Brad Newsome #3291

They totally ignored me.
Maybe that was why I thought they were cool.
They each had their own little black hoodies with some distinguishing characteristic splashed across the back with mall-kiosk airbrush pen. This made them official. They were the Exclusivists because they were exclusively friends, exclusively elite, excluding all others.
Others like me.
“Lets all drink PBR and eat pizza.”
“Okay!”
They did stuff like this in their dorm rooms.
There were three girls and three guys. The “leaders” of this secluded six were a couple that had been together since high school. They were philosophy majors and were unfortunately under the impression that they were better than anything that moved and or breathed. This also included myself.
“Brad, do you have any more cloves?”
Brad was Charlotte’s boyfriend. They were the supreme team that led the secluded six, the Exclusivists.
“I think we should run and get some before the pizza comes.”
Charlotte, Brad, Darren, Elizabeth, Maryanne, and Nigel all filed out of the room. I squeezed Nigel’s little finger and followed them down the stairs. After all, he was my boyfriend.
Nigel was tall, bronze skinned, and had a face with angular features. His eye lashes were dark and unusually long. This gave him a youthful, boyish look. He also sported a faux hawk. It might have been the only thing that gave him edge. He was pouty, self-centered, and only slightly spoiled. His parents had divorced money and married into more money. They showered him modestly by their standards, which was of course extravagantly by my standards.
I had managed to land my position as his girlfriend after a 3$ matinee led to a make out session in his car under the guise of a deep discussion on the merit and fallacies of the band Blink 182. The cd looped 3 times.
“Here, you want one?”
I didn’t smoke. The awesome six-some had just gotten back from the “Yellow Roof” which was their code word for the Discount Tobacco Outlet down the street run by an eccentric Jordanian man.
“They’re not real cigarettes. You don’t inhale them.”
Oh. I took one. Nigel handed me his lighter. He had to help me light it. I couldn’t get the thing going without fearing the fiery death of my fingers.
“Thanks.” I didn’t even cough. I thought of Michael, and our quiet and not-so-quiet rebellions at Lavery. He used to smoke, too. Breathing in the smoke, I could almost taste the memories flickering away inside my head. I was still fresh from Lavery in some ways. The incident there had only occurred seven months before.
“You’re welcome.” Nigel slung his arm around my shoulders and I nestled perfectly into his side like a mold. It made me forget about Lavery.
We were all sitting on the steps around the backside of Charlotte and Elizabeth’s dorm. Charlotte and Elizabeth were roommates. Charlotte, Brad’s girlfriend, made a big show of the fact that she weighed only 95 pounds, while Elizabeth quietly kept to herself the fact that she might have made two and a quarter Charlottes. I reminded myself that I had weighed 95 pounds in the fifth grade, and was considered a midget. I should not be concerned about the thirty-pound difference in Charlotte and myself. Elizabeth, in fact, could have reasonably taken offense. Yet Elizabeth always agreed with Charlotte, and was a nurturer by nature.
Maryanne, a radiantly pale redhead, had only joined their group this year, when she streaked across the quad in her bra and underwear as an homage to Edna Pontillier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. She was a year younger. Her face was soft and pretty, unlike Charlotte’s, whose pinched nose and plain features were constantly viewed at an angle. In a way, she was always looking down and straight ahead simultaneously.
“I think I was chunkier when I met Brad,” she looked up at him from her position on the stair below him. He had a leg on either side of her. She was leaning back on her stair, and he was sitting forward on his. It crossed my mind that they probably had sex daily.
“How did you meet Brad?” I looked up at Nigel when I said it. I didn’t want him to think I was butting in.
“Yes, tell us a story!” Maryanne chirped. She danced over next to Charlotte and sat down on the stair, laying her head in Charlotte’s lap like a little girl.
“Please, mommy!?” Even Elizabeth was squishing herself onto the stair with the two of them. I nuzzled myself deeper into the hollow under Nigel’s right arm.
“Well,” Charlotte started. She patted the top of Maryanne’s head. “It was junior year. We were both at the same party. It was a costume party, around Halloween time.”
“What were you dressed as?”
“I was a black cat.”
“She had little ears, whiskers, a tail, the whole bit.” Brad was getting sentimental, too.
“Brad and I kept looking at each other across the room.”
“What was Brad?”
“I went as a zombie,” Brad said.
“He had eyeliner on,” Charlotte grinned up at him.
“It was part of the costume!”
“Anyway, Brad and I kept looking at each other, and then suddenly I couldn’t see him in the room any more. So I told my friends I to go to the bathroom, and wandered into an empty room.”
“Guess who was there?” Brad interjected.
“You were there, and what did I say?”
“You said, ‘I hate to break it to you, but you’ve got bad luck now.’” Charlotte giggled as she remembered this and then leaned back into Brad, with Maryanne’s head still in her lap. Brad continued. “And I said, I think its good luck if the black cat that crosses you is as beautiful as you are.”
“Awwwwwwww!” Maryanne and Elizabeth cooed and sat up straight to stare at the happy couple. Next to me, Nigel choked back a laugh.
“And then we made out,” Charlotte finished before planting a kiss on Brad’s chin.
“Way to go, Brad.” Nigel cheered. He was clearly not a romantic.
“Dude, I honestly thought she could have been thirteen or something. I’d never met a sixteen year old that tiny looking.”
“Oh come on, I was chunky then!”
“Char, you know you weren’t. You never were.”
“And I’m still your little girl!”
“Yes, my little girl.”
Ew.
So I was thoroughly grossed out by the fact that Charlotte, at 95 pounds, with her blonde hair and her elitist attitude, while making out with Brad, really did look like a small child. And I briefly thought to myself that maybe a Napoleon complex was to blame for all her arrogance.
“Now, my friends, story time is over! Let us go upstairs and partake of wetness on this dry campus!” Charlotte hopped to her feet, and began hopping—marching?—
up the stairs.


One month later, Nigel broke up with me outside of the on-campus Subway. He told me that he was bored by me, and that his parents didn’t really like me.
“Why? I knew your mom was kind of stiff, but I’m shy around new people! Geez, forgive me for being shy!”
“She thought you were kind of rude, actually.” Deadpan. Way to break things to me gently, there, Nigel.
“Rude? I’m not rude.” I’m about to be rude, I thought.
“That day when you she came to the football game with us? She told you to have a nice night, and you said, ‘I will.’”
“…huh?”
“You didn’t say, ‘Thanks,’ or ‘You too.’ You just said, ‘I will.’ My mom thought that was really rude.”
“…I –
“And you just didn’t mesh well when you came for dinner that one night.”
Yeah. I’m not rich, stuck up, snobby, or drop-dead new-money gorgeous, and I’m sure as hell not an “Exclusivist”. Also, I hate green bean casserole.
“I thought your Dad liked me! You said he liked me!”
“Actually my Dad was the only one who said he didn’t care for you one way or the other.”
He left me on the bench outside while a long line of hungry students snaked their way through the sandwich line into the door in front of me. They were so obviously trying not to stare, and I had no idea why I was crying.

Everybody wants to belong somewhere. Everybody wants to fit.
It turned out Nigel had been seeing Maryanne behind my back for almost two weeks and everybody in the “group” knew.
Believe it or not, they had a pregnancy scare not two months after he broke up with me. They started coming up with baby names, and laughing about it like it was just great! But when the whole thing was over, Nigel split with Maryanne citing undue stress. I was told he could be seen sending up a few silent hallelujahs. He moved back into his mom’s house and told everyone he was going to art school. I think his “fit” was right under his mom’s metaphorical wing, bound and gagged with her apron strings.
Elizabeth tried to date Darren, Brad’s best friend, to no avail. Darren was very nice about it, but Charlotte intoned that it was probably because Elizabeth was too emotional, clingy, and last but not least, significantly overweight. Elizabeth caught up with me in the Student Center one day and tearfully recounted a “meeting” of the Exclusivists in which everyone tried to tell her that leaving the group would be for her own good. She said Darren had sat silently while they told her they could no longer be her friends.
I wondered if perhaps Darren had really liked Elizabeth after all, but that Charlotte’s influence had been so strong that her opinion in the matter was law. Because of this, I wondered how Charlotte had ever been able to allow “rude” little ole me into the inner workings of this “Exclusive” circle.
For some reason, she must have enjoyed my company.

“Hey, so we’re having a housewarming party. Charlotte and I moved to a new apartment. I don’t think I ever told you that. So we’re asking some people from the old crew to get together and hang out.”
“…really?”
I couldn’t believe Brad still had my phone number. And the “old crew??” How was that going to work?
“Nigel won’t be there. He’s not really our friend anymore.”
And I am? I thought.
“Come on! There’ll be jello shots!”
It had been close to two years since I’d been in a room with the whole exclusive crew. Out of curiosity, I had to say I’d be there.

“Nigel was a total jerk, dear. It only sucks that he kept you from us.”
Charlotte was in full matriarch mode. She stretched herself out over the sofa lounge she and Brad had no doubt bought at the Goodwill. It was a hideous orange color. Yet strangely, being a lounge, it suited Charlotte’s goddess-of-everything tendency.
“Do you know he’s trying to date my sister now?” Brad had just poured himself a new drink, and sat down next to Charlotte on the lounge.
“Your sister? Isn’t she, like, in high school?” I was sipping a mixed drink Charlotte had made me. I hoped it wasn’t poisoned.
“She was in high school,” Brad said, “She’ll be a freshman in college this year, though. And Nigel is begging me to let him go out with her.”
“Well how does she feel about it?”
“She thinks he’s really hot, of course. Just like you two did.” He gestured at Maryanne and myself. Maryanne was in a chair adjacent me. She was still gorgeous. “What a douche,” Brad finished.
I stood up.
“Well, anyone want to come smoke?” I pulled out a scrunched pack from my back pocket.
“Oh, we don’t smoke any more. We quit,” Charlotte informed me.
I looked at the four others in the room. Brad, Maryanne, and Darren were all looking at different spots on the floor. Chase, whom I had met only a few times, looked not at the floor but at me, as he had all night.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
“I will too.” Maryanne hopped up from her retro chair. “I’ve been drinking,” she said, as if this accounted for her lapse in smoking-related judgment.
We filed out the door and I didn’t look to see what sort of face Charlotte might be making.

“Brad and Charlotte are getting engaged.”
Maryanne, Chase, and I were all leaning up against the brick wall of the apartment building. It was much like the days we used to lean up against the brick wall of Charlotte’s dorm.
“They’ve been together forever, haven’t they?” Chase asked. He had known the couple because he had lived down the hall from Brad and Nigel in the boys dorm.
“Pretty much. But I think they’ll be engaged for a while. Charlotte’s not exactly the nesting type. You know, nurturing, motherly.”
“Right?” I laughed a little bit at the understatement, and Maryanne smirked at me.
“You know, Nigel was a real dumbass,” she blew out a puff of smoke, and looked at me again. “I’m not just saying that because he messed with my head, either. I’m saying that because I saw him mess with yours and somehow I thought I was different.”
Doesn’t that just mean you’re the dumbass? I thought
“Well, you know, I was outside you guys’ ‘circle’ or whatever. After a while I thought he probably would get on better with you.”
“Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s not really a circle. It never really was. It’s just Brad trying to reach out to as many people as he can in his love/hate relationship with Charlotte.”
“But… Brad’s not the reason it’s a circle. It’s a circle-- I mean-- It’s called the Exclusivists because Charlotte made it that way. Isn’t she the reason you guys don’t hang out with Elizabeth anymore?”
“Woah. Elizabeth was a mopey, depressed mess when she stopped hanging out with us. We wanted her to get over Darren, that’s all. And as far as Charlotte’s concerned, she’s got Brad in a headlock. He’ll never get too far from her. He gets us all together all the time so he doesn’t have to be the only one she tries to control. And the term Exclusivists was exclusively a Charlotte thing. We only thought it was cool for a little while.”
“So you know she’s controlling?”
“Well, yeah, but she’s a real softie. I mean Brad and her are sewn up. It kinda makes me feel sorry for them. And… I a little liberated and free for myself. Nigel was a douche, yeah, but at least I’m free.”
Oh.
Man, I felt bad for Brad.
“And anyway, I think we sort of share something because of the whole Nigel thing.”
This was the most I had ever talked to Maryanne. She’d never really spoken to me seriously about anything. I had always lumped her with Charlotte as another pawn or minion. But this made me see her differently.
Besides, boy hate can seriously bond girls together.
“Yeah,” I said. I smiled at her.
“Yeah. Nigel was an elitist scumbag!” Chase announced. We both looked at him. “…I always thought so.”
He turned and punched me lightly on one arm. Lets go inside.
Somehow I felt like he was talking only to me.
When he walked inside ahead of us, I saw that the black sweatshirt he was wearing was one of the old Exclusivist jackets they’d had made. In faded print, I could read the words Poet Laureate on the back of it.
Could it be possible that I’d actually want to spend time with some of these people?