Free I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly Page B

green suit.” I had done my part. When Wayne was sentenced a month later to life in prison without the possibility of parole, we were cheered and relieved. Finally, I could find outwhat had happened, what had been going on, what everyone else had known for a year. But it was all the kids on campus had been talking about for the last fourteen months, and they were sick of it. The sentencing had finally freed them, and the subject was never to be brought up again. I never talked to anyone about it, never even found out exactly what had gone on before that dark night, on the night itself, or during the many sad days that followed.
    My roommate James had been kicked out. Ben White, always a dark soul, had gone much darker. He was perpetually high on cough syrup, pale and gaunt, cultivating a desolate squalor in his dorm room. Zack had been charmed by him, and then the whole school seemed to have fallen in line around these two arbiters of taste, a liberal northeastern cult built around cough syrup and gangsta rap and mockery, some kids going so far as to ape Ben White’s tics, his awkward gait, his made-up words. He’d called my girlfriend a disgusting slut in front of me, and I’d been too intimidated to respond. Finally, I had taken on both Ben White and Zack one wasted night and came away with a broken nose and two black eyes for my trouble.
    I groveled before the Judicial Committee. They reminded me of my infractions over the years: the half gallon of whiskey, the half gallon of vodka, the shoplifting, the many curfew violations . . . I swore that if they would only let me walk, I would be meek as a lamb, quiet as a mouse, a humble, gracious monk of a student until graduation, then slip away and never return. Alternately, I offered that if they tossed me now, I would make such a ruckus that they would tear their hair and rend their clothes, despairing that they hadn’t had the wisdom to let me leave quietly.
    They made me wait out in the hall while they deliberated. I had been accepted into the film program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a cheap school now that Tatyana and I qualified for in-state tuition, and all we could afford. Fuck this cloistered, fussy faux-intellectual utopia. I looked forward to disappearing into the crowd at a huge state school, deep undercover in my jeans, T-shirt,and baseball hat . . . if I was allowed to graduate. They couldn’t throw me out. My grades were excellent. They wouldn’t throw me out. Would they?
    Finally, I was summoned back in. I would be allowed to walk on the condition that I never return. I could hardly contain my glee. Anyone could make dean’s list, but it took a special type of student to graduate on triple-secret social probation. And putting the two together as I had, being allowed to walk only on the condition that I never return, the excellent exile? I imagined a fat French chef kissing his fingers: c’est magnifique!
    It was who I was: the up arrow and the down arrow in the same seventeen-year-old mannish boy. I’d read a tabloid about Elvis in a bus station that spring, about how his twin brother was stillborn. Many cultures believe that, in a set of twins, one is good and the other evil. If one of them dies, the other takes on the burden of being both good and evil. More than The Stranger , more than The Catcher in the Rye , more than any book that supposedly spoke to troubled adolescents, that tabloid told me who I was and who I would be.

    We graduated. We celebrated. We annihilated and destroyed. We made a “wine machine” by hanging a box of wine from the ceiling in one of the dorms. My mom flew in from Colorado for graduation (she and Tashina had moved there so Tatyana could get in-state tuition). She drank from the wine machine to cheers from my pals. I slept in a bathtub. The next morning, when I couldn’t stop throwing up, she helped me box my stuff up to ship to Colorado.
    While my mother gathered my