Joe College: A Novel Read Online Free
Author: Tom Perrotta
year, she took night classes in accounting and marketing at Kean College. She still hung out with her high school crowd, but said it was getting boring. She went to the gym whenever she could and was thinking about buying a new car.
At the beginning of the summer, my attraction to her was tainted by doubt and disapproval. I was dismayed by her hair, the outdated Charlie’s Angels thing she was still doing with the curling iron and blow-dryer. She was big on pastels and had a weakness for matching culottes and blouses, an ensemble my mother referred to as a “short set.” She chewed Juicyfruit, painted her nails, and didn’t skimp on the eye shadow. The girls I liked in college favored baggy sweaters and objected to makeup on political grounds. On special occasions they wore thrift-store dresses and cowboy boots. They didn’t devote a lot of time to their nails, and a surprising number of them had mixed feelings about shaving their legs. I had the feeling they wouldn’t have approved of Cindy.
As the weeks went by, though, my reservations began to crumble. Who was I to be a snob about hairstyles and nail polish? Maybe I went to Yale nine months of the year, but right now I was back
home in New Jersey, spending my days speeding from one godforsaken industrial park to another in a truck with a cockroach painted on the front doors, trading stale quips about Jodie Foster with guys who wore their names on their shirts, and cultivating an impressive tan on the lower two thirds of my left arm. What did I care what the girls I went to school with—girls I hardly knew, from places like Park Avenue and Scarsdale and Bethesda and Newton and Buck-head and Sausalito and Saratoga Springs and Basel frigging Switzerland—what did I care what they would think about someone like Cindy, whom they were never going to lay eyes on or have a conversation with anyway?
I was lonely that summer, and her face lit up every time she saw me. She complimented me on my new glasses, asked what I did to stay in such good shape, made frequent comments about what a jerk her ex-boyfriend had been and how she hadn’t had a date for the past eight months.
Sometimes she wore a tight denim dress that buttoned down the front, and she always smelled like she’d just stepped out of the shower. Even in that little candy-striped jumper I hated, you could see what a nice body she had, that she worked out but wasn’t a fanatic about it, not like some of the girls I knew at school, girls who ran so much their bodies were just bones and angles. Cindy smiled a lot and had a distracting habit of touching me ever-so-lightly on the wrist as she talked, maintaining the contact for just so long, but not a fraction of a second longer. I’d spent my entire high school career pining for girls like her. Two years of college had changed me in a thousand ways, but not so much that I didn’t get a little dizzy every time she uncapped her cherry Chapstick and ran it lovingly over her dry, puckered lips.
My mother had been telling me all year that my father needed a rest, but I hadn’t realized how badly he needed one until I’d spent a few weeks on the job. He looked like he’d aged ten years
in a matter of months. He had indigestion from too much coffee, hemorrhoids from driving all day, and the haunted, jittery look of a fugitive from justice. He talked to himself more or less incessantly, often in a hostile tone of voice: “You idiot!” he’d say, slapping himself in the head the way they did on those V-8 commercials, “you forgot to refill the cup holders!” A slow driver in our path could trigger a rage in him that was frightening to behold, a teeth-grinding, horn-pressing, dashboard-pounding fury that made me think he was just a couple of red lights away from a massive heart attack or a full-scale nervous breakdown.
It was painful to compare this frayed version of my father with the optimistic, rejuvenated man he’d been the summer before, the
At the beginning of the summer, my attraction to her was tainted by doubt and disapproval. I was dismayed by her hair, the outdated Charlie’s Angels thing she was still doing with the curling iron and blow-dryer. She was big on pastels and had a weakness for matching culottes and blouses, an ensemble my mother referred to as a “short set.” She chewed Juicyfruit, painted her nails, and didn’t skimp on the eye shadow. The girls I liked in college favored baggy sweaters and objected to makeup on political grounds. On special occasions they wore thrift-store dresses and cowboy boots. They didn’t devote a lot of time to their nails, and a surprising number of them had mixed feelings about shaving their legs. I had the feeling they wouldn’t have approved of Cindy.
As the weeks went by, though, my reservations began to crumble. Who was I to be a snob about hairstyles and nail polish? Maybe I went to Yale nine months of the year, but right now I was back
home in New Jersey, spending my days speeding from one godforsaken industrial park to another in a truck with a cockroach painted on the front doors, trading stale quips about Jodie Foster with guys who wore their names on their shirts, and cultivating an impressive tan on the lower two thirds of my left arm. What did I care what the girls I went to school with—girls I hardly knew, from places like Park Avenue and Scarsdale and Bethesda and Newton and Buck-head and Sausalito and Saratoga Springs and Basel frigging Switzerland—what did I care what they would think about someone like Cindy, whom they were never going to lay eyes on or have a conversation with anyway?
I was lonely that summer, and her face lit up every time she saw me. She complimented me on my new glasses, asked what I did to stay in such good shape, made frequent comments about what a jerk her ex-boyfriend had been and how she hadn’t had a date for the past eight months.
Sometimes she wore a tight denim dress that buttoned down the front, and she always smelled like she’d just stepped out of the shower. Even in that little candy-striped jumper I hated, you could see what a nice body she had, that she worked out but wasn’t a fanatic about it, not like some of the girls I knew at school, girls who ran so much their bodies were just bones and angles. Cindy smiled a lot and had a distracting habit of touching me ever-so-lightly on the wrist as she talked, maintaining the contact for just so long, but not a fraction of a second longer. I’d spent my entire high school career pining for girls like her. Two years of college had changed me in a thousand ways, but not so much that I didn’t get a little dizzy every time she uncapped her cherry Chapstick and ran it lovingly over her dry, puckered lips.
My mother had been telling me all year that my father needed a rest, but I hadn’t realized how badly he needed one until I’d spent a few weeks on the job. He looked like he’d aged ten years
in a matter of months. He had indigestion from too much coffee, hemorrhoids from driving all day, and the haunted, jittery look of a fugitive from justice. He talked to himself more or less incessantly, often in a hostile tone of voice: “You idiot!” he’d say, slapping himself in the head the way they did on those V-8 commercials, “you forgot to refill the cup holders!” A slow driver in our path could trigger a rage in him that was frightening to behold, a teeth-grinding, horn-pressing, dashboard-pounding fury that made me think he was just a couple of red lights away from a massive heart attack or a full-scale nervous breakdown.
It was painful to compare this frayed version of my father with the optimistic, rejuvenated man he’d been the summer before, the
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