“Stay just one more night” Lucy, the Ivy-League girl I fell in love with that one night I was sitting on my Indian-print blanket asking strangers for money with my witty signs ‘need money for beer pot and hookers’, the girl I was tellin you about yesterday, would say to me every morning.
So I did.
I slept in her dorm-room one more night, night after night, and pretty soon I had gotten myself into a fairly bizarre relationship with a girl who knew nothing about me.
A girl who thought I was 18 years old, but I was sixteen. A girl who thought I was a gypsy, I wasn’t. I was on the run and couldn’t get caught. A girl who thought I was amazing, and maybe I was, but I was a liar. I was a heroin dealer. My best friend Flower, she was a hooker.
A week ago I had been squatting on blankets covered with dirty syringes, counterfeit money and ancient lit candles while writing acid-derived poetry about my fucked up situation.
But now I was hanging out with her ivy-league friends while listening to old jazz and classical music as Lucy studied for Postcolonial Literature. I felt like I was using her, and in retrospect I was. The feeling of me being in love with her had only lasted that one night when she had brought me home to her dorm room and asked me to have sex with her, but when I got so nervous that I couldn’t even get my dick hard I dodged the topic of sex for the next week cause I was so embarrassed.
She felt like it was her fault and even gave me her meal card to eat in the University cafeteria when she wasn’t around. I hadn’t eaten a real meal in months. Now I had a one-course meal almost every day.
I showered in the dorm, using her expensive bathing products, quite a change from showering myself in the local pizzeria. I did my laundry in her laundry room even though I only had one outfit. I went to frat parties uninvited and told everyone I was a junior studying economics.
I was full of shit.
But I had not slept on the street in almost a week and I didn’t wanna lose that. Winter was right around the corner and I had no idea where I would go when it was too cold to sleep outside. I needed her. And I had become accustomed to university normalcy. New scenery, new people, new music, it was all so unique.
Then one day she said
“Wanna come to class with me?” As she hopped out of bed in the morning.
Sure!
It sounded like fun. Listening to a professor lecture about history while I lounged in a seat with kids with high IQ’s was just what I needed.
Which class?
Christianity With Late Antiquity
What’s that even mean?
But without answering she just said
Great! We have to go, we’re ten minutes late.
Well, are you sure I can go to your class?
Of course! Calisse brings her boyfriend to class all the time! You’re totally fine.
That was the moment when I realized I had a girlfriend.
A girlfriend that thought I was eighteen and not dodging the police.
The academic building was only four blocks away from the Store 24 dumpster, where I had been living since August, before I met Lucy, but the campus looked as if I had entered a whole other world. One without crime, drugs, chaos, tattoos, pimps and grafitti. It was beautiful, grassy and calm.
I walked into class with her and
BOOM!
We were twenty minutes late. There were no seats. It was a small class, about twenty kids or so, and everyone was sitting in a circle. I had no idea what to do. Everyone stared at me for like… a minute. A minute of straight staring is pretty uncomfortable.
Plus, I’m pretty sure everyone recognized me as that hippie homeless kid that usually asked them for spare change… now I was in class with them?
What the fuck?
Yeah, So I had to sit on the floor with Lucy, next to the professor who paused in a weird typa pause, the typa pause one would expect a teacher to have when someone like me, some sixteen year-old homeless-looking hippie walked into his class.
But whatever… I did it.
And everything was going quasi great until my birthday arrived.
It was September 29th 2001, a couple weeks after 9/11 and I was turning seventeen but I would be celebrating my 19th birthday with Lucy and all my new Ivy League friends.