Read Joe College: A Novel for Free Online Page B

about spelling since I know it is one of your strong points (NOT one of mine!)
    You know when I think of you most? Coffee break. When I step outside and see your father’s truck waiting in the road. I expect you to be there again, wearing that doofy coin belt (No offense!) or else I remember us kissing in the front seat. Remember that?
    I’m really sorry if I disappointed you. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with you the way you wanted to be with me. I guess I
was just scared or something. Oh well. You probably have a new girlfriend now. I HOPE not! (Is it all right for me to say that?)
    You don’t have to write back if you don’t want. I mainly just want to tell you about the car, since you spent so much time helping me look. I at least owe you a ride when you get back home for Thanksgiving. Would that be okay?
    Wow! I don’t think I’ve written a letter this long in my whole life. I guess I’m like that once I get going I can’t seem to get myself to shut up. But I guess I don’t have to tell YOU!
     
     
    Love,
Cynthia
     
     
    ps—is it all right for me to say love?

    Another letter came the next day, and another one the day after that. After her eighth unanswered letter, I finally broke down and wrote her back. I congratulated her on her new car, talked a little about my classes, and told her how much fun I was having working in the dining hall. In passing, I mentioned that I wasn’t seeing anyone new, and that I still thought about her from time to time. Three days later, she called and asked if she could drive up for a visit. (“Just for the day,” she assured me.) By that time, though, it was November already, and the late semester crunch had set in. I had papers to write, and no time for visitors. We made plans to get together over Thanksgiving break.
    My first night home she picked me up in her new car, proud and happy and nervous. She had a new haircut too, shorter and less elaborate and a lot more flattering. We went to the movies, then out for a couple of drinks. We laughed a lot, and took a detour to Echo Lake on the way home. In an empty parking lot by the golf course, she showed me how the front seats of her Honda reclined like dentist chairs. With the heater running and Greetings from Asbury Park on the tape player, we kissed till our jaws ached and our tongues were sore, just like the summer had never ended.
     
     
    At ten thirty the phone rang again. I figured it to be Matt, weighing in with a second round of begging and hectoring, but it turned out to be Polly Wells, the deputy assistant literary editor for poetry at Reality.
    “Hey,” she said, chuckling softly to herself as if remembering a good joke. “What are you doing?”
    “Abusing my highlighter. It’s an ugly scene.”
    “Want to go to Naples?”
    “Like when?”
    “Like now?”
    I glanced down at the brick that was Middlemarch and weighed my alternatives. Polly had a cloud of reddish blond hair and the mouth of a cherub. We’d kissed each other once, experimentally, at the party celebrating the first issue of Reality, and neither one of us had mentioned it since. We were both drunk at the time, but I retained a vivid memory of her whispering, “You’re a very strange person,” and then kissing me on the mouth, as if to congratulate me on my strangeness. I believe I’d been going on about her name before that, telling her how great I thought it was that there were still people in the world named Polly. (The only thing I remembered after that was vomiting into a storm drain while Sang stood by with some guy I didn’t know, waiting patiently for me to finish.)
    “Now sounds good,” I told her.
    Ten minutes later I was sitting across from her in a scarred-up wooden booth near the jukebox, waiting for my glass of foam to revert to its original liquid condition. Polly was one of the few girls I knew who was always up for splitting a pitcher, but she hadn’t quite perfected her pouring technique.
    “I’m pissed at