It’s late morning on the move out day of my freshman year of college and Kiki comes striding out of her room in Sperry Hall with flowers in her arms. I’m standing a few feet from Marissa who doesn’t see Kiki coming. Marissa is about to leave with her parents. In an hour or so my parents will show up and my mother will be slurring her words and I’ll wonder how she pulled that off this early in the day before the hour and a half car ride from Rochester. We’ll pack up the car and realize that the mountain bike that I left in the bike room literally all year has been stolen and since it could have been any time between August and May, we don’t even bother filing a report or anything. In a manner truly uncharacteristic of my family, we shrug our shoulders and head to the car. But that’s in a few hours. Right now Kiki is striding down the hall with flowers in her arms. She is striding like someone determined to go through with her plan to apologize to her friend for doing something awful. A few nights before she hooked up with the guy that Marissa was seeing. I’m the one who caught her with that guy and prior to that, Kiki and I were dating. But Kiki is not striding towards me and those are not my flowers. The guy is named Chris Stanyck. He’s a freshman in college but looks forty. He’s athletic and treats women like only a freshman in college can. He is, in the parlance of the times, “a player.” Wherever he happens to be at this moment, he is oblivious to the scene that is about to unfold for which he is the catalyst.
This is all college bullshit and it’s almost twenty-two years on from these events and I’m using the real names of these people (yeah, “Kiki” is real) who are all probably married with children and careers and who don’t remember any of this. But I do.
Kiki dated Chris in the fall but then she and I went to a dorm semi-formal and we made out at Sigma Pi after drinking Coke and peach schnapps and it was magical to an eighteen-year-old weaned on John Hughes movies. Then she ghosted on me for a senior from Chi Phi who wore a North Face jacket. Then later, after that senior dumped her, in a bizarre accident while Kiki was watching Marissa row crew, she got hit in the face with an oar and had to wear a clear face mask like she was in the NBA playoffs. With no male attention forthcoming while wearing the mask, she turned back to me. I was too naive to know that I was most likely being used as a self-esteem boost.
The thing is we were all friends, Kiki, Marissa, and I. I remember they surprised me by taking me to dinner for my nineteenth birthday and it was so nice.
But youth is messy and Kiki is striding down the hall with flowers in her arms. Marissa had started seeing Chris or maybe just hooking up with him, I’m not sure. And who knows how or why Kiki and Chris came to hook up again but but you don’t cross Marissa like that.
Kiki reaches Marissa and, before she can even begin her apology, Marissa slams the flowers to the ground and begins yelling. Kiki starts crying and retreats to her room. After the drama, Marissa looks over at me and sort of shrugs her shoulders as if to say well, what did you expect? She’s self-righteous like that and, close as we were that year, it’s my least favorite part of her personality.
As I said, this is college bullshit. We were freshman. The following fall, Marissa and Kiki would resume hanging out. They both found boyfriends and then eventually their friendship reached a natural end.
It took me a while to get over it, though, that feeling of being dropped for someone better, the feeling of having someone withdraw, the feeling of catching a girl you’re dating coming out of her room with another guy.
As they say (and by “they” I mean Sheryl Crow) the first cut is the deepest. It’s not so much that it hurt but it became a template for me, that if a woman has a chance with a better guy, she’ll take it. I don’t know if I learned that then or if I was looking for external confirmation of something I already felt inside.
That episode on move out day was the weirdest drama I had ever experienced. I’ll never forget it but there’s something that’s always troubled me about it, a certain lingering question that I couldn’t put my finger on. But I think I know what it was. Man, where were my fucking flowers?
