Author’s note: This is to fall into the general storyline of First Semester between when the gang gets back from Concord and when they meet Annoying Girl and Annoying Guy. It was originally going to be an Ivy-narrated scene somewhere in the general vicinity of Chapters eight, nine and ten, but then I realized that there was just nowhere to put it and that Ivy really had no part in it. So HERE’S something interesting: I’m letting Georgia narrate.

Disclaimer: This story uses music by Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan’s song ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ can be found on his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. I don’t own it and chose it simply because it gives voice to Georgia’s feelings… and cause I love it… and fell in love with it the day I met the person who Georgia’s based on.

Oh, and as a kid, I LOVED Ka-Blam. Even though I don’t like Travis, I had to put Ka-Blam in somewhere in the Ithaca pantheon. I have no idea if you can find episodes online, but Travis is sort of a computer nerd as well as a punk, so maybe he could.

Ya Can’t Refuse

“Go to him now he calls ya, ya can’t refuse/When ya ain’t got nothing, ya got nothing to lose/You’re invisible now you’ve got no secrets to conceal/How does it feel?” –Bob Dylan

When I met Travis, I didn’t think he was anything special at first. He seemed like all of the other boys from Bangor who thought of themselves as rebels. Same baggy pants and death metal t-shirts. Same spiky hair that took longer to style than my hair ever had.

Somehow, though, he ended up being a little bit better than all of that. He decided I was someone worth worshipping, worth spending time around and getting to know. This was despite the fact that most people at that school thought I was a lesbian due to the way I dressed and the fact that I had dated girls before. In northern Maine, “bisexual” isn’t an oft-heard word. That’s what I was, though, and Travis realized that and asked me out during our senior year. I accepted him, of course. My last girlfriend Jaci had just dumped me for a college “woman” with better access to pot. Travis seemed nice enough.

And when he said he wanted to follow me to Ithaca for college, what could I say? It was his future, and he seemed to genuinely like the school as much as I did, so I couldn’t FORBID him from going when he was accepted. Besides, I thought it would be nice to have a ready-made relationship in college while everyone else was floundering around looking for someone to fall in love with, hook up with, or whatever.

And for the first year, that’s what it was like. I joined Prizm, the LGBT group, and met some interesting people, but no one interesting enough to cause me to lose what interest I had in Travis. He was my first heterosexual intercourse experience, after all. My parents liked him well enough, even if my mom did keep telling him he should experiment with colours other than black in his wardrobe. And I didn’t have to worry about ‘separation anxiety’ during vacations at all, like most of my new acquaintances did in their relationships, since we were both from Bangor.

The first day of my sophomore year, though, things changed. Over the summer I had been calling my friend Allison from Prizm more and more, and while I was attracted to her, she reminded me a bit too much of Jaci for me to consider her serious girlfriend material. Travis didn’t like it, though. So we had been fighting about it all summer.

And then, while trying to get the key for my dorm, I met Roger Lawrence.

While I said before that Travis was like every rebel in Bangor, Roger was like each one of them with special ingredient SEX added in. And I couldn’t even explain why. His hair was straight, not spiky, but it was shaved on the bottom with red hair growing out of the middle to cover it. He had the beginnings of a beard growing on his chin, bright blue eyes, and a wolfish smile. Maybe that’s why I like him: my love for wolves. No, that can’t explain it. He dressed in the same way Travis did—except sometimes he wore tight leather pants in place of the baggy cargos, giving me the nicest view of his ass. Those are what he was wearing the first time we met in the student center.

He was with another girl then—I found her attractive too, but according to Roger she was hopelessly straight and intended for his best friend Benjamin. But he invited me to meet him later on.

So I did. In my dorm, before my roommate showed up. We didn’t make love that day, but we did almost everything else. Roger was a master of massage and pressure-points. Apparently the only person who wasn’t susceptible to his touch was Benjamin. But I was susceptible.

But he and Travis met each other far too soon. I met Roger to lunch at Schmerkin’s, the best bagel place in Ithaca. He was with Benjamin and Ivy, the girl from before, who apparently lived in the same hall. That’ll be useful, I thought.

But I didn’t go alone. Travis heard about my plans and insisted on coming with me. Which led to a giant confrontation between him and Roger. And after an entire summer of arguing with him about Allison, I wasn’t going to give him any more say in the sort of friendships I made.

So he left, and I stayed. And I became part of Roger and Benjamin’s gang, and later their band. And all the while, Travis and I continued to have sex and he continued to complain about how often I hung out with Roger and Allison. Whereas Roger had no problem with my relationships with either Allison or Travis, although he did call Travis a dickhead, but only when I complained about him first.

It was during our first band practice when I started to see what my life was becoming. When Roger accused me of having no problems because I was already having sex with two different guys. When Benjamin and Ivy walked in and out of practice together without being a real couple. I looked at Roger and thought that he had truly influenced my life in the past few weeks—and that I didn’t want to give him up.

This was after he had been gone for a weekend in Concord without me. I had spent that weekend fighting with Travis, and then fighting with my roommate Margaret about Travis. She was sick of how he’d knock on the door and just expect her to leave so we could have sex. Roger didn’t do this, she explained. This was because he preferred the thrill of doing it in his Mazda Miata, but I didn’t explain this. Margaret didn’t like me much to begin with since she was a straight-arrow and I was basically a punk. We were both music majors, but she thought her classical piano-at-Carnegie Hall aspirations were more valid than mine because she played only Mozart and dressed like a librarian whereas I played keyboards for Nose Foreigner in my free time and dressed like Nancy Spungen.

That didn’t matter, though. What did matter was that time apart from Roger didn’t make me feel any closer to Travis, it only made me miss Roger more.

And after that first practice, the first thing I did was go to Travis’ dorm. His roommate, a pizza-faced nerd of Margaret’s caliber named Howie, was sitting in his bunk playing some game on his laptop while Travis lounged on the floor eating pizza and watching Ka-Blam. (Yes, Ka-Blam. He somehow found every episode Nickelodeon ever made during its short run online and transferred them onto DVD so he could enjoy Henry and June over and over again)

“Travis?” I asked him.

“Unnh?” he asked. “Sit down, it’s Prometheus and Bob.”

“No, really Travis, we have to talk.”

“Hmm?” he asked. He looked up, motioning to Howie sitting on his bed.

“Yeah, I don’t care,” I said. “I have to tell you something now, let’s go outside.”

“Georgia, it’s snowing.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Come on.”

“Fine,” he said, following me into the hall, down the stairs, and outside.

“So what is it?” he asked.

“This… can’t go on like this…” I said quietly into the night air, not looking up at him. He looked so different from Roger: dark hair and dark eyes, nothing I wanted to look at then.

“Huh,” he said. “You know, Georgia, it’s not like I didn’t know this was coming.”

This I hadn’t expected. I thought that no matter how much we fought, Travis still somehow had himself convinced that he was the only special one in my life. But maybe he wasn’t that stupid.

“It’s Roger, isn’t it?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Not Allison at all?”

“Roger’s letting me have a relationship with Allison,” I said softly.

“Oh, perfect,” he said, at once angry and sarcastic. “You finally found the perfect guy: one who’ll let you cheat and play both sides of the fence.”

“Travis!” I exclaimed.

He shook his head. “How long have you been wanting to do this?” he asked.

“I’ve been confused,” I said. “I didn’t know… what I wanted.”

He nodded. “And now you just know it’s not me, right? You’re still undecided between Roger and Allison, you’re just getting rid of the one of the three of us who you like the least. And that’s me, even though I’ve been with you for years now.”

“Not yet a year and a half, Travis—“

“Oh, shut up,” he said. “I gave you everything, Georgia Linderley. And now you’re leaving me for some Mazda-driving grad student.”

I nodded.

“Whatever,” he said, walking back into the building, walking out of my life. I didn’t want anger, I thought. I wanted to stay friends or something. It seemed so strange that after almost a year and a half together, he was now gone. But that was my choice, wasn’t it? I didn’t want him, he didn’t satisfy me the way Roger did, even the way Allison could, if in a different way.

So I walked over to Roger’s dorm, knocked on the door, and fell into his arms when he opened it.

“What’s up, bitch?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I broke up with Travis,” I said.

I could feel him nodding. “And?” he asked.

“And that’s it. I want to be with you.”

“Then come in,” he said, grabbing me and pulling me into his bed.