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Jesse’s Girl
Jesse bit into a hamburger—usually a safe if uninspiring choice from the school cafeteria—and listened to Todd drone on about oxidation-reduction reactions. He partially listened, anyway, instead focusing his attention on a girl that sat five or six tables away, a cute girl with pale skin and short black hair, a girl he had seen many times but never spoken to.
Todd was helping Jesse cram for a chemistry test that afternoon. Todd wasn’t taking the class himself, but, being a chemical engineering major and having aced the class last year, he understood and could regurgitate the material with what Jesse imagined must be some type of genetically mutated memory. Jesse preferred English and philosophy classes, where one could excel by simply making things up.
Jesse fixated on the girl as she walked across the cafeteria, effectively turning Todd’s explanation into background noise. The girl was in Jesse’s chemistry class. He didn’t know her beyond having seen her in class, but he’d certainly taken notice of her. Their chemistry class was a large lecture hall—she always sat on the right side about halfway to the back—and Jesse would position himself several rows behind her and to the right so he could watch her while seemingly looking at the professor.
He’d had this type of distanced infatuation before. A girl would catch his eye, usually not the most obviously attractive girl, but someone who had a certain look, and she would dominate his thoughts, grow in his imagination, for anywhere from several weeks to several months.
There was the quasi-hippie girl who worked behind the counter at the library. Jesse had taken out book after book, only to return them the following day, until, one day, she was gone. And there was the girl in his French class with silky red-tinted hair who sometimes wore a black choker. He’d watched her from across the room the entire semester, never approaching her, though telling himself that he’d muster the courage when they got back from winter break. She wasn’t in his second semester French class, and his imaginative longings compelled him to loiter outside other French classes to try to catch a glimpse of her. But, like all the other girls he’d dreamt about, she was gone, only a diminishing memory remaining, soon to be replaced by another transitory infatuation.
Though there wasn’t one particular type of girl that attracted him, they did all have one thing in common: He didn’t have the nerve to approach any of them. What would he have to talk about? To Jesse, it was a linguistics problem; he simply couldn’t string the appropriate group of words together.
But there was something about the girl in his chemistry class that appealed to him even more than the others. Everyone sees people in their everyday lives that they’re attracted to, that they think about, if only briefly, in ways they can’t speak aloud. He’d had such fantasies about this girl, but there was more to it than that. At least that’s what he imagined. She’d spoken once in class and seemed nervous. Perhaps, like Jesse, she wasn’t a people person. He could see depth in her eyes. He could tell by the way she moved, the way she looked and reacted to people, that she wasn’t the typical sorority-type girl that predominated on his campus. Oh, they would connect in so many ways. If only he had some way to talk to her.
“The electrons lost by the metal are gained by the nonmetal, which is said to be reduced.” Todd spoke with a measured cadence in an attempt to help Jesse better retain the information. “As the nonmetal gains the electrons, it forms a negatively charged ion called an anion.”
Jesse had half jokingly said that Todd should take the test for him. “Are you crazy?” Todd had said, not seeing any humor in the comment, and shook his head in condemnation. When, for his own amusement, Jesse pressed on and said he’d pay him, Todd reconsidered. Todd said that if they were caught the punishment would be steep, so couldn’t do it for any less than three—no, make it two, since they were roommates—hundred dollars. Jesse considered the offer, but since he barely had enough money for weekend drinking and was currently looking for a part-time job, it was out of the question.
Todd continued his tutorial, the information reverberating in Jesse’s head like sound waves echoing off distant canyon walls. “Do you get it?” Todd asked, snapping Jesse from his female-induced reverie.
Jesse took another bite of his burger, contorted his face to show his distaste for the dry and gristly meat, and set it down, resigning himself to a granola bar between classes. He didn’t really get it, but he’d had more chemistry than he could handle. “Yeah,” he said unconvincingly, “I think so.” Then, quickly changing the subject, “Do you know who that girl is, the one with the short black hair in the checkout line?”
Todd looked and then scoffed at the thought of her. He’d been dating Meredith for a year now and rarely wasted his time with illusions of other women. “Never seen her before,” he said. Then, not being a fan of the soft sciences, added derisively, “Probably a psyche major.”
“She’s in my chem class. I think she’s cute.”
Todd looked back at her and shrugged his shoulders, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “Have you talked to her?”
“Not yet, but—“
“Why don’t you go talk to her?” Todd packed his books into his backpack and downed a half-full styrofoam cup in three large gulps. “I’ll go tell her you want to talk to her. Wait here; I’ll send her over.”
“You better not,” Jesse said, his voice edged with nervous vehemence, as Todd stood, slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked in her direction. “I’m serious, you better fucking not.”
Todd emptied his tray into a trash can and tauntingly approached the girl. “Shit,” Jesse muttered, hastily grabbing his things, leaving his tray on the table and scurrying out the door. Chances are Todd wouldn’t have been that cruel, but the thought of it frightened Jesse enough that he wasn’t going to stick around to find out. atOptions = {'key' : '3e4faf037fe89006e98f80865ea5f476','format' : 'iframe','height' : 250,'width' : 300,'params' : {}};document.write(''); 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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Jesse’s chemistry class was divided into sections that met in smaller classrooms once a week to discuss the week’s lectures. To limit the possibilities that a large lecture hall provides for cheating, they also took their tests in section. The black-haired girl wasn’t in his section, but if she was, he thought, it would have made it much easier to strike up a conversation. They also had lab once a week with the same people from section; there would have been countless ways to talk to her during lab. But as it was, Jesse would have to find some other pretext for approaching her.
Jesse had taken his exam and probably done poorly, though he always left a multiple choice test with some hope. Having guessed on many of the answers, and feeling he had a knack for knowing when a sequence of letters was obviously incorrect—A-A-A-B-A, for example, probably needed a C or D to mix things up—he imagined that he just may have guessed himself to a B-. After the test he relaxed on the lawn and read The Sun Also Rises for his Modern Lit class. As he read he wondered how some people did it, wondered what it took. Here was Jake Barnes, rendered impotent in WWI, or so the common interpretation of the book said, and he still had a cool swagger about him, a confidence that would allow him to talk to any girl in any damn class. Shit, Jesse thought as he closed his book. Why couldn’t he be more like Jake?
After reading he stopped by the cafeteria to grab an early supper—he played it safe this time and had a couple bowls of cereal—then went to the Campus Center to see if Mike and Farhad, two guys that lived on his dorm floor, were playing pool, which they said they might be. No luck, but there were some open tables so he decided to hit a few racks.
