At first, I’d feel superior to the groupie girls the other band members would hook up with. After all, it was different for Richard and me. What we had wasn’t disposable. It was meaningful and real. It was love. But then it started to bother me that Richard didn’t bat an eye about their behavior, like when Bobby Crash, the drummer, had two girls going—one preshow, one postshow. I couldn’t stand the thought of Richard doing that to me. I couldn’t even bear the idea that he had been with others before me.
Yes, very mature of me, I admit. But I was frantically in love. Every minute I searched for some clue that he felt the same way. I decided that when he did catch my eye during performances, validation was there.
I stayed away for an intense, whirlwind week of music, sex, and veggie burgers. And I would have stayed on, even, but the guys were then going west, and I didn’t have any money for the airfare and no one offered to pay, despite several dropped hints.
“You need to go back to school,” Richard told me.
“I could go back anytime, anywhere,” I said, pleading inside that he’d beg me to stay.
“I don’t want to be responsible for you screwing up your education,” he said. “Go back to school. I’ll call you when we come back east again.”
Parting was agony for me, while Richard seemed to take it in stride. I was having a hard time keeping my cool. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, right then and there at dumpy Port Authority, but knew that would be too banal. I knew he wouldn’t communicate by those means either. Instead, he recited a line from another Rimbaud poem:
“Life is the farce which everyone has to perform,” he said to me before I left. He was right. I wanted to continue the fantasy. But life was inevitable.
The journey back to school was long, and as I came back down to earth, guilt was my encroaching seatmate, though I tried to distract myself with thoughts of Richard’s promise to call and what he might say. I wondered if he was missing me at that moment just as much as I was missing him, but I still couldn’t help think of Joe. I hoped he’d understand, but even Joe’s patience had its limits. The week was eye-opening in that it convinced me that we really didn’t belong together.
Joe was the first person I went to see once I got back to campus, before I even stopped in my room. I tentatively knocked on his door. “It’s me,” I announced. “Open up if you’re still talking to me.”
After a spirit-crushing minute, the door did open. “Barely,” Joe said shortly. He looked tired.
“I don’t know what to say….” I started.
He sighed. “That was a shitty thing to do to someone who is supposed to be your boyfriend,” he said.
“I know,” I agreed. But the thing was, he didn’t feel like my boyfriend. I knew it even if he didn’t. The feeling I had for Richard that week was what I thought having a boyfriend should feel like—constant, big rushes of emotion and intensity.
“So maybe we shouldn’t be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore,” I went on quietly, as a few hallmates filed past. I looked past him into his room. “Can we talk about this inside?”
Joe impatiently pulled open the door and sat on his bed. I awkwardly sat next to him.
“Admit it, Joe,” I ventured. “I’ve been terrible at the girlfriend thing. And you deserve someone who’s better at it.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know…. I don’t want you out of my life,” he said begrudgingly.
And I didn’t want him out of my life, either. “Of course not!” I reassured him. “But we don’t have to cling to the notion of ‘boyfriend/girlfriend’ just to be around each other. I think we’ll make better friends than lovers, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”
I knew this was hard for him, but I was also convinced that this was the right thing to do. I looked at him pleadingly. I had been living on adrenaline for a week and my exhilaration was fast turning into exhaustion and I wanted this awkward conversation to be over. “I think we’ll be great friends without all that other pressure.”
“Okay,” he said, but I could tell he was let down. “But I’ll need some time before we start hanging out again.”
“I understand,” I said. “As long as you don’t hate me…. I couldn’t live with that.”
“I could never hate you,” he said. “But I just need to be away from you for a while.”
I nodded. “I’m just a big, dorky fan girl, I guess,” I said, downplaying the incident, but knowing inside that Richard was the true love I had waited my life to meet.
Joe laughed a little. “Yeah,” he said, “you are a groupie, aren’t you?” He laughed again, this time with a bit of an angry edge. “I guess I don’t blame you, though,” he said, shrugging. “I mean, that took balls. It must have been a pretty cool adventure. Not to mention the free concerts.”
“Yeah,” I said, glossing over his groupie comment. “Though it was pretty tiring.” I went on to tell him a few details about the whirlwind week. I knew his anger would prevent him from understanding what had happened between Richard and me. And I certainly didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had.
After another apology from me and some tears, we parted as friends. I loved Joe, but I realized that I wasn’t in love with him and, complete retrospective truth be told, if I hadn’t been so flattered that he wanted to be my boyfriend, I never would have considered him anything but a friend. We hugged and I was so relieved that he didn’t hate me.
Sarah, on the other hand, was a different story. When I floated back to my room, I was met by her hard, scolding stare.
“Nice of you to check in,” she snapped.
“Huh? Joe didn’t tell you where I went?” I asked, completely oblivious.
She was sitting at her art table, her hands smudged with charcoal. She wiped them off impatiently as I flopped, exhausted, onto my bed. “He told me. But you could have called,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said, midyawn, before closing my eyes for a much needed nap, which made her even angrier. I didn’t think I could take any more confrontation in one day. I kept my eyes closed.
She came over to the bed and shook me until my eyes snapped open. “You missed your World Lit presentation, you know,” she pressed.
“I know,” I said, probably a little too defensively. I didn’t get her concern. Why would she care?
She grew annoyed with my apathy. “Don’t you ever think about consequences?!” she hollered. “And how could you just leave Joe standing there like that?!”
I couldn’t believe how mad she was, and I sat up. “Look, I spoke to Joe and he’s okay,” I assured her. “But I don’t get why you’re so ticked off.”
Then Sarah’s whole face fell, and she looked like she might cry. “I was ticked off because I wasn’t sure if you’d come back,” she whimpered. “What would I do here without my best friend?”
I couldn’t believe it. While I couldn’t get over that someone like Richard Ruiz craved my presence, it was even more surprising to me that someone cared about my absence. I thought back to those