For the first few weeks of my second semester, I didn't have any interaction with Dallas. Although Eckhart was small enough that you usually ran into people you didn't want to see, those who you actually wanted to encounter often remained elusive. Linda still had Heritage with him, but she said he avoided her completely.
"Why do you care?" Jane asked.
"I have to talk to him."
"Tammy, I think you've probably said enough at this point. There's really nothing left to be said."
"I need to tell him that I'm sorry for the tape."
Jane gestured to the phone on Linda's desk. My New Year's resolution was to be more assertive, so I dialed his number. Someone picked up, but as soon as I asked for Dallas, I heard a dial tone. "He hung up on me."
Jane nodded but she didn't say anything more.
The need to apologize to Dallas had plagued me all during Winter Break and I wasn't ready to give up so easily. I was going to have to orchestrate a run-in with him. I suspected Dallas purposely stopped walking on the path that went past our dorm room and was walking the long way to get to class. Since I had no idea what classes he was taking this semester, the only guaranteed time to see him was on his way to the gym for Volleyball, all the way across campus.
One day, after I worked up enough courage and planned out exactly what I was going to say—as in "I'm sorry"—I grabbed a book and sat on the picnic bench across from the gymnasium. I waited for him, my heart pounding. The weather was warm for January in Florida, and the afternoon sun warmed my back as I stared at the words in my book without reading them. Soon I sensed Dallas's familiar gait and I glanced up from my non-reading and watched him approach. When he caught sight of me, his face fell. I could feel myself blushing as I blinked back tears. He was wearing a gray T-shirt.
"Hi." I told him, completely forgetting what I had planned to say. All I could hear was his denial of the Blockhead convertible flip-off: I don't wear T-shirts.
"Hi..."
"Look, Dallas." The words came out in a rush. "I-know-you're-mad-at-me-and-I-just-wanted-to-say-that-I'm-sorry."
"I'm not mad at you, Tammy." His stride was bringing him right past the picnic table where I was standing. And then he kept walking. He wasn't even going to give me the courtesy of stopping and talking this out.
"Dallas..." But he was already past me and into the gym.
~*~
I had already decided before I returned for my second semester of freshmen year that I would allow myself a real college life, and declared to Jane and Lizzie that I would finally participate in the activity most of my peers at Eckhart and all around the country—or at least at the University of M—were doing: drinking and partying. I figured the night after the Volleyball Snub was as good a night as any to try my first on-campus drink. It also happened to be the night of yet another complex party: Beta Blackout.
Underage or not, we weren't technically allowed to have any alcohol in substance-free Gandhi, but a guy Jane knew from her Heritage class by the name of Caleb volunteered to be our supplier. We would pre-party in his room at Prasch before heading over to Beta. I decided to get dressed in the outfit I would have worn on my first date with Dallas had he not rejected me: a purple velvet dress with a white shrug to cover my arms and my push-up bra. Jane wore a slinky black dress with elbow-length gloves. Linda had decided not to join us while Lizzie, grasping her ever-present smokes, had donned a wrap-dress. As we walked into Prasch, one of Caleb's dormmates was coming out.
"Hey," he said, eyeing the three of us up and down. "You girls look like you just stepped off the Titanic."
"He's cute," Lizzie whispered to Jane and me as we continued down the hall.
"Yeah. Great eye candy. His new nickname will be Skittles," Jane declared.
"We should get those Prasch boys to play Spin the Bottle," I said, feeling braver now that I'd gotten my first drunken night/make-out session out of the way.
Caleb's room was at the end of the hall. It looked like the store Spencer's had thrown up in it with all of the drinking paraphernalia. "Watch this," Caleb told us after he opened the door. He walked over to a fake pot of flowers and flicked a switch. The flowers were rimmed in LED lights that changed color every few seconds.
"Wow," the three of us breathed.
"Now, who wants a Natty Light?" Caleb asked.
"Beer?" I asked disdainfully. "Don't you have any Everclear?"
Caleb opened up his mini-fridge. It was stocked with every kind of liquor bottle you could imagine.
"How'd you get all that alcohol?" Jane asked. "Do you have a fake?"
Caleb shrugged. "I'm from Ireland," he said, as if this explained everything. He pulled out a bottle of coconut rum, a can of crushed pineapple, and a lime. He poured everything into a blender and then set about pouring the concoction into five glasses. "I shall call this... the 'Going Home Alone.' Cheers!" he announced after he handed out each of our glasses.
Someone knocked at the door. "That'll be Adam," Caleb declared. Lizzie, Jane and I made ourselves comfortable on Caleb's foam couch as he opened the door. The boy named Adam was about 5'9" or so, the same height as Caleb, although Adam was a tad stockier. Whereas Caleb had a modified mullet, Adam's short brown hair mostly disappeared under a baseball cap. Caleb's redeeming feature was his eyes, which were a bright green. Adam's eyes underneath his cap were dark. Jane made the round of introductions. We covered the usual topics: where are you from, what dorm do live in, what's your major.
"Marine bio, huh?" Adam asked me. "Still?"
"Yeah. But I'm not one of those wanna-be dolphin trainers," I said, glancing around to make sure Linda wasn't in the room. It was as though my tongue got looser with every sip of my Going Home Alone. "I like fish, especially sharks."
"Sharks?" Caleb repeated. "Aren't they dangerous?"
"Not really. Cars are way more dangerous."
"How so?" Caleb asked, rising from his seat to refill his glass.
"It's all about probability. You are way more likely to get in a car accident than attacked by a shark."
"Yeah, but that's not really a consolation when I go to the beach and worry about what's swimming around me."
"Well, next time, you could think to yourself, 'Three people are going to be killed by a shark this year. But it won't be me.'"
"But when I get in my car and pull out of my parking space, I could think to myself 'Thousands of people are going to die on the road today. But it won't be me,'" Caleb countered. "But I don't stop to think. I just hit the gas."
"You have a car?" Jane asked.
Caleb nodded.
"But you could say that about anything," I continued. "There's a million tiny little things threatening your life every day. Every time you step out of your dorm room, every time you step out of the stall and don't wash your hands, you threaten yourself. Even just talking to someone is dangerous: who knows what germs they are carrying? And talking may lead to sex."
"Let's hope so," Jane said, raising her glass.
"Sex is just terrifying," I emptied the contents of my plastic cup down my throat. "Some of the worst diseases known to man are transmitted sexually. That condom may be the only thing standing between you and certain doom. One slip-up and your whole life goes down the Fallopian tubes."
"Is that why you're still a virgin?" Lizzie asked.
Adam tilted his head at me. I shrugged before saying, "The world is a scary place. When you sleep, you risk the fact of your breathing stopping in your sleep and not waking up again. When you walk, when you rollerblade or jog, when you drive, there's always the threat of some driver running you down. Especially if they are wearing fishermen's hats."
"Jesus, Tammy, you could spend your entire life worrying about these things."
"Not my whole life. Just sometimes when I can't sleep at night. But at least I can go to the beach and not worry about being attacked by a shark."
Jane grabbed my empty cup and brought it over to Caleb, who dutifully refilled it. He clicked a stereo remote and a beat of cymbals filled the room before a woman started moaning.
"What is this song?" I asked.
"Paula Cole's 'Feelin'Love.'" Caleb replied. "It's from the City of Angels soundtrack."
"Did she just say that she feels like the Amazon is running between her thighs?" Lizzie asked.
"I think so," Jane replied. "This song is pretty pimp."
We fell silent as Paula Cole described what 'love'—or perhaps, 'making love'—felt like; Jane, Lizzie, and I bobbing our heads to the beat.
"On that note, are we done talking about natural disasters?" Caleb asked when the song finished. "Who's ready to go to Beta?"
"Me!" I shouted, thoughts of dying drowned out by a couple more sips of my new Going Home Alone. "I'm going to ride the Horsey!"
"What horsey?" Adam asked.
"Do you know Dallas Green?" Jane replied.
"Never heard of him."
"Good," Jane said.
"Here Tammy," Adam said, holding a beaded necklace. He placed it around my neck and pressed a button behind one of the beads and the necklace lit up. "This will protect you from any drivers running you down."
Upon arrival at the party, Jane announced to no one in particular that the power for my light-up necklace was coming from my vagina. I don't remember much else from Beta Blackout; thankfully Dallas wasn't there. After we got back to the dorms, my only thought was that I needed to find my purple Abercrombie sweatshirt. Linda, who had stayed in our room all night, watched me dig through my entire closet and subsequent laundry bin in order to locate it. I remember going to the bathroom and peeing, and Jane was in the stall next to me, marveling at how clear her urine was.
But I didn't puke. I left that one to Lizzie; she spent the remainder of the night meeting who she thought was new people. In reality they were her Virgin Vault dormmates, who, inexperienced as they were with intoxicated people in general, came in to visit and marvel at the drunk girl.
"Hey!!!" Lizzie would exclaim loudly whenever someone came in. "Linda, how are you? I haven't seen you in forever."
"I just left to go to the bathroom."
"Oh. Hey.... Tammy, how are you? I haven't seen you in forever."
Finally, her roommate Andrea brought their empty popcorn bowl to her and Lizzie retched the undigested parts of her four Going Home Alone's into it. I was inaugurated into yet another college ritual that night: holding back someone else's hair as they puked their guts out. To this day I can no longer tolerate even the smell of coconut rum.
But the drinking continued.
For the rest of my college years, in fact.
"Adam likes you!" Lizzie burst into our room the next morning. I rolled over and tried to wet my dried out tongue. Forget horses, I felt as if I'd made out with a Yeti.
"Why?" I asked as I crawled out of my bed. Thankfully Linda had stocked a few water bottles in the mini-fridge. "I was so wasted last night. And how are you up bouncing around already? I thought you'd spend the day nursing your hangover."
Linda shrugged. "I ran into Caleb in the computer lab. He gave me what he called 'The Ultimate Hangover Cure.' I think it was just coffee with ice cream in it, but it worked. And he also mentioned that Adam wanted to get your number. He thought you were smart."
"Well, he was wrong."
"Tammy, aren't you flattered that some guy wants to get to know you?"
I took a gulp of water and then set the bottle on my desk. I tried to picture Adam, a stocky figure with a baseball cap, but all I could see behind my eyes was Dallas. "No," I said honestly. "If someone was going to like me, it should be Dallas. Or it might as well be nobody."