Studying sucks.
I stared at his message for a moment, puzzled, before replying. Isn’t that what you were supposed to be doing all last week?
Probably. A minute later, I was a little preoccupied with other things, though.
I grinned. Looking for a study break?
I wish. If I don’t get through this trig stuff I’m fucked for tomorrow.
I felt deflated. If he didn’t want to have sex with me, then what did he want?
My phone buzzed again. I’ve been in the library since 7am. Bored as fuck. Hope your day is going better.
He just wanted to talk. He’d texted me, not because he wanted something from me, but because he’d been thinking of me. My day might actually have yours beat as far as shittiness goes.
Oh yeah? Tell me about it.
Under my nest of blankets, sinking ever deeper into my mattress, Kip and I continued to talk into the afternoon.
ELEVEN
Meggy and Maggie would turn 23 that Wednesday and so, with repeated encouragement from ReeAnn, I joined her and the other apprentices out for a birthday dinner that Tuesday night. The Woods twins chose a Mexican restaurant in downtown Scarsdale, a loud, obtrusive place with bright sugary drinks and plastic tablecloths and complimentary bowls of chips and salsa on every table. Mariachi droned through the speakers, and my head ached.
Chapin wasn’t present—not that her absence ever necessitated remark—but everyone else, even the usually sour Babs, was in high spirits. ReeAnn sat to my right, with Babs beside her, and Raj was sandwiched between the twins across the table. ReeAnn took out her phone for a picture, and Raj slung his arms around the Woods’s skinny bodies, their three faces pressed tight together. “Dude, cilantro in your teeth,” Babs said, pointing. Raj bared his teeth and leaned over the table. “Lick it out for me?” They all howled. ReeAnn turned to me still laughing, welcoming me to join in on the fun. I hated that I could tell she felt sorry for me.
Six goblets filled to the brim with Pepto-pink frozen margarita appeared. “Drink!” Maggie commanded. Their five heads bowed to meet their colorful straws, even Babs, who apparently no longer abstained from drinking. I followed suit, and the icy thickness shot a painful blast to my temples. When I raised my head again, everyone was smiling at me, though whether their smiles were friendly or wary, I couldn’t decide. If they were willing to pretend I hadn’t spent the past two weeks shut up in my bedroom, then I was, too.
Conversation floated between grad apps, midterm exam grading, and a drunken night the five of them had shared at a bar the weekend before. I sucked up my drink and did my best to play my role. “Yeah, just about done.” “Yeah, totally a pain.” “Yeah, too bad I missed out. I’ll be there next time.” I was working on my second drink when Raj materialized at my elbow, having dragged over a chair from an unoccupied table nearby.
“Rajy,” Meggy pouted. “Where are you going?”
He pointed at me. “Going to catch up with Imogene for a sec.”
“Okay,” I said, realizing as I did that a response wasn’t expected of me.
He turned to me. “Hello.” He still had a bit of cilantro in his teeth; I caught a flash of green as he spoke. I gave a furtive look around the table to make sure nobody was still paying attention to this unexpected seat rearrangement. He noticed. “Don’t worry, it’s cool,” he said.
“Okay.” I tried to look cool.
“So.” He leaned back in his seat. “What’s up?”
A simple question that could spawn a million answers. “Not much.”
He smiled past me for an unseen TV audience. These girls liked him, his being male a fun anomaly, and their attention made him cocky. I had a strange desire to see him taken down a peg, by cooler girls, or better yet by cooler guys, by anyone who could see right through the fabricated confidence his sole maleness among unhip girls allowed him. “Okay. Listen. Chapin told me what you told her, about us…” He lowered his voice and waggled his brows. “… you know. Hooking up.”
“Okay.” My margarita gurgled unhappily in my stomach. Okay was the only word that seemed safe anymore.
“I just … I have a girlfriend, you know?”
I nodded. Nodding was okay, too.
“And I thought it was weird, especially since we haven’t hung out in a long time, you and me. Like, why would Imogene say that when we don’t even hang out? And then I thought, well, maybe we should hang out more often.”
Nod, nod, nod.
“I don’t know. It’s like, ever since she told me…” He smiled, suddenly sheepish. “I guess I’ve just been thinking. About you.”
I stopped nodding.
“Not like that,” he said quickly. “Just … thinking.”
“Do we have a birthday in the house?” a voice sang from behind. We turned and watched as a group of waiters spilled out of the kitchen, one wielding a giant slice of chocolate cake and another a vihuela. Raj turned back to me as they started in on Feliz Cumpelaños.
“So let’s hang out sometime soon.”
“Okay.” I was back to my standby response.
He flashed another smile and returned to his seat between the twins. I peered down into my drink and sucked it up until I could see the bottom of the glass.
* * *
Kip finished his exams that Thursday afternoon, and late on Thursday night, he invited me over. It was almost two in the morning, and I had just taken off my bra and slipped into bed, resigned at last to the fact that I wouldn’t be hearing from him that night. When my phone vibrated with a message notification, I leapt from my covers. I was at his door a few minutes later, an emergency official reporting for duty.
He kissed me before he’d even fully opened the door. “Hi,” he said. We smiled goofily at each other. We hadn’t been together since the Sunday before.
After scooping me up and carrying me to his bed, he clawed at my clothes. I helped him off with my shirt and pants, eager to comply. Once I was naked, he knelt before me, rubbing my thighs. I resisted the urge to cover myself.
“Wow,” he said. He squeezed my thighs tight. “Wow, wow, wow.”
“Hey. You, too.” I reached down and tugged at his shirt.
He stood, stumbling a bit, and unlatched his belt. His pants and boxers crumbled around his ankles. We both looked down at his penis, which hung flaccid between his pale legs. “Uh-oh.” He flicked it with his finger and it swung, a useless pendulum. “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs.”
It was then that I realized he was wasted.
“You okay?”
Kip grinned guiltily at me, a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar, and sat next to me on the bed. He buried his face between my breasts. “Help me, Teach. I’m fucked up.”
Teach. I inhaled sharply, inadvertently. “Please don’t call me that.”
“What, Teach?” Kip’s head lolled, his neck failing to hold it up. “Short for Teacher.”
“I know. I don’t like it.”
“Teacher. Apprentice. Whatever the fuck you are.”
I dug my nails into my palms. I had thought it unspoken that we wouldn’t address my title. It felt like a taunt coming from his mouth then, or a threat. He’s drunk, I reminded myself. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. “How much did you have to drink?”
He shrugged, head still firmly pressed into my chest. “Too much. Too much to get it up.” He giggled at the near rhyme and sang this line again in a girlish falsetto. “Too much to get it up.” He paused and grabbed himself. “And too much Adderall. Which makes my dick go, pfft.” He blew a raspberry and released his penis, letting it swing downwards again.
“Well, that would do it.”
Newly energized, he sat up and looked at me with wide eyes. “You can do something.” He laid his hand on the back of my head and pressed it downward, urging me towards his lap. “Use your magical mouth to make me magically hard.”
I knew I should have been annoyed, angry even, but I wasn’t. I didn’t like this Kip, but I liked seeing him wi
thout his edge, without his cool. It felt raw and vulnerable, private. Seeing him this way was like being let in on a secret, and I felt special, even as Kip pushed me single-mindedly towards his crotch.
I slipped to the floor, crouched on my knees. I didn’t feel like I had kneeling before Zeke Maloney’s insistent appendage; I felt older. I felt more capable. Kip stroked my hair and mumbled appreciatively, but we both knew the effort was in vain. Eventually he pulled me up and hugged me into his chest, and we fell together back into his pillows. I kissed his face. He was mine to take care of, mine to make better. He’d never seemed sweeter to me.
“Let’s just talk,” he said. His eyes were barely slits.
“Okay.”
“Tell me about yourself, Imogene.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. Anything.”
Why is it that when someone asked me about myself I could never think of a thing to say? Anyone could be from Lockport. Anyone could have a younger sister. Anyone could have gone to Buffalo State. I was anyone, no one. I spotted a Yale pennant hanging by his closet, one I didn’t remember from before. I nodded to it. “Is that new?”
“Hmm?” He opened his eyes, shut them again. “Oh. Yeah.”
“Is that where you want to go?”
He nodded. “That’s the plan.”
“That’s where your brother goes.” I said it before I could stop myself. He was quiet for a moment and then, perhaps deciding he had told me this piece of information himself and forgotten, he let the moment pass.
“Where my dad went, too. And grandfather.”
“Wow.”
“I want to sail there.”
I thought I might have misheard him. “As opposed to driving?”
“No. Sail there. Like, when I’m there. On the sailing team.” He paused, then added for clarification, “I sail.”
And then, without further prompting, eyes still closed, he began to talk—a monologue that didn’t necessitate an audience but that I listened to every word of nevertheless. He talked about growing up on the water in Hingham, about sailing with his father and brother, about his boat, The Orion. He smiled as he talked, and I smiled to hear him talk about something with such passion. We’re talking, I thought. We’d moved on from our bodies, from sex. He turned to look at me, and his eyes bore into mine with sudden startling intensity, and I realized, like a blow to the head, that losing him would destroy me. I couldn’t say when that became true any more than I could stop it from being true.
“I’ll take you there sometime,” he said.
“Where?”
“Home. To Hingham. I’ll take you out on The Orion.”
“Really? Me?”
Kip opened his eyes, bloodshot and beautiful. He didn’t love me, I knew that. But he felt something for me. He felt something close to what I did, or else I wouldn’t know to feel that way myself. I was his mirror, after all. I hadn’t, and wouldn’t have, given him any more than he gave me. I closed my eyes, relaxed into those thoughts. He burrowed his head into my lap and spoke into the valley between my legs. “You,” he said. “You, you, you.”
* * *
Dale asked me to meet him in his classroom Friday morning to start grading midterms, and having left Kip’s room only hours before, all I could think of on my walk across campus was returning to my bed afterwards to sleep. Dale grinned when I entered his room. His hair was pulled back into a wispy ponytail, as it had been when I first met him, and he’d untucked his shirt.
“Imogene,” he said, gesturing to the stack of papers on his desk. “Welcome to my hell.” I thought maybe the strangeness of earlier in the week had all been in my head.
He divided the midterms into two stacks and pulled a chair over to his side of the desk.
“Want me to sit over there?”
Dale patted the chair. “That’s what it’s for.”
I circled around the desk to join him. He slid me a stack of papers. Our knees touched under the desk, and I jerked away.
“Now, Imogene.” Dale tapped my stack with his finger. “What I’m looking for with these answers is clarity and conciseness. You’ll be able to tell if they know their shit.” His fingernail was a little long; everything about him seemed to need a little trimming. I wondered if he was married.
“Okay,” I said.
“Here are some guidelines as to what I’m looking for.” He handed me another sheet of paper printed with bullet points. “Just let me know if you have any questions. I’ll be right here.” He laughed at his own joke, and he was close enough that I could feel his breath, hot but not offensive.
I nodded, unsure as to whether my own breath would offend.
For a while we worked in silence. Dale stood a few minutes in to turn on a radio by the window, and hearing the slinky drumbeats of reggae from the speakers surprised me. I thought to comment but decided against it, not sure what I would say if I did. I’d finished grading one exam and half of another before Dale began to hum and then sing, bobbing his head and shoulders along with the music, all the while still marking the test paper before him with his red pen. I kept my eyes to the desk. Was he performing for me? Looking for praise, for laughter, for me to join in? I wished it were clearer sometimes what kind of response others wanted.
Dale saved me from having to guess. “Like this?”
“Sorry?”
“Reggae. Ever listen to it?”
“Oh. No, not really. Or, I guess, not at all.”
He laughed. “It’s cool, isn’t it?” He scribbled a B on top of a test paper and began on the next. “Chill.” He emphasized this last word, making it clear this wasn’t part of his vernacular, that he was assuming the speech of his students.
I responded with the smile I knew this time he was seeking, feeling strangely disappointed in him. I turned back to my test paper in the hopes of discouraging further conversation.
But he wasn’t to be discouraged just yet. “This is also the perfect music to…”
I looked at him, wondering why he’d stopped. He had his thumb and index finger pinched together by his lips, and he sucked in and then blew an invisible stream of smoke into the air.
I blinked at him dumbly.
“Right.” He seemed suddenly embarrassed. He’d told a foolproof joke to the wrong audience. He ran a hand over his ponytail. “Right. You wouldn’t do that. You’re a good girl, right?”
“I guess so.” I was having that uncertainty again, that one I’d had the first time I spoke to Kip when he walked me back to my room. What was allowed here, in the space between our ages, our stations? What rules were suspended outside of school hours?
“Did you ever read Cymbeline? Princess Imogen was virtuous, unable to be wooed.”
I felt too tired to remind Dale that he had told me this before, and that no, I still hadn’t read the story of my namesake. “Yeah, yeah, I have.”
He smiled at me. I stared back. The room felt airless. After a moment, I turned back to my stack of test papers. I could still feel his eyes on me.
“So what’s going on, Imogene?”
I turned back to him reluctantly. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve just seemed so … distracted lately. I just want to make sure everything is okay.”
I wondered if I could pretend to have to leave, if I could ask to grade my exam papers back at home alone. “I’m sorry again about the midterms. I don’t know how—”
He waved this away with his hand. “Water under the bridge. I just need to make sure everything is okay with you.”
Sweat beaded up on the back of my neck. “Um…”
“Because you can talk to me. I’m not just your advisor in the classroom, remember. I’m here to help you.”
His eyes bugged out of his head, and I found it impossible to look anywhere else. “No, no, really, I’m just—”
And then I felt it: his hand—heavy and thick-fingered and threatening, a man’s hand—on my thigh, a place I instinctively knew
it did not belong. His fingertips pressed through my jeans. I froze. I’d always had a fantasy of making a scene—of a man trying to grab me from behind in the street or getting too handsy in a crowded room, and me shouting, “Hands off, asshole!” or “Touch me again and I’ll knee you in the balls!” or, most satisfying of all, a triumphant “Fuck you!” I’d always liked to believe that, given the opportunity, I’d be able to fight rather than take flight, that I possessed in me some untapped strength that needed only the necessary urging to emerge like hot lava. But when Dale put his hand on my thigh, fingers curled towards my crotch, I didn’t say a word. Scenes were too uncomfortable, too embarrassing. How easy it was to simply let the moment pass.
“Whatever it is, you can tell me, okay?” He gave my thigh a squeeze. “Okay?”
His prodding informed me the question wasn’t rhetorical. “Okay.”
“Good.” Dale released my thigh. “Now we should get back to work, shouldn’t we?”
I nodded, grateful. The reggae music continued to play. I stared intently at the top exam in my stack, but I could no longer concentrate. My thigh tingled where his hand had been. I was wondering—as I had been more and more often it seemed—when every interaction I had at Vandenberg became so fraught.
* * *
I spent the next three nights with Kip, and then another night a few nights after that, and then again, and again. He always texted me—that had begun to feel like a certainty, not something I ever had to initiate myself. I loved the thrill of being woken from near sleep by the buzzing of my phone. I loved the thrill of being summoned by Adam Kipling. I applied new makeup before I went to bed, always ready.
My running training was paying off. Though my late-night rendezvous had left me too tired to wake early for runs anymore, I challenged myself each night to see how quickly I could reach Kip’s door. I leapt over branches, scurried between trees, took stairs two at a time. It wasn’t even the fear of being seen; that I no longer felt, if I’d ever felt it at all. It was simply that I couldn’t seem to reach Kip quickly enough. One night I arrived at Kip’s door in less than two minutes. “What, do you sleep with your sneakers on?” he’d asked. “Were you hiding outside my dorm?” I just laughed. We were beyond playing it cool. We wanted each other—desperately, madly—and we no longer had to pretend like we didn’t.
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