Jerry's Vegan Women. Ben Shaberman

league baseball, overnight camp, and afternoons at the community swimming pool in their immediate future.

      Jerry never said much to anyone about the impending move. He didn’t mention it to Gail until a few days before classes ended. It didn’t give either of them much time to think about it. Except for their ventures to Irv’s, they were just school buddies, so they hadn’t planned to see each other over the summer anyway. There was no dramatic goodbye. During their last conversation, Gail said that Arthur Treacher’s had closed, and given that Irv’s was nowhere near the junior high, she didn’t know where she’d go after school. Jerry realized that that information didn’t matter to him anymore. Wherever Gail decided to go, it wouldn’t be with him.

      Sarah

      The first time Jerry saw Sarah, he was futzing with his walkie talkie while standing under the window at the end of the fourth-floor hallway of the freshmen women’s dorm. Her room and Rosie’s were also at the end of the hall, directly across from each other. He had met Rosie just two weeks earlier at the freshmen orientation party, and she had oriented him well. He lost his virginity to her less than two hours after asking her to share a joint with him in back of the Student Union. As luck would have it, Rosie lived smack dab in the middle of his patrol area. The radio reception wasn’t good in her room, so while he was on duty, he had to hang out in the hall where the signal was strong.

      Being a student marshal was already the perfect part-time job for a freshman — all he had to do was wear a yellow vest and call in suspicious activity, mainly students who’d passed out from excessive drinking — but patrolling a women’s dorm, especially the one where his new girlfriend lived, made it sublime. In his dorm, he was known as Sergeant Sensimilla, because of the irony that he had a campus security job, but with a bushy head of hair and scraggily beard, looked like the consummate stoner. He also quickly gained notoriety on his hall for making a connection to a local pot dealer, a guy he’d met in a small jazz club a few blocks outside of the French Quarter.

      When Jerry saw Sarah, she had just come out of her room wearing nothing but a large white t-shirt that fell just above her knees. She was startled and embarrassed to see Jerry just standing there, so she hurried to the bathroom. About halfway down the hall, she turned and glanced back to see him mesmerized by her jiggling breasts and rear end. Sarah was petite, and not as generously proportioned as Rosie, but with no bra and panties on, it didn’t matter. There was plenty for Jerry to admire. She looked part Asian, perhaps half Chinese or Japanese, with long, dark brown hair, a small turned-up nose, and tiny feet.

      A few seconds after she disappeared into the bathroom, Rosie came out with partially burnt pizza bagels. “Sorry, I keep fucking these up,” she said. “I’m still figuring out the toaster oven.”

      “It’s cool,” he said. “I am so hungry. I kinda like’m crunchy anyway.” But he cringed as he bit into it, the hot cheese having singed the roof of his mouth.

      Before they finished the bagels, Sarah came out of the lavatory and scooted back to her room. Jerry tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help but catch another glimpse of the scantily clad girl. Rosie acknowledged Sarah with a quick smile. After she shut the door, Jerry asked in a low voice, “Who was that?”

      “Oh, that’s Sarah,” Rosie replied quietly, rolling her eyes, twirling her finger in a circular motion near her head in demonstration of the universal sign for “crazy.” “She brought two cats from home. Can you believe that? And in the freshmen handbook, she listed vegan as her hobby. Weird.”

      Jerry nodded as he ate the bagel. She might be wacky — though he wasn’t sure what a vegan was, some kind of witch? — but she looked quite delectable in nothing but a t-shirt.

      Jerry’s first two weeks at Tulane had been pure hedonism. Daily pot smoking. Daily sex. Daily deliveries of pizza and po boys to his room. And, he was getting paid to hang out in the residence of young women who were away from home for the first time and eager to sow their sexual oats.

      His only mistake was committing to Rosie so quickly. He should have played the field. Gone to more parties. Slept around. Experimented, whatever that might have entailed. The first case of AIDS in the U.S. would not be reported for another two years, so the risks of promiscuity were still manageable.

      But alas, Jerry was already operating like a married man, spending most of his nights with Rosie, a free spirit from old Jewish money in Connecticut. With far more sexual experience than most freshmen girls, she didn’t have the need to lose or prove anything. The fraternity party circuit didn’t interest her at all; she had Jerry and his reefer and that was basically all she needed.

      Though Rosie did find Sarah a bit strange at first, over time, they became friends, because they lived so close to each other, and Sarah didn’t socialize much with other girls on the hall. Being around the dorm so much, Jerry inevitably became part of their little clique.

      On the weekends, the three occasionally took the streetcar down to the French Quarter for some beignets and coffee at Café du Monde or uptown to the Camellia Grill for their famously humungous omelets. But usually, they hung at The Boot, a divey bar and grill just off campus. Rosie and Sarah would watch Jerry play pool. He often controlled the table for an hour or two, not only because he could shoot well, but also, unlike most of his competition, he wasn’t drunk.

      Sarah mystified Jerry and Rosie. She didn’t smoke. She didn’t drink. She didn’t eat meat. She ordered her Boot Burgers without the burger, but with extra tomato and pickles. She was often quiet in public, but sometimes got testy. One time when she was ordering, the bartender thought he misheard her. “You want a burger without the meat?” he asked in disbelief. “I don’t eat animals, asshole!” she yelled back. “Gotta problem with that?”

      Many men found Sarah attractive — she had an exotic, Protestant-Asian kind of look — but she always got irritated when they flirted with her. It only took a few minutes of conversation with them before she looked disdainful, as if she had eaten a rotten piece of fruit. Jerry and Rosie figured she was just prude.

      But she did need someone to confide in, and Rosie was her confidant of choice. A French-Spanish double major, Sarah studied hard and earned excellent grades, but didn’t take pressure well, which made Rosie’s friendship and support important to her. Rosie complimented Sarah frequently and effusively on her academic performance, though it never seemed to sink in. Rosie concluded that Sarah found comfort in her unhappiness. “I don’t think she knows any other way to be,” she told Jerry. “She needs to be complaining or depressed about something.”

      After a few months, Rosie and Jerry had developed their own problems; they barely eked out C averages for the first semester, and their grades went downhill from there. Like many of the freshmen who chose Tulane for its reputation as a party school, they lacked the discipline to do the necessary work to succeed. By March, they both knew that returning to Tulane next year was not in the cards, but their future was uncertain. Would they live together in Cleveland or Connecticut? They both wanted to resurrect their academic careers, but how could they afford to do so? There’d be no support from their parents after their miserable grades. Could they make it financially if they both worked and went to school? Maybe they should both go home to their families, work, save some money, and then reunite in another year. As much as they discussed the options, they had no clear path forward, and the uncertainty of their future put a strain on their relationship. And most significantly for Jerry, the novelty of having sex whenever he wanted was wearing off. He desired someone different — someone black, skinny, chubby, or whatever. He wanted variation. He wanted to explore. But having put on twenty pounds, he didn’t have the same confidence in himself he had when he first arrived on campus. And who would want to go out with a guy who was flunking out?

      ••••

      Early on Easter Sunday morning, Sarah came to Rosie’s room in tears. Francisco, one of her cats, was seriously ill. “He stopped eating and peeing last night,” Sarah said to Rosie while wiping her eyes. “Then he began howling this morning. I need to get him to an animal hospital quickly. This kind of thing is serious. I think his urethra is blocked.” Sarah was often in a crisis mode, especially when it came to school work, but never