Joe College: A Novel by Tom Perrotta Read Free Book Online Page B

would’ve told me,” she said.
    “Why?” I said, relishing the power that had come from surprising her. “What’s the difference?”
    “What’s the difference?” She seemed offended by the question.
    “Yeah. What would be different if you’d known?”
    Before she could answer, a hard ball of paper hit me in the forehead. I looked up and saw Matt standing at the edge of our table, holding open his winter coat to reveal a rectangle of pizza box cardboard taped to his shirt. The words “I’m Pathetic” were printed on it in bold capital letters. He smiled at Polly and held out his hand.
    “Hi,” he said. “I’m Pathetic. You must be George Eliot.”
    Polly smiled politely. “Excuse me?”
    Matt drew back, apparently perplexed. His head was bare, and I realized that the crumpled projectile now resting in my pizza plate was his dining-hall hat. He glanced at me, then back at Polly.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I talked to Danny earlier in the evening, and he told me he had a date with George Eliot. So I merely assumed—” He held up both hands as if in apology. “I hope I haven’t embarrassed anyone.”
    “Just yourself,” I assured him.
    “That’s okay,” he said, once again displaying his sign. “I have no shame.”
    “It’s a good thing, too,” Polly told him.
    “Touché,” said Matt. It was one of his highest compliments.
    “Good night,” I said. “See you Thursday.”
    Matt put both hands together as if in prayer and bowed to Polly—“Good night, Mr. Eliot”—and then to me—“Good night, Brutus.” Then he zipped up his coat and strode off without looking back. He didn’t even turn around when I beaned him with his hat from a distance of about ten feet.
    “Friend of yours?” asked Polly.
    “We work together in the dining hall.”
    “Isn’t his father some kind of big shot?”
    “Who, Matt?”
    “Yeah. That was what Ingrid told me.”
    “I don’t think so. His father’s a car salesman.”
    “Are you sure?” she asked. “I thought she said it was the guy who went around in the paper hat.”
    “Positive.” Matt had told me lots of hilarious stories about his hapless, overweight father, who was always moving from one dealership to another, never quite meeting his sales quotas. In the one I liked best, Matt had snuck into a lot his father had recently been fired from and soaped lots of crazy things on the windows of the used cars, phrases like Complete Piece of Shit, A Real Lemon, and They Tampered with My Odometer!
    “You must be confusing him with someone else.”
    “Whatever,” she said. “Doesn’t matter.”
     
     
    We drank a second pitcher, something we had never done before, and stayed until closing time. Polly talked about her family’s summer place in Vermont. She said there was a spring-fed pond there, and a pasture they rented out to a dairy farmer down the road. She said it was possible to really get to know the cows, not only to distinguish one from the other, but to get a pretty good sense of how they were feeling on any given day.
    “How do you do that?”
    “You talk to them. And lock at their faces. Cows have very expressive faces.”
    I knew her well enough at that point not to be surprised by this. The first few months we’d worked together, I’d found her distant and intimidating, not just because she was Professor Preston’s girlfriend, but also because she’d cultivated a very adult reserve that made her seem years older than the rest of us. She was all business at our editorial-board meetings, holding herself conspicuously aloof from the atmosphere of manic jocularity that dominated the proceedings. The more time we spent together, though, the more I’d come to realize that her reserve was rooted as much in shyness as in confidence, and that her quiet sophistication masked a powerful streak of girlish sincerity.
    “You should come visit me,” she said. “We could go for a midnight swim.”
    “Just you and me? Or are the cows