When I felt his erection, I squirmed around under him until it was between my legs, I wrapped my legs around his waist. He jerked against me so strongly that I thought he might tear through my underwear (though, really, who cared about my underwear?). He took off his shirt, and his skin was warm and soft and smooth.
I think he might have heard Martha first, the straining springs of her mattress above us. She didn’t say a word, but Cross and I froze, and then she was climbing down the rails of the bunk bed. She walked out of the room.
“Is she pissed?” Cross asked when the door shut. In this moment, clearly, she was not his co-prefect; she was my roommate.
And if she was pissed, I didn’t care. Being like this with Cross was everything I wanted. What is there to say? Sometimes in your life, you’re selfish; you just are.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
Then we stopped speaking. At one point, I heard myself make the kind of moan that I’d heard in movies, and I could not believe that such a noise had been dormant inside me, all this time.
After a while, I said, “Why didn’t you talk to me in the dining hall on Monday?” and he said, “I talked to you,” and I said, “Not really,” and he said, “Your cheeks were all blushed,” and then I didn’t ask him any more about it. And much later, when it was not yet light but it was less dark, closer to morning than to night, and I could feel that he was about to leave, I said, “You’re not going to tell people about this, right?”
He was quiet for a few seconds. “Okay.”
“When we see each other in school, we can just act normal,” I said.
“What does acting normal mean?” He sounded amused maybe, or maybe skeptical.
“I won’t come up and kiss you good morning at breakfast,” I said. “If that’s what you’re afraid of.”
Again, he was quiet, and then he said, “Okay.”
“Or it’s not like I expect you to bring me flowers.” I had meant for the example to sound absurd-of course Cross wouldn’t bring me flowers-but it didn’t sound absurd enough. It would have been better if I had said, It’s not like I expect you to buy me a diamond necklace.
“Anything else?” he said.
“I’m not trying to be weird.”
His voice contained no trace of amusement when, at last, he said, “I know.”
In the morning, as we were getting dressed, Martha said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to come over like that.”
“I’m sorry. Are you totally annoyed?”
“Waking up to the sound of you and Sug making out and then having to go sleep in the common room isn’t my preference, no.” (This seemed rather small of her, I thought, it seemed blind to the fact that this was the first guy I’d ever kissed. Didn’t I get any allowance, or just some time to learn how to act? And anyway, wasn’t it all part of boarding school, that you listened to your roommate huff and pant with some boy?) “But the real problem,” Martha continued, “is that if he ever got caught here, I could be implicated. I can’t tell him what to do, but I am responsible for myself.”
I said nothing.
“Is he planning to come back?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but probably,” and saying it made me feel so good that it almost overrode the unpleasantness of the exchange with Martha; I didn’t smile, but it was only because I was trying not to.
“Can you understand why this puts me in a weird position?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Technically, I should turn you in just because I know you’re breaking visitation. No one would really expect me to, I don’t think, but I do talk to Mr. Byden or to Fletchy practically every day. And they assume that I’m being honest. You’re not the one having all these meetings with them and looking them in the eye and talking about school integrity.”
“Martha, I already said yes, I can understand why this puts you in a weird position.”
Martha sighed. “I know you like him a lot.”
Neither of us spoke.
“Are you saying he can’t come over?” I finally asked.
“Don’t make me be your mom. That’s not fair.”
“But that’s what you’re saying, right? That you’d rather he never set foot in here again?” Had Martha always been this rigid?
“Wait a second,” she said. “I have an idea. You can use the day student room.”
Immediately, I felt resistant, though it was hard to say why. Every dorm had a day student room, smaller than a real room usually, with only one bed and a desk or two. The day student room in our dorm was three doors down from ours, and the only day student affiliated with Elwyn’s was Hillary Tompkins, a junior who wasn’t around much.
“Would I have to ask Hillary?” I said, and Martha actually laughed.
“Maybe you could ask Fletchy, too,” she said. (Before this year, I thought, she had always called him Dean Fletcher, and she’d called Cross Purple Monkey, not Sug. Now she sounded like Aspeth.)
“I guess that means no,” I said.
“I doubt Hillary would care,” Martha said. “Anyway, it won’t be that frequent, right?”
Why did she think it wouldn’t be that frequent?
“Are we having a fight?” Martha asked.
“No,” I said quickly. Then I said, “We couldn’t be. Martha and Lee never fight.” I’m not sure this is what anyone else thought of us, but it was what I thought; as seniors, Martha and I were one of only four pairs of girls in our grade to have stayed together for the three years you chose your roommate. Boys stayed together, but girls usually didn’t.
“But I’ve heard Martha is kind of a bitch,” Martha said.
“Actually, Lee is the horrible one,” I said. “She’s totally insecure, and she complains all the time. And she’s so negative. I can’t stand negative people.”
“When life gives negative people lemons, they should make lemonade,” Martha said.
“Negative people should turn that frown upside down,” I said. “Hey, Martha?”
She looked at me.
What would someone else have said? Your friendship means so much to me. I love you. Martha and I had never said I love you to each other; I thought girls who did, especially girls who said it all the time, were showy and hollow. “I’m glad you’re not mad at me,” I said.
It was like I had been walking down the sidewalk in a suburban neighborhood and then I stepped on a certain square of pavement and the square fell away and I was falling through infinite blackness with white stars glittering all around me. I was waiting to find myself slammed back onto the same sidewalk where I’d started, blue jays resting on a telephone pole, the sprinkler running in a yard across the street, and me with perhaps a cut on my knee or a bruise on my forearm-proof that something had occurred, but that what had occurred had been less than I imagined it to be. But it never happened. I just kept falling.
Partly, it had to do with the fact that on the nights Cross came, I didn’t get much sleep. Things always seem strange then. Also that I was eating less. I wasn’t eating nothing, it wasn’t like I was anorexic, it was just that food, like almost everything else, now seemed beside the point. Certain foods I was ravenous for, like avocado, which I craved so badly I rode Martha’s bike to town, bought four, let them ripen on the windowsill, peeled the skin off with Martha’s pocketknife, and ate them like apples. Vanilla ice cream also-these foods seemed somehow pure, they would slide down my throat instead of getting caught in my molars. Casserole, on the other hand, made me want to vomit.
My grades actually improved. It was because I did my homework, I could focus because homework wasn’t my entire life, in fact it didn’t really matter and was just something I had to do to act normal. So I sat down and opened my books and did the reading or memorized the equations-whatever it was-whereas once I had sat down and then looked at the ceiling and started thinking about things like if I should give myself a middle name when I went to college, or if I had chronic body odor, would anyone tell me?