Louise Read Free

lots of parties, themed, usually. Expected ones, like disco and white trash. The best was prom, where everyone wore their old dress or tux. Mine was light blue stiff taffeta with a full bubble skirt. I was the kind of girl other girls only pretended to like.
    I grew up in the Midwest, restless, thinking I was meant for something different. Something better. We all did.

CHAPTER FIVE
    C laude knows Louise from the student paper. They work together in a small stone building in the center of campus. After flirting with him for months, Louise finally invites him over for dinner. She’s sexy and bronze from a spring break trip to Jamaica, where she says she broke up with her boyfriend, an older guy named Davy, who has a band and no job. Claude likes Louise, but does not want to send a message that he will be an easy, obedient boyfriend like all the others. Louise knows guys love her, he can tell from watching her sail around the newsroom, looking back to see which guys she imagines are watching her hips. He’s heard things about her, that she dumps guys after two months and drinks whiskey out of a red plastic cup, and that all the professors in the journalism school think she’s a slacker who comes to class hung over with a giant bottle of water and writes “filler” stories with pretty art that land on the front page. Claude saw Louise with her last boyfriend, once, in the grocery store—she’d been talking on the phone while he trailed behind her, not objecting when she tossed a bunch of dried fruit and gluten-free cookies into the cart.
    â€œMaybe I’ll come,” Claude tells Louise. “Won’t know for sure until the last minute.”
    Louise shares a soggy bungalow with two friends, and when Claude walks in, half an hour late, it smells like incense and floor cleaner and her roommates are not there. Louise is making sushi, and the rolls are big and lumpy. Claude pacesthe kitchen, talking on his cell phone, and Louise continues to assemble the meal alone, slicing and arranging, probably waiting for him to help her or tell her how pretty she looks. She’s evidently used to guys who walk right up and cup her small face in their hands. Claude tries not to watch her. He tells himself, Don’t touch.
    During dinner she banters, scooting her chair so close, letting him look right down her white V-neck T-shirt to the little yellow bow on her bra, that he gives in and kisses her.
    Claude doesn’t call the next day. Or the next. After he graduates he’s moving to California and will meet tons of girls, models, probably. Because of his mother, Claude speaks French, which has helped him always have a girlfriend. In Santa Barbara he has a job waiting for him, writing for a local paper, and will soon be really doing something, not sitting around in this wheat-filled state with these farm kids.
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    All semester, Louise has been watching Claude. He tells funny stories that the staff pass all around the newsroom. “Did you hear Claude’s latest?” they ask, referring mostly to his ex-girlfriends, who are all beautiful, but troubled—one had shown up at his apartment in the middle of the night, crying and supposedly holding a pink teddy bear. The collars of Claude’s shirts are always popped up, his sleeves rolled, hands gesturing while he talks. He’s not the type to sulk in the kitchen at parties, hiding behind his hair while he nurses a bottle of Pabst the way Davy would. Davy’s neediness embarrassed Louise. Claude she’ll have to work for.
    â€¢
    Claude runs into Louise at a party and finds himself leaving with her. Soon they are together for whole weekends, in her bedroom, watching TV and leafing through magazines. He loves spending time with Louise, how she looks at him, how quick she is to laugh, but he can’t stand her friends, howthey order blue drinks at clubs and dance crudely, spilling on themselves, and is glad when he graduates.