Someone Else's Love Story

  This nun was in her sixties, at least. She didn’t look a thing like pretty Bridget Ashe, but I had this odd swoop of angry vertigo, because the second I saw her, I was positive Bridget had sent her. Why? To warn me off? Or to give me some kind of permission?

  But how would Bridget even know that I was here?

  The nun wasn’t looking at me, anyway. She didn’t even seem to be looking for me. She came abreast of me, walking briskly with her head down to pick her way across the uneven ground. She didn’t even notice my staring. Perhaps a lot of ­people stared. She was a nun who still wore the hat.

  So she didn’t have a message for me. Maybe she was the message. I blinked hard and squinted, half thinking I had invented her, but the nun was still there, still going by. Maybe she didn’t have a damn thing to do with Bridget Ashe. The world held a crap ton of nuns. There were probably thousands in Atlanta alone, hunting for lepers to care for, or eating ice cream. Doing whatever the hell nuns did. I’d never noticed them before because I’d never exactly been on the lookout for them. Why would I be?

  But no matter how hard I told myself that this was a coincidence, I did not believe it. It felt like that word William had said to me in the Circle K, after he took the bullet. It felt like destiny, or the answer to a prayer I hadn’t even yet been saying.

  Was this what a real miracle looked like? I wouldn’t know. I was the girl whose life had been upended by an ugly, purely human virgin birth. Today, I’d gotten an equally shitty version of the resurrection when Bridget opened the purple door and came to sit with me in her own garden.

  If this was a different kind of miracle, I was letting it walk past me. At that thought, I found myself rising. I hurried, angling to catch up to her. The closer I got, the more the movement toward her felt inadvertent, like she was made purely out of magnet. As I came up beside her I saw she had a sprinkle of flossy lady whiskers on her upper lip, and the rest of her skin looked like parchment paper, folded and refolded until it was creasy and soft. I stepped around and blocked her way, but then I didn’t know what to say to her.

  She stopped walking and said, “Yes?”

  I didn’t know how to address her. In the movies, when ­people talk to nuns, they say “sister,” but it felt way too disco to say “sister.”

  “Ma’am,” I said, instead. “I’m sorry. This might be too personal, or even rude to ask a nun, but my friend is . . .” I stopped. Bridget Ashe was not my friend, and I had no idea how to explain William. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to say to her. I opened my mouth, and an unplanned question came out of me. “Could you have been anything else, besides a nun? Could you have married a person or just not been one?”

  She tilted her head to a quizzical angle, but she answered me. “I was called to this life, but it was my choice to answer.” I stood there like an idiot, nodding at her for fifteen, maybe twenty seconds. She finally added, like she was encouraging me, “I’m sorry. I’m late already, unless . . . Did you need something else?”

  I didn’t know, but I shook my head no, anyway.

  “Do you need to talk to someone?” She was beaming the kind eyes at me, still. Was this a nun thing? An endless supply of exhausting, kind gazes?

  I shook my head again. “Thank you.”

  She started walking past me, but she glanced over her shoulder at me as she headed away toward whatever she was late for. Bridget had taught English to illegal aliens, to prostitutes, back when she was a pre-­nun. Maybe this nun had a job like that to get to; she’d picked up her brisk pace again. From the back, I could see her shoulders were beginning to round down into the kind of soft hump you sometimes see on grammas.

  I called to her back, “What did it feel like? Getting called to be a nun?”

  She stopped, and she turned all the way around. She looked me right in the eye across the twenty feet of green park that separated us now. Once again I had the clear feeling I had overstepped some boundary, but once again, she answered anyway.

  She said, “It felt like a love story.”

  I gave her a short nod, like a head jerk. I flat hated that answer.

  I was so effing sick of other ­people’s love stories, today in particular. Why would some higher power send me a nun, only to have her tell me this? She was what Bridget could have been, but Bridget had chosen William. Bridget was William’s love story, and he was hers. In William’s story, I might rate a footnote. He wasn’t much for narrative, so maybe Paula would tell his, and I would be a bad digression that she edited away. This, right here, this was my story, and love had no place in it.

  Looking at the nun, I thought, Unless you count Natty.

  I realized that I did. I was on my own, but yes, I did count Natty. He was all that counted, really. No matter how ugly the night when I got him, I wouldn’t go back now and change history even if I could. Any change could alter or erase him. William had told me that. All that Natty was came from his cells, and I was so in love with every piece of DNA that made him be him. I was in love with everything: his eyelashes, his serious, small voice, his overinterest in the biology of beetles. He was perfectly formed to be himself, and he was mine. I was his.

  The nun called to me again. Her voice was old, old like she was, papery and fine, but what she said, she said with such assurance.

  “It still feels like a love story.”

  I didn’t answer, but I felt my shoulders squaring up and rising. Sure, I was scared to go up there and face Clayton Lilli and whatever lies or truths he had to tell. Of course I was, but I waved good-­bye to the nun and then I started walking toward Clayton Lilli’s building anyway.

  Perhaps she had been sent—­it felt that way still—­so I would know there were so many kinds of love stories. This one belonged to me and Natty. I was going to make damn sure it ended right.

  I went right to the door and I mashed the button that was labeled C. Lilli. Mouse Brown might have a key, but she didn’t get billing on the intercom. Still, it was her voice that answered through the speaker. “Yes?”

  “It’s Shandi Pierce. Buzz me in. I need to talk to him.”

  There was a long pause. I suppose they must have been conferring. After a long thirty seconds, the buzzer sounded, and I pushed the door open.

  The intercom labels put him in 312, so I took the elevator to the third floor. I found them down the hall on the left. His door was already open, and they stood framed in it together, watching for me. As I approached, they stepped back to let me walk in past them. It felt weird and wrong to let him shut the door behind me.

  We stood in an odd triangle, all pointy with me at the apex, the two of them framing the closed door.

  “Hi,” said Clayton Lilli.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi,” Mouse Brown said, breathy and high. A long silence stretched out, thinning all the air between us.

  “Can I get you a drink or something?” Clayton Lilli asked.

  That made me and Mouse Brown both look at him, me withering and her wondering. Even with that, it was several seconds before he realized how inappropriate a thing it was, to offer the girl who says you roofied her a drink. He flushed a faint pink in his cheeks.

  “Let’s sit down,” his girl said. “I’m Beth, by the way.”

  Ugh. Her bland, brown name was bland, brown Beth. It didn’t bode well, to have her be called the plainest iteration of my step-­fridge.

  I sat down alone in the center of Clayton Lilli’s sofa. He had two armchairs across a coffee table, and he sat in one and Beth sat in the other. We’d exactly re-­created the same awkward triangle we’d made when we were standing.

  “Should I get my letter?” Clayton Lilli asked me. “I could read it to you.”

  I liked it that he didn’t bring up Natty. It was as if that moment when Natty joined me on the steps outside the condo didn’t happen. He’d rewound back to before that, when the sta
kes were lower, back to wanting to read his “What I Did After Summer Vacation” essay.

  I shook my head. “We both have ways that we could really hurt each other. So let’s try to talk this out. No paper. No rehearsed whatever. You say what you need to say to me.”

  “I’ll try. I’m not that good at telling stories, but I can try to tell you how it was that night,” he said. “I want to say what really happened, as best as I remember. I have to go back, to before I saw you, so it makes sense, okay?”

  I nodded.

  He glanced at Beth, but she was looking at her hands. I noticed for the first time she had a little diamond winking on the proper finger. The stakes were high for everyone here, then. I knew she’d heard this story before, and she’d believed it enough to show up on my steps and passionately defend him. She was quieter today, sitting in a separate chair with all that space between them. She didn’t seem as sure of him, ring or no ring. Natty was a world-­rocker, for everyone in this room.

  Clayton said, “My dad died when I was a baby, and my stepdad adopted me when I was two. He and my mom never had kids. He couldn’t. He loved me. Loves me, but I’m not much like him. He’s a salesman, really great with ­people. He was a Kappu Nu. He thought a fraternity would help me be a more social person. The Greek system was designed to create automatic, useful friendships.”

  As he spoke, Beth tilted her hand back and forth, the ring winking at her in the shifting light. Clayton Lilli stared at a spot on the wall past my head. It made him seem dishonest, to have him not even look at me. But I remembered William saying, duplications and deletions, and William wasn’t all that big on eye contact, either.

  “At the party, they had a simple machine made of a hose and funnel, and they put a certain amount of beer through it, into me. It was a lot of beer, and I ingested it very quickly. It didn’t feel like drinking. It all poured in, and I couldn’t stop it.”

  Now Beth spoke. “They filled him up like he was a pitcher, or a beer balloon.”

  “Were you there?” I asked, my voice sharp.

  “No,” she said. She looked back at her hands.

  “I was seventeen,” Clayton Lilli said. “I’d never drunk alcohol before rush. Well, no. My mom let me have champagne on New Year’s. I’d tried tastes of her wine. But not serious drinking.”

  He said it with such earnesty. The Great Pumpkin would come to this guy’s pumpkin patch, he was so damn sincere. Of course, it was entirely possible this sincere and awkward boy would then drug the Great Pumpkin and try to put it to him. I had no way of knowing.

  But I listened with my mind as open as I could make it be as he continued.

  “I wasn’t drunk, because all the beer went in so quickly. After a few minutes, I was very drunk, though, instantly. It was terrible and frightening. I had trouble walking. I had no balance.”

  “The floor pitched under his feet, like the whole house had turned into a ship in a storm,” Beth put in, unable to help herself. It was odd, how he would say something blunt and plain, in his formal tone, and then she’d translate it into simile.

  “I’m not the kind of son my stepdad would have had. I tried to be, by rushing Kappu Nu,” Clayton Lilli said. “I was bad at it. They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them. I thought, when I was suddenly so drunk, that I should go lie down. I made my way to the stairs, but it was hard, because there were so many ­people, and because the floor pitched, as she said. That’s when I saw you. You were by the stairs, leaning on the wall. You were talking to three guys. At least three. Three that I noticed.”

  I digested that. I imagined myself there, drugged and helpless, with three guys around me. I saw us already by the stairs that led up to the bedrooms. I could feel my body curling inward protectively, thinking of being taken upstairs by three guys instead of outside to a beanbag by one who didn’t even get it all the way in. Three guys was scary as all hell. Jesus, what girl would not prefer his version? If he was making this up, it was a very good story. Very crafty.

  “Who were they?” I asked. It was a test.

  “Rog Bently, Daren Case, and Michael Warren,” he said. “I wrote them down for you. In my letter.”

  I’d wanted to see if he would give their names up, but then I wasn’t sure if it made him more credible, or less, that he would so promptly tell me. He might have been finger-­pointing at guys he didn’t like to save his own ass. But it could be that he was actually trying to do the right thing.

  I said, “At my house, you said you didn’t know who drugged me.”

  “I said I couldn’t be sure,” he told me. He was being very literal, but I thought he might be right. In my memory, that was exactly how he said it. “I don’t know which of them drugged you, or if they were all in on it, or if it was someone else I didn’t notice there.”

  “He’ll help you find out, though. He’ll do whatever you want,” Beth said. “He’ll go to the cops with you, talk to other pledges from his year, or those three guys. He’ll wear a wire.”

  It was staunchly said, if overdramatic. Maybe she was saying it for her as much as me. She so wanted his version to be true, but Natty must have shaken her faith in him. At the condo they stayed so physically close. Now, each sat slumped in their own chair.

  “Go on,” I said to Clayton Lilli.

  “I was going up to pass out or vomit. I hadn’t decided. Probably both. But as I came up by you, you grabbed me and pulled me over into the group.”

  As he spoke, I tried so hard to let it spark something inside me, some unaccessed memory, some piece of my brain that had gotten buried under whatever the drug was. I waited for an inner Bing! of truth to sound, but as he described me paused by the stairs with three boys, described lurching over to us, I could only imagine it in the third person. I saw it like a story I was inventing, not a memory at all.

  “You pushed Rog to the side and you grabbed me. And you—­ Then you—­ It was you.” He blushed a deep, uncomfortable red.

  I felt my cheeks heating, too. “I kissed you?”

  Beth dropped her face down into her hands. She didn’t like to hear this part.

  “Yes,” he told me. “You did. You kissed me, and you said things to me. It was dark, and loud with music, and I was very drunk, so I don’t remember it all exactly. You hollered a lot of things into my ear. You were happy to see me. You kept saying, ‘Yay.’ It was your idea to go outside. I was drunk, but you were—­I’m sorry—­you were pretty, and you seemed drunk, too. I didn’t do so well with girls in high school. Pretty girls never grabbed me and kissed me and said nice things to me like that. You were so drunk you had to lean on the wall, and I couldn’t stand up, either. I was leaning on you, so you got pinned. I think the wall was the only thing that kept us standing. You told me that I had caught you against the wall, so you were mine now.”

  His whole head, even his neck were flushed deep crimson now. Beth picked her face up out of her hands to translate Clayton into simile. “He felt like it was a game, like you were already playing a game where a girl had to be caught, and he’d walked into the middle of it and somehow won.”

  Clayton Lilli said, “When you kissed me, and you said all the nice things, the guys around me were whooping, cheering us on. I felt like I was finally doing something right. Like what my stepdad would do. You seemed like the kind of girl he would have known in college, pretty and wild, getting drunk. Cool. Used to hooking up. Not like me. That’s what I thought you were like. Those guys were cheering, saying, ‘Whoop, Clayton’s getting off the team.’ There’s this thing the Kappas—­”

  I cut him off. “I know about the Emory Football Team.”

  He swallowed, looking unhappy, “They were all slapping my back and I was still leaning on you, and you said the thing again, like I had caught you or pinned you against the wall and now I got to have you. I wanted to get away from the other three. I thought you did, too. I was scared if w
e went upstairs they would come, too. To watch. For proof about the football team. That made me feel so scared and sick. So I said I was taking you to dance, and we went away from them. We had to help each other walk, we were so messed up.”

  “But we didn’t go to dance,” I said.

  “No. You wanted to go outside. We were in the kitchen, I remember. It was dark in there, but not crowded like the front room. You . . .” Now he was redder than anyone I’d ever seen. A silly color, tomato almost. Cartoonish and impossible. “You took—­ You had a skirt on, and you took your panties off. You dropped them off right there around your ankles and when they got stuck in your shoes, you kicked your shoes off, too. We kissed and you had your skirt on, but I knew you’d taken them off and it made a lot of difference. I couldn’t not think about that. That they were gone. That was when you said you loved me.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me,” I said.

  “You were really messed up,” he said. “Somehow we made it to the beanbag, behind the grill, in the backyard. We were there and fooling around some but I kept thinking about the thing you did in the kitchen. I thought about that and it made me be done. I thought we didn’t, you know. Not quite. That’s what I thought?”

  It was hard to believe this boy who couldn’t even say it was a rapist. But maybe that was the exact kind of person who would drug a girl? He wasn’t a forceful guy. He was red and ruined from talking about it. Maybe uptight and diffident was the exact type to go the roofie route?

  “You didn’t get it all the way in.” I said it for him, and he glanced at his girlfriend.

  “That’s what he told me,” Beth said. Her color was high, too. “He told me this story a long time ago, when we started dating, and we talked about our pasts. He told me about that night the way he’s telling it now, if that helps. He said the two of you didn’t get all the way to . . .”

  She trailed off. She meant Natty, but none of us were ready to have him in the conversation yet. Thank God. But I wanted to act in good faith here. I wanted to tell the truth, in case he was.