by Nick Borden
Michael’s first impression of Elsie is that she’s a teacher’s pet, the kind of person who doesn’t know how to have fun. He seems distant during their date, because he’s mad at the friend that set them up. Michael is realizing this is just another attempt to get him to “clean up his life.”
Elsie’s first impression of Michael is that he’s angry about something. He doesn’t seem interested in her, but she wonders if maybe deep down he feels the same anxieties she does. Maybe this is just the way he presents himself, some kind of defense mechanism, so that once she gets to know him he’ll be sweet and sensitive and loving, but she knows that only happens in movies.
He mentions that his friend told him she was really smart. She cringes, as though he has offended her.
“Is something wrong with that?”
“No, it’s just that’s so vague, isn’t it?” she says. “That’s something parents say about their kids. It’s what you say to someone when you don’t know them well enough to give them an actual, useful compliment.”
She understands that she is pretty, in a conventional, Hollywood kind of way, but instead of making her confident it makes her more anxious about everything.
“I’m terrified of talking to guys,” she jokes. “My worst fear is that I’ll say hi or wave to someone, and they’ll think that means I have a crush on them, and they’ll ask me out, and then when I say no they turn into a raging psychopath or something.”
She scrunches her forehead and fidgets her hands when she is uncomfortable, and she realizes she’s doing it now so she forces herself to smile. He can tell it’s a fake smile because he’s spent hours in the mirror practicing one of his own.
Michael is still reliving a horrible roommate meeting from the day before. His three roommates cornered him to explain that it’s not normal to lie in bed all day, unable to find the motivation to get up or go to class. They say it’s weird that whenever they go out he just sits around with a thousand yard stare, and how they were really freaked out the time he didn’t talk for a whole week. They brought emails from his professors asking if he’s okay, and when he just groaned they got mad and said he’s going to get thrown out of school. He just replied, “it’s a liberal arts school, they won’t fail me.”
She’s not really there in spirit either. She’s remembering the past weekend when she went home to see her parents because she has no one else to talk to. She was so excited to get home, but once she was there all her mom wanted to talk about was journalism, or politics, or which medicine Elsie was taking now. She accepted this blind date out of some crazy hope that somehow she would magically meet her soulmate, but now she thinks she would rather have just stayed home.
The date ends, and they politely say that maybe they’ll see each other around campus. Privately, they both know it’s a lie, and neither of them is upset about that. She walks around school like a ghost, wishing she could take the place of anyone around her. He starts a homework assignment, but finds it annoying, so he shuts his computer and lies down with his face pressed into the couch.
–
They don’t see each other again until a few weeks later. A casual friend of Elsie’s is throwing a party, and she got a pity invite, so she plans to make a polite appearance and then go home and read a book.
He shows up alone, and within minutes he’s the life of the party. He brings beer, as well as some obscure kind of rum, and soon a crowd of strangers is sitting around him listening to his every word.
He takes a break from entertaining the crowd and joins her in lurking behind the kitchen counter. She remarks that he looks more energized, and he says “what can I say, I’m a chameleon.”
They talk for a while, and it’s a more casual setting than the date, and he’s somewhat drunk, so the conversation is much more interesting and lively. She tells him she’s dreaming of becoming a journalist, and he says he doesn’t know what he wants to do but he thinks he would be good at writing, or accounting, and she says she’s terrified of the idea that college isn’t worth it anymore and that she might have come this far and done all this work for nothing, and he just laughs and says “You get to do this. It’s the only time you get to really live.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” she says. “I would love to be so confident to just go out and drink every weekend, but I…have things to do. I have to worry about my career. I don’t think these are really my people.”
He smiles and grabs her hand and pulls her into the room so she can see everyone. He finds her fascinating, like a little sister.
“The guy in the corner…he’s a journalism major too. He wants to work for the New York Times. The guy next to him in the ‘Big Lebowski’ shirt, holding the beer bong…he’s a political science major. He’s applying to an internship in Congress. This is life. Once you grow up you’re a cog in the machine forever, and one day you’ll wake up and realize your entire life has passed you by. Because what’s the point of doing anything, or having any kind of success, if it’s not real, if you can’t feel it, if you don’t have fun?”
As much as she finds him annoying, she has to admit he is right, and she feels jealous. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he says. “We’ll do a shot of this rum, then we’re going to go over to them. I’ll introduce you, and you guys are going to have a lovely talk about journalism and careers.”
She ends up talking with the journalism major all night. His name is John, and he’s very nice, but she selfishly notes that he is not as smart as she is, or as driven, which makes her feel confident.
–
Michael and Elsie meet again the next week, where she tells him the journalism guy asked her out on a date, and Michael sees that she finally looks happy, which makes him happy, too. She asks whether he has any dates set up and he says no, but she doesn’t feel bad because she thinks he must have so many options.
They hang out a lot the next few weeks, and she can’t help but be fascinated by him. His apartment is a psychopathic level of clean. He yells at his roommates when they leave things on the floor or in the sink. When he does homework he writes whatever comes to his mind for about five minutes then turns it in without proofreading at all. When she sees his grades she’s shocked, but he says it’s no big deal, they were a lot worse last week.
He takes her out to parties and nightclubs, and she likes that he doesn’t pressure her to drink. The idea of not being in control of her own body scares her, whereas he says that a New York City bar crawl would be as close to meeting God as he could ever get. She gets to hear all his weird stories, like the time he and his roommate got kicked out of a frat party, or the time he sniffed salt and smashed his head through a door.
She tells him he goes through stages of intoxication; first is the social stage, when he goes around introducing himself to everyone like it’s a business meeting. Then he hits the standup comedian stage, where he starts roasting everyone around him. Then he hits the angry political stage, where he starts lecturing everyone about socialism and the dangers of the military industrial complex, and finally the drooling phase, where he can barely stand and loses the ability to form words altogether.
–
One day next month he stops answering her texts, so she swings by his apartment. His roommate answers the door with an angry look and says, “He’s in a mood,” and she goes in to find him lying on his bed surrounded by a pile of clothes. The room looks like a tornado hit it.
She sees on his desk that he was doing homework, so she asks him about it, and he responds that the professor is just some petty bourgeois who talks and acts like he’s a common person, but in reality he’s making six figures, and all he cares about is that he gets an opportunity to strut around the classroom talking down his nose to everyone; he doesn’t give a shit about his students or their grades, it’s some kind of sick ego trip for him.
She argues, saying that he’s probably a nice guy, and he is there to help students, and that’s not what petty bourgeois means, but he doesn’t budge, so she sits down at the desk and writes the paper for him, and the only thing that can motivate him to sit up is the guilt of her doing his work.
She looks in the trash can, where there are four empty cans of red bull and a blood stained washcloth, and she asks him how is he still alive, and he says the only way to live is on the edge, but he says it in a sarcastic way, and with a little bit of sadness in it.
For some reason at this moment she remembers the time her uncle told her that she would make a great mother one day, even though she was only twelve, and she had just met him for the first time, and for some reason no one else at the family gathering had found that weird.
So she filled up a bucket with cold water and dumped it on Michael’s head and told him they were going for a walk.
Michael wears his sunglasses even though the sun isn’t out, and for once he actually thinks he looks cool. He asks how things are going with the journalism guy, and she says it’s going fine, but she doesn’t sound confident, and he can tell something is wrong. So he asks, and she says that even though John’s a nice guy and he has interesting things to say and he’s not ugly, and he cares about her, and he’s such a nice guy, for some reasons she just can’t get excited about the relationship, and does that make her shallow? Should she dump him so he can find someone better?
He laughs, because she has an obsession with always being the good guy, and he wonders sometimes if she realizes how impressive she is. She feels embarrassed, as though she has forgotten some basic rule of dating. Even in conversations with Michael and John, she is still scared of being judged.
“That’s relationships,” he says. “You think you’re looking for some great love, some magical experience because that’s what they say in movies, but that’s not true at all.”
She laughs at him now, because she finally realizes he doesn’t know everything. He’s just a depressed kid who wants to be Don Draper, or James Dean, and the only skill he has is the ability to be confident in anything he does, even if it’s only half the time, and maybe that’s the only skill that matters.
“Would you like to meet my parents?” She asks.
“I’d rather slit my wrists,” he says.
That’s the way their relationship goes for the rest of the year. When he’s lying in bed she’ll talk through his homework with him, and even help him write emails to his professors. Sometimes they’ll sit together and read. She reads Jane Austen and he reads Jack Kerouac. He’ll tell her how cutting himself isn’t the thrill it used to be, and she’ll complain about how fake social media is. Sometimes they compare what medicines they’re taking.
When he’s feeling better he takes her to parties and introduces her to complete strangers. Sometimes when he’s drunk he’ll stand on a table or couch and yell, “I am a golden god!” She always laughs because she’s the only one who gets the movie reference. One time he yells at someone for playing Call of Duty, because according to him it programs children to join the military and colonize Middle Eastern countries in the name of white supremacy, and another time he shows a girl a picture of a model in a magazine and tells her this is the face of feminist Marxist false consciousness.
She can’t help but notice a pattern that emerges for both of them. She meets people at a party, has a nice discussion about career goals, then when she runs into them later they say a quick “Hi” and keep walking with their real friends, because there’s a difference between real relationships and fake ones, and sometimes you can’t control that. She knows Michael would say, “Fuck it, that’s life,” but it still genuinely bothers her, because she knows eventually one of these fake relationships will result in a letter of recommendation, or a higher paid position, or a career connection, and she hates the idea of getting something that she didn’t truly earn.
He has it worse in her opinion. She sees how people react when they meet him at parties. Everyone loves him, and even when the other guys glare at him it’s in a jealous way, like they wish they could be him, which she understands. But she also sees the other side, the way people get tired of his intensity after a few meetings and start to whisper behind his back. She sees how the novelty of him as a fun party guy with weird stories wears off. Now she knows why he has no steady friend group, because he is surrounded by fake relationships constantly. She wonders how he motivates himself to keep going to new parties and events, knowing that the smiles around him will fade, either because they get tired of him, or because he drives them away with his aggressive mood swings. She sees the way his roommates avoid him, and don’t speak to him in their own apartment, how they take advantage of his manic energy to clean their messes for them, and how easily they give up when he doesn’t want to get out of bed.
It’s a weird mix of emotions for her. It’s comforting knowing there are people out there with problems worse than hers, but she’s also filled with dread that one day he will decide she is that same kind of fake friend and abandon her out of pity or self loathing, and she knows that even if he graduates and sees the best therapist in the world, there is still a good chance that he will self destruct and end up slitting his wrists or hanging from a door frame, and even though that’s a disgusting thing to think about, she pictures herself at his funeral telling all his fake friends how they failed him and it makes her feel happy.
