on my hands, breathing out, and say aloud the thing that is always right there, the painful thing that guides me so unsteadily through my life: “I want a guy to want me. To really want me.”
“There are better guys here who can do that.” She says it as though it is that simple. In her world, I’m sure it is. She reaches for my coffee, and I give her a sip. The boy on Long Beach Island comes to my mind, his dark, shadowy face hovering above mine.
“I want it too badly, though,” I say.
“You just haven’t met the right guy.”
I watch her, so confident in her logic. There are times I feel like I live in a different universe, as though I am watching other girls through a glass wall, these strange creatures who seem to know how to be loved.
“Give it some time,” she says. “We’ve only been here two weeks.”
I think of David, the way it felt to have his hands cradle my head when we kissed, the scratch of his stubble against my chin. All I know is I want that feeling again.
That night, early evening, while I am working on a paper, David shows up. He pulls me onto my bed and strips me down, takes out a condom from his back pocket. I am aware of the girls laughing and calling to one another in the hallway, aware too that my roommate could walk in at any time. In general, I feel no connection to these girls. They spent their first few weeks at college drinking for the first time and too much, winding up in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning. Their eyes widen with fascination at the mention of marijuana. Coming from sheltered lives, they gravitate toward being out of control, something that frightens me to no end. My roommate and I make fun of them as they steal baseball caps off the tops of boys’ heads and run away giggling. We call them childish. We think of ourselves as superior. But I know right now, under David’s thrusting body, there is nothing better about being me. Afterward David says something about meeting friends for a late dinner, and he is gone.
I go to the bathroom to clean myself up. I remake my bed. I bring my paper back onto the screen. I do what I can to bring back normalcy. The following weekend I see David at another party. He is with that girl again, the one who waited impatiently for him at the Pub. This time I notice a familiarity between them. She pulls something off his sweater. He pushes a curl off her face with his finger. They’re a couple, a couple that allows hookups with other people. This is nothing startling at a college campus. Casual sex is part of the culture, as is sexual exploration. But as much as I’d like to be the kind of person who can go with it, as much as I hoped I would be, I feel betrayed. Joining college culture hasn’t changed who I am. When I tell Zoe this later, she laughs. “You weren’t betrayed,” she says. “He made it clear he wasn’t going to give you anything more when he dissed you that first night.”
To get my mind off David, I find another boy. Adam. Adam, with his lanky body and bright eyes. Adam, who laughs easily and who dances around the room without a trace of self-consciousness. We fool around in his house after a party, and then he walks me back to my room. Twice he calls me, which gives me hope, and then on my birthday he gives me red beaded earrings he bought at a street fair. I put them on immediately. I wear them every day. A week later, though, he stops calling.
Next is Dominic, who I meet on the boys’ side of Zoe’s dormitory hall. Dominic has a girlfriend at home with the same name as me. I know this, but I fuck him for a week anyway. We joke that if he calls out the wrong name, it really won’t be the wrong name. I see him at the campus gym and that Steely Dan song plays over the loudspeaker—I’m a fool to do your dirty work…. We catch each other’s eyes and laugh, but we don’t have sex again. Then Wes, Dominic’s roommate. Once, Dominic walks in on us, but he just shrugs. “Getting my keys,” he says. “I’ll be out of your way in a sec.”
It continues like this, each boy anodyne to the last. I try not to think on it too much.
w i n t e r b r e a k , I pack up my things and head down to New Jersey. As with all changes, I look forward to it, to the relief it promises to give me from myself. Snow, which was layered thickly on the sides of the Massachusetts Turnpike, all but disappears as I come back into the Tri-State area. Ugly, bare black trees are scattered in the landscape. Trucks shoot out thick bursts of black smoke as they merge into the slow traffic. I listen to music and smoke cigarettes, and out of boredom peer into other cars, looking for hot guys. I have a fantasy some gorgeous guy will see me, motion for me to pull over, and we’ll begin a long and meaningful relationship. It never occurs to me that long and meaningful relationships don’t start this way.
But then, I have this fantasy just about everywhere—on a plane, in a restaurant, a bar, walking down the street. Someday, I figure, all the love songs and movies will be right, and love will find me. I do not understand at this point that real life is nothing like this. Dad isn’t home from work, and the apartment is quiet. I leave my bag packed on my floor and call the Jennifers. I do not yet have the eerie sense, as I will in later years, that this is no longer my room, my stuff. James Dean posters still hang on the walls. The jewelry box on the dresser is stuffed with necklaces and bracelets I no longer wear. The bookshelf is packed with books from high school English classes and yearbooks. I don’t yet have the urge to look through my things with wonder as though they aren’t my own. For now, I feel I still belong here.
I leave Dad a note and go to Jennifer A’s. Her parents are divorced, and her father, who has remarried, left town for the holiday and gave her the keys to his house. We’re psyched. When I arrive at Jennifer A’s, Jennifer C is already there, and we talk about our colleges, what it’s like to be home from college now, how different life feels. Jennifer C tells us about how cool her roommates are, and how they are already running the freshman class. I laugh and nod, but I’m aware of the old feeling I have with the Jennifers, of how smoothly they seem to own their lives, while I stand awkwardly outside my own. I want to believe college has changed me, made me more confident, but here now with the Jennifers, I see everything is the same as before.
Soon, two boys come. One I recognize. A long time ago, when we were in third grade, we were friends. His name is Charles, and he and Jennifer A became fast friends at college when she learned he dealt coke. The other one, Will, is Charles’s friend from high school. He and Jennifer have been sleeping together for the past week. Nothing serious, she tells me while they are out buying beer. Just having fun. Jennifer, I have come to realize, is one of those girls. She walks with confidence. She says whatever she wants without having to run the words first through her mind, trying them out. She really doesn’t want anything more from boys but to have fun. She used to be anorexic, and she does cocaine almost every day. She definitely has her painful wants and longings, like me. But when it comes to boys, she would rather keep them at arm’s length, out of her immediate space. This combined with her relaxed grace and beauty makes her immensely desirable.
I am so jealous I could die.
When Charles and Will return, we settle back onto Jennifer’s father’s couch and lay out lines of coke.
“I remember now,” Charles says to me. “You had that cool football game that vibrated and moved the little men around the board.”
I laugh, remembering. We were eight years old. I had handed him one of those little men while we played that day at my house, and our hands had touched. It had been one of my first exciting moments with a boy, the electricity of our hands touching, the possibility in that spark. I don’t recount any of that though, doubting it was the same for him. “We’ve come a long way from that football game, haven’t we?” I nod toward the white powder on the table, and he laughs too.
Will glances between us. “You guys know each other?”
“We went to elementary school together.” Charles chops the powder with an American Express. “She was one of the few cool girls there.”
I smile at Charles for that, and when I look at Will, he’s looking back. Will has the same air of relaxation Jennifer does. He knows he’s hot. He can sleep with any number of beautiful girls. He pushes his long blond hair behind an ear and smiles at me, a slow, sexy smile. A smile suggesting more, and my heart quickens.
“Very cool,” he says.
The next night, we do the same thing. And the next night, again. Once, Will and Jennifer disappear into her bedroom, but they come out less than an hour later, ready for more lines. On our fourth night, we are all so cozy with each other, having snorted and smoked and talked so much, we lean against one another, piled into the bend of the sectional couch. I am enjoying myself. I belong, a part of things, here with the Jennifers. I don’t need a boy’s hands on me, for once in my life. Until one is on me.
Will’s hand, in the tangle of our bodies. He slips a hand beneath my leg where there is a hole in my jeans, and he runs his fingers along the exposed skin. Igniting my need, awakening that part of me. I glance at Jennifer, but she doesn’t see. Neither does Jennifer C
or Charles. It is between Will and me, our secret. His secret desire for me. I like that. And something else.
