You get wind of a good sale at the Old Navy approximately 23 miles away.
You’ve had a bit of a rough week, trying to adjust to the college culture after a summer of lounging about the house, bookending your days feeding Mr. Spock the cat, and wearing your mother’s slippers to the grocery store; you feel you’ve earned the pair of jeans you’ll get free if you buy a pair on sale.
You spend at least 20 dollars at the gas station, filling up. You call this a practical expense even if you are driving farther than is practical to spend more money, impractically, and you ignore the light that has come on the dash, indicating you should get your oil changed because you keep driving to places like Chicago and Indianapolis and the Old Navy on a whim.
When alone in the car, you play music dangerously loudly and pretend that you have sold out Madison Square Garden and that you really did hit that high note in “Dream On.” For some reason, you’re still under the impression that the windows in your car are tinted a shade or seven darker than they really are, so you dance with wild abandon until someone slows down in the fast lane to see why you’re thrashing about.
You don’t remember which of the left turning lanes to get into once you’ve exited the highway.
So you put on a straight face and pretend that you’re changing lanes so often because you’re impatient—as if the other vehicles will be more forgiving of a pissy driver than a stupid one. You’ve settled on the left most left turning lane, and will have to make a U-turn eventually, because it is the wrong one.
Assuming it’s past four o’clock, and therefore legal to turn right on that last red light, you’ve only broken about three laws between the time you’ve U-turned and found the parking lot. You do the dance drivers in parking lots do, like aggressively competitive ballerinas, looking for a spot less than a mile from the store. You haven’t had an aggressive bone in your body since American Idol was canceled so you find a spot about a mile away from the store.
When you get inside, mothers criticizing their daughters for only picking out the shorts that are too short look up at you from the sale racks, sizing you up to tousle. Or, as you realize entirely too late, spotting a large buffalo sauce stain on the front of your shirt from that one time you stopped in the drive thru to get chicken nuggets with buffalo sauce on your way to the Old Navy.
You head towards the back corner of the store, where you’re sure you’ll find the most marked-down denim.
You don’t need to follow the signs to find the bargains—your spirit will lead you there. Suddenly in front of you is something you couldn’t have dreamed of finding: online returns. Where you thought there would be only denim is corduroy, linen, and tasteful fleece.
You hobble over to the dressing rooms holding your phone in your mouth because your hands are full of reasonably-priced pants. Trying on pants can be so discouraging, like when you can’t get them over your thighs, so you’re sure to have a plethora of pant options to avoid the lonely humiliation of trying too-small clothing in the Old Navy dressing room.
Five of the six pairs you try fit you just right, and you feel like a goddess among women, except that you are too poor and unhygienic to be anything more than a college student that’s just making it through. You decide to stick to the plan—pick two and walk away from the rest. And you say what the hell—why not pick the pair that’s the tightest; you’ve got somewhere to be tonight.
You make it to the register with one pair of jeans that hugs your lower body exceptionally closely, but still comfortably.
And also black corduroy pants that are only a few inches too long for your legs. You could just cry at the register because you’ve saved so much money, but you try not to, because you suspect the combination of heightened emotion and buffalo sauce on your shirt could give someone the wrong idea about you. Or the right one, which may be worse.
You drive home in much the same fashion you had driven to the Old Navy, and hold your purchases like flexible little trophies as you lock your car and walk towards the front door. Your housemates share in the excitement of your bargain finds, because you all have a lot in common. You decide to change into the jeans immediately, because it’ll take some time to get them zipped and buttoned and you’ll want to brush your hair through and pick a different shirt if you really are going out, after all.
You’ve just learned how to make a cosmopolitan with the help of the internet, so you drown some freshly squeezed lime juice in bottom shelf vodka and manage the rest with a makeshift, plastic cup shaker. You have a pretty hard time pouring things to begin with, but your plastic cup is not being cooperative and you end up with three fourths of a cosmopolitan in a wine glass and one fourth on your pants. You think that you might as well have kept that buffalo sauce stained shirt on, because it would have matched nicely.
The drinks you make tend to be stronger, because you need some extra encouragement to go to parties. You’re happy as a clam two sips in. Your roommates are ready to go, so you pour what’s left of your drink into a mason jar and shove it into your purse to have on the way. You’re going to walk, because you’ve just filled up the tank in the car and don’t want to waste it. And because one of your housemates has taken your keys from you.
It has just rained.
This winter has lapsed into something more like spring and the ground is warm and slippery. You walk across campus, leaning forward to trudge up the hills, bending your knees to scuttle down. You feel badly for all the walking Jesus had to do that one time in the desert. It must have been awful.
You’ve reached into your purse and grabbed a handful of damp fabric, on account of a leak in the lid of the mason jar. You suspect this is human error, and not the fault of the jar. You have decided to forgive yourself, and have forgotten that the ground is slightly lower than the curb while you try to cross the street.
Your feet have suddenly left the ground in a series of acrobatic slips and slides, and the seat of your pants is soaked through where you landed on the pavement. The corner of your back pocket catches on the cement and tears just slightly as you get back to your feet, hanging now like the dog-eared page of a book. You turn to your fashion-forward housemates with concern in your eye. Can you show your face in public looking like this? Aesthetic, they reassure you. Grunge aesthetic.
The fresh air has done nothing to sober you.
When the door closes behind you at the house party, you feel like you’ve leveled up. Except that you’re drunk and not a video game. Someone is shouting your name from somewhere behind a game of beer pong, and someone else is greeting you at the door, and you feel overwhelmed by the attention. You tell yourself to get a grip, be methodical, take things one at a time. So you say hello, and walk towards the pong table to find your other friend.
You and your housemates have dispersed like a drop of ink in water, which means you’ll have to work hard to remember that you’re walking home with them later. You’ve been coerced into a game, and fling a ping pong ball aimlessly, until someone tells you that you’ve done something right. You lose quickly, but there’s nothing to cure a broken heart like dancing—and lucky you, the music is in the next room.
There is a boy perched precariously on the arm of a couch in the corner of the room where everyone but the boy is dancing. You stop jumping up and down for a moment so that you can get a good look at his face and decide whether he’s got something important to say that no one’s listening to, or if someone should find him a trash can. Poor boy, you think. Can’t handle the punch.
You have all your belongings—purse, keys, shoes—and everything seems to be in place except that you’re clinging to a toilet bowl and your knees are wearing through your jeans and digging into the sticky floor, and you haven’t a clue how you’ve gotten here. Someone is holding your hair back and you turn your head to see and you find your housemates. Or maybe just one of them that looks like two when your head is turned like that.
You’re quite embarrassed until you see that he has his head held over the sink and his face is looking pensive, and you know for sure it’s not because he’s got something important to say that no one’s listening to. You’re feeling much better now, but you keep your head over the toilet a second longer for his sake.
Once he’s washed up the sink and you’ve unstuck yourself from the floor, you straighten each other’s shirts and agree to go home, not because you couldn’t stay if you wanted to, but because you’re feeling fine, just a little tired.
Walking home is easier.
You can’t feel the pain of walking up and down hills if you can’t feel your feet at all. You’re still feeling fine, just a little tired, but also like your stomach is hanging over your pants like an arm hangs out of an open car window. You unbutton, but you aren’t nimble and the button is loose, and then your pants are undone permanently.
You call out “safe” shuffling into the house.
You all turn the lights out.
You retreat to your rooms like weathered soldiers. You slough out of your pants like a snake out of old skin, peeling away the cosmo stains and ripped threads, and you melt into your bed and whisper to your pillow that you live with no regrets. Except that you wish you had worn the corduroys.
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