Joe College: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

everything.”
    “It’s okay. The food’s a little scary.”
    “I did really bad in high school,” she said. “My mother was sick a lot. Then I got involved with this older guy. Before I knew it, the four years were gone and I hadn’t really learned anything. Now I feel so stupid all the time.”
    “An older guy?” Just the phrase made me a little queasy.
    “I was a cashier at Medi-Mart. He was one of the supervisors.”
    I remembered seeing her a lot at Medi-Mart back when we were in high school, thinking she seemed more at home behind the register than she did walking the halls of Harding.
    “How long’d you go out?”
    “Two years.” She looked away; all the life seemed to have drained out of her. “He was married and everything. You must think I’m horrible.”
    I reached for her face, gently steering it my direction. She was teary-eyed, but happy to be kissed again. This time I tried some new strategies, nibbling on her lips and licking up and down the salty length of her neck. Within minutes she was breathing in
quick, trembly gasps, murmuring encouragement. When she seemed ready, I tried maneuvering her onto her back, but she went rigid, not resisting exactly, but certainly not cooperating.
    “What’s the matter?”
    She gave me a glassy-eyed smile of incomprehension.
    “Nothing.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I love this,” she said, running her tongue around her chapped and swollen-looking lips. “I could kiss you forever.”
     
     
    Three weeks later, I was starting to believe her. All we ever did was kiss. Nearly a month of heavy making out, and I hadn’t even succeeded in getting my hand up her shirt. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.
    Other than that, we had a pretty good time together. Sometimes we went to the movies or out to dinner, but mainly we just shopped for cars. It was the consuming quest of her life. We read the stickers, quizzed the salesmen, took demos out for drives—Civics and Corollas, Escorts and Omnis, K-cars and Firebirds, Mustangs and Rabbits. But despite all our work, she seemed no closer to making a decision. New or used? Automatic or stick? Foreign or American? Hatchback or sedan? Every night we started from scratch. There was always another dealership, new variables to ponder. I started to wonder if she saw car shopping and kissing as ends in themselves—wholly satisfying, self-contained events—rather than starting points on the road to bigger things.
    I think I would have lost patience with her a lot sooner if the end of the summer hadn’t been looming over us from the start. Every day, in some process of withdrawal that was as subtle as it was relentless, I looked upon her less and less as my actual girl-friend and more and more as a potential anecdote, a puzzling and amusing story I would share with my roommates in one of those
hilarious late-night conversations that I missed so much when I was away from college.
    Cindy saw it differently. As I retreated, her attachment to me intensified. She hated the idea that I was just going to pack my bags and disappear, leaving her right where she was at the beginning of the summer. The average night ended with her in tears, me awkwardly trying to comfort her. Shyly at first, then more insistently, she began to explore the possibility of continuing our relationship after I returned to school. We could write and talk on the phone, couldn’t we? I could come home for occasional weekends and vacations. It was do-able, wasn’t it? Then she brought up the idea of visiting me in New Haven.
    “It’s not far, right? And I’ll probably have my new car by then.” I saw how excited she was by this prospect, and how hard she was trying not to show it. “It’ll be really cool, don’t you think?”
    I didn’t think it would be cool at all, but it seemed even more uncool to say so.
    “Where would you sleep?” I asked, in a tone that suggested simple curiosity.
    “Where would you want me to?” she asked, her