Cutback

vii

Albuquerque, Spring 2014

Before there was Errol, there was Nick, the hottest guy in Philosophy 105—which had nothing to do with philosophy, by the way, just these ridiculous p -> q logic games—back at my forgettable state school. Nick had sandy brown hair, a taut snowboarder's build and golden-flecked hazel eyes forged in a supernova. I never go out of my way to meet new people, because frankly I don't care enough, but I willed myself to meet him, and then I did.

Every class period I sat next to him until our seats became fixed by routine. Finally, one day he turned to me and asked, "Do you know if we're getting our papers back today?" and my heart stood still along with time and space and the galaxy that created his eyes. I had no idea what the answer was, but I was thrilled he asked me.

After that I started finding stupid, banal things to talk to him about. Hey, when is that project due? Do you know what we were supposed to be writing about? It felt like the scene in Mean Girls where Cady dumbs herself down to talk to Aaron Samuels. Mostly I punished myself into doing this so I could hear him speak to me in his even mellow voice, observe how he was styling his hair these days—swept to the side or falling in shaggy waves against his brow?—and to try and calculate how many days it had been since he last shaved.

This was all very important to me at the time.

When he came back after skipping a day, I got to fill him in on what he missed in exhaustive detail. After class we picked our conversation up again, walking unconsciously toward the plaza by the Student Union Building. "What do you have next?" I thought to ask, and he told me he had a break. That's how we started hanging out together once or twice a week, which was great because I never got tired of trying to figure out what kind of lighting made his chameleon eyes the color of wet martini olives versus sun drenched clouds, or coaxing out that quiet laugh he would breathe through his nose.

Nick was a computer science major and he showed me all the apps and interfaces he was hacking together on his Macbook. He had some serious design skills too. For a class project he mocked up an app for laundromats where you could pay and it would tell you when your clothes were done, even though I think something like that already existed. Anyway, app design was just one of his side gigs, he said, though I didn't know what he meant. I thought he was a genius, of course. I used to ask him hundreds of annoying questions that he answered patiently enough because he was a nice guy.

It certainly wasn't because we had any chemistry together. I have no idea if he ever realized how often I thought about him when we weren't together or how many times I mentally undressed him piece by piece out of his plaid shirts and light wash jeans while we were sitting in the arm chairs between the pool hall and the Jamba Juice.

I liked that he was the perfect amount of harmless romance for me—one-sided, low-stakes flirting with no follow up. But there was always the hope of something more. Even if there wasn't, there was the fun of puzzling out why his hair was neither dirty blond or brown. Or the dreamcoat color wheel of his eyes that seemed to change like a mood ring. I'd never liked dating apps or the empty feeling of anonymous hookups in my dorm room beyond the brief electric frisson of attention, which is all I wanted. (Well, kissing's nice too.)

And when we were together Nick seemed to notice me, even if all he was doing was answering my dumb questions. Forty minutes together on a Monday could keep me going all week.

When I told him I was going to study abroad to improve my French, he sounded impressed. The thought had never crossed his mind. I suggested he think about it too—England or something so we could see each other on breaks—but he had a life nearby. His family lived only an hour away, unlike mine who lived across state lines. I started to doubt whether I wanted to go away at all because I knew I'd never speak to him again when we got back, and there were all sorts of classes we could take together in the fall. Pathetically, I didn't want to give him up.

As the Philosophy final approached, I floated the idea that we study together, and we actually did. By this point, Nick was sort of my friend, miraculously, and we even texted sometimes about class or TV shows, although we never hung out off campus or with anyone else.

Honestly, I preferred it that way. He let me compartmentalize him in a way Errol never did during the school year. Errol was always inviting other people to hang out at our place or telling me stories about what he'd done with Jess and her friends the night before while I stayed in and probably stalked Nick's Instagram from 5,000 miles away.

I went over to Nick's small house on a tree-lined street with no streetlights that he shared with his roommate Lester. When I walked inside I was instantly hit with the most pungent odor of dank weed. I knew he smoked because he joked about it sometimes and I could smell it faintly on his clothes in the way Errol smells like hair product, detergent and Old Spice. Nick took me into his room, which he had to unlock with a key, and without bothering to shut the door again opened the top dresser drawer.

"Let me know if you ever need any study aids or party goods," he said, casually taking out a baggie of Adderall and swallowing one. He held one out to me, which I declined, and he just shrugged. "It helps me focus," he said. I told him I didn't know what he meant, because I was 19 and I didn't.

"I can't study without one. It makes you not care about time or eating or any of that. You just get in the zone and study, study, study for five hours straight—it's amazing." Then he took out a small white oxycontin and started smoking it through a glass pipe over tinfoil so that the whole room began to smell of fresh spun cotton candy.

Let me just pause there: He smoked an oxy through a glass pipe in front of me.

Call me sheltered but I was a little shocked. We had rarely talked about drugs and he had hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars worth of pills in that drawer. There was a metal lockbox that he told me had a gun in it and, scarily, I had no idea whether he was kidding. I couldn't believe he'd trusted me enough to show me all that.

Later, we ran into his roommate and Nick told him I was "cool," whatever that meant. And then it hit me that he was obviously a drug dealer. Almost at once my whole body shut down and I got really quiet, like I do sometimes, because I didn't know what to make of it all. I told him I was tired and had to go but really I just needed to be alone. He offered me speed for what I assume was a really great price.

When I got home, I felt stupid, wondering where exactly I was going with this. Hanging out with a drug dealer who didn't even like me back? Because he had nice eyes? I'm the first person to wander into the forest of self-delusion in the name of mindless gratification, but this was too far even for me.

A few days later I had my formal interview in the student exchange office with the director and his deputy. They liked me and asked me who the prime minister of Belgium was. I knew it, of course, and the king too, and they were impressed. Even they didn't know the answers, which I found an odd sort of pop quiz. Before finals began they called and I accepted on the spot.

Right then I wanted to leave behind my family and my boring state school and my two good friends and go someplace where I wasn't pining all day over my drug dealer crush who had introduced me to Lester as his Philosophy classmate and not even his friend.

I decided I was going to get out of that destructive, unrequited holding pattern once and for all before it broke my heart for real. Maybe just maybe I thought I could even find a decent guy who I didn't have to hide the way I was feeling with all the time because he'd feel the same way. This was just the change I needed, I told myself. It would all be different in Brussels. A fresh start.

And just look how that turned out.