Read Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) for Free Online

we did. We were doing great until about one o’clock, when we ended the night in a bar and the pope was wasted so the nuns had to drag him outside.” She reached for another Dorito. “I’m crazy about one of my instructors, though. Wish we could date faculty.” She looked at Gwen and me. “How are the guys at Maryland?”
    Gwen shrugged. “Like guys everywhere, I guess. Some nice, some jerks. Bigger selection to choose from, though.” She turned to Liz. “What’s it like up there at the North Pole?”
    “Sleepy,” Elizabeth told her. “Definitely sleepy. Except on weekends. Then everybody’s out to hook up with someone.”
    “Yeah, tell me about it,” said Pamela. “Have any of you met someone special?”
    “No. Still seeing Austin occasionally. But he’ll be a senior at Howard next year, and I don’t know where he’ll take a job after that,” Gwen said. She looked at me. Guess I was next.
    “It’s hard to compare guys with Patrick, but there’s one guy, Dave—Dave Larson. We hang out sometimes.”
    “Yeah?” said Pamela, waiting.
    “Just the ‘nice friend’ category,” I said. “Come on, tell us about the guys in New York. There’s got to be someone other than your professor.”
    “Well, there’s Jake. He wants to do repertory theater. Weird and passionate. Passionately weird or weirdly passionate, I’m not sure which.”
    We just looked at her and grinned.
    “Passionate with you?” Elizabeth asked.
    “Yeah. We’ve slept together a couple of times,” Pamela said, and took another sip of her seltzer water.
    For Pamela, sex was probably just part of her life now, I thought, but I didn’t feel quite as adult as I had before. Sometimes it seemed as though the whole world was divided into girls who had done it and girls who hadn’t. As though Pamela and Gwen were on one side of a wall and Liz and I were on the other, just looking over.
    Liz must have been feeling the same way, because she said, “At Bennington that’s all some girls talk about.”
    Pamela just shrugged. “No big deal. Stuff happens. That’s it.”
    But I wanted it to be a big deal. I wanted it to be with someone I loved, anyway, someone who was more than weirdly passionate.
    “Yeah,” Gwen said, “when you’re still a virgin, you obsess over it. It’s huge. But once it’s happened, there are so many other things to think about.”
    What I was thinking as our talk drifted to “other things” was my conversation with Patrick the day before, trying to remember every remark, each reply. . . . I remembered saying, “Seven months till you’re home again,” but I couldn’t remember what he’d said next.
    “I love you,” I’d told him.
    And he said he was sending me a kiss by proxy.
    We’d laughed.

3
CHANGES
    It came on slowly.
    I didn’t get phone calls from Patrick anymore, I got text messages and e-mails. Occasionally photos of landmarks and stuff—rarely of him. He’d tell me how busy he was, what he was studying, where he was going on his next expedition, how much he loved Spain. He’s moving there for good, I thought. Should I give him the dates of spring break and ask if he’d like me to come? Or don’t ask? Just say I’d be there, that if he had classes I’d be glad to tag along?
    Then the tone changed ever so slightly:
    Much as I love Spain, I’m feeling more and more unsettled. Like I’m still on some kind of academic track that’s going totake me straight out of the University of Chicago and into a suit and tie.
    I replied in a joking tone: I don’t know—I think you’d look pretty good in a suit and tie.
    But he didn’t joke back. A week later I got:
    The students here are so different . . . they’ve seen so much, done so much. . . . Sometimes I feel I’d just like to take a couple years off and really do something different. With my hands, I mean. Where I can see I’ve done something constructive—made something, built something, planted something, I don’t