~ by Angela Camack
“I draw them like heat-seeking missiles,” thought Hannah, sitting on the steps of the Alexander Library. “That’s the only logical explanation.” She was thinking about lonely people, Lonely people who seemed to think she could help them. Shy girls in the campus convenience store on Saturday nights, old people who tried to make eye contact in the supermarket as they complained to the cashier about the price of tuna, guys who forgot their copy cards at the library printer. Why did they think she had anything to give them? In the battle to stave off loneliness, she needed all her courage for herself.
It’s not easy, rebuilding yourself from the ground up, but Hannah didn’t have a choice. Eighteen years of being a lonely loser was long enough. Growing up as the too-tall, scrawny, gawky, wiry-haired daughter of alcoholic parents was no picnic; no, honestly it was horrible. High school was horrible. Coming home from high school was horrible. She bounced from one sad situation to another like a badly aimed pool ball, and she always bounced alone.
She had one asset that nobody could bully out of her, and that was a first-rate mind, and her mind was going to get her away. She made the honor roll each semester, edited the school paper, wrote for the school literary magazine and volunteered at the local hospital. What time was left was devoted to babysitting and fast-food restaurant jobs. As her bank account grew, so did her GPA; she got a full scholarship to Rutgers.
She also read self-help articles as closely as she read Jane Austen and honors physics books. She learned how to handle her height and to tame her mop of hair. By junior year she finally grew some curves. Recreation center ballet lessons gave her grace. By the time she entered college she was ready to start over. Loser-ship, she knew, could trail you like a hungry bloodhound; tentative friendships with new people could be tainted when cruel words were passed along. But she would be safe on the huge Rutgers campus. “Sui generis,” she thought. “Nobody knows me, my parents or what people think of me.”
It worked. It still wasn’t easy; she felt like she had to watch the people around her to learn how to pass for ‘normal.’ Sometimes the effort to pass herself off as just another college student was more painful than the loneliness she had felt at home. But her first year yielded a place on the Dean’s list, a social life, and a part-time job in the Art library. She didn’t mind working all summer dishing out ice cream and chocolate sauce at Dairy Queen if the work made it possible to go back to school and do it all again.
Then she met Kent, or rather, re-met Kent. If anyone could be more awkward and socially impossible than she had been, it was Kent. He was in two of her first-year English classes. He had the know-everything attitude, loud manner and grating self-centeredness that only the miserably insecure show.
He became the joke of every class discussion, interrupting other students and holding forth with opinions that had little connections with what the class was reading. A wave of sighs and suppressed laughter would develop as the class settled in until the conversation could be wrenched away from him.
He had no luck with communication before and after class. He had no sense of when to enter conversations with groups of students. His too-loud, forced attempts to start chatting fell flat, sucking the talk and laughter into a black hole. He sat on the edge as groups of students talked, or gave up and walked alone back to his dorm.
Sophomore year was the same; the interruptions, the clumsy attempts to start talking with others, the rambling opinions. Even the eager new adjunct instructor, who tried to jump-start class participation every session, would grow glassy-eyed as he talked. And he still sat on the edges of groups, and walked back to his dorm alone, pale, head down.
The only difference was that he remembered Hannah from last year and decided to make her his lifeline. He would sit beside her if he came to class after her. He tried to walk out with her unless she could think of a reason to break away. Other students noticed. “New boyfriend?” purred one of the other women in the class as they walked past.
She couldn’t afford him. She had worked too hard and too long to become a satellite, to become the class joke. Why should she feel guilty? She wasn’t responsible for him.
She walked back to her dorm one Thursday after class with a whanging headache, jettisoning plans to study in the library. “I shouldn’t let it get to me. It’s no big deal. I have a life now. I’ll survive a couple of uncomfortable classes.”
She flopped on her bed, face down, a pillow over her ears to block out the clatter of other students in the hall. Why did he pick her? What did people like Kent know about her that made them think she could help? Was she going to be a loser forever?
She drifted into sleep, then awoke as an idea formed, almost like a voice in her ear. No, she was not a loser, but her time as a lonely soul would be with her forever. Even if she made a thousand friends, a billion dollars, found universal fame and married the man of the world’s dreams, a splinter of the lonely person she had been would always be inside. To pull it out would be impossible. She could let it fester or she could use it as a measure of her reinvention. That’s what people like Kent sensed; someone who had had a rotten time and found possibilities anyhow.
Would it be so hard to respond to his need for a friend? She was ashamed to admit, after all her years as the outcast, that she felt a mean little glow of satisfaction at not being the joke this time. Would she be giving up her hard-won sense of belonging? What would she be getting in return?
Maybe in her plan to make herself over was enough room for a little charity, a little less self-centeredness. A line from St. Thomas pushed into her mind, a remnant from a time seeking refuge in faith. She went to church from time to time. For a while, faith had helped. The trouble didn’t go away, but faith cushioned you. It kept you away from the sharpness of what was hurting. Faith gave you the ammunition to keep fighting whatever battles you were in. Anyway, St. Thomas gave a definition of unselfish love: “the constant, effective desire to do good for another.” (It had been a long time since she thought about St. Thomas, or any saint. Faith could be so hard to keep sometimes.) If someone ever had an effective desire to do good for her, things might have been easier, she thought bitterly.
Her hand drifted to a small scar over her right eye, a souvenir of a night spent going over her report card at the end of junior year in high school: all A’s, A+ in history. “Big deal,” her father had snorted. “History is the easiest class in school.”
“That’s because there was so much less of it when you were in school,” she snapped before thinking.
When her head cleared, she was on the floor, bleeding. The edge of the counter had just missed her eye.
She shivered. No sense getting sucked back into the past. There was only the future, and she had to face it with who she was. She was Hannah, former loser, future functioning human being. Surely, she could gather her courage together one more time and risk seeking faith again. Part of that risk would be reaching out to someone who needed her.
The weekend passed, as weekends do: study, laundry, a movie with some people in her dorm, a football game with a guy from her Chemistry class. Tuesday found her back in class with Kent.
She stopped by his desk on the way out. “How is your paper going? Mine is giving me fits.”
“My, we’re chatty today.”
“I’m sorry, I just get preoccupied sometimes.”
“Yeah, well the whole world seems to get preoccupied.”
“I’m sorry. People suck sometimes.”
“How would you know?” he asked bitterly. “You’re pretty. You get along with people. You’ve probably never had to worry about getting along your whole life.”
For a second she thought he was laughing at her, but his face showed no laughter. Could he be serious? After a lifetime of looking in mirrors and seeing flaws, and looking in at herself and seeing only inadequacy, was her reinvention working?
“Look, Kent…,” she began. “Look, I do understand. Life’s not impossible. You just… have to watch how people behave. And not try so hard.”
“So, you can’t be an individual? You have to act like everyone else?”
“Sometimes that’s the choice. That sucks too. But you don’t need everyone else, just people – people who can be friends with you.” That sounded lame, even to herself.
“Well, I really don’t know what you’re saying, but do you want to get some coffee and talk about it?”
“Sure.”
His face relaxed – sort of. He wasn’t really trusting. But they walked out of the classroom into the bright October day.