Jess and Clayton sat down on the other couch, Clayton looking nervous. Somewhere along the way, Jess realized, she’d shed that drink, or perhaps she’d finished it. Clayton had taken her hands in his, and what was he waiting for? A kiss was the threshold they could finally cross and everything would happen.
But his hands were sweaty. “It’s about Clara,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “I mean, does she mention me?” He looked up, felt the need to clarify. “Like, what has she said about what I said? About her feelings.”
“Her feelings,” Jess repeated. And she knew; on some level she’d always known, yet she hoped that she could bend reality to her will anyway, that maybe fate could be so malleable. She felt small and stupid, sitting before this besotted boy, for imagining she could possess that much power.
Clayton wouldn’t shut up. “I’m crazy about her. It’s very uncool. Just, like, watching her on stage, the way she shimmers. I can’t turn it off.” He laughed, but it sounded morelike a honk. “And, I mean, has she ever said anything that would make you think…that maybe there’s a chance?”
Jess said, “No.” She could be definitive about this thing, the only ground she had to stand on.
But Clayton wasn’t having it. “And I know that. She told me it was never going to happen, but I thought—”
“She said that?” They’d talked about this? The betrayal cut deep, because Jess hadn’t known, would never have suspected. All those conversations with Clara listening to her blathering about Clayton, and she’d never said a word.
“I didn’t believe it,” said Clayton. “Or maybe I just didn’t want to.” He was still holding her hands, but she realized it was to keep her in place. She pulled away. “She said she didn’t want to wreck our friendship.”
“Your friendship?”
“Me and her,” he said, “and I just really wanted to ask you, um, what she’d said about it all. If you think I have a chance anyway.”
Jess said, “No.” Her tiny desert island.
“No, what—” he said.
She said, “No,everything.”
“Clara said that?”
“Clara never said anything.”
“I thought you guys were so close,” he said, “like two sides of a coin.”
So she kissed him. Because he was right there, and there could be no way to make the situation worse than it was, a kiss the best strategy she could think of to blow this moment into an oblivion. And Clayton must have been as drunk as she was, or else they wouldn’t be here at all, and maybe this was why he was kissing her back, kissing her hard, his hands all over her body. Kissing her with his eyes closed, whichcould even mean passion, something real. Instead of the idea that occurred to Jess immediately—sometimes she was too smart for her own good—that he was imagining Clara in his arms.
—
They went back to his room, and it was difficult to remember exactly what happened, except that everything did, in a drunk and fumbling fashion. And when it was over, Clayton slept, softly snoring, his arm slung around Jess. She could have stayed there, fitting the part exactly, except he hadn’t asked her to and his roommate might be returning any moment. Unwinding her body from Clayton’s leaden limbs, she retrieved her clothes from the floor and got dressed again. She made her way across campus, her stomach full of butterflies, partly because she was nervous about what was going to happen when she saw Clara.
But also—and mostly—the butterflies were because something had happened. Finally. Exhilarating. And this—walking home in the night feeling shameless, bold and desired—was like something Jess had imagined, a scene recognizable from a movie or a book. The spotlight was shining on her, for once. And for the first time with abject certainty, she was glad that she wasn’t going to have a baby, no ambivalence left from the choice she’d made in December. Because she’d have a baby someday, she knew she would, when the time was right, but in the meantime there could be so much more. Those butterflies, and parties, too much to drink, and mistakes that would be inconsequential—because she was still so young, just like Clara had promised, which felt like a revelation after a season of feeling broken and sad.
And Jess was reflecting on the season as she made her way up the steps to their building and inside, heading up toClara’s room, which had always been Clara’s, never properlytheirs.Jess didn’t even have a key, which meant they had to leave the door open with the bolt on to stop it from locking automatically. Would the door be open now? In leaving with Clayton, had Jess betrayed her friend? And why did such a prospect seem so awful? Because hadn’t Clara betrayed her too? Seemingly thoroughly absorbed in the open book that was Jess’s heart, but all the while holding herself at a remove, keeping secrets, these parts of her that Jess could never reach or know.
A crack of light shone out into the hall from where the door was ajar; Jess felt relief at the sight of it and nudged the door open. Clara was in her stage makeup, curled in a corner of her bed by the window, a book on her lap, the one about the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but she wasn’t reading. The room felt all wrong, bright and garish, Jess taking a moment to realize what the difference was, that the overhead light was on, which it never was, fluorescent, not a hint of a shadow so there was no place to hide, and everything so quiet she could hear it buzzing.
“Somebody told me you’d gone,” said Jess, breaking the silence. Clara hadn’t looked at her, was gazing out the window, though Jess could see her own image reflected there. “I couldn’t find you. And then we left. I went—”
“I know where you went,” said Clara, looking over finally, her expression hardened. Sounding bored, annoyed and tired at once, she spoke as though Jess were a child, a tone that Jess had never heard from Clara before, not even in the depths of February when she’d been at her most frustrating. All the distance between them, actual years and life experience, opened up like a chasm, and Jess foundherself wanting to retreat, but Clara wouldn’t let her. “Come in and shut the door, all the way,” she commanded. Jess did what she said, secured the bolt. Clara asked her, “So, what happened?”
Jess sat down beside her on the bed. “I guess you know.”
“And it’s what you wanted?” This was a rhetorical question, delivered with a patronizing kind of patience.
Jess said, “What’s wrong with that?”
“I didn’t say anything was.”
“You didn’t have to,” said Jess. Would anyone ever be good enough for Clara, she wondered? “People are allowed to want ordinary things.”
Clara conceded, “Well, heisordinary.”
