And as for Martha-I never understood when I was at Ault why she liked me as much as I liked her. Even now, I’m still not sure. I couldn’t give back half of what she gave me, and that fact should have knocked off the balance between us, but it didn’t, and I don’t know why not. Later, after Ault, I reinvented myself-not overnight but little by little. Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self-deprecation, humor, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm. Also, Ault had been the toughest audience I’d ever encounter, to the extent that sometimes afterward, I found winning people over disappointingly easy. If Martha and I had met when we were, say, twenty-two, it wouldn’t have been hard for me to believe she’d like me. But she had liked me before I became likable; that was the confusing part.
In the first month of our senior year-we’d gotten the biggest and best room in Elwyn’s, with three windows facing the circle-Martha and I broke two full-length mirrors in the span of a week. There was a radiator beneath the windows, and we set the first mirror on top of it, between two windows, and a breeze came through the screens and knocked the mirror onto the floor. So we went into town, bought another mirror, put it in the same place, and managed to be surprised when that one also fell and shattered. Martha nailed the third mirror to the back of the door, and we left it there when we graduated from Ault.
But I remember the day the second mirror broke, how we’d run into each other in the gym after practice and walked back to the dorm together, and when we opened the door of our room, we saw it at the same time. “Shit,” I said, and Martha said, “How stupid are we?”
She lifted the mirror and propped it against, but not on top of, the radiator. It was cracked in dozens of places, and a few pieces had fallen out altogether and remained facedown on the rug, jagged shards shaped like Tennessee or North Carolina. I was standing behind Martha, and we were reflected over and over in the remaining pieces of glass; her eyes and nose and mouth were as familiar to me as my own.
“Fourteen years of bad luck,” I said, and it seemed an unfathomable stretch-not just in length, though it did seem long, but in terms of how much our lives would change during that time. In fourteen years, we would both be thirty-one. We’d have jobs, and we might be married or have children, we might live anywhere. We would be, by any definition, adult women.
Martha was the closest friend I’d ever had; I was, as always, preoccupied by the present moment (I was hoping to borrow her yellow wraparound skirt for formal dinner); and I was too young then to understand how simple facts of geography and time can separate people. These are reasons I shouldn’t have wondered what I wondered next, as I looked at our reflections in the splintered mirror-whether anything, even bad luck, would be enough to keep us bound to each other over all the years to come.
8. Kissing and Kissing
SENIOR YEAR
C ross Sugarman came back to me in the fifth week of our senior year. It was a Saturday, and Martha was staying with a cousin up at Dartmouth, trying to figure out if she wanted to apply there early. It was nearly three when the door to our room opened; I had gone to bed hours before. I think Cross must have just stood there for a minute, his eyes adjusting from the light of the hallway to the darkness of the room. This is when I woke up. Seeing a tall male figure in the threshold made my heart quicken-of course it did-but I knew by then that the weird things that happen at boarding school usually happen at night. Plus, since none of the dorm rooms had locks, I’d become accustomed to people barging in.
I must have stirred, because Cross said, “Hey.” He said it in that hoarse tone that’s half whisper and half real-voice, different from actual talking, less in volume than in meaning.
“Hey,” I said back. I still wasn’t sure of his identity.
He took a step forward and the door shut behind him. I sat up on the bottom bunk, trying to make out his face. “Can I lie down?” he said. “Just for a minute.”
That was when I realized who it was, but I remained disoriented from sleep. “Are you sick?” I asked.
He laughed. At the same time, he kicked off his shoes and eased into my bed, under the covers, and I found myself scooting toward the wall. There was a particular instant in our shifting when I could smell him-he smelled like beer and deodorant and sweat, which is to say that to me, he smelled great-and I thought, Oh my God, it’s really Cross. It seemed the unlikeliest possibility in the world.
The way we settled was that I was lying on my back, looking at the bottom of Martha’s mattress, and he was lying on his side, looking at me. The alcohol on his breath could have conjured up bus stations and old men with dirty clothes and bloodshot eyes, but because I was seventeen and a virgin and because I lived nine months a year on a campus of brick buildings and wooded hills and lovingly mown athletic fields, it conjured for me summer dances at country clubs, lives with wonderful secrets.
“I like your bed,” he said.
How had this happened? Why was he here? And what if I did something wrong and he left?
“Except,” he added, “it’s kind of hot. Hang on.” He pushed back the covers, raised his torso as if doing a sit-up, crossed his arms, lifted his sweater and T-shirt over his head, and tossed them away. “There. Much better.” When he lay back down and pulled up the covers again, relief washed over me-I’d been afraid he was leaving altogether, but now (his shirt was off!) it seemed he was settling in. “So,” he said, “this is what it’s like being Lee Fiora.”
Since our freshman year, we had scarcely spoken and I’d imagined a thousand conversations for us. And now I knew, I was finding out, that none of them had been right at all. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s probably not as exciting as being you.” Immediately, I wondered whether the comment had sounded flirtatious or insecure.
“Oh, I’m sure that being you is way more exciting.” (So: I had been flirting.) “All the time,” Cross continued, “I ask myself, why isn’t my life half as cool as that girl Lee’s?”
“A lot of people ask themselves that,” I said and when Cross laughed, it felt like the best thing that had ever happened. I was finding the situation strangely manageable, perhaps because of its strangeness: because we were alone together, because it was the middle of the night, because I had never predicted or tried to plan for it. Then he said, “Hey, Lee.”
“What?”
Perhaps four seconds had passed when I understood that I hadn’t been expected to say anything; I had been expected to turn my head, and if I had, he would have kissed me. The knowledge felt both impossible and definite; simultaneously, I was glad that I hadn’t turned and fearful that I had blown my only chance.