Set the scene: a skinny pledge’s erection is pressing on your ass as you dance, even though sweat has melted your mascara and drenched your newly short, frizzy hair and you doubt you’ve ever been uglier. In front of you, a girl of Amazonian height is bending over to smash her face into some guy’s neck a foot and a half below. The dissociated hand of a boy in a plaid shirt grazes her waist as he scoots past, beer can perpetually tipped at a forty-five-degree angle into his mouth, eyes pointed vaguely at a penis drawn on the blue wall of the staircase.
Are you drunk yet? You must be by now. Just yesterday, you were sloshed after four shots. Your friend in the black crop top and your other friend in the other black crop top are bent over with laughter and end up sitting on the floor with their legs spread apart and their arms tangled up in each other. You leave the erection to fend for itself and pull your friends up against a wall where they won’t be trampled by a herd of stumbling freshmen, who spill their half-empty piss beers all over their skinny bare legs and your lucky jean skirt, which you haven’t washed since your very first college party, where you hooked up with a football player who had eyes like green Jell-O. Someone hands you a cup and you drink the rest of the reddish liquid pooled at the bottom. You lean up against the DJ stand and wait to feel that glorious transition from buzzed to blitzed while some Bon Jovi remix pounds into your tailbone.
The pledge finds you again, his shirt now tied around his waist, his hairless chest glimmering with sweat and droplets of something congealed. You see his face for the first time, and his nose is crooked but he’s decent, so you let him kiss you, let him press against you and slide his clammy hands up the back of your shirt. His hot beer-breath is in your ear, asking you if you want to get out of there. “Have to find my friends,” you say, and slip away from him, letting the crowd carry you somewhere the boys’ hands are already occupied.
Someone passes around a bagel. You take a bite like you’d take a hit.
* * *
You’re in eighth grade the first time you kiss a boy. “Your lips are dry,” he informs you as you pull away. His name is Paul Simon, no joke, and he’s two years older. You’re standing in a pool of light and a swarm of gnats outside of your church’s youth group building. After him, you start carrying lip balm everywhere you go. After you, he ends up in jail for selling pot to a cop’s kid in the social studies hallway.
You hit puberty like a hummingbird hitting the flawlessly Windexed glass of your parents’ bedroom windows. One day, a guy in your sister’s class scans you up and down. “Damn, your little sis got curves,” he says to her, and she holds your arms up so a flock of boys can examine you. You’re reminded of the time she told the entire school bus you still wore Pull-Ups to bed. You’re reminded of the time you spent half an hour watching a tortoise try to wedge herself between the bars of her enclosure at the zoo.
Enter Hank, who you like even though his name sounds kind of like a puke noise, who holds your hand and walks you to track meets your sophomore year in high school, who buys you ice cream with the money he makes working at his dad’s auto shop, who breaks up with you over email.
You become a vegetarian for some reason.
Enter Joshua, the valedictorian with a purple moped. He gets beer from his older brother, and you talk about college with your toes in the algae of the creek that runs through the woods behind his house. The night before senior prom, he tells you he’s going places and you’ll just hold him back, but you can still go to prom together if you want. You spend the night eating tortilla chips in your powder-blue silk dress that the lady in the store said brings out your gray eyes, watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre with your mom.
An unexpected aptitude for standardized tests gets you into Penn, despite a C in chemistry. On move-in day, your dad has to go to some appointment with his prissy new wife, so your mom drops you off with a mini fridge and six family-sized bags of Cheetos. She cries a little as you shrug away from her goodbye hug. That night, you feel the five-hour distance stretch between you like the elastic string of cheese between two halves of a mozzarella stick. Soon, though, you settle into a routine. You’ve always been adaptable. Actually, mozzarella sticks become an essential part of your diet.
Enter Eddie. Eddie gives you chlamydia.
You don’t really know how chlamydia works, so you take the antibiotics and wait half of the prescribed week and when the Jell-O-eyed football player whisper-asks, “You’re clean, right?” you whisper-lie, “Yeah.” After that, you don’t ever text him back and you go to the clinic to get tested so often that the Puerto Rican nurse with a booger dangling from her nose ring has to tell you to cool it.
Maggie, your first ever roommate and therefore best friend, is the beautiful blend of Irish and Pacific Islander that gives her freckles like constellations across her olive-toned cheeks. She wants to own her own chain of salons someday, so you let her chop your hair off until it’s just above your shoulders and dye a strip of it blue. Maggie encourages you to get a Tinder. You’re hesitant, but when you get your first match, you fall into the obsessive spiral of swiping — under your desk in class, on the bus ride to Trader Joe’s, under the coffee table while you and Maggie are eating Chinese takeout and having an Indiana Jones movie marathon at two in the morning. When you go on your first Tinder date, you text Maggie updates every twenty minutes and tell her if you’re not back in three hours to call the cops.
Tinder Tom is nice but has more of a beard than his profile implied and he smells like beef. The two of you get crappy Thai food and split the bill. He tells you it’s culturally insensitive to use chopsticks with Thai food, but you use them, anyway. He hints at wanting to go back to your apartment, but you tell him you have homework and instead lie in your bed watching Gilmore Girls for three and a half hours.
One of your friends calls you a slut. He says it with admiration, way to go, laughs after, but you feel sick. You tuck your hands under your sweater, cross your arms against your stomach, and grasp your sides, pinching the extra skin. Laughing along, you realize you can’t remember the name of the last guy you slept with. Trevor? Something with a T.
Tinder Phil is from Rio de Janeiro. He’s a grad student studying aerospace engineering, he has a watch that works on the moon, and he went backpacking in Cuba for spring break last year. You like Tinder Phil. You get buzzed on white wine in his expensive apartment and make him listen to the soundtrack of One Tree Hill. He’s showing you fancy engineering equations on his computer, and you’re putting your hand on his arm, and all of a sudden he’s kissing you, he’s picking you up and setting you on the desk, and your legs wrap around him. He tastes like Brazil.
The next Friday, you and Tinder Phil have plans to watch a movie at your apartment and you gush about it all week to your friends, who joke that you’re experiencing the phenomenon referred to as “feelings.” Blanching at this idea, you scuttle out of the study room and hide in a stall of the library bathroom until the odds are good enough that they’ve moved on to a discussion of Tara’s new, reptilian neck tattoo. When Friday comes, you spend the whole day cleaning. You light a candle and put on matching socks. He calls ten minutes after he’s supposed to be there to say he’s running late but that he’ll bring popcorn, then calls again to say that actually something came up, so sorry, he won’t be able to make it.
“It’s fine,” you tell him, glancing around at the floor you spent half an hour scrubbing with the Swiffer WetJet. “My friends wanted to get together, anyway.”
You drink half a bottle of wine and call your friend Mooney from your theater class and actually say the words, “This is a booty call.” Mooney doesn’t like the movie you pick out. His voice is whinier than you remember. You chug more chardonnay and fuck on the couch.
You take a Women’s Studies class and give up boys for Lent. The professor is a wiry-haired grandma type who insists you call her Letta, with thick, round glasses and a tinny voice, which can usually be heard saying some formulation of the word “patriarchy.” You ask insightful questions, so she buys you coffee after class. Her first marriage was to an actual pimp, she tells you through crumbles of blueberry scone. But he hit her, and she hit him back, so they ended up getting a divorce, and all her lawyer was able to get her was their Eagles record set and their vacation home in Tucson, which isn’t even that nice. When you tell her about your sabbatical from men, she almost dies laughing and buys you another vanilla almond milk cappuccino with three packets of sugar.
When you first meet Kyle, it’s been four and a half weeks since you’ve kissed a boy, drunkenly or otherwise. You’ve joined this literary magazine on campus, The Raven, because you’re into the idea of painting your nails black and pretending to be Edgar Allan Poe. They have classy cocktail parties with tiny sandwiches where they talk in obvious ways about the qualities of Hemingway and which editors are sleeping together. Kyle is Prince Charming from Shrek 2, with pale blue eyes and sandy hair that falls past his chin and feels like Larry Boy, your pet rabbit from middle school, which you know because you drink three martinis and touch it without asking.
You sit on the couch and he plops down next to you, bouncing a little off of the brownish-greenish-velvetish cushions. He takes tiny bites out of a mini cheese sandwich while you shove two into your mouth at once. You admire the way his triceps flex while he nibbles. The white bread sticks to the roof of your mouth. You frantically peel it off with your tongue while you try to talk to him, praying he won’t see the soggy pieces crumbling down behind your teeth.
“Anyway,” he says, as if you’d been in the middle of a conversation. “Hard Times is Dickens’s most underrated work. Ahead of its time, really, with all the ‘watch out or industry will turn humans into machines’ stuff. Man, he’s something. Dickens.”
Oliver Twist is the only book you’ve been physically unable to finish without hating yourself since you were seven years old. “Dickens, yeah,” you say through your sandwich. “Love him.”
You notice he keeps using the word “trite,” as if he doesn’t really know what it means, as if he’s trying it out in various scenarios to see which one lands. But, God, his hair. It makes up for this defect.
Despite Maggie’s reminders about your Lenten promise to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you call Kyle the next day and make plans to read each other’s submissions for the March edition of The Raven. You invite him to your apartment, and he likes the ficus that you’ve named Robert Plant, even though he doesn’t get the reference. Over coffee, you ask him about his characters’ motivations and help him clean up the dialogue between Archetypal Old Man Number One and Archetypal Old Man Number Two. “It’s so good,” you tell him. “Your characters are really unique.” He tells you he can see Dickens’s influence on your sentence structure, that it’s so cool to find a girl who’s into the Greatest English Novelist of All Time. You nod enthusiastically as he launches into a discussion of how A Christmas Carol can be read through a postcolonial lens and later delete your entire story.
It turns out Kyle also likes other things besides dead, white, male authors. He also likes some dead, white, female authors. When he tells you that one of his favorite books is Jane Eyre, you’re so incredibly turned on that you wiggle the arm you’re leaning on until your baggy ABBA shirt slides down, exposing your shoulder and your favorite three freckles that are organized across it in a perfectly straight line. Unless it’s actually the general atmosphere of soft music and heat turned up a little too high, your strategy works — in the middle of a confusingly pro-British diatribe against imperialism he stops, distracted, and asks if he can kiss you. You reach up and run your fingers through his Prince Charming hair and pull his mouth to yours. The initial toothiness is soon resolved. But as soon as you try to ease him into a more horizontal position, one finger sliding around the inside of his waistband, he puts his hand on your arm. “Let’s not yet,” he says. “I really like you.” Which doesn’t follow a clear path of logic to you. You bite your lip and sit back on your heels. “Okay, yeah,” you say. “Don’t want to go too fast.”
After he leaves, you masturbate to the Thandie Newton version of the Jane Eyre audiobook.
The two of you weave around each other for weeks, neatly avoiding subjects of conversation that may force you to discuss feelings, labels, boundaries. You make out — a lot — but that’s it. You study together — he reads his organic chemistry notes out loud to you, and you pretend to interpret them. You make him run lines for your Shakespeare class’s upcoming performance of As You Like It.
Whenever Kyle steers talk towards the dating question, you subtly redirect him to comparisons of The Lord of the Rings movies or the best types of doughnut filling. Custard, not cream. In your planner one Thursday, between finish your paper you lazy asshole and email Pat about free food thing, you write: think about if you want to date Kyle.
Pros: Cute. Good hair. Really good hair. Really good kisser. Smart conversationalist. You’re a better writer than him, so you wouldn’t feel intimidated. He’d probably buy you food on occasion.
Cons: Commitment? Sometimes he asks questions about things you’ve already told him. He’s got this weird mole behind his ear that kind of freaks you out. And that whole Dickens thing.
Then there’s your deep-rooted terror of falling in love that developed in the wake of your parents’ divorce, right around the time your dad tried to push a dresser over on your mom while she was folding laundry. What if you fall in love with Kyle, and he tries to push a dresser over on you while you’re folding laundry? What if you fall for him and he falls less? What if you date for ten years and then he leaves you and a whole decade of your life is wasted? What if you are attracted to someone else — you’ve slept with boys who weren’t single before and didn’t feel that bad about it, so who’s to say you won’t turn into a cheater and he’ll finally find out and try to push a dresser over on you while you’re folding laundry?
The microwave beeps and you remember you were making ravioli.
Letta writes see me in the margins of your essay, but she doesn’t show up to the next class. Fifteen minutes after she’s ten minutes late, the class gets up, a few at a time, and files out of the room. As you reach the door, you look back as if she’s going to pop up from behind the podium and tell you all that the patriarchy dictates that women be on time for everything and shame on you for not having more faith that your fellow females will show up. Later that night, you get an email from the head of the Women’s Studies department. Letta passed away suddenly last night. The department head is very sorry for your loss. Grief counselors will be available for students who feel this would be helpful.
You go to the coffee shop she took you to and sit there without touching your cappuccino until a barista with a shaved head tells you she’s very sorry but they’re closing now. When you call the Women’s Studies department, they tell you the family doesn’t want them telling students when the wake will be and they’re very sorry about that. Everyone is very sorry. You already know Kyle will be sorry, too, so you don’t bother telling him what happened. The woman who takes over the class wears pastel pant suits and has a fake-sounding British accent.
The only person you’ve ever known who has died is your great-aunt Jennifer, your grandma’s favorite sister. She used to make you Mickey Mouse–shaped everything — pancakes, cookies, popcorn balls. She lived in Orlando, so you only saw her on Christmas and birthdays and the occasional spring break. When she died, you were only ten and she’d been fighting cancer for years, so most of your distress came from seeing your mom cry at the funeral. Letta is different. Letta’s death tosses you into existential crisis — the frailty of human existence, the uncertainty of what’s going to happen next, whether or not eating dark chocolate every afternoon adds five years to your life. You sit in that coffee shop most days, never really drinking your cappuccino, staring at various walls. You think about a lot of things, but mostly you wonder if you died tomorrow, if Kyle would meet your parents for the first time at your funeral, or if he would even go, or if you’d want him to? On the fourth day you start to think about if it’s worth it to be with someone you haven’t fallen helplessly in love with, someone you can’t even consider living without. Can something like that ever really exist? You’re skeptical. And you’re not sure you’d want it if it did. It seems so fake and fluffy, and thinking about it makes you restless. The cappuccino is cold, so you drop it in the trash and leave, barely noticing the rain.
A few weeks pass. It’s your birthday. You hate your birthday, because it reminds you of the year you turned nine and your mom and dad fought over who got to have you. Your dad won, and you spent the day at the zoo with him and Tillie, the fat blonde who only wore coral and said Hmm before she answered any question. They didn’t let you feed the giraffes because they smelled bad, but they bought you three cotton candies. On the way out, you threw up on Tillie’s shoes, and your dad made you sit in the car for an hour while they browsed the shoe store for acceptable replacements. Or there was the birthday when you were dating Joshua and he told you he loved you in your mom’s basement and you just sat there and finally said, “Oh,” and he didn’t speak to you for a week. But this year Kyle is so excited to make you dinner, and you have a perfect track record of never turning down free food, so your twentieth birthday finds you at a folding table in his living room with a Halloween napkin on your lap and a plate of steak in front of you. You realize you never told him you don’t eat meat.
The slab of dead, dark muscle and sinew sits in a heavy lump on one of Kyle’s two plates that aren’t plastic. Kyle’s scooping green beans out of the pan with his back to you, and you contemplate getting up and launching yourself out the window and starting over in a new town with a new identity. Instead, you poke at the steak with the tines of your fork, depressing it, releasing it, watching it spring back up. He sits down and smiles encouragingly, and you smile encouragingly back. You spend as long as possible cutting it up into tiny cubic chunks of flesh and pushing them around on your plate, until you accidentally push one off the edge, and it flops down on the floor next to your toes. There’s nothing more to it — you spear a cube and bring it to your mouth, maneuvering so it never brushes your lips, pushing it to the back so you can chew it in the dark corner where the other teeth won’t be able to see what you’ve done.
It’s sticky. Mushy fibers catch between your teeth as soon as you clamp down. Then it’s a question of whether you should chew as much as possible so it digests faster and gets out of your body, or chew as little as possible so you don’t have to taste its metallic squish. You decide on the latter and swallow, trying to ignore the trail it burns on its way down your esophagus. The wine looks like blood now, but you down the entire bitter glass, anyway. Kyle, ever observant, asks how you like it. You make an mhm sound.
After, Kyle insists on cleaning up. You go to his bathroom, run the water, and throw up, neck craned over the toilet.
His toothpaste is cinnamon, which you hate, but you steal a drop and rub it on your teeth with your finger. When you return to the living room, Kyle has a candle lit and the whole room smells like cinnamon, too. He puts on some quiet indie music that says the word “firmament” a lot and probably comes from some pre-made seduction playlist. You’ve seen the moves before, and Kyle’s putting on the moves. Since you met him, you’ve been trying to get to this, but now as he kisses your neck and pulls your sweater aside so he can kiss your shoulder, the remaining dead cow in your gut is flopping around and there’s so much cinnamon in the air and in your mouth that you are further from in the mood than you’ve ever been. When he cautiously reaches for the buttons on your jeans, you say, “My Women’s Studies professor died.”
Kyle pulls back. He puts his hand on his own jeans, playing with a crease in the thigh. “Oh,” he says.
“It was really sudden. And now it’s weird, you know, having a random professor come in for the last few weeks. She doesn’t really know what we’ve been talking about and she wears this really awful vinegary perfume,” you tell him.
He does the “I’m so sorry” bit. Expected. Disappointing. You turn away.
You sit in awful silence for a few minutes. Kyle tugs his shirt back down from where it has ridden up to show his yoga-sculpted stomach. Then he asks, “What exactly is it that we’re doing, here.” In a romantic comedy you’d say, “Sitting on the couch,” and he’d say, “No, I mean us. What are we?” But the only romantic comedy you like is The Princess Bride, and does it really count if you only like it because it sticks close to the plot of the book? Besides, Westley would never ask such an obvious question.
You take a red throw pillow and hold it on your lap, twirling the tassels around your fingers. The best approach is probably to be direct, so you press the pillow into your legs and say, “I don’t eat steak.”
“You don’t — what?”
“Any meat, actually. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was sixteen.” He looks over at the kitchen, where he set the leftover steak on the counter for his roommate when he gets home. “And by that,” you say, “I mean I like you. Really. But I think maybe I need some time to just be on my own.” It sounds so stupid and fake, you can tell from the look on his face. “I didn’t tell you about the steak thing and I threw it up in your toilet and stole your toothpaste and I don’t like cinnamon and I don’t like that I didn’t tell you. It’s not me, it’s not how I want to be.”
“How you want to be,” he says.
Kyle understands as much as he can be expected to. He even joke-offers you some leftover steak as you get around to leave. As you hug him goodbye, you run your fingers through his hair and wish you could tug out a few strands as a keepsake.
When you get back home, Maggie is waiting up with a chocolate cake and a candle shaped like the number three because it’s all that was left at the store, and you like how it feels to be a little bit alone and not at all lonely.
* * *
There is some time, and it passes. There is another party, and you go. The warm beer tastes like armpits, the carpet on the dark stairs where you hide smells like armpits, and you don’t know anyone but Maggie. You’ve been scanning the room for her for twenty minutes. When she resurfaces from the whirlpool of bodies, she has acquired a boy, who hovers behind her with his hands in his pockets, just close enough to make sure she doesn’t forget he’s there. You’re overheating and not having a particularly rousing time, so you make sure Maggie’s sober enough to decide to go home with him and head outside.
There’s something so gratifying about walking home through the brisk air, buzzed, and by yourself. The world is more poetic, somehow. You watch other clumps of party-leavers from a distance, and you consider how much more meaningful their lives are than the messy façade you see on a Saturday night. You have to walk down Kyle’s street to get home, and as you pass his apartment building he comes around the corner. For a moment you both stop, then you lift a hand to wave and he smiles back and nods. You feel more like yourself than you ever did when you were with him, like he can truly see you now that he knows you’re a vegetarian, that Letta died and it bothered you that she did. Friends is fine. Friends is being able to know each other, and that’s good.
As he disappears into his building, something tugs at the back of your mind. Kyle is barely inside, but you run up and knock, and he swings open the door again. “I forgot something,” you say, jumping down a step to avoid being knocked off the stairs. He lets you catch your breath. You stand two steps below him with your sweater sleeves pulled over your fingers, and with a sense that you have an audience of all your boys — Paul Simon and Hank, Joshua, Chlamydia Eddie and Jell-O Eyes and all those faceless others, and Kyle, with his eyebrow raised — you say:
“I really, really can’t stand Dickens.”
