NEWSLETTER

Slut-Limit
According to two sqawky voices outside Helen’s dorm room, the school’s current slut-limit is two weeks of dating before doing it.


That Weird Primal Cawing Sound
You know that noise you’ll sometimes hear a girl make from another room that’s either a really loud laugh or a really loud sob? Girls can’t tell which it is either.


Speaking of Which
Helen’s pretty bookish and reserved, but that doesn’t prevent her from harboring a ravenous appetite for some good old-fashioned schadenfreude. “This dorm’s actually really good for gossip because you can hear everything that’s going on,” she told me. “Last year during exams this really put-together-type girl started wigging out and you could hear her screaming, ‘I can’t take this anymore, I want to kill myself!’ from across the hall.”

But this little min-eruption was small beans compared to the nuclear meltdown one girl had Helen’s freshman year. “She was already sort of ‘off’ in a dumb way,” Helen told me. “Like she thought ham came from its own separate animal instead of the pig, some sort of big flightless ‘ham bird’. One night during mid-terms she lost her shit and barfed all over somebody else’s front door, then just left it there and went back to bed. There was this big to-do in the morning, because nobody knew who it was, but eventually she admitted it and they sent her home. Nowadays we use her name as a by-word for psychosis.”


Primping
Compared with her classmates’ level of primping Helen is practically a Mennonite. Still, she had an arsenal of products two rows thick. This is her non-showering morning routine: Face cleanser, eye lotion, moisturizer, eye liner, Garnier Fructis Anti-Frizz Serum and Deep Conditioning Masque. She used to set aside three to four minutes of mirror-time to silently rehearse her reactions to important conversations that might occur during the day until they involuntarily became unsilent.


The CD Situation
Each of the 15 pages of Jacque’s CD case was occupied by a rainbow-colored CD-R (except for one, which held a regular CD-R) with a title like “Party Mix” or “Summer Mix” or “Doin Homework” written on it in Sharpie. I found a larger CD book in the car which I assumed would have actual CDs, but it was page after pages of “Sleep Mix” and “Driving Tunes.”


Uh-oh Men
Right outside a pizza place we went to, we passed a trio of middle-aged guys and the skeeze was so heavy I was almost knocked over. I asked the girls if that was typical and they said it was nothing compared with what it’s like when they’re alone. “I remember one of the first times I walked downtown alone,” Helen said. “I got catcalls and honks from something like 20 guys passing in cars or on the sidewalk. One old guy ran all the way out of a gas station just to flick his tongue at me.”

“It’s so much worse when they’re old,” Jacque said. “There are two principal types of gross guys: The ones who do it from their cars and would probably never say anything to you in person, and the guys who don’t care who sees them being creepy and will come right up to you.”


And It Comes Back to: The Talking
The talk of old men turned to talk of young men, turned to more vibing on boys in general. It bears mention that neither of the girls come across as your typical chataholic—they were both busting with interesting elements to be seized on like their semi-secret “troll” language (high-pitched gibberish), fervent listenership to that “Delilah” radio show, and matching set of aviator goggles, but all of it slipped by under the hypnotic pall of boy-talk. I tried my best not to zone out in case they suddenly exposed something of worth, but finally my strength wore out and I slipped into the same foggy glaze of oblivion I fall into when someone has on the WB. So I guess they were right all along. Girls are TV.

THOMAS MORTON


ME AND THE GIRLS | 1 | 2 |

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