By early February of my senior year, I was giving so much thought to the flower exchange that when the form showed up in my mailbox, it was surprising that it had arrived at a moment when, in fact, the flower exchange was not foremost in my mind. Once the form was in my possession, it felt immediately incriminating, as if, instead of being the generic form given to everyone, it was one I’d already filled out. I quickly stuffed it in my backpack.
In the room that night, Martha said, “I swear it feels like I was just doing this for last year. Doesn’t it feel like that?”
“I guess so,” I said. I paused. “Do you think I should send one to Cross?”
“If you want.”
I was composing my next thought-I felt tightly wound, and inarticulate, on this subject-when Martha added, “I probably will.”
“Will what? You mean you’ll send Cross a flower?”
She nodded.
“What color?”
She started laughing. “Red, of course. Lee, what do you think?”
It wasn’t funny to me. And it seemed surprising that she couldn’t guess this.
“So you’d send him a pink one?”
“Do you not want me to? If you don’t, I won’t.”
This was how she always disarmed me, with her openness and her flexibility. She let me choose, and then I was the one who had made the choice.
“No, of course you should,” I said. “Since you work together so much, and since you’re friends.” What was I doing reassuring her about Cross, how had we arrived at this point? Abruptly, I did not want to be having the conversation anymore.
The night the fire alarm went off-this was also in early February-Cross and I had fallen asleep, and I heard the terrible screaming siren and opened my eyes in a panic, first because I didn’t understand what was happening and then because I did. Already, Cross had scrambled out of bed and reached for his clothes. In the not-fully-dark darkness, his penis was swinging, his thighs and chest were pale. The truth was that I had never really looked at his naked body, that even when given chances, I’d averted my eyes (I was not at all sure that a penis was a thing I wanted to see), and I wouldn’t have been looking at this moment if the room had been light or the alarm hadn’t been wailing. These distractions, the fact that he was distracted, allowed me. Then our eyes met, and he said, “Get up”-I think he might have been shouting, but his voice was barely audible over the alarm. I stood. I had my nightgown on already; sometimes, though he didn’t like it when I did, I’d pull it on again after we’d had sex. He fastened his pants, shrugged on his shirt and sweater. He reached for the doorknob, then looked back at me, and yelled, “Come on.” In the threshold of the door, he hesitated, turning his head both ways down the hall. To the right was Martha’s and my room, two other rooms, the bathroom, a fire escape door that led I didn’t know where; to the left were more rooms and the staircase to the common room. From behind Cross, I looked into the hall, and remarkably, no one was in it yet. Cross took off. He went right, dashing down the hall and pushing through the fire escape door, and I thought, Oh my God! and then I realized the fire alarm was already going, he couldn’t set it off, and the door had not yet swung shut behind him when Diana Trueblood and Abby Sciver emerged from their room, both of them wearing fleece sweatshirts over their nightgowns.
What I felt, standing there, was abandoned. It seemed nothing so much as rude for Cross to have sprinted away like that, without saying good-bye, without kissing me quickly or even touching my shoulder or my cheek.
The hall had become crowded, and over Diana’s and Abby’s heads I made eye contact with Martha-she had exited our room, seen me, turned around and come out again, this time carrying my coat and running shoes. When she handed them to me, Martha raised her eyebrows: Where’s Cross? I shook my head: We didn’t get caught.
Outside, the siren was immediately quieter, as if the sound were wrapped in a blanket. The air was icy. We stood in a cluster in front of the entrance to Elwyn’s, our breath visible, and some girls were barefoot and then someone spread a sweatshirt on the ground, and all the barefoot girls crushed onto it, pressing into one another. Mrs. Elwyn called out our names and checked us off on her list, and girls complained and swore in hoarse voices, but there was also a certain festivity to the moment-fire drills were always a little bit festive.
Groups similar to ours stood in front of the entrances to other dorms. All the dorms on our side of the circle had emptied into the courtyard, and you could look into the rooms where the lights were on and the shades were up and see people’s posters, the sweaters on the top shelves of open closets. Among the boys outside Barrow’s, I searched for Cross and I found him, in his puffy black coat-so he’d made it all the way back to his room with time to spare. He was talking to Devin and some other boys, and I felt a momentary confusion. Had we really just been lying in the same bed, did we even know each other at all? He was only forty feet from me, but there might as well have been a deep lake between us.
There was, in the swiftness with which he’d slipped from the dorm, something almost offensive. He’d made it out unseen only by a matter of seconds, which still meant he’d made it out unseen; it was the same as if he’d been sleeping all night in his own bed. What I wished was that he’d been as disoriented as I had, that he hadn’t thought to use the fire door (only I would not have thought to use the fire door) and he’d come down the main staircase with me, both sheepish and aloof as the other girls looked at us, and then he’d slunk over to his dorm, and maybe he wouldn’t be caught by a teacher, or maybe I did want him to be caught, I wanted both of us to be-we wouldn’t get kicked out because breaking visitation was a minor offense, but everyone would know. My regret surged and billowed, as regret does in the middle of the night; everything had happened so quickly, the chance to have caused a different outcome was still so recent. Later, after we were allowed back inside, after I’d gone to sleep in the room with Martha and awakened in the morning, I thought that in the moment of standing outside our separate dorms, it hadn’t been too late. I could have gone to him, I could have created a reason or just created a scene; I could have wept. It was like being drunk, how you so rarely feel drunk enough to do the thing you want to, you still feel pinned back by your own sense of the rational or the proper, but the next day, hung over, you realize just how drunk you were. You had a window of opportunity. If you had used it, you probably would have embarrassed yourself, but in not using it, you wasted something irretrievable.
As the alarm blared, it was so cold and most people weren’t wearing coats. Some of the girls around me had started howling up toward the sky, like wolves. “Let us back inside,” Isolde Haberny cried to no one in particular, and Jean Kohlhepp said-she wasn’t crooning, she said it plainly-“I just want this to be over with.”
Now I think, Jean. Jean! You got your wish. The fire drill is finished, but so is everything else. Did we believe we could pick and choose what passed quickly? Today, even the boring parts, even when it was freezing outside and half the girls were barefoot-all of it was a long time ago.
I didn’t pay much attention at curfew two nights later when I saw Hillary Tompkins, Hillary whose sleeping bag I thought of as my own, with Cross’s dried cum all over it. Hillary was rarely in the dorm at night, but I knew there was a big test in AP Chemistry the next morning, and if I assumed anything, I assumed Hillary had stayed over to study.
Then she raised her hand during announcements, and when Mrs. Elwyn called on her, Hillary said, “Yesterday in my room, I found some underwear, and they were not clean.”
Other girls laughed, and Hillary was almost smiling, but she also seemed sincerely irritated. “I threw them away,” she continued, “so if they were yours, I guess you have one less pair of underwear. I have no idea how they got there, but please try to have some consideration and don’t throw your crusty underwear into other people’s rooms.”