He looked over, and so did the two sophomores. “What can I do for you?” Cross asked, and his voice was not entirely friendly.
“I have table wipes.” I gestured toward his piece of paper. “At least I think I do. I got a notice from Fletcher.”
Cross looked at the paper. “I didn’t realize you were a delinquent,” he said, and his tone was more relaxed. “You guys should get to work,” he said to the two boys. “And no sloppiness.” One of them made that jerking-off gesture as they walked away. “Hey!” Cross said. “A little respect there, Davis.” But he was laughing with them.
When they were gone, he said, “You wanted an excuse to talk to me?”
“No! I skipped chapel.”
“I was just kidding.” He glanced down at his watch. His hair was wet, too, and as we stood there, I had the bizarre notion that we’d just showered together. My face flushed. “Listen,” he said. “Dinner doesn’t start for forty minutes, and we already have plenty of people here. You can leave.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll check your name off the list if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“So I just go?”
“Unless you don’t want to.”
“No, I do. I mean, I don’t not want to. Thank you.” I turned, and as I did, he touched me very lightly in that place between your hip and your back, and I knew something more would happen between us. Not just that I wanted it to, but that it would come to pass. It was because he set his hand so low. If it had been higher, it might have meant, No hard feelings? or even merely, See you around. But like that, at the base of my spine, even I could recognize in it something prospective and vaguely territorial. I looked back, but he was already talking to someone else.
“The fact that he let you leave isn’t a bad sign.” Martha was standing in front of the full-length mirror, brushing her hair, while I sat on the futon. “You don’t understand this because you’ve never had table wipes, but they’re kind of humiliating. Especially for seniors. So it’s not like, oh, he didn’t want to be around you so he told you to go. It’s more like he was being nice.”
“He didn’t say anything about the other night,” I said. “Not a word.”
“What was he supposed to say? Other people were there.”
“Maybe he doesn’t remember since he was drunk.”
“He remembers.” Martha set down her brush and lifted her perfume bottle. She squirted some into the air in front of her, then walked through the mist-it was a trick I’d picked up from Dede freshman year and passed on to Martha. “It actually doesn’t sound like he was all that drunk. A lot of guys can’t, you know, get it up when they’ve had a lot to drink.”
“Really?”
“Alcohol depresses your central nervous system.”
“Has that ever happened with Colby?” Martha and Colby had been together for more than a year. He was a junior at UVM, and they spoke once a week on the phone, on Mondays, and wrote to each other and spent time together on vacations and she’d had sex with him (her first time) six months into the relationship, after they’d gone to a clinic for him to get tested for AIDS because he’d had sex with two previous girlfriends. He was tall and nice and liked Martha, but he was also pale and had a beaky nose and was, at least in my opinion, rather humorless. When Martha was home, they did things together like go for fifty-mile bike rides, or take turns reading aloud their favorite parts from The Odyssey. I did not feel jealous.
“Colby doesn’t drink that much because of crew,” Martha said. She looked at me. “You really shouldn’t be stressing.”
“I’m not.” I propped my legs on the trunk and looked at my calves in black opaque tights and my feet in black dress shoes. I wondered if my shoes were cheesy. Lately, a lot of girls were wearing chunkier heels.
“What do you want to happen?” Martha asked. “Seriously.”
I wanted to be the person Cross told things to. I wanted him to think I was pretty, I wanted him to be reminded of me by stuff I liked-pistachios and hooded sweatshirts and the Dylan song “Girl from the North Country”-and I wanted him to miss me when we were apart. I wanted him to feel, when we were lying in bed together, like he couldn’t imagine anywhere better.
“Can you picture him being my boyfriend?” I asked.
Martha was putting on her jacket, with her back to me, when she said, “No,” and because she couldn’t see my face, I don’t think she realized how startled I was. By the time she turned around, I was straining not to seem surprised or hurt. “I’m sure if you want to hook up with him again, you can,” she said. “But the sense I get, just from little comments he makes, is that he’s really into this being his senior year. I doubt he wants to be tied down. And also, just, you and Cross?” She made a face like she’d smelled something bad. “Do you see it happening?”
“If you can’t imagine Cross and me going out, why’d you just tell me to think about what I want?” I tried to speak in a normal, curious voice. These were, hands down, the worst things Martha had ever said to me, but if she knew I thought so, she’d feel terrible and stop being honest.
“I’m not saying to be passive. That’s what makes me worry about you, that it seems like you’re leaving it all in his hands. You definitely should express what you want, and if he can’t deal with it, it’s his problem.”
“But why should I go after something you’re so sure I won’t get?”
“I’m not sure of anything. How could I be? But you’ve had a huge crush on Sug for almost the entire time you’ve been here. He came over, you guys fooled around, and now there’s an opportunity, and you owe it to yourself to see what happens. And it’s not like I’m skeptical because I don’t think you’re good enough for him. If anything, you’re too good. I’m just not sure he realizes that.”
“So what should I say to him? And when?”
“He’s not that hard to find. Go to his room during visitation.”
“I would never go to Cross’s room.”
“Then wait until you see him around campus, and tell him you want to talk to him.”
“To say what?”
“Lee, there aren’t magical words.” Martha stepped into shoes exactly like mine, and my resentment of her flared. Most of the time I loved having her as my roommate, I loved the clarity and closeness of one single best friend. But at rare moments, for exactly the same reason, I felt trapped by my reliance on her, flattened by her pragmatism and bluntness. If I had ever made Dede into my best friend and if I’d then had this conversation with her (and if, of course, Dede herself hadn’t harbored a crush on Cross for years), then in this moment Dede would scheme and bolster. She wouldn’t deflate me like Martha was doing.
And besides, why was it right, why was it so goddamn reasonable, for Martha to have a boyfriend and me not to, for her to be senior prefect and me to be nobody? I literally wasn’t anything, not a chapel prefect or yearbook editor or sports captain (Martha, also, was captain of crew). The summer after our junior year, I had gone through a class list to try to find anyone similarly undistinguished and had come up with only two other people: Nicole Aufwenschwieder and Dan Ponce. Both of them were less than boring-they were practically invisible.
In the dining hall, before we split up to find our separate tables, Martha said, “Divide and conquer,” and I detested her for being both ordinary and lucky, when most people at Ault were lucky and lucky, or ordinary and ordinary.
When Cross came the second time, I believed it was because waves of desire were rolling off my body and across the courtyard between our dorms. It was a Saturday morning-it was around one o’clock, I think, because Martha had already gone to bed. She usually stayed up later than I did, studying, then woke me when she’d turned out the light so we could talk. When Cross showed up, this had happened already and we’d both gone to sleep.
He was all the way in the room this time before I awakened, crouching over my bed with his hand on my arm. “Lee,” he was whispering. “Lee-it’s me.” I opened my eyes and smiled, and it wasn’t a smile where you choose it or not. Before he even climbed into bed, he leaned down and kissed me on the mouth and then we were kissing and kissing and I realized that this was what kissing was, this was why people liked it-the perfect sliminess of each other’s tongues. I wasn’t sure of the exact moment he lowered himself onto me.