Twice already, the librarian had reprimanded us for laughing, and now we had our heads pressed close over the table as we whispered.
“I think I want to help them,” I said.
“Not this again.” She clicked the piercing in her tongue against her teeth, which was such an unsettling habit she had. “You can’t help anyone yet. You’re still a kid.”
“I can help them,” I said. I was a little surprised at the rush of defensiveness I felt. I softened my voice. “They need it.”
She lifted her eyebrow (also pierced) and her palms (lotus flower tattooed on the right hand). “Hey, you want to babysit for the bad seed? Go for it.”
A lash of anger heated the skin on my cheeks, but I quashed it. I’m good at that, hiding my feelings. I bury them deep and you wouldn’t want them to start clawing their way up through the dirt. People were so quick to judge, referencing their own prejudice to prove themselves right. That idea of the “bad seed” is something that pervades our culture like any other of the myriad acceptable bigotries. The idea that a person might be born bad, be a lost cause, better off dead-it was something that I railed against for all sorts of reasons.
“Don’t go quiet on me,” she said. She was peering at me over her book again, looking sheepish. “I’m just teasing you.”
I issued a little laugh. “I know,” I said. I wrinkled up my face to show her that I was in on the joke. But I couldn’t soften the prickle I had inside.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She fingered a little gold star that she wore around her neck. I’d given it to her before Christmas break. On the back there was a carved inscription in impossibly small print: Stars are like good friends. You can’t always see them, but you know they’re always there. “For real. I’m sure he’s great.”
I went back to my reading and so did she. We had these little dustups, Beck and I, always had since freshman year. There was an essential difference between us. She was very loudly and fearlessly herself. She held back nothing-not her political or religious views, not her laughter or her tears, not her sneezes or farts. She was a hurricane of emotions, ideas, brazen sexuality.
“So, how’s it going with Long Dong?” she asked. She shot me a mischievous grin, which I did not return. She was baiting me, wanted a reaction. She thought I had a crush, a serious soul-destroying case of lovesickness over Langdon. (See how clever she is? Langdon, Long Dong, get it?) She’d never accepted that the only personal element to my relationship with Langdon was friendship. Above all else, he was my mentor, my professor and adviser; that was all it was or ever will be.
“I heard he has a boyfriend in the city,” she said. “Goes to see him on the weekends.”
She had a pen in her mouth. She was alternately chewing it and clicking it with her tongue piercing. I wanted to knock it out of her glossy, pouty, cherry-red lips.
“That’s bullshit,” I said. Was it? I had no idea what Langdon did with his spare time. It wasn’t my business, and I really didn’t care.
“I don’t think so.” She licked her lips and I had to avert my eyes. “I’ve heard the rumor more than once.”
“Oh, well, that proves it.”
“Time to face it,” she said. “Your crush is a queer.”
Something hot and nasty pulsed inside me.
She’d kissed me once. We were both hammered, at a party in the common room at one of the three fraternity houses that sat on the edge of the school property. We were dancing on the makeshift dance floor framed by old, stained couches. The music was some kind of warped electronica. There were strobe lights and a disco ball twirled overhead, casting fragments of light. I was on the wrong side of the line, where being drunk is just about to not be fun anymore. I was watching her, the way her body turned lithe and graceful. And she saw me looking. We were drawn together, a line of energy between us taut and growing shorter, pulling us nearer and nearer. I was powerless to move away, which under other circumstances I surely would have done.
“Come here,” she whispered in my ear, boozy and sexy. Our bodies were touching, hand to hand, thigh to thigh. Then she put her fingers in my hair. “I want to show you something.”
She led me up the stairs, and the room around us wobbled and warped. The music was so loud, a throbbing presence pulsating through the thin walls. I could feel it in the floor beneath my feet. I was dizzy, the stairs tilting. (I would later be so ill that to this day I can’t even say the words Fuzzy Navel without feeling a rise of bile in my throat.)
“Where are we going?” I asked. But I didn’t even know if she heard me.
She didn’t say anything, just led me up the staircase to the darkened hall. The second level was for lovers-on the chaise, on the floor, on the bed in a room where the door stood open. It was a little quieter here, but my heart started thundering.
Virginity was just one of my secret shames. I’d never been touched in that way by another person. I’d never even been kissed. All around us couples were groping and thrusting in the dim smoky air, awakening a host of unpleasant, uncomfortable feelings in me. I started pulling her back toward the stairs.
“Beck,” I said, feeling the first wave of nausea hit. “I want to go. I have to go.”
But she kept tugging at me, until we were in a room by ourselves. She pushed me against a wall, and a framed picture tumbled from the cheap particleboard dresser beside us. She touched my hair, my face, moved in and sucked lightly on my earlobe. My whole body froze as I started to tremble with desire, terror, and shame.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay to feel good.”
And she did feel good. Her lips were hot and soft as she pressed her mouth to mine, tasting of whiskey and cigarettes. I stood rigid, unmoving, even as she put her hand inside my shirt. She ran her hand over my belly, and up to my chest. Here, she paused and looked at me, a deep, knowing, penetrating gaze. I almost reached for her, pulled her to me. I wanted to. I wanted her. Bad.
But then I was on my knees puking up more fluid than I knew my body could hold. And it never ended. We spent the next hour in the bathroom, where I heaved and heaved into the toilet, while she sat beside me, rubbing my back until we both passed out.
We woke up the next morning, her hanging over the rim of the tub, me with my face pressed against the cool tile floor. We opened our eyes at the same moment, and if we hadn’t been so poisoned by alcohol, so sick, so muddled by drink and fatigue and what had passed between us, we might have laughed. We were ridiculous. When I looked in the mirror, the right side of my face held the small, square impressions of the tile floor.
We stumbled home in the cold, milky-gray light of morning and slept for the rest of the day. We never, ever spoke of that night again. She’d gone on to suck and fuck girls and boys all over campus, while I remained as chaste as a nun. But there was an undeniable tension, a wondering, a building resentment. It was a current that had threaded its way through our friendship; it was part of who we were together.
After that night, there was suddenly constant fighting in my relationship with Beck. Spats could spring up over anything-maybe she took one of the million black button-down shirts I had. (That was my uniform-jeans, a button shirt, a pair of chunky shoes, some kind of black coat in winter.) Or she’d steal my class notes and then get mad at me if she didn’t do well on a quiz. She’d say my music was keeping her up. It could be anything that got us going at it. But it wasn’t any of those things.
“Why don’t you two just fuck and get it over with,” our other suite mate, Ainsley, complained the last time we argued over who had done the dishes last.