When she’d adjusted the stereo, Aspeth said, “Give me two secs. I was hoping my jeans would be dry, but I don’t think they are”-here, she gripped in several places a pair of jeans hanging over a desk chair-“so I have to wear my other ones.” She lifted a second pair of jeans from the top of a laundry basket, stepped into them, and pulled them up, buttoning them over her flat stomach. As she did, I felt my own insignificance-how I was someone in front of whom she could prance around in her underwear and yank on conspicuously dirty clothes, and how it wasn’t because we were close, it was because she didn’t care what I thought. Whereas I kept trying out in my mind things to say-Can you believe how cold it’s gotten?–before rejecting them as stilted or boring or the kind of thing a boy who had a crush on her would say while trying to make conversation.
I looked around. Though Aspeth and I had been in the same dorm the year before, I’d never entered her room. Aspeth’s roommate this year was a girl from Biloxi named Horton Kinnelly-Dede had longed to become Aspeth’s roommate for sophomore year and had even believed she would, but I don’t think anyone else had shared this belief-and on the two unmade beds were duvets with floral covers. (As always, the floral duvets made me think of Little Washington.) White Christmas lights, currently turned on, were taped high up along all the walls, and on the north wall they’d hung an enormous orange and green tapestry. Above one desk were lots of postcards and a map of Tibet, and above the other was a blue felt banner that said Ole Miss in white letters. On the third and fourth walls were several huge black-and-white posters-one of John Coltrane, another of a thin, shirtless, staring Jim Morrison (most girls had posters of still lifes from the MFA in Boston)-as well as the photo collages that were a staple of all Ault girls’ rooms: pictures of you and your friends in fleece hats, skiing, or in bathing suits, at the beach; of you and your friends in formal dresses, before a dance; of you and your friends in Ault sports uniforms, your arms slung around one another’s necks after a winning game. There were computers on both desks, and two stereos, and on all the surfaces there were notebooks and textbooks and catalogs and a combination of cheap and expensive toiletries: a tall white plastic container of hand lotion, some talcum powder, several gold tubes of lipstick, mouthwash, a bottle of Chanel (I had never seen Chanel in real life), a carton of generic band-aids, and on the floor in front of the door there was a gray peacoat with satin lining, which Aspeth stepped on-stepped on, with her shoe-as we exited the room. Also, she left on the lights, Christmas and otherwise, as well as the music. Following her down the hall-before the haircut, we were picking up someone else, but either I hadn’t caught who it was or she hadn’t said-I felt overstimulated and vaguely irritated. The room I shared with Martha seemed so quiet and plain, our lives seemed so quiet and plain. Had Aspeth been born cool, I wondered, or had someone taught her, like an older sister or a cousin?
“So who are we meeting?” I asked. Aspeth was walking quickly, and I was a couple steps behind her.
She spoke, but I thought I must have heard her wrong, so I said, “Who?”
She turned. “What? You don’t like him or something?”
“No,” I said. “I just didn’t-did you say Cross? Like, Cross Sugarman?”
She smirked. “Like, the Cross Sugarman? The famous Cross Sugarman? Why, do you have a crush on him?”
“No,” I said, but I remembered that the more vehement I was, the more obvious it would be that I was lying. “I hardly know him,” I added.
“I told him I was getting my hair cut and he was like, ‘I’ve gotta see this.’ So I said we’d swing by his dorm and get him.”
In the last couple months, I had been in the common rooms of nearly all the boys’ dorms. Most of them smelled weird and were littered with pizza boxes, and the more guys present, the more unwelcoming they were, slouching with their hands in their pants, talking and laughing about a topic that was probably but not definitely sex, glancing at me in the hopes that I either had or hadn’t understood their coded remarks and had or hadn’t been offended. Or else they’d be playing some game, throwing around a basketball so that it flew toward my head and I had to stumble away, mid-clip, from the person whose hair I was cutting, or maybe the game was even more made-up, maybe they were kicking a pizza box and trying not to let it touch the ground as it became increasingly punctured. The TV was always turned on and set to something jarringly loud or really boring or, as in the case of the Sunday when I’d cut Martin Weiher’s hair while he watched a monster truck show, both. Always before showing up at a boys’ dorm, I’d have made sure I looked nice, maybe borrowed Martha’s perfume, but once there, I’d feel utterly irrelevant, or even worse, like an intruder. Girls always liked when boys were around, but it often seemed to me that boys preferred to be by themselves, talking about girls in the hungry way that, I suspected, they found more gratifying than the presence of an actual girl. Yet strangely, in the loud sour inhospitable lairs of my male classmates, as out of place as I felt, I never really wanted to leave; sometimes I’d prolong a haircut by cutting individual strands, pretending to even things up. (Once I finished a haircut, it was unthinkable that I’d stay, that I’d just hang out. This might have been fine for other girls, but I needed a reason.) I wanted to stay, I think, because the way these boys were, their bluntness, their pleasure in physical acts like wrestling and burping, the way everything was too noisy and disorderly to ever feel awkward-this all seemed perhaps preferable to, truer and more lively than, the way that girls were. At least it seemed preferable to the way I was, trying to look pretty, trying to seem smart, when wasn’t I just as full of disgusting urges as any boy?
Inside the common room of Cross’s dorm, a bunch of guys were sitting on the couches, eating hamburgers and french fries and drinking out of huge wax cups-someone must have persuaded a teacher to drive him to McDonald’s and put in an order for the whole dorm. Usually when I entered a boys’ common room, I stood in the doorway, waiting for someone to notice me and offer assistance. When I entered with Aspeth, Mike Duane, a senior and a big football player, immediately stood and walked toward us. “What’s the word?” he asked and pulled Aspeth toward him in a bear hug. I had never, literally never, been hugged by an Ault boy.
“Tell Sug to get his ass out here,” Aspeth said.
“I’ll find him,” said another guy and scrambled off down the hall.
“Man, Aspeth, why’re you always coming around looking for Sug?” Mike said. “Why don’t you look for me?”
Aspeth laughed. “Are you lonely?”
“I’m lonely for a hot girl is what I’m lonely for.” He still had his arm around Aspeth’s shoulder, and he began to rub her back. I would not have wanted Mike Duane to touch me like that. In his hulking strength and his red skin and heavy stubble, there was something potentially scary. “You should have been here-” Mike began, and then I heard Cross say, “Hey, Aspeth.” He nodded once at me. “Lee.” My heart was beating furiously.
“Let’s get this over with,” Aspeth said. “I’m starving.” So, in fact, was I-the smell of food filled the common room, and what I’d much rather have done than cut Aspeth’s hair was grab a pack of french fries, sprint away, and eat them somewhere by myself. Except that Cross had just appeared, and I’d rather have been in Cross’s presence than anything. “Lee, where should we go?” Aspeth asked.