Miss Me When I'm Gone Page 0,2

guy Adam has a little crush on you, I’d said. He was asking about you again.

Hmm. I’m not sure about him, she’d replied. He enunciates his swear words too much.

I shrugged and let the subject drop. I imagine we complained for the remaining duration of my smoke, although none of the details was memorable to me later. What I do remember is that as I took my final puff, Gretchen uncapped her paper cup and tossed the remains of her cold coffee sideways into Winthrop’s grave site.

She caught my look of surprise, and my immediate, self-conscious glance around us for witnesses. As jaded as I was about Forrester College, I’d never have thought of taking it out on the memorial of an illustrious nineteenth-century feminist.

In some cultures, Gretchen had informed me, they put bottles of water or even soda on a person’s grave. For the long journey ahead. It’s a common thing, giving the dead something to drink.

I’d squinted at Gretchen. Not this culture, though.

What is this culture, Jamie? Anyways, if she’s gotta be caged up here for eternity, listening to us all whine and deconstruct and dichotomize all day—if that’s what her life’s work has come to here, then pouring mochachino on her grave is about as honest a tribute as she’ll ever get.

The words were grasping and snide, but the most memorable of them now was anyways. The s at the end made it a word a little girl would use. Words like that slipped into her speech when we were alone together—when she wasn’t in the presence of professors or the more intellectually competitive of our classmates.

Now the memory of that girlish anyways unfroze a tiny hole in my shock, and I sobbed till Sam came upstairs.

“What’s going on?” He put his arms around me and folded his hands on my big belly. “Oh my God. It seems bigger than yesterday.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled, snuffling. “I had three peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches yesterday, so you’re probably right about that.”

“I’ve been wondering about those sandwiches of yours. Isn’t that what Elvis liked to eat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I figure if I eat enough of them, the kid might just come out singing ‘In the Ghetto.’ ”

Sam was deadpan. “Do we want that, though?”

I giggled and almost answered, but then teared up again, angry at myself for forgetting Gretchen for a moment. Sam wiped my cheeks and came away with black thumbs. I’d forgotten that I hadn’t washed my makeup off yet.

“What’ve you been doing up here?” Sam asked.

“Thinking about Gretchen. What else would I be doing? Reading her old e-mails.”

“Oh.” Sam nodded solemnly.

“What’ve you been up to?” I mopped my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater.

“Just watching the game,” Sam said. “I’m sorry. I should have been up here with you.”

“It’s okay. It wouldn’t have made much difference.”

It was kind of a mean thing to say, but I’d found it easy to say mean things to Sam lately. He hadn’t shot back in months. It was starting to feel like an experiment, to see when he’d break. I was beginning to wish he would.

“I mean, just, under the circumstances,” I backpedaled. “I probably needed to be by myself and just let the shock wear off.”

Sam didn’t reply. He took my hands in his, pulled me out of my office chair, and put me to bed.

Chapter 4

Gretchen and I met when we were freshmen at Forrester. Forrester is a small liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts, once a women’s college, now coed with about a 35 percent male population. Gretchen lived down the dormitory hall from me. I can’t remember exactly what attracted us to each other at first. She seemed a bit spacey and pretty shy, but at the first floor party, she was hilarious when she was drunk. We’d sat together on someone’s couch confessing to each other what dorks we’d been in high school and our ambitious plans to be much cooler at Forrester. There was something mutually sarcastic about the exchange that no one else in the room seemed to grasp, and we ended up falling over each other with laughter, toasting each other’s likely collegiate domination with swigs of Goldschläger. The evening ended with me puking my guts out in the corner bathroom, with her checking on me periodically even though she couldn’t remember my name. The next morning we officially introduced ourselves over breakfast, and we were fast friends. I made friends with Jeremy while working in dining services and introduced him to Gretchen. They started dating