Girl with Glasses by Marissa Walsh

Author:Marissa Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Blind Date

Reality Bites had come out spring semester of my senior year, and I had seen it in town one weekday afternoon by myself when I was probably supposed to be doing something else. I was both terrified and hopeful that my post-graduation life would resemble the film. Oh, for some kooky dancing at the gas-station convenience mart! Drinking games to Good Times! A job at the Gap! That cute Winona haircut!

That spring I also met this musician guy at a Liz Phair concert, and he was nice, and I tried to make myself like him so I could get over someone else. We had no chemistry, but I didn’t mind. He was in a band. He gave me this really intense bear hug when we parted, even though we had just met. And I soon revealed my “crush” to him, even though my words rang false as soon as they were out of my mouth.

That fall, Musician Guy called me at my parents’ and asked if I had a car I could borrow to help get his band’s equipment to a gig. A gig. Would this make me a roadie? I said yes. Of course. Musician Guy may have been exploiting my fake crush, but I was bored, and it sounded fun. Who knew? Maybe the band would make it big. And I could say I was with the band. My father told me to watch out for the drugs. But he let me borrow his car.

Meliss had moved to Boston by now—Somerville, to be exact. Slumerville, to be more exact. One night Musician Guy and I went to Meliss’s to watch Quadrophenia, and I drank too much, which I thought would help with Musician Guy—or at least with Quadrophenia. I got sick, which never helps with anyone, and poor Meliss held my hair. I wasn’t used to drinking with men. But before I got sick, we did have a drunken Store 24 moment: An emaciated man, glasses askew, was lying on the floor. “My Sharona” was not playing.

I would be on the floor soon enough. It was the first time I ever got sick from drinking. Throwing up is a difficult time to be a GWG. You don’t really want to be wearing your glasses, but there’s just no good place to put them from your vantage point in the bathroom. And you do not want them to fall in. Luckily you are too busy praying for death—and being interrupted by teeth-brushing roommates—to worry about it.

After I moved to New York, Musician Guy sent me a fun package with the kind of mix tape (“Miss You” by the Stones; “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” by Frank Sinatra) you dream of getting from someone you like. I analyzed it for a while. But then we spoke on the phone, and he casually mentioned he’d been staying at his girlfriend’s. We hardly even knew each other, he said. I agreed.

And, really, I hardly even knew myself. My glasses weren’t right; my future was uncertain; I was never really with the band.

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