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

earlier than usual, once as early as five-thirty in the afternoon. This is probably not the best idea, but it’s only cough medicine, not real sleeping pills.
    Tonight it is strange to be part of the DJ’s universe, to be going out. She looks at her watch and thinks she might as well go downstairs. She pulls on her coat, feels in the pocket—ChapStick, gum, keys—and looks once more in the mirror before heading out the door.
    They are late, which she expects. She reads the campus newspaper, first today’s, then yesterday’s, then the classifieds from today’s. Other students cut through the entry hall of the dorm, several of them conspicuously drunk. One guy wears jeans so many sizes too large that six inches of his boxer shorts are visible in the back. “What’s up?” he says as he passes her. He is with another guy, who holds a bottle inside a paper bag. The other guy grins at her. Hannah says nothing. “Yo, that’s cool,” says the first guy.
    She is sitting on a bench, and every few minutes she walks to the window next to the front door and presses her face against the glass, peering into the blackness. She is looking out the window when the car pulls up; she doesn’t recognize it as the car she’s waiting for, but then Jenny waves from the passenger seat. Hannah steps away from the window, zipping her coat. There is a moment when she’s standing in front of the door, a massive door of dark wood, when they can’t see her and she thinks that she could crouch down and back up on all fours and sneak upstairs, that by the time one of them came inside to look for her, she’d have vanished.
    “Hey,” Jenny says when Hannah is outside. “I’m sorry we’re so late.”
    Climbing inside the car, Hannah is bombarded with music and cigarette smoke and the creamy, perfumed smell of girls who take better care of themselves than she does.
    Jenny turns around from the front seat. “This is Kim.” Jenny gestures to the driver, a tiny girl with short dark hair and diamond earrings whom Hannah has never seen before. “And this is Michelle, and you know Angie, right?” Angie is Jenny’s roommate, whom Hannah has met while studying with Jenny. In Jenny’s room, she has also met Michelle, though Michelle says, “Nice to meet you.”
    “It’s Michelle’s friend who goes to school at Tech,” Jenny says. “So what have you been up to—still recovering from the stats test? If I just pass, I swear I’ll celebrate.”
    Hannah and Jenny know each other from statistics class, though they met during the freshman orientation camping trip, when they slept in the same tent. Hannah remembers most of this trip dimly, a blur of other freshmen who seemed to be trying embarrassingly hard; she did not understand that this was the part when you had to try. Her one distinct memory is of awakening around three in the morning, with girls whose names she didn’t know in sleeping bags on either side of her, the air in the tent hot and unbreathable. She lay with her eyes open for a long time, then finally stood, hunching, stepping over arms and heads, whispering apologies when the other girls stirred, and pushed through the tent flap into the night. She could see the bathroom, a cement structure thirty yards away, on the other side of a dirt road. In bare feet, she walked toward it. On the women’s side of the structure, greenish light illuminated three stalls whose doors were scratched with initials and swear words. When she looked at her face in the mirror above the sink, Hannah felt a desperate wish for this moment to pass, this segment of time not to exist anymore. Her misery seemed tangible, a thing she could grasp or throw.
    The next morning they returned to campus, and Hannah didn’t talk to anyone she’d met on the orientation. She saw the people sometimes; at first it seemed that they were pretending not to recognize her, then, after a few weeks, it seemed that they were no longer pretending. But one day in January a