She revealed to me that I helped her to remember the Colonel when he came to Jaipur. They were rookies together, she stated, both grant kids with, as she put it, “a common enthusiasm for alcohol and wickedness.” The expression liquor and wickedness left me stressing I’d discovered what my mom alluded to as “some unacceptable group.” Yet, for some unacceptable swarm, the two of them appeared to be dreadfully savvy. As she lit another cigarette off the butt of her past one, she revealed to me that the Colonel was savvy however hadn’t made a lot of living when he got to the Jaipur.
“I got rid of that problem quickly.” She smiled. “By November, I’d gotten him his first girlfriend, a perfectly nice
non-Weekday Warrior named Jenny. He dumped her after a month because she was too rich for his poverty-
soaked blood, but whatever. We pulled our first prank that year—we filled Classroom 4 with a thin layer of
marbles. We’ve progressed some since then, of course.” She laughed. So Chip became the Colonel—the military-
style planner of their pranks, and Rosy was ever Rosy, the larger-than-life creative force behind them.
“You’re smart like him,” she said. “Quieter, though. And cuter, but I didn’t even just say that, because I love my
boyfriend.”
“Yeah, you’re not bad either,” I said, overwhelmed by her compliment. “But I didn’t just say that, because I love
my girlfriend. Oh, wait. Right. I don’t have one.”
She laughed. “Yeah, don’t worry, Pudge. If there’s one thing I can get you, it’s a girlfriend. Let’s make a deal: You
figure out what the labyrinth is and how to get out of it, and I’ll get you laid.”
“Deal.” We shook on it.
Later, I walked toward the dorm circle beside Rosy. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had
at home in Kota. She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said, “When you’re walking
at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it’s silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?”
It seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger, but I told her, “Yeah, totally.”
For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered, “Run run run run run,” and took off,
pulling me behind her.
one hundred twenty-seven days before
early the next afternoon,I blinked sweat from my eyes as I taped a van Gogh poster to the back of the door. The
Colonel sat on the couch judging whether the poster was level and fielding my endless questions about Rosy.
What’s her story? “She’s from Udaipur. You could drive past it without noticing—and from what I
understand, you ought to. Her boyfriend’s scholarship. Plays bass in some band. Don’t know
much about her family.” So she really likes him? “I guess. She hasn’t cheated on him, which is a first.” And so on.
All morning, I’d been unable to care about anything else, not the van Gogh poster and not video games and not
even my class schedule, which the Eagle had brought by that morning. He introduced himself, too:
“Welcome to Arya college, Aaron. You’re given a large measure of freedom here. If you abuse it, you’ll regret
it. You seem like a nice young man. I’d hate to have to bid you farewell.”
And then he stared at me in a manner that was either serious or seriously malicious. “Rosy calls that the Look
of Doom,” the Colonel told me after the Eagle left. “The next time you see that, you’re busted.”
“Okay, Pudge,” the Colonel said as I stepped away from the poster. Not entirely level, but close enough. “Enough
with the Rosy already. By my count, there are ninety-two girls at this school, and every last one of them is less
crazy than Rosy, who, I might add, already has a boyfriend. I’m going to lunch. It’s bufriedo day.” He walked
out, leaving the door open. Feeling like an over infatuated idiot, I got up to close the door. The Colonel, already
halfway across the dorm circle, turned around. “Christ. Are you coming or what?”
You can say a lot of bad things about Jaipur, but you can’t say that Jaipur as a people are unduly afraid of
deep fryers. In that first week at the Arya, the cafeteria served fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, and fried okra,
which marked my first foray into the delicacy that is the fried vegetable. I half expected them to fry the iceberg
lettuce. But nothing matched the bufriedo, a dish created by Maureen, the amazingly (and understandably) obese
Arya collage cook. A deep-fried bean burrito, the bufriedo proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that frying
always improves a food. Sitting with the Colonel and five guys I didn’t know at a circular table in the cafeteria
that afternoon, I sank my teeth into the crunchy shell of my first buried and experienced a culinary orgasm. My
mom cooked okay, but I immediately wanted to bring Maureen home with me over Thanksgiving.