Sandra Dee than Scrooge.
My gradual decent into grimdom might have continued unabated, had it not been for a certain startling phone call one cold March afternoon. It was almost a year to the day after Hannah died.
"You' said Soo-Jin, barely turning from Diagram 2114.74 "Amino Acids and Peptides" to hand me the phone.
"Hello?"
"Hi. It's me. Your past."
I couldn't breathe. It was unmistakable—her low voice of sex and highways, equal parts Marilyn and Charles Kuralt, but it had changed. If once it had been sugared and crackly, now it was porridged, grueled.
"Don't worry/' Jade said. "I'm not catching up with you." She laughed, a short, Ha laugh, like a foot kicking a rock. "I no longer smoke," she announced, obviously quite proud of herself, and then she went on to explain that after St. Gallway she hadn't made it to college. Instead, due to her "troubles" she'd voluntarily admitted herself to a "Narnia kind of place" where people talked about their feelings and learned to watercolor fruit. Jade hinted excitedly that a "really huge rock star" had been in residence on her floor, the comparatively well-adjusted third floor ("not as suicidal as the fourth or as manic as the second") and they'd become "close," but to reveal his name would be to forsake everything she'd learned during her ten-month "growth period" at Heathridge Park. (Jade now, I realized, saw herself as some sort of herbaceous vine or creeper.) One of the parameters of her "graduation," she explained (she used this word, probably because it was preferable to "release") was that she tie up Loose Ends.
I was a Loose End.
"So how are you?" she asked. "How's life? Your dad?"
"He's fantastic."
"And Harvard?"
"Fine."
"Well, that brings me to the purpose of the call, an apology, which I will not dodge or do unconvincingly," she said officially, which made me sort of sad, because it sounded nothing at all like the Real Jade. The Jade I knew, as a rule, always dodged apology and, if forced, did it unconvincingly, but this was the Jade Vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys), a member of the Leguminosae family, distantly related to the humble garden pea.
"I'm sorry for the way I behaved. I know what happened had nothing to do with you. She just lost it, you know. People do that all the time and they always have their own reasons. Please accept my request for forgiveness."
I thought about interrupting her with my little cliff-hanger, my about-face, my kick in the teeth, myfine print: "Actually, to be technical about the whole thing, uh . .." But I couldn't do it. Not only did I not have the courage, I didn't see the point of telling her the truth —not now. Jade was blooming, after all, receiving ideal amounts of sun exposure and water, displaying promising signs of reaching her maximum height of seventy feet, and would eventually expand via seeds, stem-cutting in the summer, layering in the spring, to overtake the entire side of a stone wall. My words would have the effect of a one-hundred-day drought.
The rest of the call was a fervid exchange of "so give me your e-mail," and "let's plan big reunions"—paper-doll pleasantness that did little to cover the fact we'd never see each other again and would rarely speak. I was aware as ever that she, and maybe the others too, would occasionally float over to me like pollen off a withered dandelion with news of sugarplum marriages, gooey divorces, moves to Florida, a new job in real estate, but there was nothing keeping them and they'd drift away as simply and randomly as they'd come.
Later that day, as Fate would have it, I had my "Greek and Roman Epic" lecture with Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, Zolo Kydd. Students called Zolo "Rolo," because, if only in stature and complexion, he happened to resemble that particular chewable chocolate caramel candy. He was short, tan and round, wore bright plaid Christmas pants regardless of the time of year, and his thick, yellow-white hair encrusted his shiny freckled forehead as if, ages ago, Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing had been dribbled all over him. Customarily, by the end of Zolo's lectures on "Gods and Godlessness" or "The Beginning and the End," most students had nodded off; unlike Dad, Zolo had an anesthetizing delivery style, which had to do with his run-on sentences and tendency to repeat a certain word, usually a preposition or adjective, in a way that brought to mind a small green frog bouncing across lily pads.
And