Lovely Penguin

by marie gordon

There are these tiny moments when I seem to inherit, through some strange mental process, a blip of nostalgia. It can never be inherently serious nostalgia. Inevitably, these little mental clippings come from some imaginary storehouse of the lowest-common denominator of memories in my brain. Usually they stay locked up. They remain in their closet, or wherever it is they go, until an all too inconvenient moment for me. They are comedy and they are tragedy. My only source of sanity and insanity.
I have a short series of these anti-climactic stories. They are entirely unrelated.
Story 1- Carnegie Mellon
Senior year of high school. I received my acceptance letter from Duke in December. It is March now.
I sat behind Matt in calculus class watching him pull out his deck of cards from his backpack while sharing with me the list of schools who recently sent him rejection letters. At the time, I was praying for Matt on a regular basis, hopefully to fight the mechanical cruelty of the college selection process which had been crushing Matt’s hopes and dreams for the past two weeks of our lives.
Matt was a genius. Still is. I was always jealous of his innate ability to score above a 1500 on the SAT on his first try without studying rigorously. His piano skills far exceeded mine. His grades spoke for themselves, as did his numerous AP exam scores.
But somehow, someway, while I coveted my one-and-only acceptance letter from the one-and-only school I applied to, Matt’s list of rejection letters were piling up as was my heartfelt sympathy. Matt and I went way back. Middle school buds, the whole bit.
There I was playing war with Matt, feeling guilty for the acceptance letter which I kept tucked away in my backpack in case of any sudden travesties which might obliterate my self-esteem. Matt was down on his luck. It had gotten to the point where he required multiple daily hugs. As we reveled over Matt’s troubles, a sudden climate change must have occurred without our noticing. I looked around and realized the entire rest of the room was silent except for us.
We shoved the cards to the side of my desk and grabbed our notebooks. Playtime was over, apparently—or just taking a short hiatus. I grabbed my snack from my bookbag to entertain myself while listening to the lecture,
As I shoveled Captain Crunch into my mouth, Matt surreptitiously whispered something in my direction. What?? I asked. I couldn’t hear him at all when he whispered. As the words rolled out of Matt’s mouth, I felt a crunchberry lodging itself into my lung. “I got into Carnegie Mellon.” I wanted to scream. Carnegie Mellon Compsci is the best compsci school in the world. But I couldn’t. I had a fuckin crunchberry lodged in my lungs and I was doubled-over, hee-hawing like a donkey. Fuck. I gasped. And Matt hit my back with his fist. The crunchberry dislodged and I gasped for air before I screamed to everyone that Matt got into Carnegie Mellon Compsci. The class clapped, as is customary for the dorky and semi-mechanically-intellectual crowd in AP classes, to congratulate one-another on their accomplishments.
I tasted the crunchberry for the rest of the hour every time I breathed in deep. I still had crunchberry dust in my lungs. But that was ok. It reminded me of the moment when Matt found out he got off the dreaded waitlist and got in.
Matt is at Carnegie Mellon now and I am at Duke. Needless to stay, as always, neither of us have a life.

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