Joe College: A Novel by Tom Perrotta Page A

asshole about this.”
    “Gimme a break,” I said lamely.
    “Why don’t you give her a break? You had sex with the girl. The least you could do is return her phone calls.”
    His logic was airtight, but I felt betrayed anyway. The unwritten rule said you gave your roommates the benefit of the doubt. I’d certainly given it to him a few times.
    “You know what?” I told him. “It’s really none of your business.”
    “Yeah, right. She calls in tears every night, and I’m the one who has to comfort her, and it’s none of my business.”
    “You don’t have to comfort her, Max. All you have to do is take a message, okay?”
    He looked away, as if it were beneath him to contemplate my face at that moment. I took a deep breath and tried to strike a less defensive tone.
    “Look. It’s over between me and Cindy. Talking about it isn’t going to help. She’s just going to have to get used to it.”
    “I just don’t think she deserves this.”
    “Nobody deserves it,” I informed him. “But it happens anyway. I’ve been on the receiving end once or twice myself.”
    “So that makes it all right?”
    “It doesn’t make it anything. It’s just the way it goes.”
    He ran his hand partway through his tangled hair and left it there.
    “I guess I expected better of you.”
    “Then you overestimated me.”
    He shrugged and left the room, his hand still resting on top of his head. It wasn’t until he’d gone that I realized I’d been clutching a pair of dirty underwear throughout the entire conversation, the same dingy briefs I’d been wearing the night I almost slept with Polly. I shoved them into the duffel bag, then bent to retrieve Max’s wreck of a paper airplane from the floor.
    I was about to drop it into the official NFL wastebasket I’d brought from home as a souvenir of my misspent youth when I noticed the drawings. With a blue ballpoint pen, Max had inked four porthole windows on the fuselage. Each window contained a crude but easily recognizable caricature of one of our suitemates, Nancy not included. The plane was apparently headed for a crash, because Sang, Ted, and I all had looks of pure terror on our faces. Cartoon bubbles floating overhead detailed our reactions to the impending disaster.
    “Rats,” thought Ted. “Guess I’m not getting laid tonight.”
    “Darn,” reflected Sang. “Looks like I won’t make Phi Beta Kappa after all.”
    “Hmmm,” wondered Danny. “Maybe I should have called her back.”
    Only Max seemed unperturbed. He held one hand on top of his head, just as he had moments before, and gazed out the window with an expression of philosophical calm, maybe even the ghost of a smile.
    “Oh, well,” he considered. “At least I won’t have to suffer through this fucking dinner tonight.”
    I laughed in spite of myself, then wandered out to the common room to compliment him on the likenesses, already forgiving him for taking his anxieties about his parents out on me. He wasn’t around to receive my absolution, though. The common room was empty, and so were the other two bedrooms. I called his name a couple of times just to make sure, but I already knew he was gone. He’d slipped away so quietly, I hadn’t even heard him close the door.
     
     
    At six thirty that evening he still hadn’t returned. This was awkward, because Gail and Howard Friedlin had been sitting in our common room for close to an hour at that point, making small talk and trying not to appear too concerned while we humored them by making phone calls to anyone who might have an idea about their son’s whereabouts.
    “It’s just like Max,” his mother said, manufacturing a tense little smile. “Punctuality’s never been one of his strong points.”
    The Friedlins hadn’t visited for a long time—Parents’ Weekend that year had overlapped with their Australian walkabout—and I was still getting over the mild shock of seeing them in person again. Living as I did with Max’s demonized