January 23

1/23

Today is the first day of my twenty-something life. My last few days of teenagedom were pretty good. No spring transfers were tempted by my eccentric roommate agreement, so I still have my big beautiful double all to myself. And every night Christopher texts me between nine thirty and eleven. I make sure never to text him first and to wait at least twenty minutes to reply and to be the one to end the conversation, just as that one article in Marie Claire advised.

One thing I got wrong: classes do not help distract me from thoughts of him. I'm sure I would be done reading Mary Barton by now if my mind didn't wander in his direction every time the story gets mildly romantic. Not that I need a romantic background to think of him – nowhere am I more distracted than in Hydrology class, talking about groundwater and pipes.

And all this for a guy who is, in the end, probably gay. I looked through all 800-odd of his Facebook pictures like the psycho I am trying to find any hint of a girlfriend (or a boyfriend, as the case may be). I didn't find anything, but I did find out that the quiet cool-guy image I originally had of him is totally wrong. His Facebook page is six years of crossdressing and crazy parties and unfortunate mustaches. Even that couldn't shake him from my mind, as much as I wanted it to. If that stupid chicken suit from Halloween 2008 starts figuring into my sexual fantasies I'm going to have to strangle something.

This evening, after spending the afternoon trying to get through Mary Barton and Seneca's Oedipus without letting my mind wander to certain other fictions, I went to the Wilder common room to have dinner with Filipina Club. When I arrived they were laying out plastic trays of Chinese delivery on the coffee table, and everything looked so much like the night I first saw Christopher that I half expected him to see him come through the door carrying a Dutch oven of peanut-free kare-kare.

I was glad to see them all again, especially Rosa, because I like her best but also because she's the only other person on this campus who knows Christopher. In return for the chocolate ganache cake I had bought for her birthday last semester, Rosa had brought me an intensely rich chocolate cheesecake. They sang Happy Birthday to me and I made a wish and pretended there were candles on top to blow out. Then Rosa gave me two packages prettily wrapped in cream-colored tissue paper and twine. Inside was a leaf-printed notebook and a set of colored pencils. 

While everyone who wasn't on a diet worked on crumbly slices of cheesecake, I decided I was close enough to Rosa now to ask her a personal question.

“Camille,” I said, “Is Christian gay?”

She didn't miss a beat before saying “I have no idea. I think he's just Southern.”

Of course everyone else had to know what was going on then. I tried to tell them the whole story but it came out all wrong, and there wasn't much to tell anyway. I was so nervous my shaking hands almost sloshed my Diet Coke into my lap.

I was feeling pretty lame by the time I got back to my room. I collapsed into bed and lay there for a while, staring at the yellow circles the streetlamps cast on snow-covered Prospect Hill, until it was nine-thirty and Christopher texted me as usual.

I've never had a stranger text conversation, or a longer one – it lasted over four hours. Christopher had drunk half a bottle of malbec and woken up in a dreaming mood. He asked me about silly things first, cooking and birthday presents, but as the night deepened the subjects did too. He started talking about how he wants to spend his life, about jobs and settling down.

“Would you rather spend the rest of your life a transient?” I asked him. “Personally, I would.” That was true, although it was the first time I had admitted it since starting my trudging path towards a career in geologic consulting last year.

“Yes,” he said. “That's what I really want to do.” And we kept writing about that back and forth and each of his messages was like my own soul echoing back.

At half-past one he wrote “This conversation has gone too far for phones. Do you have video chat?”

Then I was forced back into the reality of my body, of my unmade face and undone hair, and I lied and said I didn't and that I had to go to bed. “Then I'll save it for later,” he wrote, and although it went against Marie Claire I said I was looking forward to it. He wished me good night, which was the first time that happened – usually I just fall asleep in the middle of a conversation and his last text is some question.