Free Joe College: A Novel by Tom Perrotta

stressful for both of us. I hadn’t even packed a lambskin.
    “It’s okay,” she said. “I have something else.”
    Already naked, she broke open a package she’d produced from one of her dresser drawers and turned away from me, squatting in a froglike stance. I heard an odd noise, something like the sound of shaving cream foaming out of the can. When it stopped, she turned around and approached the bed, wiping her hands across her thighs.
    “What was that?” I asked.
    “Birth control.”
    I wanted to ask her what kind, but she’d already climbed into bed with me. There was no sign of the nervousness she’d exhibited at my house; she was in charge of the situation, utterly at peace with her decision. She looked up at me, and her face was pure invitation.
    “Happy New Year,” she said, pulling me on top of her.
    Her eyes widened as I slipped inside her, and she gasped, as if something profound and transforming had just happened, as though this were more pleasure than she deserved or could bear. I was startled by the urgency with which she met me, the frantic rhythm of our coupling. The noises that came out of her were heartfelt and unpredictable. Sitting at my desk two months later, I could still feel the tension of her legs around my waist as I came, the groan of desolation she gave when we slipped apart.
    What I wanted to forget—for her sake as well as mine—was the feeling of wild emptiness that had come upon me the moment I entered her, the awful physical knowledge that she’d been right all along: this really was all I’d wanted, and now that I had it, I knew I’d never want it again. Her passion was embarrassing, not because of what it said about her, but because of what it revealed about me, the person who’d been willing to humor her and string her along for half a year just so I could fuck her and not feel a thing, except maybe that I deserved it for putting up with all those visits to the car lots, all the annoying chitchat, all those letters on pink stationery.
    She must have realized it too, because as soon as we were finished she burst into tears and told me to please get out of her house. Five weeks later she mailed me the letter I was now slipping back into its envelope. Why such a shameful memory gave me an erection every time I replayed it, I had no idea, but that was how it always happened. I already had my pants open and the zipper down when my eyes strayed to the face-down copy of Middlemarch , the words “George Eliot” thundering off the cover like an accusation. Three hundred ninety-two pages to go.
    Fuck it, I thought. I’ll just have to skim the rest over breakfast.

roadkill manicotti
    Between 4:30 and 4:59 the long table by the salad bar was colonized by dining-hall workers—students and full-timers alike—wolfing down last-minute dinners before the early birds started banging on the doors at 5:00 on the dot. I breezed in at twenty of, grabbed a tray and some silverware off the serving cart, and wandered over to the deserted beverage station. One of the perks of dining hall employment was that you didn’t get stuck in traffic so often at the height of the dinner rush, trying to appear unruffled as you waited for some weirdo to finish filling a dozen glasses with a precisely calibrated mixture of pink and orange bug juice, or for a chin-scratching professor emeritus of comparative religion to finally take the plunge and choose between the day-old tuna lasagna and tonight’s meat loaf with brown gravy.
    I had just topped off my third glass of Coke when Matt emerged from the kitchen, already punched in and hard at work. A gigantic sheet cake balanced in his arms, he whistled the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show, with a chipper virtuosity he had successfully concealed from the world—or at least from me—until that very minute. He stopped as soon as he spotted me, but it was too late. We both knew he’d been caught in a moment of extreme uncoolness.
    “Damn,” I said.