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College Days Are Swiftly Fleeting

Dave Nelson

    Okay, so why am I here? Well, I’m here because of my friend from college, Lisa. So, look, right from the start, you just need to know that my situation is probably different than yours. I’m not talking about a relative, or my wife, or somebody like that. Just a friend, and that’s the hard part. The sign outside said, “Come in and tell your story,” so here I am, telling about my friend Lisa, okay? It’s just that, I don’t know...I’ve gotta tell somebody about her. I don’t even know what to say. What? What was she like? Huh. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that she was a real bitch. No, seriously. She just was. I told you my story was different. I mean, haven’t you ever had a friend that irritated the hell outta ya? You know what I’m talking about? So...I’m dying up here. I don’t know what to say. This is not how I was thinking this would go, so I’m just gonna...What? How did I meet her? Uh, well, I first met her when I was a junior, she was a senior. It was Spring semester. What? Okay, yeah, good question. This was at the University of Alabama. Roll Tide, right? Yeah, my dad and granddad went there, so I went there, even though I lived in Philly my whole life. Never been to Alabama until I got to campus for orientation. Crazy, huh? I figured it’d just be me and a bunch of rednecks. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.
    Okay, so Lisa. Right...so it’s junior year, and I got roped into doing this Model UN thing by one of my professors. Yeah, yeah, sounds goofy, right? I can hear people out there whispering “nerd” to the person you’re sitting next to. Whatever. Look, I’m just freaking out up here! Okay, okay, you’re right. I can do this. Back on track. So this prof made it sound like some extra credit was involved, so I decided to at least check out one meeting. So, before the meeting was over, I was heading up some committee to plan for our trip to a regional conference representing Costa Rica—that’s right, real fast it became our trip. I was in, and we were Costa Rica. Yep, it’s a real heavy-hitter of international politics. “The Switzerland of Central America,” they call it, both for its mountains and its neutrality. See? I learned something from it. You should be impressed. You know what? They don’t even have an army. How in the hell can you be a Central American country and not have an army, right? When I was a kid, that was the quickest way to let the commies take over, just let them waltz right in and stir up the peasants, and boom! Another Cuba, right in our backyard. At least that was what my old man said. Anyway, I am getting way off topic again, but ya know, stuff sticks with you, and sometimes you don’t even know why.
    Okay, so, like the first time I learned her name. It was probably the third meeting of that Model UN club that I went to, and I was just sitting there talking with Paulo, the guy from Brazil who was the only person I knew in the group. We’d had a class or two together and lived in the same dorm. So we’re sitting there talking before the meeting started, and somebody in the back is whispering some story about what somebody did at a bar on the Strip to about three or four other people. Suddenly, this girl in the back busts out with the loudest, most obnoxious laugh you can imagine. Yep, that was her. Except, you see, I didn’t know her name, but I knew that damn laugh. She was the tall, skinny girl who always sat near the windows on the left side in the dining hall and just laughed like that all through dinner, talking to her little friends. You couldn’t miss her: she was close to six feet tall, real long legs and arms, and she had this jet-black hair that was cut real short. So she stood out in a crowd, but you know what I remembered about her? For three years I had been listening to that laugh. It was one of those that sounded like, “Hey, listen to how much fun I’m having. You’re not having this much fun right now, and you probably wouldn’t even get the joke anyway.” My roommate and I had nicknamed her “Laugh-In,” like the old show. So anyway, once I realized “Laugh-In” was in the club, I made sure to pay attention and get her real name so I could tell him. “Laugh-In Lisa” was even better than we could have hoped for. He laughed his ass off that night when I told him who was in the dumb club with me, and that I found out her real name.
    So, not such a great start to a relationship, huh? Well, not really a relationship—just a friendship. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. But here’s the deal: I ended up working with her on some of the projects for the club, and she wasn’t as bad as I thought. She was smart, even though she hadn’t been top of the class in high school or anything. But she was smart, and she knew it, and that made her a know-it-all, which also made her obnoxious, too. Kind of a vicious cycle or something. But I like smart. She was majoring in international business and Russian. Yep, Russian. Ten years after the Cold War is over and done, she’s studying Russian. She always used to talk about how the market was going to be booming for American business in Russia in just a few years. She wanted in on it. She was gonna make big bucks importing or exporting or whatever. I guess she had forgotten about China, just still thinking about Russia like a lot of us Cold War kids.
    So I see her at the club meetings every week, and then I started sitting with her in the dining hall sometimes at supper, and she’s not so bad. Pissed me off sometimes? Hell yeah. If she got on your case, she was gonna let you have it. No stopping her. But if you could ever one-up her with a crack or if you pushed back when she tried to talk you down, she liked you. That’s how we got to be friends. I just started cracking jokes about her one time after she said something really smart-ass when we were practicing for the conference, and she got a kick out of it. What can I say? I’m a sucker for people who laugh at my jokes, and so, kinda all of a sudden, she was less obnoxious, especially with that crazy laugh. Being in on the joke made that laugh sound different. If I kept pushing, eventually she’d be out of breath and claiming that her stomach was hurting her. She’d double-over and put her hands on her stomach and just shake her head, laughing.
    Okay, I’ll never forget what she did once we finally made it to the conference. It was at Mississippi State, and the delegation representing Costa Rica drove over in one dorky caravan. It’s not that far from Alabama, and I rode with her, one of her little friends, Cindy, and Paulo, the Brazilian kid. They were about the only members of the club I could stand being around for that amount of time. All four of us piled into her black 1998 Honda Civic. At least it was a four-door. Soon as we got there, she immediately set to work rubbing the other groups the wrong way, and loving every minute of it. That’s why she liked Model UN so much. She just loved to argue with people.
    Anyway, we’re at the conference, and after all the playing international politics is done, of course there’s a party in the evening. What? Nerdy kids drink in college, too. It’s at somebody’s house who’s local, and so we all pile in the cars and head over there. It ends up being pretty dull, and me, Lisa, and Paulo decide to bail. Jake, one of the other guys in the club, had some friends at State, and so he had been in charge of arranging a place for us to stay. So, we ask him, “What’s up? Where are we staying so that we can get out of this lame party?” So he tells us that some of his friends who go to State will let us stay in some dorms on campus. We’ll be able to sleep on the floor for free! He is so enthusiastic about it, and Lisa just looks at us. Paulo doesn’t quite understand, because his English was good, not great, so I start trying to explain to him what’s going on. The next thing I know, Lisa is going at Jake, cussing a blue streak about how nobody is going to sleep on any floor of any shitty dorm that looks like it’s from East Germany like all the dorms on this shitty campus. Needless to say, the whole party kinda stops, and everybody’s wondering how the Security Council is going to work through this issue. Nobody’s ever heard of the delegation from Costa Rica going medieval on anybody, let alone each other. Right then, Lisa turns around and yells, “Anybody who is riding in my car better get their ass outside unless they want to walk!” So, I grab Paulo, who was still confused, and Cindy falls in behind. The others looked pretty pissed, but we aren’t riding home with them. Besides, they were taking this whole “playing international politics” thing way too seriously.
    When we get to the car, Lisa peels out. “Where’re we going?” I ask, thinking we’re probably heading back to T-town. “We’re going to find a hotel,” she says. And we did. It just so happened that it was 20 minutes down the road in West Point, Mississippi, because all the local hotels were booked. Why? I don’t know. Who could have guessed every hotel room in Starkville, Mississippi, would be booked on a weeknight?
    So we check in to this dingy place—which, by the way, it was at least as dingy as the dorm would have been—and all four of us pile into this 2 bed setup. Guys on one side, girls on the other. Paulo is worn out from the day’s English and almost immediately dozes off. Cindy steps out for a smoke, and Lisa and I are sitting there, looking at each other.
    She looks up at me, and I know that she is about to launch into some sort of rant about what a loser Jake is. But she doesn’t. “Thanks for coming with me,” she says. I give her a funny look, cause I’m like, “What other option did I have? You were gonna leave my ass. I’m not taking a chance on having to ride in the back of Jake’s truck and get dropped off to sleep at some random dorm, on some dude’s floor!”
    I’m just joking around like usual, but she doesn’t laugh. She just looks at me again. “I’m glad you’re here with me,” is all she says, but with maybe, just a little, some kinda emphasis on the word “you’re.” I mean, I don’t think it was just me. So, like, all of a sudden, I get this feeling like maybe I have been missing something. Like maybe I haven’t realized what was going on. She’s just looking at me, right in my eyes, and not looking down. And she looks really pretty sitting there on the edge of the bed, in the dark. And it’s so quiet. I mean, we would hang out now and then, sometimes I would eat dinner with her and her roommate in the cafeteria, and I had always thought she was pretty, but I never felt like there was anything there.
    Now, wait, this isn’t that kind of story. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. But what you’re thinking happened, didn’t happen. So, she’s looking at me, and it’s just the two of us, except for Paulo, and he’s asleep, and I start feeling a little nervous, like I should say something. And I’m about to say something to her, which would have been magical, right? Yeah, I’m sure. You can tell I’m a pretty smooth operator. But then Cindy busts in, bitching about the idea of sleeping on a dorm room floor. Lisa switches gears like that, and then it’s over. We start talking to Cindy, and then everybody gets tired and drops off to sleep. Hey, we’d had a big day of international politics. Naturally, we get a chilly reception from the rest of the group the next morning, to say the least, and that takes up most of the day’s action. We get ready to head back to Tuscaloosa, and I thought about bringing it up with her in the car on the way. No chance to. Paulo and Cindy are talking the whole way, mostly Cindy, and an opportunity just never presents itself, and who knows, maybe I was just misunderstanding.
    But here’s the thing that’s driving me nuts: I didn’t ever talk to her about it. I quit the club pretty soon after that when I realized there wasn’t any extra credit there. By that point we were halfway through the semester, so I didn’t see her that much anymore. I just saw her around campus every so often, ate dinner with her and her little friends a few times, but it was different than seeing her every week at the meetings. She’d tell me about her job in New York, and how she was headed up there after graduation. She had this job all lined up because she had interned with them the past summer. They thought her Model UN experience was really interesting. Yeah, right, who saw that coming? Not me. She was going to be working in the Twin Towers, in an office on the 105th floor, I can’t even remember which tower. I would always joke with her that it wasn’t the same as Russia, and she would always say, “Just you wait.” We emailed back and forth over the summer, and I guess I was just working up the courage. I don’t know...I just couldn’t shake what I felt—or thought I felt—that night in that crummy hotel.
    Do I regret not bringing it up with her? You bet I do. Especially when I got back from the gym that morning. My senior year had barely started. I was going to do some reading for my 11 o’clock class after breakfast. I turned on the TV and sat down with a bowl of cereal. By that time, both towers were on fire. And then they were falling. What did I think of? Another thing we never saw coming, I guess. And I thought of her. I thought of her laughing in the cafeteria. I thought of her strutting into a conference room at Mississippi State like she owned the place. I couldn’t stop thinking about her for that whole week, and the weeks after that. I finally got up the nerve to look at the list of names, and sure enough, there was hers, right there in black and white.
    But that’s why I’m here, talking to all of you. It’s been a year since it happened, and I still can’t stop thinking about her. It seems dumb to me, especially here. Everybody in this group has like, real stories. I mean, she wasn’t even my girlfriend. But yesterday, I pulled up behind a car with a New York license plate, which isn’t that weird here in Philly. But it was a black 1998 Honda Civic, four-door, just like the one she used to drive. I just sat there staring at it, until all of a sudden I had tears running down my face and the cars behind me where honking because the car in front of me was gone and the light was green. All that because it was a black Honda Civic. It’s just funny how the little things stick with you, ya know?

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