The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories by Ben Monopoli Page B

a
fleece from one of the Tupperware crates under my bed. From his own bed, under
his quilt, Wesley looked at me putting it on.
    “I’m going to have to skip class today,” he said. “I didn’t
bring anything warm. I don’t do cold.”
    I laughed. “You do do cold. You lived on the Cape. I’ve seen pictures of
you in the snow—you were loving it. Coffee cups in snowbanks, remember?”
    “Yeah. I don’t know.” Blankets up to his chin, he stared at
the window while I loaded my books into my backpack. “After your classes,” he
said, “would you want to go to this thrift store in Northampton I heard of?
Harriet mentioned it.”
    “Sure, as long as I don’t have to buy anything.”
    “Why?”
    “I hate thrift stores. Used clothes give me the heebie
jeebies.”
    I left him lying in bed. After suffering through two classes
and stopping at the dining hall with Shelley for a grilled cheese, I met him
back at our room. He had the directions to the thrift store, a place called
Garment Alley, written out on a Post-It. He was sitting on his bed looking
through his photo album. It was clear he hadn’t gone to class.
    We walked across the Quad and waited for a Northampton bus
at the edge of campus. Picture him wearing a thin sweater, his hands stuffed
deep in the pockets of his jeans. Around us the trees were starting to turn.
Time was flying; I’d already been at UMass six weeks. I could barely remember
anything before it, and almost never tried.
    “I should’ve brought my car to school,” I mused. “I didn’t
expect to leave campus so much.”
    “Why didn’t you?”
    “Well, it’s kind of a shitbox. I hit a telephone pole junior
year and it was never the same after that. I think I’ll sell it next summer and
buy a bike.”
    “A motorcycle?”
    “Oh. No. A bicycle.”
    “On the Cape,” he said, “me and the guys shared this old
diesel Jetta. It was a shitbox too but I loved it. When we all moved out we
drew straws for the car.”
    “Who won?”
    “Not me.”
    “I want a Jeep someday, I think.” I stepped to the curb to
look for the bus.
    “Like MacGuyver?”
    “My friend Boyd had one. I liked it.”
    “Boyd, Boyd, Boyd.”
    “Boyd, Boyd, Boyd. Where are your friends now?”
    He looked off down the street. A bus was approaching but it
wasn’t bound for Northampton, and he shivered. “Jim is back in San Francisco,
Harley is in Montana, and Scoop is in Mexico City.”
    “Wow. How’d you end up here in Amherst?”
    He sighed. “My parents thought it would be good for me to
get back on track. They said one gap year is enough.”
    The bus to Northampton arrived. As we rode Wes was telling
me about Jack Kerouac and the Beats, people for whom writing and travel was
everything, was life itself. “Imagine being that passionate about anything?” he
said. I couldn’t.
    He stopped talking as the bus crossed the bridge over the
Connecticut River. I watched him look out at the water, that wide blue space
that cut Massachusetts in half and gave a border to New Hampshire and Vermont. “I
miss the ocean,” he said quietly, to himself. On the other side he started
talking about Kerouac again, as if the little interlude had never happened.

 
    Garment Alley was a big, attic-smelling warehouse with dim
lights and green floors. Wesley seemed to think it was heaven, but it skeeved
me out. I imagined everything as full of lice and stiff with pit-stains.
    Wesley chose a few Seventies-era t-shirts, flopping them
over his thin forearm. Then we browsed the coats.
    “This one’s very cool,” he said, pulling an olive Army
jacket off the rack. There were a few blue chevrons embroidered on one sleeve.
He checked to make sure all the green buttons were still there and then he held
it against himself. “Hold these?” He handed me his t-shirts and put the jacket
on.
    “A little baggy,” I said. We walked to a mirror so he could
see for himself.
    “Yeah,” he said, “in the shoulders. It might fit