The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld Read Free Book Online

time they were driving to western Massachusetts. And Hannah will have spent another night doing nothing, sleeping. She’ll wake at six A.M. , the campus dark and silent, the dining hall not open for five whole hours because it’s the weekend. She’ll shower, eat dry cereal from the box on her windowsill, start her homework. After a while, when she has finished Marxist Theory and gone on to Evolutionary Biology, she’ll look at the clock and it will be seven forty-five—only seven forty-five!—and still no one else will be awake, not even close to awake. She will be sitting there with her hair combed out straight and wet, squeaky clean, with page after page of her textbooks highlighted, and she will feel not industrious, not diligent, but panicked. The morning will be a rush of gray air she must fill alone. Who cares if her hair is clean or she’s read about pathogen population structure? Who is her hair clean for, who does she have to talk to about pathogen population structure?
    Go,
Hannah thinks to herself
. You should go.
    “I’ll wait by the main entrance,” she says to Jenny.
    When she hangs up the phone, she is, as she was before Jenny called, unsure what to do. She shouldn’t do homework—either she won’t be able to concentrate or she’ll become so absorbed that she’ll entirely lose the mood she’s losing now anyway, the mood that ascended as she stood under the hot water in the shower, raising her left leg and running the razor up her calf, then putting down her left leg and raising her right. Back in her room, she turned the radio way up and stood in front of the closet inspecting her clothes. She pulled out two black shirts, trying on one and then the other. She imagined which her cousin Fig would recommend (Hannah is a freshman at Tufts, and Fig is a freshman at Boston University). Fig would say to wear the tight one.
    She wishes she owned nail polish so she could paint her nails right now, or that she wore makeup and could stand before the mirror with her lips puckered, smearing them some oily, sparkly shade of pink. At the very least, she wishes she had a women’s magazine so she could read about other people doing these things. She does have a fingernail clipper—that’s not festive, but it’s something. She returns to her desk chair, pulls the trash can in front of her, and sticks the tip of a nail into the jaw of the clipper.
    This doesn’t take long. When she’s finished, she stands and looks at herself sideways in the full-length mirror on the back of the door to her room. The shirt she chose isn’t that flattering. It’s tight in the arms but loose across the boobs—tight in the wrong way, and actually, it’s not even that tight, not compared to what the other girls will probably be wearing. She changes into the second one.
    The song on the radio ends, and the DJ says, “Who’s psyched that it’s Friday night? We’ve got more of today’s greatest dance hits coming up after this, so stay tuned.” An advertisement for a car dealership comes on, and Hannah turns the radio down. She listens to the radio a lot, including when she’s studying, but she rarely listens to it on Friday or Saturday nights for this very reason: the DJs’ delighted tone of anticipation. Every Friday afternoon at five, the station plays a song with the lyrics “I don’t want to work / I just want to bang on the drum all day,” and that’s when Hannah switches off the radio. She imagines the working men and women of Boston leaving their offices, pulling out of parking garages or hopping on the T. The people in their twenties call their friends and plan to meet at bars, and the families in the suburbs make spaghetti and rent movies (it is the families she’s more jealous of), and the weekend opens up to them, the relief of empty hours. They will sleep late, wash their cars, pay bills, whatever the things are that people do. Sometimes on Fridays Hannah takes cough medicine so she can fall asleep even