stay up late gazing at the stars. They loved astronomy, so I learned to appreciate it too, swept up by something I would never be exposed to at home.
The McDaniels’ house was open and breezy, in contrast to the literal and figurative darkness of my own. Mitch’s mother, Blanch, was a redheaded beauty who sometimes fried homemade potato chips for us to snack on after school.
One Friday night Hank took all the guys to the drive-in to see Night of the Living Dead. We were thirteen. The movie scared Scotty Levett so much, we couldn’t hear the chomping of human flesh over his screaming. Robert Dullis choked down a whole stick of bologna during the movie and promptly threw it up over the front seat after witnessing more acts of zombie cannibalism than his stomach could take. We left soon after. I still haven’t seen how the movie ends.
School fights, tree heights, dog bites. In sickness and in health, Mitchell and I grew up together. We played basketball through tenth grade, we dated girls together, we sang in the senior chorus, and we camped out at Indian Falls with the gang. But one day stands out above all others: the day Mitchell bought the classic 1976 navy blue Cutlass. It was his sixteenth birthday. There’s no feeling in the world that compares to riding in your best friend’s navy blue Cutlass through Overton, Iowa, on a Saturday night.
Through high school Mitchell was popular and good-looking, while I was neither. The closest I’d come to a high-school romance was a brief on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Maria Lambert. We’d dated through my junior year, and then she dumped me to go to the senior prom with James Whitford.
Mitchell, on the other hand, experienced at least one serious infatuation every year of high school. All of them ended in an emotional mess. Mitchell fell head over heels for a girl named Heather Howell at a football game our senior year. Her name always made me think “feathered owl,” and I never saw in her what Mitchell did. The two were combustible. They’d fight and make up, fight and make up, all of us riding the roller coaster along with them. It all came to a head in March. They’d had words yet again, only this time Heather threw something—a can of Coke, an ashtray, a brick—at Mitchell while he was sitting in the Cutlass. She nailed the backseat window. Hasta la vista, baby. That was the end of Heather. I reminded Mitchell of that story as often as I could.
Providence, Indiana, appeared before us as bright as the moon and fantastically different from the small planet we’d traveled from five hours earlier.
Up Brighton Avenue, through the Mercer Mall, we drove the east-side marketplace, where recent city expansion gave evidence that Providence was indeed a college town. There were rows of student housing—renovated Victorian houses painted purple or bright orange. There was the fraternity mansion district—giant homes with giant porches filled with twenty-one-year-olds holding giant plastic cups of beer. We passed the Holloway Ice Arena, where the Badgers play ice hockey, and Briggs Stadium, where seventy-five thousand football fans camp out every Saturday when the Badgers play at home.
“Directions, please.”
“We’re going to …”—I pulled a folded sheet of paper from my shirt pocket—“1740 Wilshire Avenue. We’re meeting a rental agent named Margaret Shiner at four o’clock.”
The Providence College housing policy normally required freshmen to live in on-campus dorm rooms their first two years. But because of overcrowding from a peak year in admissions and woefully behind-schedule dorm renovations, there was a historic shift in college housing policy: Freshmen were allowed to live off campus. Mitchell and I were happy to take advantage of this change.
We met Mrs. Shiner at her office after grabbing lunch at Taco Bell. She showed us two apartments within walking distance of West Campus, and we took a semi-furnished two-bedroom on the
The McDaniels’ house was open and breezy, in contrast to the literal and figurative darkness of my own. Mitch’s mother, Blanch, was a redheaded beauty who sometimes fried homemade potato chips for us to snack on after school.
One Friday night Hank took all the guys to the drive-in to see Night of the Living Dead. We were thirteen. The movie scared Scotty Levett so much, we couldn’t hear the chomping of human flesh over his screaming. Robert Dullis choked down a whole stick of bologna during the movie and promptly threw it up over the front seat after witnessing more acts of zombie cannibalism than his stomach could take. We left soon after. I still haven’t seen how the movie ends.
School fights, tree heights, dog bites. In sickness and in health, Mitchell and I grew up together. We played basketball through tenth grade, we dated girls together, we sang in the senior chorus, and we camped out at Indian Falls with the gang. But one day stands out above all others: the day Mitchell bought the classic 1976 navy blue Cutlass. It was his sixteenth birthday. There’s no feeling in the world that compares to riding in your best friend’s navy blue Cutlass through Overton, Iowa, on a Saturday night.
Through high school Mitchell was popular and good-looking, while I was neither. The closest I’d come to a high-school romance was a brief on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Maria Lambert. We’d dated through my junior year, and then she dumped me to go to the senior prom with James Whitford.
Mitchell, on the other hand, experienced at least one serious infatuation every year of high school. All of them ended in an emotional mess. Mitchell fell head over heels for a girl named Heather Howell at a football game our senior year. Her name always made me think “feathered owl,” and I never saw in her what Mitchell did. The two were combustible. They’d fight and make up, fight and make up, all of us riding the roller coaster along with them. It all came to a head in March. They’d had words yet again, only this time Heather threw something—a can of Coke, an ashtray, a brick—at Mitchell while he was sitting in the Cutlass. She nailed the backseat window. Hasta la vista, baby. That was the end of Heather. I reminded Mitchell of that story as often as I could.
Providence, Indiana, appeared before us as bright as the moon and fantastically different from the small planet we’d traveled from five hours earlier.
Up Brighton Avenue, through the Mercer Mall, we drove the east-side marketplace, where recent city expansion gave evidence that Providence was indeed a college town. There were rows of student housing—renovated Victorian houses painted purple or bright orange. There was the fraternity mansion district—giant homes with giant porches filled with twenty-one-year-olds holding giant plastic cups of beer. We passed the Holloway Ice Arena, where the Badgers play ice hockey, and Briggs Stadium, where seventy-five thousand football fans camp out every Saturday when the Badgers play at home.
“Directions, please.”
“We’re going to …”—I pulled a folded sheet of paper from my shirt pocket—“1740 Wilshire Avenue. We’re meeting a rental agent named Margaret Shiner at four o’clock.”
The Providence College housing policy normally required freshmen to live in on-campus dorm rooms their first two years. But because of overcrowding from a peak year in admissions and woefully behind-schedule dorm renovations, there was a historic shift in college housing policy: Freshmen were allowed to live off campus. Mitchell and I were happy to take advantage of this change.
We met Mrs. Shiner at her office after grabbing lunch at Taco Bell. She showed us two apartments within walking distance of West Campus, and we took a semi-furnished two-bedroom on the
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