We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Read online

  I found myself surrounded on all sides by the kind of dudes who wore shorts in the winter and blasted Tim McGraw while tucking in their polo shirts and putting on belts to go party on a Saturday night. And, surprise, surprise, I kind of liked these jagoffs. I liked watching wrestling and would never mind going in on the delicious party sampler to eat in front of Monday Night Football. (Hot wings! Onion rings! Egg rolls! Pizza bites! Corn dogs! Jumbo mozzarella sticks! Heart disease.) I’m not a “just one of the guys” kind of person—I fucking hate men—but I love eating and marathon television watching and I never met any girls in DeKalb willing to endure six hours on a busted couch with cold cheese fries and reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000. John could eat seventeen ground beef tacos in one sitting and once watched From Dusk till Dawn three consecutive times on a Tuesday morning before class. Swoon.

  Adam was convinced that the later we left, the quicker the drive home would be, so we laid in bed all morning watching corny Lifetime Christmas movies and listening to our floormates leaving for home. I was feeling strangely conflicted, anxious to get back to gossiping in my friends’ cozy bedrooms yet apprehensive about what, if anything, I could contribute to the discussion. I hadn’t gone to homecoming and I didn’t have a crush on anyone and I couldn’t remember how to get into my e-mail; what was I going to talk about? I got the same activity books everyone else did, and the one time I ventured out to one of the vaguely interesting events (to the Movie Club, which turned out to be me and three other weirdos watching Pulp Fiction in an empty classroom at night with no snacks) I was disappointed and vowed to never try any new things ever again. Except for that one time John dragged me to a Young Republicans meeting. Oh, and Bible Club.

  My winter break would consist almost entirely of coffee shop gatherings during which I’d sit silently listening to the kinds of sugarcoated fables of idyllic college life that I didn’t have to offer: lush, sprawling lawns and picnic lunches on the quad, and sororities chosen and pledged. I hated these get-togethers. First of all, I didn’t know how to order coffee. I still goddamn don’t, because it is gross and unnecessarily fussy and I am a grown woman who really cannot tell a cup of bad coffee from a good one. I will drink coffee if it has a pint of cream, nine hundred packets of real sugar, and comes with a shot of insulin. Which is why I don’t drink coffee. So I’d be sitting there in the same hoodies and gym shoes I’d worn in high school, feeling like an asshole because I ordered a hot chocolate while everyone else was drinking complicated lattes, bored and mute because the most exciting thing I’d discovered in the months prior was that if I showed my student ID at McDonald’s they would take 10 percent off my fries.

  These bitches were at Brown and Harvard and Georgetown, driving their parents’ old BMWs to parties around campus while once a week I waited two hours sometimes for the local Sycamore bus to drop me off to buy Pop-Tarts and maxi pads at Walmart. NO, I WAS NOT GOING TO VOLUNTARILY TALK ABOUT MY COLLEGE EXPERIENCE. So many expectant eyes, peering at me from under so many shiny blunt-cut bangs. What could I tell these girls that would satisfy their curiosity? That college, at best, had been a lateral move I hadn’t really wanted to make? That I really should have learned how to sew in a weave or take apart a carburetor, because school never really has been my thing and there is no shame in being an hourly working person? I couldn’t tell them that all I did was constantly call my friend Anna in Rhode Island and anxiously wait for her monthly care packages (Portishead’s second album, various SARK books, etc.). That my very first ATM PIN was Matt Shaffer’s birthday even though he was halfway across the country playing rugby at Dartmouth and probably didn’t even remember who I was anymore. That’s the kind of gross creepy weird I am, the “your birthday is my PIN number” weird. In my mind I poured hot chocolate down the front of the ringleader’s silly Fair Isle sweater and bounced the empty paper cup off the top of her head. In real life I told them about the used record store I hung out in pretending to be Janeane Garofalo in Reality Bites. They remained unimpressed. It was a long afternoon.

  —

  Adam and I were the last ones out of the dorm. Adam hauled the luggage through the hushed, darkened hallways while John carried what was left of a Budweiser-fueled McDonald’s run the week before: a crumpled bag filled with slimy old nuggets and cheeseburgers that he had reheated in the tiny communal kitchen on our floor and cleaned of bits of mold. The three of us slipped and fell across the parking lot toward one of two remaining cars while sideways winds blew snow directly into our faces. While John wedged his oversize frame horizontally into the backseat, and I struggled to breathe under the weight of what I can only assume were suitcases full of mesh tank tops and Cubs jerseys in the front, Adam uneasily piloted his tiny car through the blizzard and out of the student lot.

  I shouldn’t eat old McDonald’s. An hour on the road and we were still only ten miles outside of campus. As holiday traffic inched imperceptibly along, John snored peacefully in the backseat and I squinted at the radio dial and tried to pick up a signal from DeKalb’s one decent radio station. Suddenly, I felt something strike a match in the pit of my stomach. I ignored it, continuing to search vainly for strains of that one Third Eye Blind song everybody knows by heart and hates. What I found instead was droning conservative talk radio, artificially cheerful Christmas carols, the play-by-play of some football game being held in the middle of a cornfield, and fuck there it was again, except this time it was slick, boiling oil churning through my large intestine at breakneck speed. “I need a bathroom,” I blurted at Adam, my armpits suddenly damp. “I NEED A BATHROOM RIGHT NOW.”

  Adam threw up his hands, helpless inside his toy car, gesticulating wildly toward the stretch of motionless cars in the icy tundra before us and, I don’t know, bleating like a teenage girl about how far the nearest exit was. I tried to distract myself from the reality that I was trapped in a metal box with two spray-tanned pieces of beef jerky by returning my attention to the useless radio in front of me. An eerie calm washed over me as I felt another wave of molten lava break gently against my intestinal wall. I bolted upright. “I am going to shit in your car,” I announced, surrendering to the inevitable. John awoke with a grunt, jumping out of the backseat as Adam desperately yanked the car out of traffic and onto the shoulder. I kicked out of my reasonably priced new Walmart winter boots. John snatched my door open, threw the suitcase I was holding into a snowbank with one hand, and held the empty cheeseburger bag out to me with the other. “IN HERE,” he commanded. OKAY. SURE, BRO. Leaning with my right side against the open car and my left arm wrapped around John’s leg for balance, I squatted, hopeful and relieved, my eyes trained on the bead of sweat trickling slowly down Adam’s temple.

  —

  When I first moved into the dorm I didn’t shit for three days. The morning after move-in, I got up at dawn and eased out of my room in my freshly purchased pajamas into the dimly lit corridor. I had everything the Bed Bath & Beyond ad suggested a young woman headed off to college would need: a large shower caddy with multiple compartments to carry things from my room to whatever shower stall I could claw a bitch’s eyes out to get into so I wouldn’t be late for Biology 101, bacteria-resistant flip-flops to protect me from other people’s periods, and a towel big enough to protect my boobs from the prying eyes of girls who had never seen their moms’ grown-up, veiny breasts before.

  I tiptoed into the bathroom, glancing under the stalls for tiny manicured feet. When I saw none I slipped into the closest stall and waited a few seconds before letting out the loudest, grossest fart any non–zoo animal had ever emitted and taking the biggest shit ever. Like, the fattiest, fast-food-iest dump any human had ever taken. I emerged from the stall several minutes later, light as air, my butthole singing, and ran smack into a trio of girls responsibly washing their faces over the sink, eyes aghast behind the thin layer of Clinique mild cleanser they passed between them. I avoided eye contact in the mirror while washing my hands, then spent the rest of the semester sneakily shitting at
2:00 p.m. in the crumbling library in the center of campus.

  Now: I shit all over my jeans, legs, hand, and that greasy, disintegrating bag, as good Christian people in Ford Tauruses pretended they weren’t trying to figure out what was happening on the other side of Adam’s car. After the first wave, I kicked out of my jeans entirely, held my butthole closed as tightly as I could against the cold, wet air, and started digging a toilet hole in the snow. “YOU ARE A GODDAMN GENIUS,” John boomed proudly next to me, swirling snowflakes getting caught in his beard. I crouched again as another forest fire raced through my guts. Under ordinary circumstances I would be totally fucking humiliated, demanding that these dudes turn away from the embarrassment of my thighs, but when you are shitting yourself in public in broad daylight, the last thing you worry about is some drunk kid from Schaumburg seeing how long your pubic hair is. “Atta girl!” Coach John shouted encouragingly over the dull roar of the howling winter wind, awkwardly patting the top of my head as I was, once again, clinging miserably to his knees while evacuating my bowels onto the side of the road. “You’re doing so good!” An odd surge of pride rushed through me.

  Adam, absolutely horrified, tossed me an NIU T-shirt he’d yanked from his gym bag. I fashioned it into a makeshift washcloth—GO HUSKIES—and then used mittenfuls of melting snow to clean out the diarrhea that had splashed into my vagina. John kicked fresh snow into my shit hole as Adam hyperventilated inside the car, punching buttons and twisting knobs like a man possessed as he tried valiantly to not look at my shame. The radio finally caught a spark, that “Bittersweet Symphony” song that was everywhere in 1997 suddenly crackling out of the tinny speakers. And then the car died.

  Happy Birthday

  Thursday, February 12, 1998, was the day before my eighteenth birthday. Some girls on our floor had papered the hallway with pink and red construction-paper hearts in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, and it was a source of constant annoyance to me. No one at NIU wanted to have sex with me, and that was fine, but I didn’t need a visual reminder that I was hideous and unloved every time I dragged my pore-unclogging face wash to the goddamned bathroom. I had a break after my English class and came back to the dorm to drink imitation Cokes and watch MTV while ignoring the mountain of homework I’d accumulated since the beginning of the semester. The phone on the wall rang as soon as I unlocked the door and I paused to figure out whether it was for me. Two rings for Cara, one long ring for Sam. Or maybe it was the other way around. The phone was for me.

  On the other end of the line was a detective from the Evanston Police Department, and I knew, because he was using his gentlest inside voice, two things: (1) someone had made sure to tell him that I was seventeen years old, and (2) my father was probably dead.

  At this point in the heartrending after-school special of my life, there would be a flashback to the week before, when I’d received another startling and unexpected phone call. But first, a little bit of background: Samuel Bishop Irby was the kind of alcoholic who made grain alcohol in our bathtub and sold what he didn’t drink in SunnyD bottles to the local degenerates in his crew. Samuel Bishop Irby was the kind of alcoholic who would drink three bottles of NyQuil if my mother forbade his going to the liquor store and hid his car keys where he was too drunk to think of looking for them. Samuel Bishop Irby was the kind of alcoholic who, when desperate for a fix and home alone with his preadolescent daughter and an empty liquor cabinet, would soak a loaf of bread with shoe polish and drink whatever he could filter through the loaf into a glass. SB, as his friends called him, was handsome and charming and affable, and he had the greatest laugh you’ve ever heard. But SB was also broken, just totally broken. And I couldn’t grow up around him. It wasn’t safe.

  After my mom and I moved out when I was four, SB’s life underwent a series of changes, most of which I have no real idea about. He’d move away, get his life together, come back, destroy it again. I saw him randomly, in fits and starts, and always on the upswing. Always with a healthy glow and toothy grin, singing a new song about how he really was going to get his shit together this time. I’d like to think that eventually he pulled it together for me, that when he’d gotten word I was suffering, some paternal urge deep within him willed him clean and sober and back in town, superhero cape affixed firmly to his collar. The part of me that needs to believe my life was important to a person who created it clings to that, but I am logical, realistic. I know otherwise. At that point I was worth little more than the five-hundred-dollar-or-so monthly Social Security check that followed me like a dowry to whoever was willing to take me in. When he caught wind that this money was up for grabs, he was back in town in an instant, back in his chauffeur uniform and cap, buying me a futon and a tiny television set.

  But SB had his eyes on a bigger prize. The state was paying my mother’s nursing home rent to the tune of nine hundred dollars a month, and my dad figured that if he could somehow get her into his household, that money could be his. “This is not a good idea,” I whispered into her ear as my father laid out his plan, fast-talking like a used-car salesman as he spread papers of zero consequence, full of calculations that she could barely understand, across the cafeteria table. I glared at him, my chubby fingers laced through her skeletal ones, my eyes shining with tears. She was nodding excitedly. “You need a nurse,” I murmured, my heart fracturing, incrementally, as I watched her excitement build. “This house doesn’t even have a ramp. How are we going to get your wheelchair inside?”

  She didn’t want to hear me. She had been locked away in this place for three years already, waiting to die, and now she could have what she always wanted: her husband and her kid and a home. Together. I tried to hide how much I was crying as two techs and my father loaded her into the car, my father sweating and cursing as he folded her wheelchair and shoved it awkwardly in the trunk. It took half an hour for us to get her inside the house, me tilting her wheelchair backward up the concrete steps as SB grimaced under the weight of her balanced on his shoulder. I read the lists of her medications and the instructions that the Patient Care Technician had scribbled on a notepad over and over as she beamed up at me from the couch. As much as I wanted my mom back, this wasn’t the way to do it, with no nurse and no real money and a man with a hair-trigger temper sleeping in the next room.

  I have to stop and tell you that this is not a place I revisit often in my mind. Of everything, of all the sad things and disappointing things and hurtful things, this is the place in my head that it hurts most to go to. This part, where my mom, my baby, has such a monumental insult added to injury—it makes my heart die a little to even think about it. She was so hopeful, man. So happy. Like a kid finally being adopted after having been passed over in the orphanage dozens of previous times. And all we had to offer her was a couch. A television with all the cable channels on it. Diapers she was too humiliated to wear in front of a man who had chosen the bottle over her love, and pills I had to put in applesauce so she could swallow them because she couldn’t really swallow anymore. She needed a nurse. She needed a bed that she could raise and lower. She needed a feeding tube. She needed a call button and a daily doctor visit and occupational therapy because she couldn’t remember how to use her hands anymore and, for the nine hundred dollars my father had already gambled away on the lottery, she didn’t have any of those things.

  You also should know that I was fifteen when this experiment took place, and lest you start to cast me in some sort of saintly light, I was still wholly consumed with fifteen-year-old things: Spanish tests and boys and Tori Amos and things. I was anxious and stressed out and, most of all, resentful. Resentful that, as I’d suspected, all of the caretaking would again fall to me. I had played this game before. Years before my mother had even gone into the nursing home, I had done the “pretend you can have a real life while inadequately caring for this terminally ill person” charade. I felt like my time had already been served, that the payoff was a normal curfew and shoulders that weren’t hunched beneath the weight of
adult responsibility.

  Mom would sleep sitting up, bolstered on either side by shapeless pillows on a couch salvaged from some rich person’s trash and from which she was rarely moved. She watched TV, ate her meals, took her medicine, and decomposed a little bit more every day. The three of us were such a goddamned nightmare. When she went back to the nursing home, it came as no surprise to any of us; the ambulance slid away from our rented house with her tucked safely inside, malnourished and fragile, deflated by this most recent disappointment. Her meager belongings bounced in the small suitcase balanced across my knees as SB and I silently followed behind them in the Cadillac, his face grim.

  Now I stood facing the corner near our dorm room’s door, nose almost touching the wall, because I could feel Cara’s concerned eyes searching my back for a clue. The phone felt hot and slippery against my ear. “Your father is missing, Samantha,” the detective said. “He’s been gone for over twenty-four hours and no one has any idea where he is.” I let silence fill the empty space between us. After thirty seconds he cleared his throat. “We will be in touch with you as things develop, okay? We’re doing everything we can to find him.”