A Little Bit of Something Real

                                                                                Chapter 1:
        I cannot stand weaving through the constant hell of morning traffic as I make my way toward class. I am already a junior in college.  Somehow, I have managed to make my way through the thirteen years of lower education successfully and even alarmingly well, academically at least.  Now, I am somewhere, stuck in the middle of feeling like I having all the opportunity in the world before me and having almost no opportunity in the world before me.  Sometimes I sink so low as to see my only possible future involve my manning the graveyard shift at the local 7/11—lovely prospect INDEED.  There is nothing like the 3:00am influx of drunk and stoned college kids wanting some greasy chicken to really give your life some meaning.  But, back from my (hopefully wrong caricature) of the future… 
         I go to a university in rural north Mississippi. In other words, I go to a university smack in the very epicenter of absolutely nowhere.  I was going to go to Columbia, university that is.  You know, the Ivy League up in the bustling metropolis of New York City that boasts some of the best educators and bright young minds in the world? Yes, that one.  I was even accepted!  How very exhilarating that was for me.  New York has always instilled such fascination, such thrills of excitement in me.  But alas, the darndest things can get in the way of dream achieving.  In my case, it was money.  I was naïve indeed to think that my parents, solid middle-classes though they are, could afford a cool $50 grand a year for college tuition.  HA!  That’ll shatter any sort of rose-colored view you have of the world in an instant, which it did for me, almost immediately.  I had to come to the disenchanting realization that, no matter how hard we work in life, we still sometimes don’t get what we want. 
         God, it’s far too early to ponder philosophical revelations like that one.  Sometimes my internal monologues trail off to unknown quarters of my mind.  I should work on that. I slammed on my brakes as I realized the light in front of me was red.  Okay… must get back to reality…pulling into parking lot so far from class that I may have to hail one of the two taxis servicing Oxford to get there in time.  Damn!  Should have left earlier. 
“Lucy! Lucy, Get your ass over here, thank God I’m not the only one late!”
Sometimes I feel like when I’m in my head, it’s like being really deep underwater, and I must resurface from a great distance in order to bring myself back to the real world and socialize.  So, I squinted at the sun, took a deep breath, and came back to reality. 
“Morning Steve, how goes it?” I returned his lovely salutation with some trepidation.  Steve kind of gives me the heebie jeebies, all social anxiety aside.  Furthermore, he is mildly attractive and heterosexual, which makes me all the more unable to form coherent sentences around him. 
“Oh you know, I’m just livin’ the dream,” he replied in a most characteristic nonsensical manner as he flipped his hair a little and gave a sort of half-smile.
Um, no, actually I don’t know what your dreams are, Steve, I mused.  To be woefully cheerful at eight in the morning? Why don’t we go have a chat over some good wine, and you can tell me all about them?  It could lead to beautiful places for both of us…
Right, get out of my head.
“Oh, yeah, the dream… nice. Gotta love the dream. I know I do. The dream… yeah. Mmm..” I reply, lamely.  God, I need coffee.  How am I supposed to be culpable for social interactions when I can barely form coherent sentences in my own head?
Steve gave me a sort of sideways eyebrow raise, as if to silently question my sanity, then we walked to class silently.  Damn.  And another one bites the dust…
I am not the world’s best conversationalist.  I have a bit of performance anxiety about it, actually.  When I am talking to someone with whom I have no desire to get to know better, I am perfectly great at it! It is when I have to talk to anyone that I actually do like or admire that this becomes a problem.  It is a most inconvenient problem. 
I sneaked into class as quietly as possible, but promptly and loudly hit my chair against the table behind me as I sat down.  Shit.  The professor cleared his throat, gave me that squinty eye severe look that professors give, then continued with his lecture.  I sat in class and played games on my laptop to keep from falling asleep as I tried to pick up the most important tidbits of the lecture.  Oh the joy of learning!  At Ole Miss, it’s reduced to a widely accepted mindset in which the primary goal is to do as little work as humanly possible to get the desired grade.  Over-achievers go for the A: in this way, I am an over-achiever.  Although, as an over-achiever in a place in which underachievement is the guiding norm, overachievement is really just very efficient underachievement.  In other words, my academic record is really not all that impressive.  I’ve been able to eke by with A’s by doing surprisingly little substantive work.  This would perhaps be extremely gratifying, if I did not like learning or studying.  Unfortunately, I thrive on studies and learning.  But I have found myself conforming to the system, and therefore learning far less than I would really like to, which of course leaves me constantly yearning for more.  I am a very complicated being. 
                                                                          Chapter 2:
         It is night, and I am a party animal! Okay, so not really.  I’m more of a party kitten:  cute and cuddly, and not fully grown in the ways of partying.  I am with Kate, a waifish sort who is one of the rare girls that pulls off a pixie haircut and makes everyone jealous of it.  Kate doesn’t drink, but my throat is burning for one, or maybe it’s my social inhibitions that are burning to be broken.  We are at a club on the square; actually, the only club on the square.  Oxford has a square with a courthouse and nice quaint shops and bars all around it.  It’s very old fashioned in that sense, and in many other senses for that matter. 
         Kate has no inhibitions about dancing.  She just gets out there and goes for it.  I kind of shook around a bit and pretended to be completely confident in my out of sync wobbling, then gave up and sneaked off to the bar for some liquid confidence.  After a gin and tonic, I felt that little buzz of cheer wash over me, and I returned to the dance floor, which was full of gyrating drunks feeling each other up through their clothes, and found Kate rocking out to a beat that could only exist in her own head.  God, she needs at least a 5 foot radius around her to guarantee that the surrounding people don’t get flogged by one of her signature moves.  Therefore, I smiled at her and retreated to a safe distance to take in the atmosphere while I still had a buzz on.
Despite the wave of comfort and warmth that a G and T can cause, I still don’t feel comfortable in a club setting.  They are always so damn loud and full of drunken freshmen girls falling over their boyfriends and admirers while giggling like very well dressed hyenas.  I’m not much of a giggler.  I looked around, to see if there were any potential hopefuls for a drunken make out, just in case I knocked back a few more cocktails.  As far as the guys were concerned, all I saw was a sea of preppy polos and khakis. Ew. Frat night at the club…. Not my cup of tea. 
“LUUUCY!!!” God, Kate has got a set of lungs on her.
“What, Kate?” She had stopped her flailing about and edged through the crowd near me.
“Why aren’t you dancing? It’s fabulous tonight! Well, except for a few wankers.” Kate often inserts British words like “wanker” into her so very American English, in what I can only see as an effort to prove to the little town of Oxford her worldliness and sophistication.  At her remark, she glanced in disgust at the couple next to us, who had become so entwined in one another that they looked as if they might need help getting apart again.
“Kate, look, I’m just not in the mood tonight.  Sorry.  I think I’m going to head home. You stay and have fun though, really.”
Kate frowned at me then shrugged, said good-bye, and turned back toward the dance floor.  I shuffled toward the door, feeling very alone indeed, and started the long walk back toward my car.  So much for my party kitten-ness:  I now felt so drained of any desire to party that I don’t think anything could have gotten me up again.  There is nothing like a room full of dancing happy people to make you feel like the loneliest person in the whole goddamn world, which is just about how I felt at present, actually. 
Oxford at night, once you get off the hustle-bustle of the square, is quite charming, really.  Quaint old Southern wood-slat houses with wrap around verandas line the streets, and it embodies the sort of small town feel you would think only existed in 1950s television.  This image was broken up a little by the fact that I could still hear the constant bumping of loud hip/hop from the square, and droves of students laughing and moving around from bar to bar.  I sat down on the curb wrapped my arms around myself.  I felt like I was part of an entirely different world than all those people, and I almost wanted to be part of a different world.  I just couldn’t give myself over fully to mindless partying and messing around with friends.  I always thought too much about everything to really be a part of everything. 
“Wooo! Yeeah!” a drunken guy yelled out of the back of a car window, successfully scaring me out of my reverie.  I scrambled up and hurried to my car, anxious to get away from the constant chaos of a college weekend.
Once in my car and homeward bound, I saw that I had four missed calls from Dave, a guy whose friendship with me revolved primarily around our mutual ability to spill all of our problems to each other when they were about to boil over into oblivion, then go without talking for however long it took for one of us to have another crisis. 
I called him back, subjugating my own woes and preparing mentally to act as an ear for a while.
“Lucy! God where have you been?” His voice sounded frantic. This must be pretty big. 
“Hey, yeah, sorry I missed your calls… I actually tried going out tonight.  In a fit of crazed optimism I thought I might actually have fun. Heh.. no luck there.  It was wretched.”
“eck.. Lucy, really, Oxford is not your scene.  Come up to Boston and visit me! It’s absolutely fantastic this time of year!  I could introduce you to some very attractive boys, too...” He trailed off with a dangerous edge of mischievousness in his voice. 
“oh, come on Dave, I know all your guy friends only like other boys.  I would feel more lonely and forgotten than ever. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. Now get on with your story. I know you must be needing to spill something. I can hear the itch in your voice from holding back this long,” I responded crisply.
“First of all, cute cliché, but I know for a fact you were born in the morning, and second of all, you are right… they are all gay, but that doesn’t make them any less hot, I sure you.  Quite the contrary, actually.  But now, enough of you, let’s focus on me. Here’s the thing:  Tom wants to meet my parents!”
“God, Dave, does he not understand that your parents are members of the radical right, undyingly committed to the notion that gay people don’t really exist and any fool who gets the mistaken notion that they do is headed straight to hell in a handbag?”
“Lovely summary there, Luce, but no, of course he doesn’t understand!  His parents are NPR loving tree huggers from Vermont! He got all goddamn upset when I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea.  He hasn’t even talked to me for the past four hours.  I’m going stir crazy here!!”
I prattled on with him about the cultural differences between the south and north, left and right, offering platitudes and reassurances in an effort to calm Dave’s panic.  After about half an hour of gut-spilling, Tom beeped in on his call waiting, and Dave frantically hung up on me to go make amends with Tom.  By now, I was back in my room, laying in bed and staring up at the ceiling, feeling more like a sound board than a human.  “How did I get here?” I asked the ceiling.
No response. 
Damn. 
                                                                            Chapter 3
         My best physical attributes are undoubtedly my eyebrows and my cheekbones.  My nose is horrible; I hate it.  It is sort of big and has the unfortunate quality of spreading out and thus increasing its area even more when I smile.  Aside from the nose-spreading, my smile is quite nice, enviable even.  I stared at myself in the mirror, driven out of sheer boredom into making faces at myself, until I heard my roommate slam the door and screech at me.
         “God Lucy, why are you here?”  Did you not hear me say that Colin and I wanted to have the place to ourselves tonight? I mean, I know you are kind of a loner, but couldn’t you have found something to do for just this one Friday night?”
         She is such a darling, my roommate.  She certainly doesn’t beat around the bush about things, that’s for sure.  “Damn, Amy, sorry, I forgot.  Uhhh… yeah, I’m on my way out anyway,” I lied, so as not to appear quite the loser that she had painted me to be.  I grabbed my keys and purse, and headed toward my little gas-efficient hatchback, still dressed in heels and a dress from the club.  “See y’all later!  Have fun.  Hope the house is still standing tomorrow!”  Amy and Colin took a sort of rough’n’wild approach to relationships, often leaving a path of demolition in their wake.
         “Ha. Ha. Ha. Anyway, have fun-er-wherever you are headed,” she countered before slamming the door shut.
I wish I knew where exactly I was headed, I thought to myself, as I revved the engine and backed out, somewhat dejectedly.  The truth is I didn’t want to be around anybody right now.  I felt too alone to be around people.  I knew that my feeling of disconnectedness from the world around me, from human relationships and love, would only intensify if I were to surround myself with the sorry excuses I liked to call friends.  So instead I just drove, through the endless fields and softly rolling fields of North Mississippi, swerving now and then to miss deer who tried to throw themselves in my path.  The darkness was oppressive, and I started to cry.  Not just little weepy girl tears either; I was really crying.  Fat tears poured out of my eyes like mad, until I finally had to pull over in a service station parking lot because I couldn’t see anymore.  I drew my knees up to my chin and huddled into myself, shaking with sobs until an old man knocked on my window, terrifying me and causing me to hit my head hard on the side of the door. 
“Hey little darlin’, why you cryin’? A girl pretty as you shouldn’t be out here in the middle a’nowhere cryin’ her heart out. Come on inside an’ me and Ted’ll fix you up some nice hot coffee, on the house.”  Oh god, he had about four teeth, all smiling hopefully at me. I could smell whiskey through the window. 
“Um, thanks sir, but I better be on my way.” I responded shakily through the window as I yanked the car into reverse and pealed out of the parking lot.