“My dad would like you, I think,” she says. “He’s got his quiet ways too. Loves to shoot. He says he’ll take you hunting when you meet him. He can’t believe you’ve never been.”
I don’t say anything. I feel her eyes on me. I feel her hand on my shoulder. She moves closer, puts her arm around my waist. Her breath is warm against my ear.
“I tell him you’re too gentle. Baby, I just know my family’s gonna love you,” she says.
“Sure.” I put my arm around her. I hear nothing but her breathing, my breathing.
Soon there are headlights cresting the hill far off, and I say, “Just a minute,” and pull away from Glen. I’m leaning over the rail again, looking out. The lights are growing, haloed. It’s a pickup truck, I think, going thirty-five, maybe forty.
“Baby, is something wrong?” she says.
I don’t say anything. I back off the rail. I’m stooping now, feeling around in the darkness. I hook my fingers through the holes in my cinder block, and I’m lifting it, pushing up with my legs.
“We’re going so soon?” she says.
“Something like that,” I say, and I wobble closer to the rail. I balance the cinder block along the edge. I’m reckoning time. The truck comes closer. I turn. “We better hurry up and get yours lifted. It won’t be much longer now.”
Glen is just looking at me.
“Let’s go,” I say. “You can push this one.”
“Quit playing around,” she says.
“Who’s playing?”
“Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“Something like that,” I say. I look back down the road. Glen is screaming now and reaching around me, trying to grab the cinder block. She gets a grip, but I pry her fingers loose and push the cinder block over the edge. I hear the screech of tires. I hear my cinder block crash and break against the pavement. I hear the crunch of gravel as the truck veers onto the shoulder.
Glen is staring at me, again not saying anything. I grin, and she backs away.
“What’s wrong, baby?” I say to her. “Don’t you understand?”
She says nothing.
“I bet you were right,” I say. “Your folks would love me. I’m so gentle. I’m so sweet.”
“Stop it,” she says, her voice just above a whisper.
“Let’s get married. Let’s have babies and drop them off this overpass.”
She’s crying. “Please, just stop.”
I’m laughing now. “You’ve gotta love the whole of the man,” I say. “Gotta love him all the way.”
Then I hear footsteps crunching through the high grass leading up to the overpass. I hear two men’s voices, angry voices. One of them pumps a shotgun, and they keep coming, creeping their way up the slope. I turn and run, from what exactly I’m not sure anymore, but I’m laughing harder all the time. The soles of my tennis shoes go slapping across the pavement, then I run deep into the woods, cutting down the old dirt road toward the fish camp. Glen is right behind me all the way. Running like hell.
Oxford Girl
by Megan Abbott
Oxford
Two a.m., you slid one of your Kappa Sig T-shirts over my head, fluorescent green XXL with a bleach stain on the right shoulder blade, soft and smelling like old sheets.
I feigned sleep, your big brother Keith snoring lustily across the room, and you, arms clutched about me until the sun started to squeak behind the Rebels pennant across the window. Watching the hump of your Adam’s apple, I tried to will you to wake up.
But I couldn’t wait forever, due for first shift at the Inn. Who else would stir those big tanks of grits for the game-weekend early arrivals, parents and grandparents, all manner of snowy-haired alumni in searing red swarming into the café for their continental-plus, six thirty sharp?
So I left you, your head sunk deep in your pillow, and ducked out still wearing your shirt. Wore it hustling across the Grove, my legs bare and goosy in last night’s party skirt, the zipper stuck.
I wore your shirt, frat boy, because it was stiff and warm and smelled like you, your bed, you.
I wore it all day Friday, to my midterm and to gen chem lab and to Walgreens and Holli’s Sweet Tooth to pick up the cookies for tomorrow’s tailgate.
That evening, head in my calc text, I fell asleep at my desk still wearing it, page crease on my cheek.
So of course I was still wearing it when you woke me up, coming on eleven o’clock, you drunk and heated up on something, everything.
You had a funny look in your eye I’d not seen before and I thought, Does he know? But you couldn’t have.
I’d only learned myself a few hours before, the Walgreens bag hidden in my trash.
The baby inside me was far smaller than a pinhead, the Internet told me.
Did you feel it, though, somehow — can boys? — when you hoisted me on the sinktop in the Kappa Sig bathroom the night before, your hands on my belly? Your fingers were five thumbs like hot dogs but you were strong, strong as my dad swinging a bat in our backyard in Batesville, saying, My girl, my girl, she’s going to the U, all. That’s my pride and joy. She aims proud and true.
Someone as strong as you couldn’t feel something as small as a pinhead, could you?
But is that why you did me, because of the baby you put inside me?
It wasn’t even a baby yet, except maybe to God.
Didn’t you know I would fix it. I had dreams too.
Bigger dreams than you, frat.
The first time I saw you was at church, and it was fate because I hadn’t been since Easter. Your face stuck out among all the others. It was like I knew you, girl.
It wasn’t until later I figured out where I’d seen you before: in the painting hanging on the wall of my grandmother’s house. A smudgy rendering of a petticoated country girl feeding a baby calf with a bottle. It was on her wall my whole life, right above the table with the phone you had to dial, and the girl was so beautiful, with light on her face.
You had that light on your face.
The next day, I saw you again. You were gliding up the library steps at seven a.m., just as I was slouching home. One of those mornings I’d been sneaking fast through some girl’s pink-foiled door — the entire door covered in wrapping paper, that’s a thing some girls do, the door also dripping with things, Mardi Gras beads, a message board with a frilly pen hanging from it. So many things, so that when you snuck out just as the sky was shaking night off you couldn’t help but wake that girl, the cinnamon blast of last night’s fireball from her open sleep-mouth.
Even after I escaped the sweet cream whip of a bed, wriggling free by sliding out from her arm hooked around my neck, wrist pinned to my thigh, that booby-trapped door still told on me. The clatter-click shimmy-slap of that gimcrack door, waking all the girls on the hall, their topknots sliding from sleeping heads.
These girls, they were all like candy, sweet ’n’ sour.
My mouth, my gut, coated with it. With them.
But you were different. I could tell.
Your heart, pure as a girl in a dream — that’s what I knew, just from looking at you. You in the faded pasteled picture in my grandma’s house, that baby calf near purring with delight, head nestled on your soft bosoms.
Your heart pure and your body barely touched, never said a curse and bet you ironed your bedsheets just like my grandma too. She told me that boys were meant to misbehave and it was for a good girl to save us boys, each and every one.
1
“The Oxford Girl” is an English ballad with multiple lyrical variations dating back at least to the 1820s and possibly as far as the seventeenth century. This version comes from the John Quincy Wolf Folklore Collection at Lyon College.