Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  “Can’t she just work under the table and keep getting SSI?” Tyler asked.

  “If she gets caught, it gets terminated.”

  “Damn,” he muttered, flicking his lighter. “And people think the poor don’t want to work.”

  “The poor?” She grunted and rolled her eyes. “Jesus. We aren’t a species.”

  “Hey, maybe I could get you a better job or something.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “My dad.”

  “He’s that connected, huh?”

  “He’s like a Delta hub. He’s Atlanta.”

  She smiled. Was he serious?

  He held his bottle up to the light and looked at it.

  “I should stop drinking,” he said. “I really should stop drinking.”

  “Why don’t you, if you think you need to?” she asked.

  He sighed a long, slow sigh, sitting back down beside her.

  “Daddy issues? Shame spiraling? Self-sabotage? Rinse and repeat?” He rubbed his eyes. “I don’t fucking know, Stayja.”

  “What’s so bad about your dad?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “I mean, I know you think he’s this monster who profits off drug addicts, but, like, what’s that got to do with your drinking?”

  After a pause, he said, “I was never great at sports. I, uh, don’t have the hand-eye coordination. I had a lazy eye as a kid and had to wear a patch in elementary school to fix it. Like a pirate. Anyway, this impeded my athletic abilities, wearing a patch for two years and then suddenly not wearing one—I never really figured out the spatial orientation thing.

  “But my parents signed me up for, like, every sport—softball, basketball, soccer. Until I was a teenager, I didn’t know I was bad. You know how it is when you’re a kid. . . . The coaches played everybody, so it wasn’t like I had any signs that I sucked. I didn’t think I was good because I never scored, but I figured I was somewhere in the middle. I really just didn’t think much about it.

  “My dad didn’t know I sucked either because he didn’t come to my games. He was always traveling for work and whatnot. One night, I was invited by my softball coach to throw the first pitch at the Rangers game. My dad was super excited about it, must’ve thought it was because I was good or something. He rented a box and invited all his friends, my uncles, my cousins.

  “That night, I went out on the field, and I wasn’t the only one—there were three of us, all throwing pitches from the mound. The other two were girls from different schools from mine. One of them was in a wheelchair, and the other had a robotic hand. I was still wearing my eye patch then. I didn’t think much about the girls. I was proud. I got my T-shirt, I got my photograph made with a couple of the players. I ran off the field where my mom was waiting, and we headed back up to the box.

  “I could hear my dad yelling before I even got through the door. ‘My kid isn’t disabled!’ So I walk in, and he’s like, ‘Tyler, come here!’ Everyone is quiet, watching. He says, ‘Toss me that ball.’ And for the next . . . I don’t know how long, half hour? Hour? He makes me play catch with him to ‘prove’ to all of his friends that I’m not disabled. But I kept missing it. And he’d say, ‘Try again.’ And then we’d take a break and stop. And then a few minutes later, he’d say, ‘Tyler! Toss me that ball!’ And we’d have to do it again. I didn’t know if he was just forgetting we’d already done it—this was before he got sober—or if he just wasn’t giving up. But at some point . . . I mean, I was only seven, but at some point, I remember thinking, Is he trying to get me to show I can catch, or is he mocking me because I can’t? Eventually I started crying, and my aunt intervened and took me to get popcorn.”

  “Was it different after he stopped drinking? When did he stop?”

  “He got sober when I was in high school. It just made him madder. He didn’t choose it. His liver was pickled, and the doctor said he was going to fucking die if he didn’t. So for six years he’s been sober and pissed off about it.”

  “How does your mom handle it?”

  He shrugged.

  “She doesn’t really engage. She’s sort of in her own world. You know how poets are.”

  “Your mom is a poet?”

  “Not a famous poet or anything. She has a couple of chapbooks out.”

  Stayja had never heard the term chapbook and assumed it was a book of poetry but didn’t ask.

  “So I have a 3.8 GPA, right?” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “That’s really good.”

  “I know how GPAs work.”

  “When I told my dad my GPA and that I’ll probably graduate summa, he said, ‘With grade inflation, that’s probably like a 3.2 in 1992.’ That was the year he graduated from here.”

  “Why is he so competitive with you?”

  He shook his head. “Not competition. There’s no fight. It’s a bludgeoning. He lives to stomp me out.”

  Without thinking, she took his hand. His clasped around hers instantly, gripping it as if she were going to save him from something.

  Holding his warm hand in that moment, she would do anything he asked.

  10

  Annie

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9

  Over the following week, our banter over text and Snapchat was constant. He sent me funny videos and screenshots of old political cartoons he was collecting for a paper on the emergence of political satire as what he described as the primary mode of public political discourse in the contemporary United States. (When I asked him what that meant, he said, “Colbert.”) He was also working on a paper for his Religion in America class on the rising popularity of mysticism within both the religious population and the secular population.

  “Everyone is interested in personal spirituality. Mysticism is the only way that traditional religion is managing to stay relevant.” Take Kabbalah—the Jewish brand of mysticism that had become popular among a critical mass of people who, he claimed, would never have subscribed to traditional religion but now studied its ancient wisdom as a means to individual enlightenment.

  I didn’t know you were Jewish, I texted back. How observant are you?

  I’m not, he wrote. Just fascinated by Kabbalah.

  I was grasping for every clue that he was a good person, seizing onto them and storing them up as reassurance, filing them away as evidence that he was a decent person.

  How could someone devoted to his religion be a rapist?

  But then, when it turned out he hadn’t meant that he himself was religious:

  How could someone interested in personal spirituality be a rapist?

  “Kabbalah also embraces the divine feminine, defying, like other popular strands of mysticism in contemporary culture, the misogyny inherent in every major religion.”

  How could someone who points out the importance of gender equality be a rapist?

  He told me about his final project for his art minor—a series of paintings themed on “the golden ratio.” I didn’t know what the golden ratio was, and he didn’t explain it. He’d collaborated with a dance major, who’d choreographed a dance based on this mysterious ratio. He’d then taken stills from the video of the performance and made watercolors of them.

  He paints.

  He collaborates with women.

  I needed him to be normal so that I could be normal—not his victim or anyone’s victim. Just a girl he was interested in.

  It was in these seven days that I experienced just how dangerously close belief is to incentive. Both charmed by Tyler Brand and determined to be charmed by Tyler Brand, at the end of our weeklong, post-assault courtship, I felt only a tinge of fear when I stood in my closet, choosing what to wear for our second date—this time an actual one, so that when I had used the term to my mother, it hadn’t felt like fudging. (I obviously hadn’t mentioned anything about how the previous weekend had gone, other than a vague “it was fun.”)

  He’d asked what my favorite restaurant was off campus, and I’d answered Pi.

  A rapist doesn’t a
sk you what your favorite restaurant is.

  AT PI, THE digits of Pi were scrawled in black Sharpie across the walls, trickling off into nothing as it circled the room once, twice, three times. Late on weekend nights, drunk engineering students would take turns reciting as many digits as they could from memory—hit 314 and get a free cheese pizza. (Drunk liberal arts majors couldn’t get past the second digit.)

  After Pi, he’d said, we could check out the improv show on campus.

  I surveyed my hanging clothes in search of an outfit. In reaction to the weekend before, I found that my overwhelming desire was to appear casual, as if I hadn’t put in effort. I knew green brought out my eyes. I pulled out a hunter green T-shirt and denim cutoffs—more laid back than the navy ones. I wouldn’t resort to jeans, wouldn’t let him send me back into hiding.

  An hour later, I got to the restaurant before he did and waited outside, finally spotting him walking toward me with a small wave. Watching him, it occurred to me that his gait—its childlike bounce, its slight tilt forward—may have been the root of his attractiveness. There was nothing cool or withholding about it. It was easy to imagine him as a kid with that same toe-walk, the same involuntary lean-in that said, I’m open, and I won’t bother pretending otherwise.

  Pi offered pizzas in varieties like garlic truffle parmesan and chorizo pineapple. “Sausage” appeared nowhere on its menu. Bread sticks were “cheddar spears.” He insisted that we share a pear and prosciutto white pie topped with toasted almonds, his favorite.

  Growing up, my pizza-eating experience had been limited to the Little Caesars three blocks from my house, where you could play the old-school electronic game Simon to win free bread sticks with your meal. We were there every Friday night like clockwork, my dad pounding his palm on the colorful buttons to save us the $2.99.

  “How’d you choose history as your major?” I asked after we put in our order, feeling boring but too nervous to think of a better question. I felt sensitive, maybe fragile. Like using your arm for the first time after you’ve sprained your wrist and it’s supposed to have healed. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but you’re not quite sure you trust it.

  “I decided when my Office of the Presidency class in high school got a private tour of the West Wing.”

  I choked on my bite and guzzled my water, jarred out of my jitters. He laughed. Over a year in, I was still frequently amazed by how different my high school experience had been from those of my peers. They spent semesters—of high school—in Italy, France, and Spain. They had performed theater in Mandarin. They had had alpine skiing as a PE option.

  “My school,” he said as I wiped my eyes, running with the opportunity to make fun of himself, “had an outdoor swimming pool and an indoor one. We had a restaurant for lunch with table service, along with a normal cafeteria, of course. And, yes, we had an entire course called The Office of the Presidency, for seniors. Each of us was assigned a role in the White House, and the whole semester you worked together to run the country—international crises, bills, lobbyists, PR.”

  “Let me guess . . .” I said.

  “Yep,” he said, beaming. “Mr. President!” He looked overjoyed. It was so dorky.

  A rapist doesn’t act like a dork.

  After dinner, we walked over to the show, which was in the big auditorium on campus and made me laugh so hard I peed on myself a little and had to rush to the bathroom afterward to make sure I wasn’t mistaken about the wetness, that I hadn’t started my period. I had not.

  I found Tyler outside, chatting with one of the only two girls who had been in the show. I was intimidated by how effortlessly confident she and the other girl seemed. Did Tyler know her?

  “Hey, there you are,” he said as I approached. “Ready?”

  “You were amazing,” I said to her.

  “Thanks,” she said and smiled at me.

  As Tyler and I walked in the direction of both of our dorm rooms, he began talking about a film the show had reminded him of—using the word film. He said he owned it but hadn’t watched it in a long time.

  “It’s from the nineties. It’s just footage,” he said as we strolled more slowly than was natural, as if we didn’t want the night to end or weren’t ready for what was coming next. “Footage from everywhere. There’s no story line or commentary. Just visuals of stuff from all over the world. Like, have you ever seen Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Like a kaleidoscope, sort of,” he said. “I’m telling you, this movie changed my life.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  He stopped and faced me.

  “What do you think? Want to come over and watch it?” His hands were in his pockets and his wild, messy hair was blowing in the breeze. My stomach tightened, and I took a deep breath in, then let it out. Did I want to? I didn’t know what I wanted—but I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be afraid.

  A rapist doesn’t say a movie changed his life.

  “Sure,” I said.

  WHEN WE REACHED his room, he opened it without unlocking it.

  “It’s a pain to have to unlock it every time,” he said, entering. I followed. “I did the same thing in high school with my locker. Never put a lock on it. One morning senior year, I opened it and all my books were gone. It was completely empty. Turned out Derek, the vice principal—we were close—had cleaned it out as a joke. I found all my stuff sitting on his desk in his office and took it right back.”

  “But that was just a locker,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “It’s all just stuff. Nothing is irreplaceable. Well, except. . . .”

  He went to his bookshelf and pulled down from the top of it an oversized black leather folder.

  “Can I show you my project?” Carrying the folder with him, he plopped onto his bed to lean against the wall and patted the comforter, gesturing for me to join him. Then he opened it to reveal a watercolor on paper. Even upside down, I could tell it showed a dancer on her toes, reaching skyward.

  My body felt as if it were moving against an invisible pull, as if there were a rope around my waist trying to hold me back, as I moved to the bed and took a seat next to him.

  He carefully, painstakingly, as if the pages were as delicate as flower petals, flipped through fifteen or so of them, pausing for several long seconds on each one. The paintings were muted but vibrant, in jewel tones that jumped off the page. There was movement and ferocity but also a softness that left me shocked that they’d been made by a man. They were so tender.

  “This is the project I told you about,” he said. “Of the golden ratio. Also known as the Fibonacci sequence. I have three more to make.”

  “They’re amazing,” I said.

  He closed the portfolio and hopped off the bed. With both hands, he slid the portfolio out of sight onto the top of the shelf between a stack of reams of printer paper and a small plant I hadn’t noticed before.

  What college student keeps a plant?

  Not a rapist.

  “I keep it up here where it’s safe,” he said.

  “Can I ask a dumb question?” I asked. “What’s the Fibonacci sequence?”

  “Not a dumb question,” he said, lifting up his shirt. On his chest, squares of various sizes were inscribed inside one another, forming a sort of angular spiral.

  “Recognize it? The golden ratio?” he asked.

  “Honestly,” I said. “I’ve never heard of that either.”

  He grabbed his laptop and climbed back onto the bed. Next to me again, he googled “the golden ratio.” Images filled the screen: seashells, orchids, the Mona Lisa, a cat curled up sleeping. “The ratio that defines all of nature. The relationship between plants and stems, animal skeletons, crystals. It’s the grounding principle of all beautiful forms.” He pulled up a photo he’d taken of a brown, sandy beach on which rivulets of water formed tree-shaped divots in the sand, creases branching in stunning formation. “Like here—see how the water recedes and leaves this
same form? That looks like hands, or trees? This is in Costa Rica.”

  “But your tattoo . . .” I said. His tattoo didn’t look anything like seashells or trees.

  “Well, the actual spiral felt a little too cliché as a tat. The rectangles were more like a puzzle. Plus I didn’t want a seashell on my chest.” He snickered as he stood again to fetch a spiral notebook and a pen. I watched over his shoulder as he scribbled:

  He stopped, looking frustrated.

  “I can’t believe I can’t remember how to do this.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re in college and don’t have to remember algebra anymore. That’s one of the nice things about it.” I laughed at my own joke. He didn’t.

  “No,” he said distantly. “I need to figure this out.”

  “We can just look it up,” I said, reaching for his laptop, still open.

  He ignored me. For several more minutes he worked until, finally, he picked up his pen.

  “Finally,” he said. “That’s it.” He handed the notebook to me. The page was filled with a manic scribble, ending in the equation φ + 1 = φ2.

  “Congrats?” I said.

  He looked embarrassed as he took it back and said, “My seventh-grade algebra teacher, Mr. Getty, showed this to me. When he saw how excited I got, he asked the principal to move me from regular math to advanced math. It was the first time I remember feeling smart.”

  “What happened to Mr. Getty?”

  “Happened to him? I guess he’s still teaching, probably.”

  “You don’t keep up with your favorite teacher?”

  “From when I was eleven?” He seemed flabbergasted.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He grinned at me.

  “Wholesome!” he said. “That’s the word I was trying to think of. You’re wholesome.”

  “I’m not wholesome,” I said, offended.

  “Oh, you’re totally all-American.”

  I scoffed.

  “It’s not an insult.”

  “Who wants to be wholesome? I’m not Amish.”