Listen: I told you I had once been a bad young man, a fool and coward. And I told you I’d changed, and I had. You were my change, and I thought about you days and nights, in accounting and business communication, and porch-drinking at the house with Keith and the boys. Just like a girl, I held my phone tight, and when it pulsed with you, it felt like a church thing.
I didn’t sleep with anyone else, all those three weeks.
And so, October fell to November and that Friday came, the one where I came to be sneaking from your bed at dawn in your XXL shirt, green as a glow stick, as play slime, as a jellyfish under a microscope.
Did I know that would be the day? No.
But I had a special stitch of worry over my brow anyway.
Checking my underwear between every class. I was only five days late, but I had not forgotten the latex clot found via my fingertip three weeks prior, and I could not wait any longer.
In our three weeks together, you always came to my room, so I decided that night to come to you. I wanted to see your room, and your tits so extrasoft the night before, I got crazy just thinking about them.
Dusk falling, I stepped through the Tara pillars and into Chi O.
Your door (spare, unfoiled) was open, but you weren’t there.
Sitting on your bed, I waited, smelling your powder-fresh smells and looking through your underwear drawers filled with such neon-colored beauty I felt sick from it. Honey and strawberry butter, the sheets smelled just like you.
You don’t remember me, the girl in the doorway said.
And I said, Sure I do. Because I did. From the party where I met you. And how that puke bib she wore and her weakness to drink had taken you away from me.
She said she had something to show me and outstretched her hand, palm up. At first I thought it was a blowpop stick, or a thermometer, its tip blue.
But it wasn’t either. It was scepter. A sword into the center of my heart. Because in its little window there was a +, like a tiny blue cross.
She said you had shown it to her, confided. I just thought you should know, the girl said. Being as you’re a good guy. Adding, She’s my sister, but she’s a sly kitty.
I saw you buy the kit, Briane said, standing outside the bathroom stall. I saw you today at the Walgreens.
Briane always had eyes on all sides of her bobbly head.
It’s okay, sis, she said. It’s okay.
I opened the door, my — your — neon shirt like a flag, a flare, staring her down.
That’s right, I said, it is okay. Because I’m not. Which was a lie, at least for now.
Maybe I should have taken the blue stick with me. Hidden it in the dumpster behind the kitchen, somewhere. You could never hide things in the house. The sisters were always watching. But I buried the stick under all the blister-foil laxative strips and seeping old tampons in the stall bin.
Briane couldn’t ever have found it. She wouldn’t have put her Jackson-girl fingers into that bin, mingling with all our girl blood and shame.
The Chi O girl wouldn’t stop talking to me, saying she wants her an Oxford boy or Jackson or Houston oil. Country club golf and fine china on the Grove, a house with white pillars. None of this had to do with me, my dad in a divorced-man’s condo in Atlanta for work, my mom the pharmacist at Kroger.
But the girl kept talking, and I had to leave, sickened suddenly by all the ugliness and the girls’s pink-papered doors and sweet vanilla smells that are meant to keep you there forever, to choke you.
The Grove was dark but neck high in girls, all with their mouths open, teeth glowing. Or so it seemed.
But I wished I hadn’t started drinking.
If only you’d texted me back right away. I said I needed to see you. Even if you were in some lab, or something.
But you didn’t text back, at least not right away, and soon I stopped looking at my phone like a girl, because I found Keith, staking the spot for tomorrow’s game, and we started drinking from that bottle of Aristocrat tucked under his arm like a baby doll.
We couldn’t put up the tent till nine so we were tossing those loose tentpoles like batons, like girls swinging batons. We were swinging them like baseball bats. The ping of the fiberglass on cement, on everything.
Everything was like a bright, spangled blur. My blood was pounding. Like I said, I wished I hadn’t started drinking right then.
At my desk, trying for concentration, I wasn’t thinking that much about the blue stick exactly, my palm touching once, twice, my stomach.
WHERE R U, your text said.
I texted you back, but you never replied.
This won’t happen, I said to myself, but I wasn’t even sure what it meant.
I knew I wouldn’t have that baby. But I wasn’t sure the way it would play out.
Until you came calling.
Prowling the campus, Keith loud in my ear beside me, I kept talking about you. About how I’d seen you in church and you were just like the country lass nursing the baby calf who was like my grandma and all good women everywhere, and now I’d defiled you and myself in the eyes of God and all that. Except hadn’t she said it was for the girl to save us boys? I couldn’t make all the pieces fit.
Keith would have none of it anyway, and never liked church talk. He shoved me hard and told me to stop being a pussy. Then he told me how he saw you sneak out of our room that very morning wearing my shirt like you owned me, or some such badge of domination.
My shirt, I said, because I hadn’t realized.
And that’s how I came to thinking I hadn’t defiled you, you had defiled yourself, your jeans off so fast our first date, and this dawn striding out of my room in my shirt, my own shirt.
And for that, you must be taught a lesson.
Well, that is how I thought.
I had it in my mind that I would retrieve you and we would walk once more in Bailey Woods, like we had that magic night three weeks before when you sealed your fate with me, girl.
But I had no other plan, on account of I could barely walk and had lost Keith some time ago, left him in the shadow of Vaught-Hem knocking out parking-lot lights with his tentpole.
That last pole he struck, it looked like something surged through him.
When he fell onto the cement, his knees knocked together, like a cartoon. On the ground, stuttering, he was a slug-struck bird.
So I pushed on. I couldn’t remember at first which house was yours, even though I’d been there mere hours before.
They all had white pillars, you see.
But I still had that tentpole, it felt like a saber.
Show me your blue stick, I’ll raise you a saber.
It was so late. I’d fallen asleep, my arm still stuck in my phys sci textbook.