And besides, why was it right, why was it so goddamn reasonable, for Martha to have a boyfriend and me not to, for her to be senior prefect and me to be nobody? I literally wasn’t anything, not a chapel prefect or yearbook editor or sports captain (Martha, also, was captain of crew). The summer after our junior year, I had gone through a class list to try to find anyone similarly undistinguished and had come up with only two other people: Nicole Aufwenschwieder and Dan Ponce. Both of them were less than boring‑they were practically invisible.
In the dining hall, before we split up to find our separate tables, Martha said, “Divide and conquer,” and I detested her for being both ordinary and lucky, when most people at Ault were lucky and lucky, or ordinary and ordinary.
When Cross came the second time, I believed it was because waves of desire were rolling off my body and across the courtyard between our dorms. It was a Saturday morning‑it was around one o’clock, I think, because Martha had already gone to bed. She usually stayed up later than I did, studying, then woke me when she’d turned out the light so we could talk. When Cross showed up, this had happened already and we’d both gone to sleep.
He was all the way in the room this time before I awakened, crouching over my bed with his hand on my arm. “Lee,” he was whispering. “Lee‑it’s me.” I opened my eyes and smiled, and it wasn’t a smile where you choose it or not. Before he even climbed into bed, he leaned down and kissed me on the mouth and then we were kissing and kissing and I realized that this was what kissing was, this was why people liked it‑the perfect sliminess of each other’s tongues. I wasn’t sure of the exact moment he lowered himself onto me.
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 li
ke 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?
The third time Cross came over, he was half‑lying on me, our arms were already tangled (it surprised me how sloppy hooking up was, and how this was one of the good parts: how your bodies did not become sleek and precise, as in a synchronized swimming routine, but how they remained your bodies‑your arm still hurt if the other person’s weight was distributed the wrong way, your nose could bump his collarbone, and this clumsiness made me feel at home, like Cross and I were friends) when I said to him, “We can’t stay in here. We can’t‑” and then he cut me off by kissing me and I said, “No, Cross, really‑” and then we were kissing more and then I heard Martha roll over, and I said, “Just follow me. Get up and follow me.”
Stepping into the brightly lit hall was terrible. I had pulled him out of bed, tugging him across the room, but when I’d opened the door we’d lost physical contact and to be in the light, not touching at all, was hideous; I missed him, and I also felt self‑conscious because he was behind me. Was my hair sticking up in back, and really, did Cross even know what I looked like in the light? I certainly wasn’t about to turn around, face‑to‑face, and show him.
“Wait up,” he mumbled as he followed me, and then I opened the door to the day student room. The room had one window, with the shade up, and light from a lamppost outside made it possible to see. On the bed was a sleeping bag and I lay on it, and then I sat up and reached for Cross and he was on top of me again, his khaki pants and belt buckle, the buttons down his shirt, my face at the side of his neck, just below his left ear, his stubble and how good he smelled and how warm he always was and how much I liked to be with him. I already recognized, even then, the sadness of another person lying on top of you. They will always leave (what’s someone going to do, just lie there forever?) and that’s the sad part. You can always feel the imminent loss.
It seemed to me, and it kept seeming like this for a long time, that this was what it was to love a boy‑to feel consumed. I’d awaken in the morning, without him, thinking, I love you so much, Cross. Knowing that other people would not consider what went on between us to be love‑of course they wouldn’t‑only made me more certain. When he arrived at night, tapping my shoulder in the dark, then the two of us walking down the hall to the day student room, then finally being in bed again, our bodies overlapping, my arms around his back‑that was one of the times when not telling him I loved him required willpower. Also when he was about to leave. I loved him so much! Later, with other guys, I’d think, Do I? Is this what it feels like? Does love feel different with different people? But with Cross, I never wondered. There was nothing about him I didn’t like. The other guys, guys in my future, were maybe also tall but as slim as girls, they listened to classical music and drank wine and liked modern art, and they seemed to me like sissies. Or we had enough to say to each other to fill an evening, we could go to a baseball game, but it never stopped being an effort. Or their fingers were‑not stubby, but not long and sure. If I kissed these guys, I’d wonder if it would turn out to be an obligation, if I was moving forward into a situation from which I’d later have to extricate myself. It’s not that they were unattractive, they weren’t boring. But I never thought of what Cross wasn’t, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn’t even care what we talked about. It was never a compromise.
Or maybe for him it was. But it never was for me.
If people asked, which not many did, I said I was staying on campus for long weekend to work on college applications. Really, I was staying at school because school was the place of Cross. He was leaving, of course‑I knew, not because we’d talked about it but because I’d listened to a conversation in the dining hall, that he and a few other guys were going to Newport to stay with Devin’s mother and stepfather‑but at least school would be the place he’d been and was coming back to, whereas Martha’s house in Burlington, where I’d gone every long weekend since freshman year, would only be a detour; all I’d be doing was waiting to leave.
Martha was taking the bus, a bus I’d been on with her many times, and just before she caught the one from Ault that would transport her and other students into Boston and leave them off at South Station, she stood facing me in the room. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” she said. “I promise I won’t distract you.”
“It’s better for me to stay here,” I said. “But tell your parents hi.”
Martha looked at me. “You’re okay, right? Nothing’s wrong?”
“Go,” I said and hugged her. “You’ll miss the bus.”
I was relieved as I watched the buses pull away. In the room alone, I lay on the futon, not reading, not sleeping, not even shutting my eyes, and I thought of Cross. I thought of him otherwise, of course, but it was while I was doing things, and when I tried to think of him at night, I usually fell asleep; but lying alone on the futon was almost like meditating. Everything that had happened between us, every comment he’d made, each way he’d touched me, I could now think about for longer than the thing had taken to occur.
For a while, I was glad it was getting dark, glad that campus was mostly empty‑the only people who stayed around for long weekend were the ones who didn’t get invited somewhere, or were too poor to travel, or both. There was a long weekend every term, and as a freshman, I’d stayed on campus for all three, though it was hard to remember how I’d spent them‑reading magazines probably, and waiting for it to be time to go to a meal, and feeling isolated. But maybe this was the beginning of my luck, maybe from now on, I’d get what I wanted most, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever want anything more than I wanted Cross.
He had been coming over for three weeks by then, and we’d almost had sex. A few nights before, we’d both had all our clothes off, and his penis had been jabbing at me not so it hurt but so it felt like something I wanted. I had opened my legs to him and neither of us had spoken because if we did, it could only be to acknowledge what was happening.
Finally, I said, “Do you‑”
He was kissing my shoulder. He did not say anything but I could feel him listening.
The moment stretched. He propped himself up to look at me. My hands had been set on either side of his rib cage, but I became self‑conscious and pulled my arms in, as if to block a ball from hitting my chest. He moved my arms, first one, then the other, and set them at my sides. I liked this
about him, how he didn’t let me get away with things. If it was like we were starting from the beginning every time, it wasn’t that I was testing him. It was more like needing proof: You want to be here; you want to touch me. In these moments, when I was stiff or bashful, he’d say, “No shyness,” and burrow into me, and shyness seemed such a generous word for it.
“Do I what?” he said. He was smiling.
What could I ever say to equal Cross’s face above mine, Cross’s smile? Down below, the stabbing was milder now, but both of us were still moving.
He settled back onto me and said, “You have the softest hair in the world,” which was a compliment I loved. Because I couldn’t control it, it seemed true, not like if I were wearing perfume and he said I smelled good.
He was nudging my legs further apart, starting to enter, and I felt the first flash of not actual pain but anticipatory pain. But I didn’t know I was resisting until he said, “What?” Then he said, “It’s cool,” which I thought for a split second was his way of reassuring me that it was okay if I didn’t want to go through with it. But that wasn’t what he meant‑he was still easing my legs open with his own.
“I just don’t think‑” I said, and then he stopped. It was good he stopped, and also a letdown. I wanted to say that I was sorry, but I knew I shouldn’t. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” I said.
“Does that mean you do want to?”
In a small voice, I said, “Yes.”
“Then what’s wrong?” He asked it softly, not accusingly.
I didn’t say anything.
“Are you afraid it’ll hurt?”
I sometimes wondered if Cross knew just how inexperienced I was; this question indicated that he did, or at least that he knew I was a virgin.
“I’ll go really slow,” he said.
“We don’t even have a condom.”