David Shapiro's Pick: "Strong characters, sharp observations and intriguing complexity bring this disjointed world to life."
That summer before grad school, I wrote personal statements for all my friends applying to medical school. I was happy to do it. At night, we'd party and drink pitchers of Miller Lite out of plastic cups, and in the morning, they'd email me their notes, their attempted paragraphs, ask me to "have a look" when I had a chance. I deleted every word they wrote. Instead, I started fresh, and I wrote them what admissions wanted.
Mainly, I just made up stories. I invented patients, volunteer experiences, and for them, I fictionalized the same epiphany and pretended it was unique. When these boys read their statements to their mothers, their mothers cried. They knew I had written them, knew their sons had done nothing, and still they cried, showered them with hugs, blubbered just how proud they were of their future doctors.
Then, night came once more, and we partied, and they wrapped sweaty arms around me and made promises of prescriptions. "Hey, as soon as I get licensed," they said, wielding beer bottles like joysticks, "anything you want, you just let me know. Percodan, morphine, it really doesn't matter." They made these offers like they were doing me favors, and while the majority of these friends of mine were old acquaintances, high school friends who I hadn't seen in years, I tried desperately to pretend that none of us had bothered to change in our absences. Though we had, and often, I found myself sitting at the corners of dimly lit tables, ordering one beer for their two, drifting away from the conversations while they remained enthralled. Their future plans were of racking in big money, of taking trips to Acapulco and Madrid, of marrying models and then divorcing them for younger models when their ripeness began to fade. "Women are like cars," Bill chuckled. "Just trade 'em in when they start to go bad."
When we partied, I always watched the way they moved, how they interacted with strangers in bathroom lines and outdoor patios. How they smoked cigarettes; who they asked to borrow lighters. I watched them grinding on dance floors with dumb girls we'd never have bothered with years prior, watched them piss in barroom flora, watched them over tip the pretty bartenders and leave nothing for the ugly. For weeks, they repeated the same conversation about banging girls they'd never even met, about the cars they would buy and the garages where they would park them. The two-car garage at the lake house, the three-car garage at the summer house, the private lot connected to the rental on the coast. They'd laugh, order more pitchers, then turn to me well past midnight, hazy-eyed, and say, "Listen, can you proofread my statement sometime when you have a chance?" I said yes when I should have said no.
*****
Once, I left early. It was June — the most reckless days before the heat — and that night, Garret slept with the girl who was engaged to some guy we didn't know. I didn't hear about it until the following morning, when we all clumped around a white table-clothed table in somebody's backyard. It was a graduation party for a little brother, and our entire table held our heads up heroically, despite the hangovers.
"Yeah, last I saw of him, we dropped him off at some apartment," Bill shrugged, then took a fork, dug around the fresh fruit piled on his plate. There were about eight of us there, drinking orange juice and trying to train our taste buds to capers and salmon. "Must have been around 3:00 a.m. when we dropped him off."
"What's her name?" I asked, but Bill didn't know.
"Is she engaged?" I asked, having heard the rumor, but again, Bill couldn't be sure.
When Garrett arrived, he sat down at the table, shirt crumpled, and looked us over, before saying: "We all need to shotgun a beer. I'm not feeling so hot." Everyone asked him about his night, what had happened, but all he revealed was that it was "phenomenal," and that he didn't want to talk about it further.
"That was one tight skirt she was wearing," noted Drew, grin escaping. "She was pretty much asking for it."
"Is she engaged?" I asked, and Garret said she was, then took a swig. This news brought rolled eyes, high fives, chuckling. It encouraged most of us to go back up to the buffet and grab another bagel or two before the caterers began taking it away from us.
I didn't ask him about the apartment, if there were pictures of her fiancé littered around, if the sheets looked clean. I didn't double-check that he'd used a condom, and I didn't ask if he felt bad or guilty. I just asked how it was and he said, "It was just phenomenal, but that's all, really."
*****
A week later, I'd write his personal statement for him, and I'd say, "Science offers a kind of unity for mankind." I wasn't sure what that unity was, or how it got there. But it sounded good, so I wrote it. Then, I discussed how "biology is a common language which allows everyone to understand one another." Garrett said it looked phenomenal, and he thanked me. "Where do you come up with this shit?" he asked, and I shrugged, said I just happened to know a little about biology.
"Like what?" he tested.
"Like.mitosis," I shrugged. "Like how the cells split up and stuff." He nodded.
"You do know a lot about biology."
"I even know more than that," I bragged. "Lots more." But I didn't tell him what else I knew, what he himself had taught me: that sometimes, biology just makes everyone feel a little worse. A natural reaction, perhaps, or a common side effect: some kind of unity of which I was not a part.
B.J. Hollars, a recent graduate of Knox College, is currently pursuing
his MFA in writing at the University of Alabama where he is on staff for
Black Warrior Review.
He was awarded first prize in Backwards City Review's 2007 Fiction Prize
and was named a finalist in Mid-American Review's 2006 Sherwood Anderson
Fiction Prize. He's been published (or has work forthcoming) in Quick
Fiction, Backwards City Review, The Summerset Review, The Evansville
Review, Ballyhoo, among others.