The Rules of Attraction

One of them is standing by the jukebox. Susan is standing at the bar. The other one is the girl Freshman sitting on the couch talking with her friend. And I tell myself that I’m going to avoid random one-night stands after Friday night parties, and drunken meaningless f**ks on slow Saturday nights and I realize I don’t want anyone but Lauren. “Heaven,” sad Talking Heads plays from the jukebox. I get depressed. Susan walks over.



“Hi, Sean,” she says.



“Hi, Susan,” I say, hoping she won’t sit down.



“Going to the party?” she asks, smiling, not sitting.



“Yeah. Maybe,” I shrug. “After I finish this beer.”



She looks around the room. “Yeah. I hear it’s pretty good.”



“Yeah?”



“Yeah. Where’s Lauren?” she asks.



“Probably there. I guess.”



“Oh,” Susan says. “I heard you two were having some trouble.”



“No.” I shake my head. “Not at all. Where did you hear that?”



“Oh, around.”



“Well no,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”



“Okay.”



“Great.” I take a sip of beer and wonder how many people know about this; how many care?



“Well, I’ll see you at the party maybe later, okay?” she asks, standing there, dying to sit down, with me.



“Okay, sure,” I nod, can’t remember how it was with us, smile.



She stands there a while longer.



I look up and smile once more.



She finally walks back to her friend.



I hope Lauren and I never have a conversation like that: slight, depressing, hopeless. And I miss her so badly and want her back that the urge to hold and feel her stabs at me, blinding me momentarily and I finish the beer quickly, feeling better, since I’m sure she feels the same way. One of the guys playing Crystal Castles kicks the machine and growls, “Fuck you, bitch.” The song “Heaven” keeps playing.



There are things that I will never do: I will never buy cheese popcorn in The Pub. I will never tell a video game to f**k off. I will never erase graffiti about myself that I happen to catch in bathrooms on campus. I will never sleep with anyone but Lauren. I will never throw a pumpkin at her door. I will never play “Burning Down the House” on the jukebox.



PAUL I pretend to look at old notes from last week’s Student Council meeting, which are crumpled and muddied on the floor in the backseat of Lizzie’s car. Gerald’s sitting next to me, trying to give me a hand-job, both of us crammed in the back. Somehow Sean got dragged into the huge Buick, and he’s up front with about five other people, eleven of us piled into the car altogether. Everyone is drunk, no one knows where we’re going, vague idea about a road trip. Gerald keeps rubbing my thighs. It’s freezing. We are lost.



The last time I saw Sean he had stopped by my room sometime in mid-November. I was sitting at my desk doing nothing and I heard a knock on the door. “Come in,” I said. There was a silence followed by another knock, this one louder. “Come in,” I stood up. The door opened. He walked in. I sat back down. I sat there looking at him and then I got up very slowly.



“Hi, Sean,” I said.



“Hi, Dent,” he said.



Dent? Had he ever called me that? I wondered about his as we drove into town, had dinner, came back to campus. He parked in front of Booth. We went upstairs to his room. His room looked bigger and emptier than I remembered it. The narrow bed on the floor, the desk, a chair, a chest of drawers, a broken stereo, no posters, no photos, a lot of records leaning against a wall in the corner. And I woke up the next morning laying on the small mattress. He was already up, sitting in his armchair, staring out the window at the morning’s snowfall. He needed a shave, his hair was sticking up. I dressed quietly. It was hot in the room. He wasn’t saying anything. He just sat in the chair and smoked Parliaments. I went up behind the chair to tell him I was leaving. I stood so close that I could have touched the side of his face, his neck, but I didn’t do this. I just left. Then I stood in the hallway and heard him lock the door….



Gerald realizes I’m not interested but keeps trying. I look out the window of the car, at the snow, wondering how I got forced into this. I don’t know half the people in the car: heroin addicts, a Freshman, a couple who lives off-campus, someone who works behind the snack bar, Lizzie, Gerald, Sean and me, and this Korean guy.



I have my eye on the Korean boy, some Asian Art major punk I think I made out with last term who only paints self-portraits of his penis. He’s sitting on my other side, tripping and he keeps repeating the word “wow.” Lizzie keeps driving and circling Main Street, then she’s on the highway leaving Camden, looking for a place that’s open where we can get beer. A joint is passed around, then another. We get lost again. The Smiths are singing and someone says “Turn that g*y angst music off.” The Replacements replace them singing “Unsatisfied.” No one has I.D. is the consensus so we can’t get beer since Camden kids are almost always asked. We almost get stopped by the police. Lizzie almost drives us into a lake. The Korean boy keeps screaming, “Let’s call this art,” and I keep whispering to him in his calmer moments, “Come to my room.” But by the time we get back to campus and I wait in my room for him, Gerald comes by instead and takes his clothes off which means, I guess, for me to take mine off too.