The Blue Window by Suzanne Berne

Author:Suzanne Berne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner / Marysue Rucci Books
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

IT HAD BEEN a mosh pit on the quad, and he’d been as drunk as everyone else, and really high, for the first time all year, finally ignoring his mother’s warnings about “dope” being mixed with rat poison. He’d been passed a joint and smoked the whole thing, not even passing it on. The band was a bunch of totally wasted UConn Biebers playing Zeppelin, so it wasn’t really music, any more than the jumping around was really dancing. It was riot noise. A single spotlight threw a white circle that spilled past the band and onto the grass, and in and out of that pool of light, kids were laughing and jumping on top of each other and being carried around and then dumped onto the ground.

Some kid handed him a pill while he was standing in line at a keg and he swallowed it, not caring what it was. Today had been such an epic fail that nothing could make it worse. His roommate, Dan Q-tip, that total mediocrity, had ditched him for next year’s housing and hadn’t even bothered to tell him, blocking with a bunch of guys on the hall who had been his friends first, whom he’d just assumed he’d be living with; but Dan had just shrugged and said, Dude, we only had room for four. When the music started, he’d been in the library basement, working on his final Bio lab report, which was late, so he’d probably get a D on it, so goodbye to being pre-med, and his face was all broken out again. Thank god he was alone in the library basement, because he’d actually started crying. He’d been left out of everything; he didn’t belong here, he didn’t belong anywhere. He had to stop himself from calling his mother, to tell her he was feeling like absolute crap. Because she would offer to come get him and bring him home, which is what he wanted, and it would be all over for him then.

Girls in tank tops and shorts brushed past him; he could smell their warm skin and their hair. He poured himself another beer from the keg and stood at the edge of the dancing, watching people slam into each other.

The beer and the weed were starting to make him feel a little better. Over the library’s dark tower hung a big white moon against a navy blue sky. He thought of slides his Art History professor had shown a week ago: a medieval tapestry about the Apocalypse. A knight on a horse was trying to save a woman while a dragon tried to pull off her blue robe, exposing one of her breasts. Blue, the professor said, pointing to the woman’s robe, symbolizes imagination. A requirement for true compassion. Imagination & compassion, the girl next to him wrote in her notebook. He’d wanted to lean over and scribble: What’s the boob symbolize?

Without Art History, he thought solemnly now, the sky would be just blue. And maybe that would be better.

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