Joe College: A Novel by Tom Perrotta

this closeness took a peculiar form. He was their only child, and if Mr. and Mrs. Friedlin weren’t traveling, they called him every evening, the conversations sometimes lasting for hours. They began cordially enough, with small talk about classes and current events, then grew increasingly testy, ending more often than not with Max slamming down the phone and barging out of the suite without stopping to grab a coat. He would return an hour or so later, calmer but still wired, grinding his teeth at the latest outrage:
his father was pressuring him to take Econ; his mother was trying to fix him up with a sophomore in Davenport, the niece of one of her tennis buddies. In recent weeks, both of them had encouraged him to stop thinking so much about Arthur Bremer and John Hinckley and get in touch with a therapist.
    “They don’t think I’m normal,” he reported one night, sounding somewhat offended by this verdict.
    “Do you?” I asked.
    “I reject the category,” he replied haughtily. “Especially when it’s invoked by people who had electric buttwarmers installed in their cars.”
    “Buttwarmers?”
    “The seats heat up,” he explained. “There’s some kind of coil hidden under the leather.”
    “Must feel pretty good on a cold day.”
    “Actually,” he said, “if you leave it on long enough, it feels like you shit in your pants.”
    The Friedlins were on their way to Paris for the month of April and had arranged their itinerary so they could stop in New Haven on Friday night and take our whole suite out to dinner at Robert Henry’s, the fanciest restaurant on Chapel Street. That afternoon, a few hours before they were due to arrive, Max poked his head into my room.
    “You busy?”
    “Just packing a little. I want to catch an early train tomorrow.”
    He took that as permission to step inside, though he didn’t go so far as to sit down in his usual spot at the foot of my unmade bed. Instead he hovered just inside the doorway, dressed, as he often was at that time of day, in baggy fatigue pants and his favorite too-small pajama top that had recently developed a plunging neckline after all but the two bottom-most buttons had popped off. He had a paper airplane in his hand and a grim expression on his face.
    “What’s up?” I asked, ramming more dirty clothes into my already tumescent duffel bag.
    “Not much. Boning up on Oswald.”
    “Guess you’ll have a lot of reading time in the next few weeks.”
    “I hope so. I’m usually pretty bad about getting work done during vacations.”
    Max was one of only a handful of students in Jonathan Edwards who had received permission to stay on campus for the duration of the two-week break. The others were foreign students marooned in New Haven for financial reasons; Max was just staying to be perverse. His parents would gladly have taken him to Paris if he’d wanted to join them, and they certainly would have paid for him to fly home to Colorado. I’d invited him to my house as well, but he’d declined after I’d explained that I’d be driving the lunch truck full-time while my father recuperated from his “procedure.” I couldn’t say I blamed him. The idea of him and my convalescent dad sharing a house for several days sounded like a scenario for a sitcom that was too weird even for Max.
    He closed one eye and launched his paper airplane, clearly aiming for my head. The aircraft performed a single loop-de-loop, then promptly crashed on the floor near my laundry basket, its flimsy nose crumpling like an accordion.
    “Did you call her?” he asked.
    The question caught me off guard. The only “her” on my mind at that point was Polly, and I understood from the careful neutrality in his voice that he wasn’t referring to her. In the split second it took me to get up to speed, I’d already spoken.
    “Call who?”
    His face changed, the spacy blankness giving way to a kind of amazement.
    “Wow,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re being such an