zero
chapter 20
previous (the face in the tree)
next (the legacy of parade day)
The face that confronted me in the mirror during my college years was not a laughing matter and was the source of deep personal discontent and both literal and figurative scarring. This was because, due to my tardy pubescence, I had a face covered with acne.
When I bring this up, people usually say something like, “Oh! I had really bad acne too!” because, it’s true, many people have pimples when they go through puberty. But no one had acne like me. In my life, I’ve only seen one or two people with acne worse than mine, either subjectively or—by surface area and depth—objectively.
My face was like the face of Mars. It was acne vulgaris in extremis, not little pimples or whiteheads, but generally deep cysts or nodules that sprouted roots all over my face and the top of my back. Mostly un-pop-able, but on the rare occasions they were, they left behind lesions that had me looking like Edward James Olmos.
My life revolved around the acne during that time. Every other thought was some variation of: Why did this happen to me? Is it my fault? Do I eat the wrong foods? Wash my face too vigorously? Not vigorously enough? The dermatologists who later saved me said it was genetic, that acne as bad as mine wasn’t possible unless there was a pre-existing condition that left my skin helpless to fight off the bacteria that caused these cysts.
Everywhere I went, I saw billboards, movies, TV shows, advertisements—all featuring people with clear skin, reminding me that what plagued my face was undesirable, ghastly, and unworthy of any representation within normality. It weighed on me considerably, and if girls weren’t already disinterested because of the acne, my overall depression did me no favors either.
Such was my mental state when Tommy and Emma came to visit me for the first time, not long after Thanksgiving. My roommate was the kind who went home every chance he got to see his family and girlfriend, and had even taken his bed sheets home to wash, leaving a sleeping place for Tommy and Emma when they stayed the night. They arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and I showed them the campus and its attractions, which amounted to some impressive vistas, a deli I liked to get sandwiches from, and a homemade ice cream place. Nothing more than Veddersburgh could offer.
I went to school at SUNY Livingston, a beautiful campus in a valley between the Finger Lakes, about a thirty-minute drive south of Rochester, in the heart of old Iroquois territory. The campus bordered the village closely, and within the village was the infamous First Street, lined with the many student houses that each weekend turned into alcohol-lubricated bacchanalian halls of hormonal lust and chaos.
I felt like I had something to prove to Emma and Tommy, that my social education was at least as interesting as theirs, and that even with my face in its grotesque state, I could still have a good time despite the hardship I was going through. There was a party I planned on taking them to later that night, a weekly Saturday night event at a house on First Street colloquially known as ‘The Maples,’ thanks to its two large maple trees on the front lawn. The house was derelict, lived in by senior boys who paid for utilities by charging incoming freshmen five dollars each to drink there on Saturdays. The last time I was there, someone left a faucet running upstairs and caused a chunk of the ceiling to cave in. Yet, the parties continued.
After munching some sandwiches from my favorite deli, we went back to campus to “get ready,” which for us boys was a simple affair. For me, it was a shower, deodorant, and deciding which of my three button-down shirts I would wear with my only pair of good jeans.
Returning from the shower, I paused by the entrance of the girls’ bathroom in my hallway, and as I scanned both ends of the empty hallway, I sensed there was an opportunity to eavesdrop. Through the vent at the bottom of the door, I heard the echoing voices of Jenn and Sara, two female friends from my new college group. They were chatting with Emma, who they had taken under their wing for the night, drying off together after their showers and no doubt engaging the mirrors to become their truer selves.
“So, you’re with that Tommy guy who’s visiting Jude, huh?” I heard Jenn say.
“Uh-huh,” Emma replied.
“Oh wow. Lucky. He is so hot,” Sara added. “You met him in high school?”
“He’s a piece of work. Really sweet though. He writes me poems, ha!” Emma said.
I rolled my eyes. I’d heard Emma impress people with this so many times. Jenn and Sara cooed as they were supposed to.
“And you found him in high school? God, my high school was full of some very questionable options,” Jenn said.
“So... what about Jude?” Emma asked suggestively. “Anybody in this bathroom sniffing around him?”
A pause. Likely a look passed between them.
“Jude is cute. Cool too,” Sara said.
“And so nice, we love him,” Jenn added.
“But I mean with the—” Sara said, trailing off, and there was a pause I imagined was filled with gesturing.
“It’s so bad,” Jenn said.
Before I could hear more, someone came around the hallway corner, so I quickly opened the door to my room, but not before hearing Emma say:
“Really? I think either of you would be lucky to get with Jude.”
Though her words made my heart soar, it caught in my throat with the weight of everything else.
“Jude! There’s a flush to your face and an aura about you,” Tommy said as I entered my dorm room. He was in the beanbag chair between the two beds in front of the TV, crammed in with a couple of my other male friends in the way that college students are able to turn any area bigger than their bodies into a hangout space, playing FIFA on the PlayStation.
“I’m good,” I lied. “Who’s winning?”
Emma, Sara, and Jenn soon joined us, and we started ‘pre-gaming,’ a new term to me, though I quickly realized it was the same as what Tommy had done before our senior prom. I didn’t drink much before going out because I couldn’t hold my alcohol well.
I wasn’t sure how much Tommy usually drank at his school, but that night he was partaking heavily, refusing to leave his beanbag seat. He had a flask that appeared and disappeared from his jacket pocket with regularity. Emma sat between his legs, leaning back to kiss him at intervals less frequent than his sips. His eyes were reddened and glazed over. He looked cool in a red long-sleeved henley, skinny jeans, and high-top Nikes, and was successfully reconciling his social oddities with alcohol. The full force of his personality was unleashed.
“My friend Jude here can write anyone under the table, he’s a magnificent writer, this guy. First prize in the Gazette’s high school short story competition, did you know that? Of course not, he’s too humble to admit it,” Tommy said, smiling.
I shook my head.
“Look at that smile, ladies, how can you resist?” Tommy grinned.
“I never knew that about you, Jude. That’s really cool. You want one?” My friend Asher offered me a beer.
“Nah, I’ll drink at the party,” I explained.
“Are you sure?” he pressed. “Way easier to drink now than to pay five dollars for some shitty Natural Ice.”
“Yeah, Jude. You could be so fun if you were really fucked up,” Jenn said, twirling her hair.
I had, of course, been really fucked up around them before, but I was good at hiding it. Tommy, on the other hand, was no longer able to conceal it—he flaunted it.
“Jude-dude, do not be cowed,” Tommy said. “Appreciate your agency.”
Asher snorted. “‘Cowed?’ What, like a dairy cow? And what agency, the CIA?”
I declined again, and Tommy winked at me sluggishly. The others continued to drink and play various card games I couldn’t follow. When it was time to go, Tommy struggled to get up from the beanbag chair, tumbling backward, straight into my arms.
“You okay, Big T?” I asked. Emma and I made eye contact over his shoulder. It felt like I was home again in her gaze, like the many unspoken words between us had their own kingdom.
“I’m fine,” Tommy slurred. “The fruit of life, Jude-dude. We’re all just playin’ on.”
“This dude is TRASHED!” Asher announced, putting on his backward baseball cap.
Tommy whispered something in Emma’s ear.
“Uhm, you guys go ahead. I’m going to stay behind with Tommy for a second,” Emma said.
“I’ll stay too,” I said, knowing I had to help.
My friends filed out, loud and rowdy, and I wondered how I had ended up being friends with them, and what separated them from my bond with Tommy.
“Can you help me get him to the bathroom?” Emma asked once we were alone.
I nodded, and we shouldered Tommy like he was a battle survivor. His head lolled as we moved him.
“If only, if only, the woodpecker sighed, the bark on the tree was a little bit softer,” he mumbled.
I laughed. “Isn’t that from Holes?”
“It’s me and you,” he said. “Stanley and Zero. But who’s Stanley, and who’s Zero?”
We swung open the door and I took Tommy into the bathroom on my own. He kneeled before the toilet in a well-practiced manner and began to heave chunks of the deli sandwiches we had eaten.
“Zero,” he kept saying. “Zero. Zero. Zero.”
Once the last remnants of his stomach were evacuated, I took him back out to the worry-faced Emma.
“There’s no way he can go out,” Emma said as we helped him back into the room. He collapsed back into the beanbag chair on his back, half laying down, legs splayed out.
“He made the pre-game the game,” I said.
“We’ll have to go without him,” Emma said, which surprised me. I had been prepared for her to stay behind and spend the night in while she nursed him well.
“Is it okay to leave him here?”
“I’ve got this water bottle to leave here with him,” she said, pulling one from her backpack.
“What if he, like, chokes on his own vomit or whatever, laying on his back, you know? Like Janis Joplin or Hendrix style?” This was something I heard could happen to super fucked up people from an RA at our freshman orientation, although I never found any record of it happening to a college freshman.
“We’ll take this backpack…” Emma said, stuffing it with clothes and his jacket, “And fill it up. And put it on him.” She outfitted the backpack onto a now almost unresponsive Tommy. “Now help me turn him on his side. With the backpack on, he can’t roll onto his back.”
We did so as Tommy groaned and laughed at something unintelligible he had said. Emma kissed him on the cheek.
“Are you sure he’s okay?” I asked. I felt myself frowning.
“Yeah. Honestly, this has happened before, a few weeks ago actually,” she said, to my surprise. “Anyways, we came to visit you. It’d be pretty sad if both of us failed to go out with you!”
We walked from the campus to First Street and to ‘The Maples’, the party house that was our destination for the night. As we went, she explained to me the changes she had discerned in Tommy in the short time of our first semester thus far.
The gist was that he seemed to have fallen in with a ‘bad’ crowd at school, or perhaps had intentionally sought one, and was now living even faster than we’d ever known, propelled by drugs and alcohol into a lifestyle he had always gravitated toward but had been held back from by the strictures of his family, friends, and the environment of Veddersburgh. Apparently, she had begun to suspect that he was drinking nearly every night, even when he wasn’t going out, and then lying to her about it. More than that, he was smoking weed daily—which wasn’t such a big deal on its own (I didn’t tell Emma that I did the same)—but he was taking it to excess, even smoking before class. As a result, he was doing poorly in nearly all his classes, though not yet poorly enough to fail. Even though they were in the same town, their separate colleges and campuses made it impossible for Emma to babysit him all the time, which, of course, I reminded her she shouldn’t need to do.
Helping Tommy was an inescapable impulse for her, just as it was for me, because when he was on your side—like earlier that night when he defended me from the pressure to drink, or how he complimented my writing—it felt so good. You felt the least you could do was take care of him in return.
Emma shook her head as we arrived at the party, passing between the two maple trees from which the house derived its name.
“I’m just so worried about him all the time. I want to forget about him for tonight, let him sleep it off, and finally have a college night out where I’m not worrying about whether Tommy is okay,” she said.
‘Zero’ by Yeah Yeah Yeahs was playing at a volume that was intentionally not loud enough to incite a noise complaint, and the house was a little too crowded, as it always was, the wooden floors either sticky or covered with a millimeter of beer. It seemed to me like everyone there was more beautiful than me in every way.
A senior at the door, presumably one of the house residents, was collecting five dollars from everyone and marking their hands with an X. We paid and stepped inside, where enormous coolers of beer awaited us in exchange for our money.
“Ugh, what is this, cheap beer?” Emma said in disgust after her first sip. “I don’t think I usually drink cheap beer.”
“At least they’re playing good music,” I said, doing more than sipping mine and doubting my decision not to pregame.
“Come on, let’s get something else,” she said. She took my hand (which electrified me) and pulled me down a hallway lined with people into the kitchen, where there was a plastic table set up for beer pong. The part of the ceiling that had fallen in the last time I was there had been plastered up.
“Ayy!” my friends yelled as I entered. I saluted. Emma started looking through kitchen cabinets.
“Whoa, what are you doing!” I said, alarmed.
“Usually at places like this, when they have a party, they hide all their good alcohol somewhere so freshmen don’t find it,” she explained. My friends in the kitchen took no notice of Emma’s actions as they yelled at each other over beer pong, a game I found juvenile and uninteresting. She made her way to the cabinet doors right below the sink, the place where you’d expect to find a fire extinguisher, trash bags, or extra sponges. Sure enough, she pulled out a half-empty bottle of some orangish-red liquor called Fireball.
“Bingo! Oh my god, Jude-dude, have you ever had this? You gotta try it,” she said, twisting off the top. She took a swig directly from the bottle and handed it to me. “It’s cinnamon-flavored.”
Was this the same Emma I knew? I sipped as well and had to admit, it went down easier than cheap beer or most other liquors.
“Not bad,” I said. We scooted ourselves over to the only unoccupied part of the kitchen, right in front of the oven.
I finished my beer quickly as we talked and swapped gulps from the Fireball bottle.
“Have you talked to Cynthia lately?” she asked.
“Nah,” I lied. I had drunkenly texted her a few days prior, but she wisely hadn’t responded.
“Good,” she nodded. “Best way to move on. Second best way is to get a new gal, right? Any prospects in here?”
I looked at Jenn and Sara as they played drinking games. “I don’t know, maybe,” I lied again, knowing they weren’t interested in me, but feeling like I needed to portray some semblance of direction.
Emma made a face. “Ooh, Jude, I don’t think they’re really your type. And, I don’t think they’re really...very nice.”
“Well, they seem nice enough to me,” I contested. “And they seem nice to you.”
“They’re not as nice as you think,” she said, swigging from the Fireball, then changing the subject. “Hey, is that shirt you’re wearing the same one we got from the mall that time?”
“Indeed, it is.”
“Why not get a new one?”
“It still fits. And I like it.”
“It’s still nice.”
“Thanks. It’s more than the look, you know? I got it with you guys, so there are memories attached to it. Sentimentality means a lot to me.”
She snorted a laugh. “No kidding, you’ve always been that way. I love that about you, though. Remember what you wrote in Tommy’s yearbook?”
“I was being genuine!”
“You would have thought you were the one dating him, not me!”
“Platonic male love needs more representation in our culture. I was just doing my part.”
She rolled her eyes. “Platonic male love gets represented all the time. Most men love their bros more than women, they just don’t say it so explicitly. Not like you.”
“I’m not exactly hesitant to declare love to women, either. There just hasn’t been much interest lately.”
“Oh Jude-dude, Judey-dudey,” she said, stroking my face. That she would deign to touch its red bumpiness made me shudder. “It’ll happen for you, eventually.”
We talked, like we used to in high school, during the classes we had together sans Tommy. We talked about Tommy, worried about him. We talked about her dogs. One had passed away, and she had gotten her first tattoo as a memorial. We talked about her pre-law pursuits (she wasn’t sure about it) and my business degree (doubly unsure). The way we talked, it felt like we were in a bubble, impenetrable to the cauldron of noise around us in the kitchen at The Maples.
We talked until the guy who let us in spotted us drinking the Fireball whiskey and accosted us.
“Hey! The five dollars is for the beer only,” he said in a Long Island accent. “Don’t go through our stuff!”
“Well, you should’ve had us sign a contract stipulating that at the door,” Emma said.
He ignored her. “Yo, what the fuck—is the oven on?!”
While talking to Emma, I must have leaned on the gas stove knob and the gas was hissing out and clicking without igniting. I quickly shut it off.
“Okay, you know what, just leave. You’re both out. Get lost,” the Long Island guy said.
Emma and I giggled, apologized, then squeezed through the crowded kitchen and hallway, out into the cold Upstate air. Our breath mingled in the night as we laughed and agreed to head back to campus.
As we got to the end of the street, two police cars with their lights flashing came around the corner and pulled up at The Maples, and even though I didn’t hear an explosion, I thought the worst—a lit cigarette or joint in a house that I had unintentionally filled with gas! As became quickly apparent, though, it was an underaged drinking raid. Freshmen poured from the house as if routed on a great 18th century battlefield.
“Oh my god, can you imagine if we were still in there?” Emma said.
“That would be bad for you, Miss Pre-Law,” I teased.
“Yeah, maybe. Worse for the guys living there, who we paid five dollars to.”
“Good point.”
“Can you imagine, though? What if we got to the party a few minutes later and we were still in there? What if you hadn’t accidentally turned the gas on and gotten us kicked out? We’d still be inside, having a really shitty night.”
“So, what you’re saying is, Tommy saved us by making us late?”
“Saved us in his absence, for sure,” she said. “And I saved us. And you saved us.”
“And it’s not a shitty night?”
“I don’t think so, do you?” she asked, shivering.
Emma wasn’t one of those girls who wore skimpy outfits on cold nights. She had on jeans and a jacket, but she shivered anyway, and big, thick flakes of snow landed on her eyelashes.
“No, I don’t think it was a shitty night,” I said. “Quite fortuitous, as Tommy might say.”
“The world is just metaphor after metaphor stacked on top of each other, and once you learn to read it that way, anything is possible,” Emma said. “Tommy taught me that. If you think about tonight like that, it doesn’t seem fortuitous—it was destined.”
“He’s right,” I said, thinking of the kismet of Tommy mentioning Zero from Holes, then the song ‘Zero’ by Yeah Yeah Yeahs playing. And how we drank Fireball, then almost destroyed The Maples with a fireball of our own.
I wasn’t reading the metaphors correctly in that moment though, because my impulse was to grab Emma’s hand and hope she kissed me. That didn’t happen, though, because her boyfriend was my best friend and I could not reconcile that and perhaps never would.
We returned to campus, finding Tommy still passed out but seemingly alive and well, a sleepy smile on his face like he was in the middle of a great dream. We lifted him onto my roommate’s bed, and Emma lay beside him as I lay in mine. The night was still ‘young’ for college kids, and while we waited for the drunk hordes to return to campus, Emma and I ironically watched Tangled, the new Disney movie about a princess with a long blonde braid.
Further kismet.
Nothing would ever come of it. I was convinced of that. But after that night, I knew I had no choice but to admit: I was in love with Emma Lightfoote.
next (the legacy of parade day)
previous (the face in the tree)