In the fall, I head to college, leaving behind what happened in the Long Beach Island apartment, leaving behind what feels like a rash of mistakes and bad times. I am determined not to put myself in those situations again, although I’m also not yet sure how to do that. The new surroundings of college make me optimistic. My father helps me carry my boxes and duffels to my new room, and then I shoo him out. I’m ready to get started with my new life, that hopeful blank slate. This is the start of a new era for me, when I’ll be confident and smart. I’ll stop burying myself under my need. I unpack my brightly colored comforter and packaged toiletries. I set a new Brother word processor on the solid wooden desk, a gift from Dad, an unspoken vote of encouragement for doing well while I’m here. I don’t tell him, but it means a lot to me, especially because of my interest in writing. Maybe he noticed.
I hang the tapestry I bought in Manhattan at a downtown flea market. It is blue and white, South American, and it brightens the cinderblock, white-walled feel of the tiny room. When my roommate arrives, she’s pleased. She’s from Ecuador, and the design feels familiar and homey to her. We’re confident we’ll get along just fine.
We’re also happy because neither of us is anything like the other girls on our hallway. We congratulate ourselves on being more mature, more self-sufficient. We don’t hang all over each other, anxious about being away from home. We aren’t interested in having high-school-grade crushes or dramatic fights with our new friends. We’ve both done our share already, and now we’re happy to be on our own, to start again. She has a group of Latin American friends she’s met through the international students’ orientation, so she doesn’t need me in order to feel secure. Likewise, I have Zoë, a childhood friend of Jennifer C’s from back home.
Zoë lives in the other freshman dorm on the other side of campus. She’s beautiful, with big blue eyes and butterfly-shaped lips, but she doesn’t believe she’s beautiful, and this makes her all the more endearing to me. Her roommate, from Rhode Island, is here on scholarship. She dresses differently from us. She feathers her hair, as though it is still 1980. She paints on too much makeup. But Zoë invites her to come along with us wherever we go. She doesn’t judge her for these external things the way I do. Or maybe it’s just that I want Zoë all to myself.
“I’LL COME TO your room later,” the guy says. A girl waits, annoyed, eyeing me up and down. I scribble my dorm number on a piece of paper and hand it to him. He stuffs it in his pocket and the girl whispers something to him. He smiles and regards me before turning to head down the stairs with his friend to the Pub, the campus bar into which I can’t go because I’m only a freshman. David. His name is David. We met earlier at a party and kissed, and then he and his friend wanted to go to the Pub. I tagged along, hoping the bouncer wouldn’t notice me, but he stopped me at the door.
I watch David go, a longing tugging at my throat. Zoë left the party early too. She wanted to call her high school boyfriend at his Pennsylvania college. There is nothing for me to do except go back to my dorm and wait.
I eat a few cookies from the care package Nora sent. Then I brush my teeth. I change into pajama bottoms and a tank top. I put on music. Midnight comes. Then one. Then two. Hollow, I finally fall asleep. Sometime later the door opens and I wake, my heart fluttering, but it is only my roommate, back from her night.
The next day, Zoë and I discuss David.
“Why are you wasting your time?” she asks, lying on her bed. I sit on the floor of her dorm room, drinking coffee. “He didn’t come see you when he said he would. He’s obviously an asshole.”
“Easy for you to say. You have a boyfriend.”
Zoë looks oddly at me. “How does that change David being an ass?”
I shrug. It just does. She has someone, I don’t. In my mind, this makes her worth more than me. I lean back on my hands, breathing out, and say aloud the thing that is always right there, the painful thing that guides me so unsteadily through my life: “I want a guy to want me. To really want me.”
“There are better guys here who can do that.” She says it as though it is that simple. In her world, I’m sure it is. She reaches for my coffee, and I give her a sip.
The boy on Long Beach Island comes to my mind, his dark, shadowy face hovering above mine.
“I want it too badly, though,” I say.
“You just haven’t met the right guy.”
I watch her, so confident in her logic. There are times I feel like I live in a different universe, as though I am watching other girls through a glass wall, these strange creatures who seem to know how to be loved.
“Give it some time,” she says. “We’ve only been here two weeks.”
I think of David, the way it felt to have his hands cradle my head when we kissed, the scratch of his stubble against my chin. All I know is I want that feeling again.
That night, early evening, while I am working on a paper, David shows up. He pulls me onto my bed and strips me down, takes out a condom from his back pocket. I am aware of the girls laughing and calling to one another in the hallway, aware too that my roommate could walk in at any time. In general, I feel no connection to these girls. They spent their first few weeks at college drinking for the first time and too much, winding up in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning. Their eyes widen with fascination at the mention of marijuana. Coming from sheltered lives, they gravitate toward being out of control, something that frightens me to no end. My roommate and I make fun of them as they steal baseball caps off the tops of boys’ heads and run away giggling. We call them childish. We think of ourselves as superior. But I know right now, under David’s thrusting body, there is nothing better about being me.
Afterward David says something about meeting friends for a late dinner, and he is gone.
I go to the bathroom to clean myself up. I remake my bed. I bring my paper back onto the screen. I do what I can to bring back normalcy.
The following weekend I see David at another party. He is with that girl again, the one who waited impatiently for him at the Pub. This time I notice a familiarity between them. She pulls something off his sweater. He pushes a curl off her face with his finger. They’re a couple, a couple that allows hookups with other people. This is nothing startling at a college campus. Casual sex is part of the culture, as is sexual exploration. But as much as I’d like to be the kind of person who can go with it, as much as I hoped I would be, I feel betrayed. Joining college culture hasn’t changed who I am.
When I tell Zoë this later, she laughs. “You weren’t betrayed,” she says. “He made it clear he wasn’t going to give you anything more when he dissed you that first night.”
To get my mind off David, I find another boy. Adam. Adam, with his lanky body and bright eyes. Adam, who laughs easily and who dances around the room without a trace of self-consciousness. We fool around in his house after a party, and then he walks me back to my room. Twice he calls me, which gives me hope, and then on my birthday he gives me red beaded earrings he bought at a street fair. I put them on immediately. I wear them every day. A week later, though, he stops calling.
Next is Dominic, who I meet on the boys’ side of Zoë’s dormitory hall. Dominic has a girlfriend at home with the same name as me. I know this, but I fuck him for a week anyway. We joke that if he calls out the wrong name, it really won’t be the wrong name. I see him at the campus gym and that Steely Dan song plays over the loudspeaker—I’m a fool to do your dirty work…. We catch each other’s eyes and laugh, but we don’t have sex again.
Then Wes, Dominic’s roommate. Once, Dominic walks in on us, but he just shrugs. “Getting my keys,” he says. “I’ll be out of your way in a sec.”
It continues like this, each boy anodyne to the last. I try not to think on it too much.
WINTER BREAK, I pack up my things and head down to New Jersey. As with all changes, I look forward to it, to the relief it promises to give me from myself. Snow, which was layered thickly on the sides of the Massachusetts Turnpike, all but disappears as I come back into the Tri-State area. Ugly, bare black trees are scattered in the landscape. Trucks shoot out thick bursts of black smoke as they merge into the slow traffic. I listen to music and smoke cigarettes, and out of boredom peer into other cars, looking for hot guys. I have a fantasy some gorgeous guy will see me, motion for me to pull over, and we’ll begin a long and meaningful relationship. It never occurs to me that long and meaningful relationships don’t start this way. But then, I have this fantasy just about everywhere—on a plane, in a restaurant, a bar, walking down the street. Someday, I figure, all the love songs and movies will be right, and love will find me. I do not understand at this point that real life is nothing like this.
Dad isn’t home from work, and the apartment is quiet. I leave my bag packed on my floor and call the Jennifers. I do not yet have the eerie sense, as I will in later years, that this is no longer my room, my stuff. James Dean posters still hang on the walls. The jewelry box on the dresser is stuffed with necklaces and bracelets I no longer wear. The bookshelf is packed with books from high school English classes and yearbooks. I don’t yet have the urge to look through my things with wonder as though they aren’t my own. For now, I feel I still belong here.
I leave Dad a note and go to Jennifer A’s. Her parents are divorced, and her father, who has remarried, left town for the holiday and gave her the keys to his house. We’re psyched.
When I arrive at Jennifer A’s, Jennifer C is already there, and we talk about our colleges, what it’s like to be home from college now, how different life feels. Jennifer C tells us about how cool her roommates are, and how they are already running the freshman class. I laugh and nod, but I’m aware of the old feeling I have with the Jennifers, of how smoothly they seem to own their lives, while I stand awkwardly outside my own. I want to believe college has changed me, made me more confident, but here now with the Jennifers, I see everything is the same as before.
Soon, two boys come. One I recognize. A long time ago, when we were in third grade, we were friends. His name is Charles, and he and Jennifer A became fast friends at college when she learned he dealt coke. The other one, Will, is Charles’s friend from high school. He and Jennifer have been sleeping together for the past week. Nothing serious, she tells me while they are out buying beer. Just having fun. Jennifer, I have come to realize, is one of those girls. She walks with confidence. She says whatever she wants without having to run the words first through her mind, trying them out. She really doesn’t want anything more from boys but to have fun. She used to be anorexic, and she does cocaine almost every day. She definitely has her painful wants and longings, like me. But when it comes to boys, she would rather keep them at arm’s length, out of her immediate space. This combined with her relaxed grace and beauty makes her immensely desirable.
I am so jealous I could die.
When Charles and Will return, we settle back onto Jennifer’s father’s couch and lay out lines of coke.
“I remember now,” Charles says to me. “You had that cool football game that vibrated and moved the little men around the board.”
I laugh, remembering. We were eight years old. I had handed him one of those little men while we played that day at my house, and our hands had touched. It had been one of my first exciting moments with a boy, the electricity of our hands touching, the possibility in that spark. I don’t recount any of that though, doubting it was the same for him. “We’ve come a long way from that football game, haven’t we?” I nod toward the white powder on the table, and he laughs too.
Will glances between us. “You guys know each other?”
“We went to elementary school together.” Charles chops the powder with an American Express. “She was one of the few cool girls there.”
I smile at Charles for that, and when I look at Will, he’s looking back. Will has the same air of relaxation Jennifer does. He knows he’s hot. He can sleep with any number of beautiful girls. He pushes his long blond hair behind an ear and smiles at me, a slow, sexy smile. A smile suggesting more, and my heart quickens.
“Very cool,” he says.
The next night, we do the same thing. And the next night, again. Once, Will and Jennifer disappear into her bedroom, but they come out less than an hour later, ready for more lines. On our fourth night, we are all so cozy with each other, having snorted and smoked and talked so much, we lean against one another, piled into the bend of the sectional couch. I am enjoying myself. I belong, a part of things, here with the Jennifers. I don’t need a boy’s hands on me, for once in my life. Until one is on me.
Will’s hand, in the tangle of our bodies. He slips a hand beneath my leg where there is a hole in my jeans, and he runs his fingers along the exposed skin. Igniting my need, awakening that part of me. I glance at Jennifer, but she doesn’t see. Neither does Jennifer C or Charles. It is between Will and me, our secret. His secret desire for me. I like that. And something else. Something I am less eager to admit. Jennifer, for all her perfection, is not enough for him. But maybe I could be.
Around one in the morning, I put on my coat to go home, and Will surprises me by asking for a ride.
Jennifer, who has just lit a cigarette, looks at him as he stands.
“You’re not staying over?” It is a casual question, but I recognize the hint of worry in her voice. Maybe Jennifer isn’t as free as I thought. Maybe she sometimes feels like I do, waiting, always waiting for a boy to save her.
Will shakes his head. He doesn’t hear her anxiety. Or else he doesn’t care. He reaches for his army jacket. “I have to get home,” he says.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I say to Jennifer as Will follows me to the door.
We listen to music as we drive through the dark streets. I am so tired my body aches. A few hours ago I started refusing lines, knowing I needed to give my body a rest. I love the way cocaine makes me feel. It’s the opposite of most every other drug I’ve tried, all of which made me feel out of control. Cocaine centers me. It tightens time, brings everything around me into sharp focus. Lots of people take drugs to loosen up. Not me. I want to be pulled together. I want to look around and feel that I know everything I see. Cocaine does this. It erases the questions. I feel confident, resolved, so unlike the unsteadiness I usually feel. When the high wears off, everything is blurry again. Uncertain. Worse, the only thing you want to do is sleep, and you can’t. I had been unable to sleep until three or four in the morning each night, and then slept until noon. I was waking to have coffee and a bagel with Dad, then heading out to Jennifer’s again a few hours later. I was ready to take a day off, maybe go shopping with Dad.
Will directs me through the streets of Englewood, my high school’s wealthy town, until he tells me to slow in front of a large, modern ranch.
“Thanks for the ride,” he says. He clicks off the seat belt.
“I guess I’ll see you back at Jennifer’s.”
He nods, but he doesn’t get out. I wait, the air growing thick between us.
“Well,” he says. “Good night.”
He leans toward me for what I assume is a good-bye kiss on the cheek, but his lips land on mine. I kiss back, and his hands go to my back, my waist, my legs. I put my hands in his hair, pulling him toward me. We pull apart and start to laugh.
“What the hell was that?” I ask.
“Oh, come on,” he says, reaching for me. “It was bound to happen.”
I smile.
“Take me home with you.”
On the drive to my apartment, he keeps his hands on my body. He finds the hole in my jeans again.
“You wore these purposely to make me crazy.”
“What are you talking about?” I laugh. I am high, no longer tired. I’m not thinking about Jennifer. No way. I’m not thinking at all.
We barely make it to my bed before our clothes are off.
After sex, he falls asleep beside me, but I toss and turn, unable to drop fully into deep sleep. I am too energized, overwhelmed by what I’ve done.
Late morning we wake, and I drive him home. He kisses me on the mouth when we reach his house.
“What about Jennifer?” I ask.
“What about her?”
“Aren’t you guys sleeping together?”
He shrugs. “It was nothing. She won’t care.”
It was nothing. Sex with Jennifer was nothing. Maybe, after me, he doesn’t want to do it with Jennifer anymore.
I think of Jennifer the night before, the way her voice went up just slightly when she asked if he was staying. “You can’t tell her. She’d hate me.”
He smiles, not bothered at all. “No problem.”
I call Jennifer later, just to force myself to be normal.
“You have to come back tonight,” she says when I tell her I’m staying in. “It won’t be the same without you.”
I light a cigarette, the guilt digging at me. Will most certainly will be back there tonight, and this frightens me. Regardless of his use of past tense, I don’t have any idea of his intentions, if he’ll have sex with Jennifer again now that we’ve had sex. I am smart enough to know it would be good for me to stay away, let Will wonder about me. But if I do, I know I’ll wind up pacing the apartment and smoking, frustrated I can’t control what’s happening over there. Plus, Jennifer’s words feel good. Maybe I matter to her, to all of them. I blow out a long stream of smoke.
“OK,” I say. “I’ll come for a little while.”
I don’t want to think too much about Jennifer after we hang up, so I wander out to the living room. Dad is there, smoking too, the TV on. I sit beside him.
“I haven’t seen you much since you’ve been home.” He stubs out his cigarette. The smoke sits in a hazy cloud above us. Someone is always smoking in this apartment.
When Tyler and I first moved here six years ago, I brought home a kitten from a friend’s house. I didn’t ask Dad. I knew not to. Dad had already made us give away our cat. Right after we moved her to a friend’s house, she ran away, traumatized, and no one ever saw her again. I hated him for that, for letting Tyler and me lose our cat on top of everything else we lost that year. And I figured if I didn’t ask, just let him see how cute it was and how much I loved it, he would let me keep it. But I was wrong. Dad didn’t want a cat he said he knew he’d wind up having to take care of eventually. I begged to keep it, but Dad refused and he drove us to the pound to give it away. I wouldn’t talk to him the whole way there. In the short time it had been living with us, it had developed a wheeze. I didn’t think much of it until the man at the pound asked whether it was the cat or me breathing like that. I could tell by the man’s expression he would have to put it to sleep. I screamed and cried, but Dad made me hand over the kitten. I figured the cat had gotten sick living with Dad’s constant smoke, and I hated him even more.
Now that seems far away. I settle back into the couch, looking at the game he has on the television. “I’ve been busy,” I tell him. “With friends.”
“Why don’t you have your friends come over here?”
I light another cigarette. I don’t really want it, but I’m annoyed.
“Because,” I say, “we want to hang out somewhere else.”
He smiles, not catching my mood. “I like it when your friends come over. It’s fun.”
Dad thinks I’m proud when he hangs around my friends, trying to get laughs, telling me later which ones he thinks are cute, but it’s embarrassing. Once, after he sat with my friends while they passed around a joint in the living room, I told him to get out and he pouted. Another time he came crawling into the living room on his hands and knees, just to be silly. I wish he would just leave us alone like a normal parent. I want to say, “Get your own damn friends,” but what I say is, “Well, they’re not coming.”
His smile drops. “I’m just trying to have a normal conversation with you.”
“Is that what this is?” I ask, smart-mouthed.
“You’ve got quite an attitude for someone who prances through here just to eat and sleep.” When I don’t answer he says, “So glad you could come home for the holidays.” And he leaves me there alone.
At Jennifer’s that evening I try to act ordinary. Having Will near me, knowing there is something between us, something no one else knows, is electrifying. We pass each other to go to the bathroom or get a drink, and the movement of the air between us makes my throat flutter. Our knees touch when we’re on the couch. Our eyes meet every so often. The arousal is so strong, my guilt fizzles beneath it. I can’t wait to get him alone, and I don’t have to. I take him home again that night, and the next one as well.
“You’re not going to sleep with Jennifer again?” I ask a few nights later in my bed. I’m still amazed he’s chosen me over her.
“Nah.”
“Just me?”
He laughs, not at all bothered by the neediness I’m so bad at keeping hidden.
“Just you,” he says, and pushes my knee, opening my legs again. I spread them willingly, thrilled.
Back at school, I tell Zoë. She listens wide-eyed and laughs, and I tell her she cannot tell Jennifer C, no matter what.
“Why?” We are in her room, as usual, eating the chocolate-chip granola bars she and her roommate keep stashed in a desk drawer. She eats these instead of candy when she wants something sweet, but I know she’ll probably feel bad about it later and make herself throw up. Sticking her fingers down her throat is apparently not new for her. She held off for the first few months, perhaps hoping to be someone different when she first got to college, like me. She is not secretive about it. Not at all. In fact, she urges her friends to join her. “It makes you feel so much better,” she says. But I hang back in the room when they head down to the bathroom. I like the idea of controlling my weight, but puking doesn’t make me feel any better, only out of control.
“I stole him from Jennifer,” I explain now. “They’ll hate me.”
“He wasn’t her boyfriend,” she says, opening another bar.
“That doesn’t matter.” I know I can’t make Zoë understand the way it is with the Jennifers. There’s them, and then there’s me. It’s always been that way. “Just don’t say anything,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “All right.”
But I wish I hadn’t told.
Will and I speak a few times by phone, and I do my best to keep it light. Still, I push things just enough to make plans to see him at Columbia University over a weekend.
I drive back down to New Jersey, where Dad is away for the weekend, and leave Will a message from the apartment. I take a shower and do my makeup. I turn up my stereo to drown out the quiet. The old anxiety is with me, the feeling I’ll be left here wanting, that he’s changed his mind. But he calls back an hour later, and soon I am on my way into the city.
He meets me in the lobby of his dorm and we go to a party. Like the university, the party is far up on the West Side, not far from the Port Authority Bus Terminal where I went with Liz and Ashley to meet Milo all those years ago. We enter a building and take the elevator to someone’s apartment. College students in cocktail dresses and button-down shirts fill the rooms. No one dresses up like this for parties at Clark. I stand on the sidelines in my jeans and cowboy boots, gripping a sweaty beer bottle that is lukewarm after half an hour. I do my best to act nonchalant, like I’m not uncomfortable at all. I watch Will chat with friends. He introduces me a few times, checks to make sure I’m OK. He’s nice enough.
I want to get back to his room, though, where we can take off our clothes, all his attention on just me. Just you, he told me that time. I remember that, cling to it, as I sit on a brown, velvety couch and wait. When I told Zoë about us, I made it sound like we had something special, something that rose above the betrayal of Jennifer. Our connection was irresistible. I told the story like a movie plot, like About Last Night where Demi Moore and Rob Lowe give in to difficult love, where, as much as they try, two people can’t deny the forces that bring them together.
Finally, around midnight we walk back to his dorm. He and his roommate, who is conveniently gone for the weekend, sleep in bunk beds, and Will directs me to the top bunk. I go first to the bathroom, my eyes averted from anyone in the halls. This is a boys’ floor. No one knows me, and I’m obviously here for one reason. I brush my teeth quickly and throw some water on my face, and then I rush back to Will’s room. When I get there, he’s lying on the bottom bunk. My stomach is hollow as I climb the ladder to the top bunk. I feel out of place, like I shouldn’t be here at all.
After a minute Will comes up to join me and we have sex. He jams his hips into mine, moving like a jackhammer. Was this what our sex was like before? I can’t recall. I barely enjoy it. When he’s done he climbs back down the ladder, leaving me there on the strange-smelling sheets in the darkness. He says something about the beds being too small, some apologetic comment, but his words make no difference. I can see I’m an utter fool.
Back at school, I hang around Zoë’s room. I try to focus on my schoolwork. I get the flu and stay in bed for three days. I am sick, but more, I am sick of myself. Sick of my desperation and emptiness. Sick of the constant defeat. I am convinced if someone will just love me I will be able to focus on something else. I’ll be able to enjoy my life. I’ll feel whole and real, released from this weight.
One evening, I head down Zoë’s hall to the boys’ side. Eli is in his room with a few of the other guys. I know Eli is attracted to me. I have thought about the possibility of liking him back. He’s a good-looking, sweet boy from a little town in Maine. Even though I slept with half the guys on his hall, he never wavered from treating me with respect and kindness. But for some reason I can’t pinpoint, I’m not attracted to him. Perhaps it’s his kindness, which I am not used to. Or else I don’t like the insecurity I see in him, too much like my own. Or maybe it’s just the outdated way he wears his hair. Whatever it is, I am determined to push through it. I want to be loved, and Eli might be the one to finally do so.
I flirt with him, and by the end of the night we are in his bed. He is both skilled and tender as a lover, which surprises me. It is a nice night, a really nice night, but I leave the next morning without the crazy feeling I usually get when I like someone. As much as I want to, I don’t feel drawn to him.
Two days later, Eli knocks at my door. He is flustered and upset, and he tells me he has some things to say. I sit on my bed as he pulls a piece of scrap paper from his back pocket and starts reading from it. How we had this night together and then I just disappeared. How we were friends first and this matters to him. How he wants to be closer to me but I don’t seem willing to let him in.
I blink, put a hand to my mouth. No one has ever spoken like this to me. No one has ever thought of me long enough to write down notes about what they want to say. I reach for his hand and pull him down beside me. I kiss him hard on the mouth.
Eli and I date for the rest of the school year. We go to SweetTreats for ice cream, or we go to the Lebanese restaurant for falafel. We shop together at the health-food store for food. We spend lots of time cuddling on his bed watching rented videos, and his roommate sleeps in friends’ dorm rooms to give us time alone. Everything is “we.” I love to use the word. I make a point of it whenever I can. We saw that movie already. We can hang out with you Friday. I’m comfortable, almost content. This is such a new feeling, to be loved, no longer wracked all the time with wanting, no longer nervously searching for a boy. I feel for the first time like a normal girl. I’m happy and self-contained. I finally inhabit the other side of the glass wall.
There is another feeling, however. Somehow, I am not committed yet to the relationship. Eli is not enough. Before summer starts we decide we will visit each other as much as possible, but I am also hoping to see Will, maybe even Heath. I still want those boys I can’t really have, and with Eli around the wanting feels more like just that—wanting, not need. It is as though he fills my hunger just enough to keep me from feeling ravenous when I go up to fill my plate at the buffet. This is selfish, I realize. What’s more, it makes no sense. I’ve been claiming I want one boy to love me, which Eli is willing to do, yet now that I have it, now that I’m experiencing how good it feels, I won’t step fully inside.
The morning after I get home to New Jersey, I have to leave for a cruise with Mom, her new boyfriend, my grandparents, and Tyler. I do not want to go at all, but like all things with Mom, what I want doesn’t matter. The cruise is to celebrate my grandfather’s eightieth birthday, and if I don’t go, no one in the family would forgive me. Mom already considers me the selfish one.
I leave messages for the Jennifers, anxious to have some fun before I have to leave. I know there is a party that evening where all of our high school friends can reunite. But strangely, no one calls me back. Finally, I get a friend, John, on the phone, and he agrees to drive out to the party with me.
When we get there, I see the Jennifers. Everyone is in the big backyard, which has a cement patio and a fountain. I walk toward the Jennifers, full of excitement, but they turn their backs and walk the other way. I stop, my throat closing.
Zoë told.
I get myself a beer and hug a few other friends. I feel nauseous and twitchy, unable to focus. I take a breath and head toward them again, this time making them stop.
“Let me explain,” I say to them.
They wait, scowls on their faces. Jennifer A keeps her eyes on the grass, not even meeting my eyes.
“I shouldn’t have done it, I know.”
Jennifer C twists her mouth in disgust. “You lied.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” I look at Jennifer A. She’s the one I need to apologize to most, but she still won’t look up.
“We could never trust you again,” says Jennifer B.
I press my lips together, trying not to cry. That’s when Jennifer A finally looks up.
“I thought you were my friend,” she says.
Tears pop into my eyes. I want to tell her I was her friend. I didn’t want her to get hurt. But for all the ways I tried to make it OK, thinking she preferred to keep boys at bay, thinking she chose cocaine over intimacy with boys, thinking she could have anyone she wanted, I knew that wasn’t true. I knew she needed to feel chosen just as much as I did. It was easy to romanticize what was happening, to make up some bullshit story about our love. The truth is, Will and I had nothing. Will was just one more attempt to fill my ugly emptiness, and this time it was at the cost of my friend. I hadn’t thought of her at all. I was self-absorbed and insensitive. I cared about no one but myself. I close my eyes, knowing this. There is nothing I can say, nothing that will change the sickening truth of what I did. I’m as disgusted with myself as they are. The three of them walk away.
I find John to let him know he’ll need to get another ride, and I speed home, crying the whole way. Back in the apartment I immediately call Eli, who tells me he’s coming down to see me. I stay awake, smoking cigarette after cigarette, until he arrives at three a.m. and holds me until I have to leave for the cruise four hours later.