get used to sleeping in a new bed, in part because the beds at Dylan were two feet wide and soft like a bird’s nest made of barbed wire, and in part because sleeping at Dylan Hall on the eleventh floor meant waking up to Metallica. At full blast. Every morning.

  The source of Metallica was Hope, who at seven a.m. liked to start her day with an explosion of music by angry men. Sometimes she’d even prop her door open with a garbage can so she could hear the music while she showered in the bathroom across the hall. My first three mornings at Dylan Hall went something like this:

  7:00 a.m.—ENTER METALLICA.

  5 seconds later—Slam knee on concrete wall waking up to blast of Metallica.

  5 seconds later—Have delirious moment of wondering where the fuck I am and why Metallica is also there and why they are so fucking loud.

  20 seconds later—Lie in bed surrounded by the screams and groans of eleventh-floor residents and think about Anne.

  My first “girlfriend.”

  I’m actually still not sure whether or not to call her that.

  That’s stupid but that’s reality. Every time—even every, like, “mental” in-my-head time—I call her my “girlfriend,” I still feel a little pinch.

  The first few seconds after waking up was a pretty potent time for thinking about Anne because of this memory I have from the morning after the first and only time she ever slept over, also the morning after the first and only time I ever slept with a girl, when she rolled over and looked at me and said, “It’s you.”

  That’s what I used to see over and over again whenever I daydreamed or closed my eyes or sat down or heard any song by a woman sung in a breathy voice: Anne’s face pressed against my pillow, her sleepy eyes opening, eyelashes fluttering back to reveal cool blue eyes, irises focusing on me.

  Anne’s little pink lips folding over her words, “It’s you.”

  What’s that saying? About how you don’t know you want something until you have it and it things I needed to be doingR",’s taken away? Is it the one about the eggs?

  I don’t know.

  I also didn’t know at the time that Anne woke up every morning not knowing where she was or thinking she was somewhere she wasn’t. Apparently, the morning she woke up in my room, she thought she was at her grandma’s house—partly because of my flowery sheets.

  When she said “It’s you,” I thought she meant, like, “You’re the one. It’s you.” “It’s you” was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard anyone say when it came from Anne’s mouth. The words felt like a breath of perfect cold winter air. It wasn’t until a week later, between first and second period, that I heard about the grandma thing and the waking up stuff.

  “So what did you mean when you said ‘It’s you’?” I asked.

  “Duh! I meant, like, not my grandma!” Anne scoffed, I would say overly defensively. “What did you think I meant?”

  What did she think I thought it meant? I wanted to say that the grandma thing was messed up considering what we’d done to each other the night before, but I didn’t.

  I can’t imagine what thoughts Metallica inspired in the other people on the eleventh floor. I’m pretty sure they weren’t very, uh, positive thoughts.

  Mostly people screamed at Hope to “SHUT THE FUCKING MUSIC OFF.” Or just to “FUCK OFF.”

  A more delicate approach was taken by Katy, my next-door neighbour, a social work student with a frizzy perm and plans to get her degree, return home, and marry her boyfriend of eight years (which meant they’d gotten together when they were in grade school). Katy had a pad of sticky notes on which she would write long and involved messages to Hope about the “best interests of the floor.”

  I don’t think Hope read Katy’s notes. She didn’t even bother to peel them off her door. As an engineering student, for the first week of school she had a million frosh activities to go to, some of which involved painting herself red, many of which involved running around with the rest of the engineering students from sun-up to sundown. So I almost never saw her.

  I probably couldn’t even tell you Hope’s eye colour, but if you gave me a keyboard I could recreate the opening of “Enter Sandman” for you. Now and possibly for the rest of my life.

  You’d think there’d be some sort of administrative solution to something like a morning heavy-metal wake-up call. I mean, you know, there were all these brochures on college life and LIVING IT UP IN RESIDENCE, plus we sat through this three-hour snooze-fest “Welcome to Dylan Hall” orientation meeting the second day, where all the floorfellows got up and talked to us about how following the rules would make everyone’s life better.

  That meeting was one of many events I ended up going to with Carly. After barfing on me, she seemed to think it was her responsibility to make sure I had someone to go to things with. Before heading out just about anywhere, most especially to a meal, she’d knock on my door.

  “Hey you! You wanna go get some grub?”

  Carly wasn’t like anyone I’d hung out with for a very long time, partly because I didn’ things I needed to be doing
icddt hang out with a very wide selection of people. For one thing, she was always really fucking happy. Happy in the way a child who knows nothing of sorrow is happy. Happy in a way that radiated out of her face and clothes and hair. The first day I met her I guessed she’d never broken a bone and I was right. The girl was, like, born in sunshine or something. Sometimes, instead of walking, she would bounce down the stairs and then land at the bottom with a swivel turn.

  The other amazing thing about Carly was that, despite her intensive happiness, she did not appear to be stupid. I used to have this theory that happiness was oblivion, you know? So in order to be happy you had to be able to block out reality. Carly, on the other hand, seemed to have a pretty firm grip on the world around her. Like she had this insane ability to remember everything anyone ever told her. By the end of the first week she knew everyone’s name, floor, and what classes they were in, even if they had no connection to what Carly was taking. It was like walking around with a human Google search page, or a mom. Every five minutes it was like, “Oh look, there’s ______.”

  Sample:

  Carly: Oh look, there’s Sandy.

  Me: Sandy. Sandy? The girl with the slightly infected nose pierce?

  Carly: Uh. Ew! No! Sandy. She’s on the ninth floor. From Indiana?

  Me: Yeah. I think. Yeah. With the nose pierce and the slight BO? Who’s in East Asian History?

  Carly: Oh my gosh, you’re SO FUNNY.

  I am not a human memory stick so I typically didn’t know who Carly was talking about. In fact, I think the only time we ever did zero in on the same girl was in Cultural Studies, which just about every first-year student was enrolled in, when Carly leaned over and said, “There’s Sharon.”

  She was pointing at the girl I vaguely recognized from our hazy, barfy, lighter-searching encounter after the Tower of Power.

  “Sharon?”