My winter break would consist almost entirely of coffee shop gatherings during which I’d sit silently listening to the kinds of sugarcoated fables of idyllic college life that I didn’t have to offer: lush, sprawling lawns and picnic lunches on the quad, and sororities chosen and pledged. I hated these get-togethers. First of all, I didn’t know how to order coffee. I still goddamn don’t, because it is gross and unnecessarily fussy and I am a grown woman who really cannot tell a cup of bad coffee from a good one. I will drink coffee if it has a pint of cream, nine hundred packets of real sugar, and comes with a shot of insulin. Which is why I don’t drink coffee. So I’d be sitting there in the same hoodies and gym shoes I’d worn in high school, feeling like an asshole because I ordered a hot chocolate while everyone else was drinking complicated lattes, bored and mute because the most exciting thing I’d discovered in the months prior was that if I showed my student ID at McDonald’s they would take 10 percent off my fries.
These bitches were at Brown and Harvard and Georgetown, driving their parents’ old BMWs to parties around campus while once a week I waited two hours sometimes for the local Sycamore bus to drop me off to buy Pop-Tarts and maxi pads at Walmart. NO, I WAS NOT GOING TO VOLUNTARILY TALK ABOUT MY COLLEGE EXPERIENCE. So many expectant eyes, peering at me from under so many shiny blunt-cut bangs. What could I tell these girls that would satisfy their curiosity? That college, at best, had been a lateral move I hadn’t really wanted to make? That I really should have learned how to sew in a weave or take apart a carburetor, because school never really has been my thing and there is no shame in being an hourly working person? I couldn’t tell them that all I did was constantly call my friend Anna in Rhode Island and anxiously wait for her monthly care packages (Portishead’s second album, various SARK books, etc.). That my very first ATM PIN was Matt Shaffer’s birthday even though he was halfway across the country playing rugby at Dartmouth and probably didn’t even remember who I was anymore. That’s the kind of gross creepy weird I am, the “your birthday is my PIN number” weird. In my mind I poured hot chocolate down the front of the ringleader’s silly Fair Isle sweater and bounced the empty paper cup off the top of her head. In real life I told them about the used record store I hung out in pretending to be Janeane Garofalo in Reality Bites. They remained unimpressed. It was a long afternoon.
—
Adam and I were the last ones out of the dorm. Adam hauled the luggage through the hushed, darkened hallways while John carried what was left of a Budweiser-fueled McDonald’s run the week before: a crumpled bag filled with slimy old nuggets and cheeseburgers that he had reheated in the tiny communal kitchen on our floor and cleaned of bits of mold. The three of us slipped and fell across the parking lot toward one of two remaining cars while sideways winds blew snow directly into our faces. While John wedged his oversize frame horizontally into the backseat, and I struggled to breathe under the weight of what I can only assume were suitcases full of mesh tank tops and Cubs jerseys in the front, Adam uneasily piloted his tiny car through the blizzard and out of the student lot.
I shouldn’t eat old McDonald’s. An hour on the road and we were still only ten miles outside of campus. As holiday traffic inched imperceptibly along, John snored peacefully in the backseat and I squinted at the radio dial and tried to pick up a signal from DeKalb’s one decent radio station. Suddenly, I felt something strike a match in the pit of my stomach. I ignored it, continuing to search vainly for strains of that one Third Eye Blind song everybody knows by heart and hates. What I found instead was droning conservative talk radio, artificially cheerful Christmas carols, the play-by-play of some football game being held in the middle of a cornfield, and fuck there it was again, except this time it was slick, boiling oil churning through my large intestine at breakneck speed. “I need a bathroom,” I blurted at Adam, my armpits suddenly damp. “I NEED A BATHROOM RIGHT NOW.”
Adam threw up his hands, helpless inside his toy car, gesticulating wildly toward the stretch of motionless cars in the icy tundra before us and, I don’t know, bleating like a teenage girl about how far the nearest exit was. I tried to distract myself from the reality that I was trapped in a metal box with two spray-tanned pieces of beef jerky by returning my attention to the useless radio in front of me. An eerie calm washed over me as I felt another wave of molten lava break gently against my intestinal wall. I bolted upright. “I am going to shit in your car,” I announced, surrendering to the inevitable. John awoke with a grunt, jumping out of the backseat as Adam desperately yanked the car out of traffic and onto the shoulder. I kicked out of my reasonably priced new Walmart winter boots. John snatched my door open, threw the suitcase I was holding into a snowbank with one hand, and held the empty cheeseburger bag out to me with the other. “IN HERE,” he commanded. OKAY. SURE, BRO. Leaning with my right side against the open car and my left arm wrapped around John’s leg for balance, I squatted, hopeful and relieved, my eyes trained on the bead of sweat trickling slowly down Adam’s temple.
—
When I first moved into the dorm I didn’t shit for three days. The morning after move-in, I got up at dawn and eased out of my room in my freshly purchased pajamas into the dimly lit corridor. I had everything the Bed Bath & Beyond ad suggested a young woman headed off to college would need: a large shower caddy with multiple compartments to carry things from my room to whatever shower stall I could claw a bitch’s eyes out to get into so I wouldn’t be late for Biology 101, bacteria-resistant flip-flops to protect me from other people’s periods, and a towel big enough to protect my boobs from the prying eyes of girls who had never seen their moms’ grown-up, veiny breasts before.
I tiptoed into the bathroom, glancing under the stalls for tiny manicured feet. When I saw none I slipped into the closest stall and waited a few seconds before letting out the loudest, grossest fart any non–zoo animal had ever emitted and taking the biggest shit ever. Like, the fattiest, fast-food-iest dump any human had ever taken. I emerged from the stall several minutes later, light as air, my butthole singing, and ran smack into a trio of girls responsibly washing their faces over the sink, eyes aghast behind the thin layer of Clinique mild cleanser they passed between them. I avoided eye contact in the mirror while washing my hands, then spent the rest of the semester sneakily shitting at 2:00 p.m. in the crumbling library in the center of campus.