One of these friends was Monique, a black girl who’d brought a box of Trivial Pursuit cards. We made up a game using the cards, taking turns asking each other questions from them and downing a slug of tequila whenever we got an answer wrong.
—What’s narwhal tusk made of?
—What’s Spain’s most famous epic poem?
—What amphibian did Pliny the Elder suggest be tied to the jaw to make teeth firmer?
—Monique already asked that!
—Wait wait. What did she say?
We looked at Monique, who started laughing, looking up at the ceiling to avoid ruining her eye makeup.
—What Renaissance master sculpted the Pietà? This one was for me.
—Um—
—Michelangelo, Reshawn jumped in.
—It’s not your turn!
—It is now, Jamie said, reaching for another card. Okay, what US state has the lowest elevation at 60 feet?
—Delaware.
—Right! Okay, on what date in 44 BC was Julius Caesar assassinated?
—March fifteenth.
—What country did Rhodesia become?
—Zimbabwe.
—How many moons does Mercury have?
—None?
Jamie kissed Reshawn on the cheek
—I told you guys he’s the smartest football player you’ll ever meet.
Reshawn had been riding so high. Proud of his girlfriend, delighted to share a couch with future leading lights of English scholarship. But now, though he continued smiling after Jamie made her compliment, I saw his eyes go dull.
Jamie didn’t notice his change and read the next question.
—Okay, she said, easy one. What’s Samuel Clemens’s nom de plume?
Reshawn shrugged. She lowered her card and nudged him.
—You’ve got like five of his books in your room? Samuel. Clemens.
He shrugged again. Now Jamie couldn’t help noticing the mood shift.
—What’s wrong?
—Nothing.
—Samuel … Clemens …
—I heard you. I really don’t know.
To preempt her from pushing anymore, Reshawn picked up the tequila bottle and took a shot. Jamie was still holding the card, at a loss.
The group became awkward, and after a few limp attempts at restarting the game, we stopped playing. Several people rose to refresh their drinks. Jamie finally sensed she’d done something wrong, and to make up for it she told us:
—Reshawn found something amazing this week.
He shrugged.
—It’s not that big a deal.
—I’ll tell them, then. He found this newspaper article about a mansion owned by Eula Bigmore, an old lady in Savannah. Eula is this epic hoarder. Every floor of her mansion is filled with junk, receipts from the fifties, a room with nothing but umbrellas. Dementia or something, and her younger sisters have been trying to move her to a nursing home for years. The only reason they haven’t gotten a court order is because Eula’s a millionaire and they don’t want to endanger their places in the will. But a couple months ago the sisters got her to at least clean out her place, and that’s how they found the old newspapers in the attic. Thousands from as far back as the 1870s, preserved beautifully. Turns out her father, and his father, were hoarders too. Reshawn learned the newspapers got donated to Savannah State, and he contacted a scholar there who he knew had coauthored some papers with Grayson before, see if the guy had discovered anything interesting. And he had—an essay by an ex-slave signed with the initials CSK.
—Your guy!
—Yes! Jamie said. Have you ever heard Professor Grayson laugh? I didn’t think he knew how, but this week when he was telling me about Reshawn’s discovery, he was like a giggly little kid. The three of us are driving down to Savannah next month to authenticate the essay.
—Can you do that? I asked Reshawn.
—It’ll be fine, he said quickly.
—What—
—Really, he said, shutting me down. It’s fine.
Attending that party meant I got to revisit the porch where Thao kissed me—a cumulative ten seconds walking over old wood that were enough to sustain fierce fantasies for the next week. The fantasies were alternate-reality branchings of the night back in November, and in them Thao’s lips didn’t meet my cheek but my own lips, and I didn’t walk with Reshawn back to East but went inside the house with Thao, holding his hand as we entered a bedroom on the second floor, laying his lithe body onto a mattress, lifting the tanktop he’d worn at Stefan Knows and running my tongue around the nipples I’d seen flash out while he danced. Really, I told myself, it wasn’t so bad he was gone—our brief encounter could remain unsullied by real-life sequels in which, say, he ran into me on the quad and failed to remember who I was, or I saw him in a café and pretended I didn’t want to do to him the things I knew Reshawn was doing to Jamie.
Only the first week of the Rebel Yells course was dedicated to Carmichael Stewart King, and we had since moved on to other antebellum upstarts, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. The content was as challenging as Reshawn said it would be, and rewarding for that—but what nudged me from respecting the class to outright loving it was the section on Walt Whitman.
I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea,
His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs.
It was a shock, reading this for a class; it seemed a
