Consensual Hex

by Amanda Harlowe

  I’m about to turn the water off when she comes out of the stall.

  She’s a waifish Asian girl in Pippi Longstocking thigh socks and denim cutoffs, a dog-eared Didion crammed inside her elbow, and when she smiles and says “Hello,” she’s already my enemy because she’s seen me all red and slathered in mucus and I’m sure she’s thinking how weak and pathetic I am and how it would be better for the world as a whole if I just had the courage to hang myself with my baby blanket.

  “I’m Luna,” she says. She tells me she lives in the room right next to the bathroom, and she accidentally has a single because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate is taking a gap year.

  She asks if I want to get dinner. She’s going with her friend who lives in Lawrence House. Afterward, we could swing by Lawrence and try to see Sylvia Plath’s old room. Luna knows the girl who lives there.

  “I’m good,” I say. “I’m already getting dinner with someone.”

  She smiles, like she hates me. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure, thanks.”

  “Cool. See you around,” Luna says with a wave of her vermilion nails, and part of me, suddenly, desperately, wants to join her side, compliment her hair, ask her about Slouching Towards Bethlehem and get bubble tea after dinner and not stop talking until we come back to the bathroom to take off our eyeliner.

  “See you,” I say.

  “I live right next to the bathroom,” she repeats with a glance over her shoulder, in a tone I expect to interpret as pity, but feels like a golden June fireside, a whole branch of marshmallows dripping onto her thighs.

  Chapter Two

  Madwomen

  I GO TO ALL THE required Orientation events, the auditorium speeches about the honor code and diversity and sexual misconduct that you have to attend in order to get your registration code, but otherwise I sit in my room and try to pay attention to Orphan Black, or, when I figure I should go outside, sit cross-legged on the lawn with a book in my lap, watching people learning and flirting and smoking weed with confidence and the adventurous, toothy ruggedness that accompanies a self-image that isn’t constantly sifting through your fingers and expanding into an ever-greater pile of quicksand.

  People try to talk to me, try to get me to come and join the icebreakers in Chapin’s common room (they assure me they won’t do the viral one from Swarthmore, where everyone has to line up in descending order of oppression). I always have an excuse: migraine, cramps, all the graphic period issues you’re not supposed to talk about in the big wide polite world of not-women’s-colleges, where you must say you’re under the weather to seem dainty and appealing to hypothetical male listeners.

  “We’re totally understanding of that here,” one of the Orientation leaders assures me. “Let me know if you need any Midol.”

  Way back when—junior year, when Zara and I would go to Starbucks and loudly discuss Gramsci and Gloria Steinem, until she fell out of fashion for being a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist)—I had this idea that I was going to be a Campus Activist, and when the Smith course catalog arrived with a list of clubs, I vowed to go to the first meeting of every “political” student organization. But by the time Orientation week rounds up on a rainy Friday, I only feel okay enough to go to Smithies Against Sexual Violence, which meets once per month and doesn’t require members to attend every meeting.

  They meet in an empty lecture hall basement decorated with a solitary poster explaining that you should not speak just to speak; you should let other folks talk when the issue concerns their daily bread, not just some tragedy you saw on the news. There are a couple of guys at the meeting, male allies from the other Five College campuses. One stands out from the scruffy hipsters in his Amherst hoodie and whale-print pants (in that washing machine accident they call Nantucket red), sand-hewn Sperry topsiders on his feet. But he’s carrying a copy of Judith Butler, which washes him clean like a bucket of holy water. He’s the sort of guy I suppose I should like, who might play a round of golf with my brother and spontaneously whip out a bouquet when he’s got his arm around me on top of a Ferris wheel, overlooking the shore fading to dark Atlantic, the end of the cotton-candy seersucker world.

  I wonder if it will play out like Zara promised me over flatbreads and carrot hummus at the deli where she worked. That day she didn’t tell me that no guy could ever be attracted to me (unlike that other time, with Gianna in my room, where we all confessed we’d touched ourselves without ever using the word masturbated, and Zara assured me I was safe from sexual harassment because, in her words, No offense, no one is ever going to look at you as a sex object, and Gianna objected because she’s nice). At the deli, Zara assured me it would happen, with a friend, after we got to know each other over common interests and that sort of thing just arises out of getting coffee and exchanging DVDs and eventually making out. Only I didn’t have any male friends. Zara then criticized me for intentionally attending a women’s college and started telling me about her friend with a pineapple allergy who had to go to the hospital the other night because she was hanging out with her boyfriend, and then, you know, she started to go down on him and all of a sudden she was like, “Cade! You know I’m allergic to pineapple!”

  I didn’t want to blow any male friends, I said. I wasn’t sure I wanted to blow anyone, especially if blowjobs land girls in the emergency room.

  Zara rolled her eyes and assured me she hadn’t gone down on that guy she was seeing, who worked at the café at Barnes & Noble and desperately wanted to unlock the Zara Karen Khoury Pussy™, especially after he kept paying for dinner. It must be great to have so many guys into you, I said, watching her lick the dripping white feta from the webbed skin between her fingers.

  Before the meeting starts, I learn the Amherst guy’s name is Tripp—which we almost started calling my brother before my mom objected—and he’s from Greenwich. Great, I’m from Fairfield, originally, before we had to move for my mom’s job. We talk about Connecticut and dogwood trees, Metro-North, and the Blue Man Group. Oh, I’m a freshman—sorry, first-year? Intending to be a history major? We have something in common. “Great shoes,” he adds, pointing to my feet wobbling in the platforms, his hand accidentally brushing mine.

  He says he’s a sophomore and he just thinks it’s so critical that male allies work together with women activists to fight sexual assault. Like how in Sweden, they did that big campaign encouraging men to stick up to their buddies trying to steal disoriented women from bars, and it cut rates of sexual assault by a huge margin. We should all be like Scandinavia.

  I’m asking him why he’s at the Smith group, instead of the one at Amherst, when a girl trips over his outstretched legs. Her hundred-calorie bag of Doritos catapults into the air and spills over his lap.

  “Go to hell,” Tripp says with a smirk, brushing the crumbs off his pants. Then: “Sorry, I didn’t mean—are you all right?”

  He helps her up, his knee a ladder, his hair shining like the helmet of a knight.

  “Are you all right?” he repeats.

  The girl doesn’t respond, and as she’s walking away she looks me in the eye.

  It’s her again, the Chapin bathroom girl with the thigh socks—Luna—but this time, instead of staring at me with Fourth of July–seaside-barbecue, serape-blanket expectation, she’s seething. Her brown eyes are muddy, her glasses fogged up with tears.

  So he broke up with her.

  Tripp and I sit next to each other during the meeting, which is moderated by a blue-haired senior with rainbow feathers dangling from her ears and her shorter, Justin Bieber–lesbian roommate. They want us to make T-shirts about sexual assault, which they will use for a protest art exhibition on the Quad, with all the T-shirts arranged in a big circle. But they want us to turn the shirts inside out during the day, so as not to trigger anyone.

  They’re just about to discuss the budget when heavy feet in sneakers crash down the stairs.

  It’s a petite girl, and she’s halfway between sobbing and cac
kling. She reaches the last step, careens out of the shadows, and turns to the messy rectangular assortment of tables and chairs, student limbs sprawled everywhere. But her eyes, red and shot with veins, aren’t looking at the confused congregation—she’s staring up at the high fluorescence of the ceiling, as if she’s been blinded.

  The girl grips her middle and chokes back a sob. She’s swaddled in athletic gear, running shorts and an Amherst sweatshirt, blue k-tape wrapped in a thick layer around her knee, but she’s frail, with small wasted muscles and ankles so delicate they look ready to snap at a vigorous gust of wind. She is barefoot (there’s a tattoo clenching her ankle, the red string of fate). Her hair is wet, her face pocked with acne.

  She reaches into the fleece pocket of her hoodie and removes a long plastic object that I realize too late is a vibrator.

  The girl cries out and flings the vibrator at the group, knocking over the slim white vase holding a sprig of white daisies, just as more feet pound down the stairs: Campus Police, mumbling into radios, followed by a pair of paramedics bearing a slim white stretcher.

  I stare at the vibrator on the floor, the mess of flowers and water and ceramic shards, as the girl screams over the radio fizzle and the paramedics wrestle her onto the stretcher.

  “You know who you are,” the girl is screaming. “I have your texts, I have the sweatshirt, I have evidence—”

  The paramedics start hoisting her up the stairs, one officer bounding up the steps to hold the door open—but I can still hear her, “I have proof, it’s not just my word.”

  The stretcher disappears, the door creaks and shuts, the screams roll away, and all that’s left are the girl’s muddy footprints.

  We stare at the moderator, who doesn’t know what to do.

  “Uh, can people help us clean this up?” she says, indicating the flowers and the vibrator.

  No one wants to touch the vibrator, but I pick up a daisy and the Bieber lookalike finds paper towels in an abandoned cabinet.

  “Are you all right?” says Tripp, hand on my back, as I spin the daisy and try to look busy.

  “What? Yes—” I drop the flower.

  He picks it up.

  “For you,” he says, handing it back to me.

  Someone else is sobbing.

  Actually, two people, but Luna—who has since removed her glasses, wiping them on her cardigan—is walking toward me, and I wonder if she’s going to throw something at me, if she’s a part of this.

  She passes me, and I hold the flower out to her; she doesn’t take it.

  “Excuse me,” says Luna.

  I’m blocking her way. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” She passes the vibrator, stepping over it clumsily, so her heel twists the long pink object sideways and the rounded end points at Tripp’s golf-tanned feet.

  Luna goes upstairs; the group starts to disassemble.

  Tripp puts his hand on my back again.

  “Leisl,” he says. “Has anyone ever told you you look like Taylor Swift?”

  Tripp walks me out. We go to the PVTA stop and wait for the bus. The rain has stopped, but the concrete is damp and mosquitoes keep pricking my arms.

  “You sure you’ll get back to your room okay?” Tripp asks, opening his wallet to remove a bus token, his plastic Amherst ID reflecting the streetlight (CLASS OF 2014).

  “Chapin is like two hundred feet away,” I say, craning my chin toward the postcard red-brick exterior of the house. “And I thought you were a sophomore?”

  He ignores my question, starts to smoke; he asks me if I want one.

  “My grandfather died from lung cancer,” I say.

  Tripp exhales, smoky tendrils reaching out to smack my cheeks and eyes. I start to cough.

  “My dad was a smoker,” says Tripp. “But he stopped when I was seven. He was supposed to be on the plane that flew into the Twin Towers, would you believe it? But something went wrong with his luggage. He got delayed.”

  “My mom almost died in 9/11,” I say. “She was supposed to be at a meeting at the World Trade Center that morning. But she was late. She’s never late for anything in her life. That’s why I believe in God.”

  “But how could God have let all those other people die?” Tripp says, hazel eyes hooded and bloodshot. “Is God still good if he only saves you?”

  “God doesn’t always make sense.” I pause, hoping he won’t think I’m an idiot for repeating my sophomore-year nun teacher’s explanation for why evil exists if God only creates good things. “So when are you going to stop smoking? What terrorist event or natural disaster will you have to narrowly avoid to convince yourself to quit?”

  He laughs, and, like all nicotine-dependent twenty-year-olds asked to defend their habit, doesn’t provide an answer. I remember sitting in my house with Zara after I tried to get her to stop smoking, that time she got a splinter from the new wood floors and sat in my mom’s velvet chair while she removed it, caught her blood on a single tissue; when I pointed out the statistics she just insisted she was going to die young. I hope Tripp isn’t planning to die young. I hope he’s planning to stop being a mild asshole so he can ask me to the Hamptons next summer and his dad can introduce me to the dean of Columbia Law so I can coast by on a three-point-seven and not a four-point-oh because I’ve got connections.

  A bike hitched to the fence rattles in the wind, but not long enough. Tripp’s chapped mouth is sealed and it’s up to me to fix the silence.

  “I wonder what happened to that girl,” I say.

  “What girl?” He raises an eyebrow, my chest ballooning with inadequacy. “Oh, that girl.”

  Silence. Closed mouth. I gulp and feel like I always do when I send a text that is accidentally unanswerable and I spend the next five hours with my phone against my hip, ready to climb into a hole and seal myself underground forever. “I mean, I hope they’re able to take care of her at the hospital—”

  Tripp puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “You’re a freshman,” he says. “Sorry—first-year. You don’t know.”

  I gulp. “I don’t know what?”

  He takes his hand away. “You don’t know her.”

  “No?”

  “Her name is Clara. She goes to Amherst.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She obviously just had a mental breakdown. She was, well, it’s hard to say without sounding insensitive. One of those girls. The type who goes around accusing every man she encounters of some serious crime just because they were both drunk one night and something happened she doesn’t remember. God, it’s not like she didn’t have someone with her when she went to get the morning-after pill. And he paid. Anyway, what I’m saying is—”

  “What?”

  “I slept with her,” he admits, hands shoved deep in his pockets; with his admission, he turns from a silver knight to gold, solid gold, a prize at the end of the race, a medal to hang over the mantel and dust. “And she’s just, like, this insane girl. I really hope she’s able to get the help she needs.”

  The PVTA bus halts at the light and Tripp slings his backpack over his shoulder.

  He touches me, again.

  “Leisl,” he says, and I’m amazed he remembers my name. “I’ve got my own TV in my room. Why don’t you come back to Amherst?”

  His skin collects the yellow streetlight and spits it back gilded; he’s that hazel-cat-eye, upturned-nose, sharp-jaw phenotype of Burberry fragrance and rolled-up white shirts, the kind of guy I should want, desperately. I feel like if I could just get a picture of us making out and post it where Zara would see it, that would be enough. Proving that an objectively hot guy was into me, that’s all I need.

  “I have an Orientation thing early,” I say, “and you look tired.”

  The PVTA careens toward the curb.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Tripp says, his voice ringing like an auriscope shining deeper and deeper into my ear canal. “Another time?”

  The bus headlights swing into view; he grins, cups
the back of my neck, and kisses me. He smells like dish soap, the lavender kind, a strangely clinical, dental-mask-latex sort of scent that makes me wonder if carnal passion is like swallowing bland toast and warm orange juice, something you only eat because breakfast is the most important meal of the day. He’s messing up my hair and I don’t know what to do with my hands. I’m glad he’s being clear with his intentions, but I feel something in me twist, and it’s not until he quits sucking my bottom lip that I realize the feeling is unpleasant. I don’t want him close to my body, even though he’s a man, he’s attractive, he goes to Amherst, and he probably has a house in the Hamptons.

  Tripp stops kissing me and I feel better. Why don’t we go to dinner, he asks as he inches toward the bus. What do I like? Sushi? All girls like sushi. I assure him I’m the real sort of sushi lover, I like everything raw, but I won’t eat sea urchin two hours from the coast because it’s supposed to be alive when you consume it and I don’t trust seafood delivery trucks, not after my Vermont food poisoning incident.

  He’ll text me.

  Saturday, he texts good morning, and my heart swims—men are always better in retrospect, I realize—but then the texts stop, even after I ask him, for the second time, if we’re going to get sushi.

  Saturday night, I’m alone. By Sunday, I’m subsisting on diet soda and energy bars in the comfort of my twin XL. Convocation—the ringing in of the academic year, a tremendous celebration in the main auditorium where all the seniors are naked and the first-years swear they’ll never be naked and the bare-breasted Head Residents are taking swigs of vodka and recalling that they felt the same way when I was your age—is tonight, but I ignore the false invitations of my floor’s RA, and Rachel’s guilty last-minute attempt at including me in her group of intramural volleyball Bachelorette friends.

  Tripp texts me after sunset, and invites me to meet him at SooRa, which closes in an hour. I wear the shoes he likes, and run, not walk, past the auditorium booming with laughter, past the Northamptonites ushering their dogs through the melted-butter air, my throat tight from moving so fast. Tripp texting me late doesn’t mean anything, aside from that he’s busy, which is a good thing, he doesn’t just play video games, and not texting me back immediately doesn’t mean he thinks I’m ugly.