The actual trip wasn’t too bad. Mom had paid to get them seats with a table, so they could get their homework done during the trip. At first, when Mom said they would all be going to visit Jan at Brown, Melanie had thought Dad would be there, too, but “all of us” now only meant everyone who was left. Melanie was disappointed Dad wouldn’t be there. It made her think of all the times Dad might not be there with them when it actually mattered, like graduation or holidays. Mom had looked at her with surprise when she had asked about it, like Dad was in Hong Kong, and that was that. He’d emailed Melanie, of course, and asked about school, but he, too, was vague about when he might be coming back.
They arrived at the hotel at eleven. They had a big suite at the Biltmore, which was one of the only actual city-type buildings in downtown Providence. There was one room for Mom, and one for Melanie and Erika to share, but Melanie put her foot down.
“It’s late, Mel. No one is asking you to move back in permanently with your sister, only to share a king-sized bed with her for one night.” Mom stood in her worn black yoga pants and bare feet, hands on hips. Erika was already changed and in bed reading. Erika said nothing about having to share a bed with Melanie, although Melanie was sure Erika hated the idea as much as she did.
“Can’t you call them and say there was a mistake?” Melanie asked. “It’s a hotel. You’re supposed to get what you want at a hotel, right? You pay for what you want.”
“I said I’d take the two king beds. It’s all they had. This is family weekend at Brown. Every place is fully booked. You’ll live.”
Melanie sighed, and then spied the couch in the sitting room. “I bet that thing folds out,” she said. Mom finally got the picture that Melanie wasn’t playing games, and she let Melanie make up the foldout couch with a blanket and spare pillows she found in the closet.
“That thing will murder your back,” Mom said. “But if you insist, it’s yours.” Melanie lay in the darkness of the Biltmore suite. It was private, at least, on the dinky pullout bed. Mom and Erika closed their doors and she was alone with the lights from the city streets filtering through the curtains. She could close the heavier blackout shade, but she liked being in the semidark. Traveling alone with Mom and Erika was the last thing Melanie wanted to be doing. She and Erika were barely talking, and every time she caught Erika looking at her, Erika looked away with a frightened giant-mouse expression. Erika had those big eyes that seemed to always register panic. Why couldn’t she have a normal sister, someone who had half a brain, and would know better than to keep staring at her in that annoying way? It made Melanie feel like a freak. Like what had happened on Halloween with Gerald had some visible, permanent consequence—as if she had shattered her spine. She could see now why bums on the street sometimes said stuff to you when you looked at them—What are you staring at? It was an invitation to a fight. But so was staring at someone like there was something wrong with that person. It made Melanie want to truly wring her sister’s neck.
As hard as it was to be around Erika, it was good to get away, and not see Gerald or Jess or anyone else from school. Going places could erase the present, and turn it into the past. That’s why people traveled, Melanie thought, to make their lives disappear, and then reappear, like a magic trick. When she went back home, she could get a fresh start.
Her mother was right that the pull-out couch was murder on her back, but her back had been aching her all day anyway. As she turned over on her stomach, she felt her breasts ache slightly against the hard bed frame, and realized that position was just as bad. She rolled back on her side and ran her hand down the length of her body. She was wearing a long T-shirt and a pair of boy shorts. She stroked her belly and her thighs, trying to press the achiness out of her body.
It had been a week now since the party. There was gossip, but she was good at ignoring gossip, and nothing else had appeared online after that one Instagram tag.
At first, her body had felt sore. There had been the hangover, of course, that seemed to go on for days. But there was the other soreness, too, inside and in her inner thighs. She had fooled around with boys before. There had been the usual kissing behind the school building with Bob Masur, and then she’d gone out with a boy from the neighborhood, Chase Lang, for a couple months last year. But going out with Chase had been no big deal. She’d gone to his house and watched a movie. One time, she’d been over there and they’d made out on the couch, and he’d taken her bra off, and felt her breasts, but when he’d reached for her jeans’ button she’d told him to stop. She’d said she had her period, but that was a lie, and then they’d broken up over something stupid. The truth was, she was bored by Chase. She didn’t like kissing him. He’d opened his mouth too wide, but she hadn’t had the courage to tell him it was like kissing one of those white and orange fish that swim around the tanks in Chinese restaurants.
Thinking about the night with Gerald made Melanie blush with shame. She tried to push it from her mind, but for some reason the image of his drunken face kept rising in front of her. She remembered little from that night, but she recalled Gerald’s looming, lumpy face, the look of concentration in his slate-blue eyes, the slackness of his mouth that came from drunkenness, and the slight flush in his cheeks that looked like pleasure. But maybe that wasn’t a memory from that night at all, maybe it was a dream image, or an older memory of Gerald from some other time, some time when she’d made him happy by inviting him over, or by sitting close to him in the cafeteria. She knew Gerald had always liked her, and that their friendship was a bit of a sham. He’d do anything to be close to her.
She wondered whether people in other grades had heard about what happened, if Edward and his friends knew, and if so, what they thought. It wasn’t fair that people talked about stuff that wasn’t their business, or that you had to worry about other people saying you were a slut, a drunk ho, or whatever it was they’d say. People talked because they were bored and other people’s fucked-up lives were like entertainment for them. Melanie Russell was a slut. It was a game to them to think of her like that.
It had been a crazy party. Lots of people were drunk besides her and Gerald, she was sure of that, though she didn’t remember thinking about it at the time. She remembered so little she wasn’t sure she could put together the full story, though the bits and pieces she did recall were vivid, even if they weren’t completely reliable. There was the boy who laughed at her on the balcony. The red cup in her hand. The bear rug. And then there was Gerald. His touch was familiar at first, and made her want to laugh. It was silly to kiss Gerald. Silly and not much else. But then there was a strange moment when a rush of darkness whooshed over her, and she became very, very drunk, much drunker than before, and then there was Gerald, a part of that whooshing darkness, and her own body, and her own body whooshed, too—river-like, moving of its own will. It was like swimming and drowning at the same time. It was like being carried away, but it was also like being the water.
The aching in her back and breasts reminded Melanie that she was getting her period. Her period would come in a day or so, and then everything would truly be back to normal. She’d have no real worries.
She slid her hand down her belly once more, and thought, as she often did, about a boy. It was no one real, not exactly, though sometimes she realized there were parts of real people—a certain movie star’s eyes—or, more awful and more secret, bits of people she knew, especially Edward—Edward’s crooked smile, Edward’s broad-shouldered body. It was wrong. Wrong. She knew that.
There must be something about her that was off—really perverted, and not like other girls, because even now, after what had happened with Gerald, Melanie couldn’t control her own mind. In the darkness, her mind set itself free. She relished this feeling, her mind and her body moving as one in the dark; it always came back to this same feeling, and the feeling—she could not help it—was overwhelming and good. It was sometimes the only way she could get to sleep. She thought other people, especially other girls, must
have easier brains, simpler lives, less messed-up dreams, more muted, less shameful desires. But maybe that wasn’t true at all, and everyone was awful in this same way. It actually could explain a lot.
The next morning was bright and sunny, unseasonably warm for early November. After breakfast, if you could call a stale croissant and orange juice breakfast, they met Jan in the quad. They had been on their way to her dorm, but Jan had spotted them across the green, and ran over to them. She ran like a little kid coming home from camp. She threw herself at Mom and then Erika, pulling them close, but Melanie kept her hands at her sides and Jan gave her just a quick, little embrace.
“Oh, God, I’m so psyched to see you!” Jan said. Jan looked dramatically different, mostly in a good way. Melanie liked her haircut and eye makeup, and her clothes looked normal—jeans and a sweater, but everything looked a little tight. Jan and Melanie were the same body type, and Melanie took it almost personally that Jan had gained a little weight, as though this meant that she, too, was destined to be chubby in college.
“Let’s go back to my room, and I’ll show you around the dorm before we have to do the whole program. There’s a few things we’re supposed to go to—for information-type stuff—but then I want you to see the student art show, and then there’s a poetry reading. I’m not reading. I was asked to, but I felt like it was too much. I mean, reading in front of other students is bad enough, but parents, no way.” Jan was rambling and holding Mom’s arm in a way that almost embarrassed Melanie. She looked around to see what the other freshman were like, but almost everyone Melanie saw looked really happy to see their families. She couldn’t imagine herself at Jan’s age being that excited to see Mom or Dad, but especially Mom. Mom was always around—too much so, and it was hard to imagine feeling excited to see her.
Jan’s dorm room was cluttered with potted plants, posters, and stacks of books everywhere. Jan’s roommate, Eliza, was there by herself, lying on her bed with headphones on, taking notes out of a huge book with a woman’s face in profile on the cover. “Hey all,” Eliza said, rolling off the bed and removing her headphones. “Don’t mind me. I’m an orphan.” Melanie was startled to see Eliza’s hair was shorn on one side almost to the scalp. The girl had a sweet-looking round face, with round blue eyes, but then she had this extreme haircut, several ear piercings, and an eyebrow stud. Melanie wasn’t opposed to the ear piercings, but the eyebrow piercing made Eliza look like the New York City kids who hung out on Fourteenth Street, not like someone who went to a really good college.
Mom put her hand out to shake Eliza’s hand and Eliza wiped her hand on her black and tan miniskirt and then shook it. There was a bag of half-eaten corn chips on the bed. “I’ve been drowning my sorrows in trans fats,” Eliza said.
“Eliza is from Montana, and her parents couldn’t come out,” Jan explained. Melanie could see Eliza made Jan nervous. She smiled to herself thinking of her perfect sister living with this tall girl in fishnet stockings with her half-shaved head. “This is my sister Erika, and my other sister, Melanie,” Jan said.
Eliza raised her eyebrows. “Well, aren’t we an attractive bunch!” Eliza said. “There must be something in that New York City water that makes everyone there a sex bomb. Or maybe it’s just the fat thing. My people have huge asses. It’s like you spend a few winters in Montana, and your body starts trying to cover as much ground as possible. I don’t know why. It’s like you become part of the landscape.”
“Perhaps it’s to stay warm,” Mom offered lamely. But Melanie stayed quiet, unsure, around this steamroller of a girl.
“That’s not how adaptation works,” Erika said. “Regional trends are usually about diet.” Erika was wandering around the dorm room, flipping through Jan’s books. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that were too loose around the waist, and had her hair in a ponytail. If you didn’t know Erika, she looked cool, confident, like one of those beautiful girls who dressed down, as if they were unaware of their obvious advantage.
Eliza eyed Erika. “So where are you applying? MIT? Yale? Some genius clusterfuck?” Mom raised her eyebrows.
“Eliza!” Jan said sharply, shaking her head.
“Oh, Jan’s Mom, I’m so sorry! I was raised by wolves. Seriously, people in my family are completely tacky. We have zero class.” Eliza went over to Mom and gave her a little hug. She was statuesque, but not thin, with a belly that protruded slightly from beneath a too-short sweater. Her asymmetrical hair was dyed red and she wore heavy black eyeliner. Melanie tried to imagine Eliza with normal hair. She thought she would be pretty, prettier than Jan, and maybe even than Melanie herself. She had a tattoo on one hand that was shaped like a gecko or some other lizard. She caught Melanie eyeing the tattoo.
“Like it?” Eliza asked. “That’s Fred. I had him for five years and then my cat ate him. Our cat is like this giant half-bobcat thing. He was really cute when he was little, all fluffy like a regular cat, but the vet said he must be the product of some feral housecat and a bobcat, and so now we live with this dangerous animal. Last year, he knocked the top off Fred’s cage and ate every last bit of him. I took a picture to the tat artist and he did this for me. There was nothing my parents could say, because they know it’s insane to live with this creature prowling around the house at night. My mom keeps him in the house so he won’t get the chickens.”
All three of the visiting Russells stared at Eliza. She hadn’t stopped talking since they’d walked in, and it was hard to assess if anything she said was true. Jan sighed loudly. She seemed used to being in Eliza’s shadow. Melanie wondered how she would deal with a roommate like that. She looked from Eliza to Jan. Then, for a second, Jan caught Melanie’s eye, giving her what Melanie took to be a questioning glance. Melanie quickly looked away. But then Jan went back to being their tour guide.
“Well,” Jan said, “I think we’re going to do the Campus Walk and then go around to the reading at the Spanish House.” She hesitated a moment. “You can come if you want,” she said to Eliza.
“No, thanks,” Eliza said. “But maybe I’ll catch up with you later? There’s this protest thing over on West Quad tonight at eight.” She turned to Mom. “It’s an annual thing we do—a Women and Allies March. It’s every Family Weekend. It’s in the slut walk tradition. We’re trying to get rid of these cretin frat guys—gain awareness among all the families that these Neanderthals still walk the earth. You know, the ‘no means yes, and yes means anal’ types?’ Just got to slam that shit.”
“I’m not sure I’ve heard of that type,” Mom said, half laughing. “Certainly, the first part, but not the latter. Anyway, date rape is the oldest problem on campus. I’m glad you girls are aware of that.” Mom was being annoying, sucking up to Jan’s weird roommate. Or was that comment meant for her? What was going on? Melanie wondered. It seemed like all eyes were on her, like both Jan and Erika were staring right through her. It was like she lived in a family of mind readers.
“Jan’s Mom, it’s the oldest problem period. Dudes act like the penis is a power tool with no off switch.” Eliza shook her head. “Jan, you should bring the little Russell chicklets. They need their heads on straight now. High school is when girls get groomed to think boys are their salvation on earth. Those proms and dances and football games and cheerleaders with their ass cheeks hanging out. Ugh. It is one giant grooming enterprise to disempower women and make them worship dick. Get them thinking their asses belong to the biggest, fastest, genetically high-performing male organ, like some sort of stone-aged primal orgy. That’s high school, fucking prehistoric. Getting them ready for the frat-house gang bang.” Eliza paced around the room, getting her coat and packing her bag while ranting about high school.
Melanie could feel her heart skip a beat. Who was this girl? Melanie wondered what Montana must be like to have bred an Eliza. She thought about Rose Dyer High School, about Gerald and the party. Dyer didn’t even have a football team. James Jamison’s school probably did, though. The uptown school
s, Melanie thought, might be more like Montana. But still, what Eliza said gave Melanie a nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach. She felt tears welling up in her eyes, and her throat constrict. She knew Eliza couldn’t possibly know what was going through her mind, but did Jan? She had to put a stop to it somehow. She felt like in some bizarre way everything Eliza said was meant for her, and that her whole silent family was interrogating her.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Melanie suddenly heard herself say. Everyone looked at her, Erika staring her inescapable stare.
“Well, honey . . .” Eliza began.
“No. I mean some guys maybe. But not all guys. Anyway, sometimes it’s the girls too. Not like what you said about frat parties, I’m not talking about really awful stuff like that, but I know girls who brag about their hookups, you know, keep lists,” Melanie stammered. She wasn’t sure what she was trying to say. She thought about Lani Elliot. She thought about Gerald. Gerald had always been afraid of her. Could he also have been, as Eliza suggested, just waiting for an opportunity? But didn’t that make him more pathetic than anything? “I don’t know about where you went to school,” Melanie said finally, “but at my school it’s not like that. Guys and girls are pretty much equal. I think girls are responsible, too, for things that happen. . . .” Melanie trailed off, still uncertain of what she meant.
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