“Come on. You’ve seen me eat.”
“Alright, you are a little gross. Sometimes it seems like you don’t know where your own mouth is.”
“Right here.” I gulped at the beer and bent forward, kissing him roughly, biting at his lip.
“Someone’s feeling frisky.” He kissed me back, his breath yeasty and warm. I smiled against his mouth.Friskywas a funny word, I thought—for old ladies trying to flirt with the bag boy at the grocery store.
I sat up and pulled Stephen to his bedroom. I shoved him onto the bed, clambering on top. He was bigger than me, pleasantly solid, thick around the torso. He smelled good, a mulchy mix of sweat and cologne. His scent was the thing that had really turned me on our first night together, and there in the bedroom I felt it had been a long time since I’d taken in the smell of him. I pulled at the buttons of his shirt. He raised his hand and I pushed him away, his wrist thick in my palm. “Let me.” I ran my fingers from his chest to his shoulder. The hair grew in patches across both shoulders and he shaved it off, but the stubble had come in and I wondered why he didn’t just leave it. He shifted beneath me, lifting his hips and mumbling softly.
“What did you say?”
“I said—” he exhaled, voice rough and thick—“I said I want you inside me.”
I pictured a miniature version of myself, like a Russian nesting doll, tucked into him. I tried to hold back a laugh, but it spilled out.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” I laughed again. “Sex is just so weird if you think about it.”
I pulled off the rest of his clothes and then my own and hoisted his legs, probing. I rubbed the head of my dick against the edge of his asshole, coiled with hair.
“Hold on.”
Stephen reached into the bedside table. His hand swum around and found it—a bottle of lube. He squeezed some out and rubbed it against himself. He grabbed a condom and passed me the bottle. I oozed some into my palm.
I closed my eyes and Tyler filled the dark of my head, unbidden, pulsing and bright. I saw him in the soccer field, the twist of his body, his face lowering to himself. The white, white of his skin, the spun golden-blonde of his hair. I grew hard. I ripped open the condom and mashed it on. I leaned and licked at Stephen’s mouth, maneuvering my dick toward him. I stared past him to the windowsill. A lone houseplant perched there, one droopy leaf leeched of color. For all his competencies, Stephen could not keep a plant alive. I pumped in quick thrusts, trying to hold thoughts of Tyler at bay.
“Let’s try this.” I rearranged us, moving the angle of Stephen’s legs. I bore down, shifted again, and then my penis popped out. It was going soft and the condom sagged around it. “Hold on.” I pushed with my thumb against his hole. The hair, gummy with lube, splattered around it. My thumb slipped; the condom slid off. It stuck, plastered to his thigh.
“Shit.” I rolled onto my back. A faint stain bloomed in a corner of the ceiling. Had that always been there?
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m sorry. I think I drank too much on an empty stomach.”
Stephen nuzzled against me, hand moving in loops across my stomach. We stayed like that for a while. I got up and went to thebathroom. I stood around, doing nothing, waiting for enough time to pass. In the mirror, a face stared back, slack with disappointment. I flushed the unused toilet and ran the tap. When I returned, Stephen was sitting on the corner of the bed in a T-shirt and boxers. He’d brought in his stash of take-out menus. They were fanned out, dog-eared and grease-stained, across the empty space of the mattress where I had been.
CHAPTER 6
I bolted awake and checked my phone; not yet 6:00 a.m. My Fall Fest lecture was at 5:00—I had eleven hours. Why had I said yes?
Fall Fest was Sawyer’s version of homecoming, but without the football games and ridiculous pageants. Admin wanted a more dignified affair. “Homecoming for nerds,” Colin said; he’d done undergrad at Penn and thought Sawyer was denying us all a good time. Student clubs hosted events: Smart Tech for Social Problems and A Conversation about Sex Trafficking—Karaoke After.Art majors curated an exhibit of student work in the campus gallery. The theater department hosted a showcase of experimental monologues, about which Safie said, “Those parents must really love their kids.” And one suspected they really did; the weekend was Sawyer’s biggest fund-raising event of the year.
It had become lucrative for the town as well (although the town would need more than a few flush days). As the weekend approached, Sawyer’s streets and shops filled with visiting parents and siblings and nostalgic alums. It was disorienting; one got used to the near-deserted feel of living here. Restaurants and the few hotels and inns offered specials. A street fair took over the downtown blocks around my building. The nearest Mennonite community, ten or so miles away, transformed an unused stretch of field into a “traditional village experience.” Horse-drawn buggies took visitors from the parking lot to a circle of tables laden with items for sale, dense cakes and wooden bowls with the MADE INCHINAstamp scratchedoff. The women behind the tables, saddled in heavy, drab smocks, lived in suburban tract homes and had discreetly parked their leased sedans behind an abandoned barn. They named the site Amish Land because most people didn’t know the difference.
I had been working at the lecture steadily; in fact, I wasn’t doing much of anything else. I’d seen neither Safie nor Stephen outside campus the past few weeks. But I felt like I was going in circles. I’d gone back to Ohio State a few times and was building a real relationship with Lucy—youngest child of six, third-generation librarian. I had uncovered a number of surprising details about the court proceedings in the archives. The industrialist seemed to think Leopold was the innocent victim of Loeb, seduced into a lurid life of sex and crime—no one had written on this. Despite these discoveries, each day, as I sat down to work, a growing dread greeted me. I started dreaming up ways to get out of the lecture: I’ll just quit; I don’t like this job anyway. Or I could say my grandmother died—it worked for students, an alarming number of whose senior family members seem to conveniently croak around midterms and finals.
I checked the time again. Almost 6:30. Ten and a half hours. Anxiety pressed me to the bed. I used to be excited about research—I had chosen this life, hadn’t I? In grad school I discovered that many of my peers were the children of academics. For them, the path was set: four years at a private college like Sawyer, if not Sawyer itself; one year being humanitarian work in Latin America or Africa, just long enough to generate material for an application essay; and then a PhD. These students carried a heavy burden: Realizing their parents’ unachieved ambitions earned both praise and resentment; the petty jealousies of the academy spare no one, not even your offspring. Worse off were my classmates from tense and unhappy families of actual doctors. These peers attacked their work withexhausting drive, desperate to prove that a deconstructive analysis ofSwann’s Waywas a meaningful contribution to society, even if it might not save any lives. (Might not!)
Of my life and what should be made of it, my parents had no real expectations. I got through high school with them hardly aware it was happening. By senior year, I could produce an uncanny facsimile of my mother’s signature, and I wrote my own checks for my college application fees. I applied only to in-state schools; the logistics of loans and winter clothes felt overwhelming, too much to figure out on my own. I got in everywhere and enrolled at Florida State in Tallahassee, kissing distance from Georgia, across the entire length of the peninsula, because it was the farthest away.
I arrived at college with no idea what I wanted to study or what my interests might be. I signed up for a gender studies seminar because this girl from my dorm who had purple hair and didn’t shave her legs told me to. The professor, Marianne Wahls, was new to the school. Our first class meeting she announced, “I will not pander to you. We are not going to keep journals or look at our cervixes, although I encourage you to do both. We are going to work hard.” A few weeks in, she assigned Michel Foucault,The History of Sexuality. I read the first ten pages over and over again until the library closed and they kicked me out. I couldn’t understand what I was reading but I knew there was something there, a promise reaching toward me. By the week’s close I had made it to the end, having scribbled the near equivalent of a second book in the back pages and margins. In class we debated the central premise of the book, the question of whether sexuality was a true thing inside you, waiting to be discovered, or whether society had erected an entire apparatus that made youfeelthere was something inside you called “sexuality”—a thing you must find, understand, andname. The conversation was electrifying, dizzying, and I felt I was getting both closer and farther away from understanding who I was—and that was the point. And being in those conversations, with kids my age who wanted to question everything they’d been told—it felt like, here’s the truth of who I am. I was testing a new way of seeing myself and the world, and feeling for the first time that I might have a place within it.
I took every course that Professor Wahls offered and when we ran out of classes senior year, we set up an independent study. We met in her office on Fridays, late in the afternoon. The sun would often set before we finished. One night, she asked about my plans after graduation. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought of it and until then, no one had asked. “I think you should consider a PhD,” she said. I tried to recall the last time someone talked to me about my future but came up with nothing. I remember sitting in her office and thinking—if she cares enough to ask, she must be right. And so I did.
Seven in the morning. I made a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table. It got the best light during the day; I hoped it might illuminate my path forward. I set to work but whenever I found a thread it slipped away, leaving me grasping at nothing. Tyler had missed class again yesterday—he’d been absent a lot, another away match. Without him, the time dragged on. I had gotten used to an expectant, uneasy feeling in his presence which, strangely, I found myself missing. Again and again, I checked the clock and its slow progress. Afterward I found an email from him. I rushed to open it. It was just his make-up assignment and a single sentence: “Thank you for accepting this work and for your support of athletics at Sawyer.” A boilerplate message, copied and pasted. He didn’t even bother to sign his name.
I got up to brew a second pot of coffee. My stomach rumbled. I opened a cabinet, looking for a snack—and then suddenly I remembered: Tyler’s Adderall. A few days after our trip to Columbus I found the bottle rattling around beneath the passenger seat. I had meant to return it. As more time passed and the silence between us grew, it had started feeling like the trip never happened, which somehow made me morose with regret. The pills were proof it had. I reached to the top shelf where I’d hidden them—it was weird stashing them like this, I knew, creepy even—like a serial killer’s trophies. I found the bottle of pills and pulled it down, the cheap plastic light in my hand.
