I told my mother I was dropping out six weeks before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and two weeks before Valentine’s Day.
It was a panicked, frantic phone call that I’d dialed with shaking hands — hoping, maybe, that she wouldn’t pick up and that I could put off the conversation for another sleepless night. She answered (I should have known) but barely registered surprise; I don’t remember much from that month but I’ll always remember her voice over the phone saying, “Oh, honey, I know.”
I resented it a bit. There’s something romantic about being a spontaneous college dropout but there’s nothing at all romantic about being a college dropout who everyone knew was doomed from the start.
But as with teeth-spinach and bad boyfriends, I found out too late that everyone knew the punchline but me. My mother would tell me later that she had realized I’d leave before I even started my first semester. For everyone else in my life, the hints sneaked up slowly.
“You know that back pain you get when you haven’t stood up in a couple days?” I said to a friend as we walked to dinner one night. I was wearing a neon green wig; I kept forgetting to wash my hair. “No,” she replied. I laughed nervously.
It was a kind of interaction I’d become intimately familiar with — you ask a question expecting laughs of mutual understanding, because its premise seems so commonplace, but the response actually reveals that you’ve been doing so badly that you’ve forgotten what normal is. “So, how many days do you guys go before changing your underwear?” “No one actually does those assignments, right?” Crickets, a sudden public vulnerability you didn’t sign up for, the smell of pity. I was always accidentally letting people get to know me.
The night before I dropped out of school, I stick-and-poked a Kurt Vonnegut quote onto my thigh with a sewing needle taped to a pencil. It was meant to say “SO IT GOES,” but it ended up more like “SO I GUES.” I became crushingly embarrassed of it almost immediately, but now I joke that the mark of agood bad tattoo is that it can serve as its own explanation.
Just a year before, I’d been the type of person who had a 10-year plan interspersed with bullet points that said “Nobel Prize (physics or peace)” and “‘Ellen’ show?” So it goes.
Now I was dropping out and moving across the country. My last day was Feb. 14, 2020. This also happened to be the day that the movie “Sonic the Hedgehog” premiered, which seemed like the funniest thing in the world.
While discussing it in the dining hall, my friends and I ranked the funniest things one could do on a Valentine’s Day: Go see the “Sonic” movie, ask to open up your relationship, buy a sex doll, go on “Wheel of Fortune.” The only thing funnier than seeing “Sonic,” we determined, would be to get engaged in a Red Robin.
This idea struck us as too good to leave unfulfilled, and a plan was hatched. This would be the send-off of a lifetime, the glorious finale to my five-month tenure in higher education: I would get fake-engaged in the fast-casual dining chain Red Robin on Valentine’s Day, and then go see the “Sonic”movie.
We put out a Craigslist ad asking for a covert film job — “VIDEOGRAPHER NEEDED FOR VALENTINE’S DAY EXTRAVAGANZA.” Responses were sparse and unhelpful at best (we received one long-winded email that called us “nitwits”), so we opted to have a friend take up the mantle instead.
My fake fiancé, Sam, wore a suit borrowed from a dorm-mate, a size too small. I planned to wear a wedding dress with a fur coat and sneakers, but I didn’t want to take an actual wedding dress from Value Village, so I bought a piece of floor-length white lingerie with a lacy neckline and side slits all the way up to my hips and called it a wedding dress instead. (The plan had an obvious logical flaw: Why would someone wear a wedding dress for a surprise marriage proposal? In retrospect, this was a critical oversight.)
After mediocre burgers, Sam took out a folded piece of paper and got down on one knee. He’d written the speech with our friends, and it ended up being phenomenally stupid, all dumb jokes and stifled snorts of laughter; it was perfect, and I fought back real tears when he presented me with a ring he’d found on the ground a couple of weeks before.
The entire restaurant actually stood up and applauded. A few kindly Red Robin patrons filmed it and came up to us afterward to pass on their footage — it was funny seeing ourselves through someone else’s phone camera. The floor that Sam knelt on was carpeted like an ’80s arcade. The waitress didn’t give us free dessert, in case you were wondering (let this be a lesson to you, if you were considering getting engaged in a Red Robin).
We got a text that an indie show had started up at our favorite DIY venue, so we ditched the “Sonic” idea and ran to the east side. By some precious miracle, all my friends were there. As I wove through the crowd, colliding with familiar faces and outstretched hands, it felt religious, almost — like I was suspended in a state of grace.
I spent the night making promises that I would be back, but I knew, somehow, that it wasn’t true. The 10-year plan was dead; all I could do was make the most of the wake. And so, in a way that was far more cosmic than purposeful, I packed the college experience I might have had into one strange, sweaty, euphoric night. I danced to Pixies songs and sobbed outside the venue for no reason, glitter running down my cheeks. I got engaged, sort of. I felt so lucky to be known.
My friends and I took the bus home, most of them drunk, some of them dragging sexual interlopers back to their grimy dorms. They flitted from front to back, filling the bus with the energy of beautiful people for whom the best and worst was yet to come. I tucked myself into a sticky corner seat and watched, switching on a smile when a phone camera was turned my way, resting my head on the shoulder of someone I no longer know, headphones in, aware, in a rare way, of the feeling of time passing through me. I was listening to “Fairytale of New York,” my favorite Christmas song.
Another precious friend (the only one of us with a car) drove me to the airport at 4 a.m., and I walked into the silent terminal with my passport clutched between my teeth — tugging all my worldly possessions behind me, glitter streaked across my face, lipstick smudged, dress plastered to my body from the rain.
Rayne Fisher-Quann is the writer of the Substack newsletter Internet Princess.
