What do you call it when you know when somebody has class and what material their next test is about, and they know when you’re going to be working and how many hours it is since you slept, so they bring you all your favorite junk food to help keep you going?
Caroline and I were friends.
I was lying about it.
I told her I wasn’t going to touch her, but I touched her every chance I got. Brushed my arm against hers. Leaned into her with my knee. When she turned her back, I checked out her ass and thought about how it would feel in my hands. When she leaned over the table, kneading, I looked down her shirt.
I’d find reasons to get inside her personal space. I’d watch her skin get pink and patchy, and I’d love it.
I wasn’t any kind of saint. Even though I couldn’t have her, I did my best to make her want me. I made sure she was thinking about me, and I didn’t stop when I found out she wanted to ask out some guy she’d met playing rugby.
I ramped it up.
I treated her like she belonged to me, even though I wouldn’t have her and I wouldn’t let her have me, either.
I told Caroline to admit how she was feeling—how she was really feeling—but when she’d ask me, “What’s on your mind?” I wouldn’t say, I’m worried about my mom because she said her back went out and I think she must be missing shifts at the prison. If she gets fired, she’s going to get whiny, and Bo’s never been around her when she’s like that. He might dump her for being a useless drag—which she is, I swear, my mother whines like nobody else alive—and if that happens, I’ll have to go back home.
What would be the point?
I was two different people, and only one of them was real. The real West Leavitt lived in a trailer in Silt, Oregon. He talked to me all day long. Check on your mom. Make sure she gets groceries so Frankie’s got something decent to eat. Pick up another shift at the library, because you never know. You just never know.
Whereas the guy I was in Iowa—he was the clothes I put on to get where I needed to go. He was me, pretending to be the kind of person Caroline has been every minute of her life.
Whoever you are when you’re born, you can’t just shake that off. We like to pretend we can. That’s the American dream, right? No limits. But the truth is, you might get rich, but you can’t buy the way rich people are. You can’t just put the right clothes on and belong. You’re still going to think like a poor kid, dream like one, want like one. You’ll still flinch every time another student asks you, So what does your dad do? or Where are you going for break?
It’s hard work, teaching yourself not to flinch. Learning to be someone you’re not.
That’s what I was doing at Putnam. I was working. I wasn’t there for laughs, or to party, or to find the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I was there to make the rest of my life happen, and it was a full-time project.
People like Caroline don’t have to worry about the groceries or the rent. They can assume all that shit’s taken care of, and then they just have to figure out what they want and go for it.
Where I’m from, assuming you’re going to get into med school is like assuming you can walk on water. It’s a fairy tale, and people who believe in fairy tales are idiots.
I didn’t get to Putnam assuming anything. I got there on the charity of a rich alum whose wife I fucked.
I knew what I was doing. I would have done it again.
I hated it, but I would have done it.
I hated lying to Caroline, but I lied to her. If I’d told her the truth, it would’ve broken her heart.
I couldn’t have her. That was the truth.
I could only have this one thing, if I worked hard enough. Nothing else.
Caroline texts me on Saturday. What are you doing?
I’ve been sleeping.
I woke up at dawn and walked around campus in a fog—a literal fog, I mean, the air full of thick white mist—and felt like some lost ghost haunting the place. I stayed out there too long, not dressed right for the wet invasiveness of the weather.
When I came back to the apartment, I was shuddering, and it was so fucking quiet that I got this creepy feeling, like maybe I didn’t exist at all. I got out my phone and scrolled through yesterday’s texts from Caroline and Frankie and my mom.
It’s Thanksgiving break, I told myself. Not the apocalypse.
But I still felt strange. I sat on my bed, staring out at the fog, and polished off the last few inches in Krishna’s bottle of butterscotch schnapps.
I stared at the ceiling until I fell asleep.
When Caroline’s text wakes me up, the phone says it’s four o’clock, but it takes me a few seconds to figure out that means afternoon. I slept all day. My fingers are stiff, my mouth tastes like garbage, and my dick is half hard for no reason.
Nothing. You?
The phone rings. It’s her. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“You sound sleepy. Did I wake you up?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry. I can go. You go back to sleep. I know this is, like, your one big chance to be lazy.”
“It’s all right. How’s your break going?” We’ve only exchanged a few texts since she left on Wednesday. I haven’t known what to say to her. She’s pissed at me. I’m pissed at myself. I think we’d be better off not seeing each other at all, but if we’re going to stop, it’s going to have to be her who stops it.
“Okay, I guess. I mean, Thanksgiving was okay. Now everybody’s gone, and it kind of sucks.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Janelle and her fiancé already went home. My dad went over to some friends of our family’s in Marshalltown.”
“He left you home by yourself?”
“He wanted me to go with him, but I didn’t feel like it.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Late, I guess. It’s for dinner, but this friend is a judge, too, and they usually drink after dinner and sit around telling judge stories for hours.”
“Huh. So what are you up to?”
“Nothing.” She makes this soft sound, kind of laughing at herself. “I’m bored. Three days off school, and I officially have no idea what to do with myself. Plus, I’m lying on my bed in my room, which hasn’t changed since high school, so I kind of feel like I’m in this weird time warp, like I never went to college at all, and nothing that happened at Putnam was real.”
I reach down to adjust myself. I’m picturing her on her bed, and it’s not helping the hard-on situation. In real life she’s probably got her sweats on and her hair in one of those floppy-mess ponytails, but in my head she’s wearing that pajama top from the first night at the bakery, white panties, and nothing else. Lacy panties—the kind that go down over her hips like shorts, her pussy a pink shadow underneath.
“But then you wouldn’t be talking to me,” I say. “Since you know me from Putnam.”
“Yeah. It still kind of feels like that, though.”
“Like what?”
There’s a hitch in my breathing. I’ve got my hand on my cock, stroking.
Fuck. I shouldn’t. She’s interested in another guy, and I’m an asshole. I shouldn’t.
But I don’t stop. I haven’t heard her voice in a few days. I’ve been alone so much, I’m not sure I can stop. My hand is dry and hot, pulling so hard it’s almost cruel.
“Not real,” she says. “Like my worlds are colliding, only not, like, colliding. More like mingling or something?”
“Are you sober?”
She laughs. “I am. That just makes it weirder. Are you?”
“Yeah, why?”
The reason I’m picturing those white panties so vividly is she wore them in one of the pictures online.
I know her pussy is pink beneath those panties, shaved, because I’ve seen it.
I don’t deserve to be her friend.
I have to stop.
“Your voice is all scratchy,” she says. “You don’t sound like you.”
I’m not who you think I am.
I’m an asshole with my hand on my cock, picturing you, because I want you.
I want you all the goddamn time, and it’s making everything impossible.
“Who do I sound like?”
She’s quiet for a second, and then she laughs again, shy now. “I don’t know.”
I want her to say something dirty. I want this to be phone sex, for Caroline to tell me she’s blowing me, I’m fucking her, she never wants me to stop.
I’m loathsome.
It only makes my hand jerk faster.
“Tell me what your room looks like,” I say.
Tell me what you’re wearing. Tell me what you want me to do to you.
So she describes it—purple walls painted when she was eleven, a desk that she got in trouble for carving her name into, a daybed, whatever the fuck that is—and I turn my face away from the phone so she can’t hear my breath, broken.
“West?”
“Yeah?” I sound strange. I’ve lost track of everything but the sound of her voice and the slick flesh moving under my palm.
“Will you come, West?”
The sound of my name, the way her voice wraps around it. The breathy intimacy of her request. She wants me with her, and I do come. All over my hand.
“Sure.” I’m so wrecked, I have to clear my throat and try again. “Sure, yeah, I’ll come.”
It’s only when I’m getting in the car, asking her for directions, that I understand what a terrible idea this is.
By then it’s too late to back out.
“Boost me,” she says, and she giggles. Actually giggles, like a kid. “C’mon, West! Give me a boost!”
She’s got her hands on the roof, one foot denting the gutter—though it’s already pretty trashed at that spot, she must always go up this way—and her ass wiggling in my face. I’m pushed up against the railing of this tiny balcony off Caroline’s bedroom on the second story of her giant house, the cold of the metal seeping through my coat, wondering how I got myself into this insane situation.
She slips, shrieks, and knocks against me, hard. Without thinking, I get an arm around her waist, the fingers of my other hand wrapped tight around the rail. I wonder how this balcony is attached to the house. A few bolts? What’s the weight limit? What’s this fucking thing for, anyway? It’s not as if she’s going to string the laundry out her window to dry.
“You’re crazy,” I tell her, but she just laughs.
“I’ve done this a zillion times. Give me a boost, and I’ll help you up.”
“It’s November.”
“There’s no snow or ice. The stars are good up here. Come on.”
I figure either I help her up on the roof or I spend the next hour of my life trying to talk her out of it. Plus, if we keep trying to do this her way, we’re going to end up dead.
She’s already got her foot up again, her ass pressing into my groin. My hands grip her hips automatically, guiding that sweet, soft pressure right where I want it.
I’ve forgotten all about helping her up, but Caroline finds purchase with her other foot, and then she’s gone, up, up, and away.
I’ve just helped a stoned girl onto the roof of her suburban mansion. After getting her stoned.
I’m going to hell for this.
Her hand is in front of my face now, white and small. “I’ll help you up.”
“I can do it. Move over.”
Her hand disappears. I climb up. She’s flopped onto her back, looking at the sky. The black coat she’s wearing kind of disappears into the dark shingles, and the moonlight catches the row of silver buttons like a landing strip that leads to her smile and the sparkles in her knit cap.