“Oh good. Did you learn something useful? I promised her I’d check up on it, if she’d GTFO for the evening.”
“I think so. There were eleven separate blue or gold polyester strands, probably from our guy. Those are Emory colors, so you could posit her attacker was affiliated with the school.” This is good. A good, absorbing topic. He doesn’t enjoy excessive drinking, but he doesn’t want to think about Steven Parch. “Moreover, it’s likely he was older. I’d look for an alum or even a professor.”
Paula nods and helps herself to a second beer. “That’s really helpful, because if some old fart crashed a frat party, people would remember him, you know?”
William doesn’t know. When he went to Notre Dame, he stopped seeing the Atlanta therapist who made peer events mandatory. His parents wanted him to live at home and go to Emory, but William accepted a football scholarship at Bridget’s first-choice school instead. His father was excited about the football, but both parents knew he could not tolerate dorm life. They worried his college experience would not be successful in spite of his intellect. In the end they let him go, but they rented a house for him and found him a new behaviorist in Indiana.
The new doc absolved him of parties, deciding it was fine for William to hang out with only Bridget and Paula after games. Dr. Bennett didn’t know the three of them spent those hours driving William’s SUV deep into the country to blow up thrift-store furniture in a fallow cornfield. William, cannier at nineteen, played up the fact that he had successfully formed two interpersonal relationships and kept his mouth shut about handcrafting explosives.
Paula asks, “Why couldn’t it have been a student, though?”
“The jersey he was wearing was probably more than a decade old. That’s why the fabric shed so much.”
Paula sits up very straight then, setting down her beer. “The guy was wearing a blue and gold sports jersey? And it was weirdly old?”
William nods. “Weird for a college kid. Not an adult. I’ve got shirts that old.”
Paula jams both hands into her hair, her voice rising in both pitch and volume. “No, shut up. This was Kappu Nu? That house?”
“Yes?” he says.
“Holy crap, William! Shandi’s looking for a guy on the Emory Football Team!” Paula is spinning and heading out of the kitchen at a fast clip.
“Emory doesn’t have a football team,” William says, following her. He should know.
“Kappa Nu has one, though,” Paula says over her shoulder. She is practically running into his office. “They’ve had one for years. It’s a joke, like an old joke, or a ritual. Emory doesn’t have a football team, and Kappa Nu doesn’t have virgins. Like, virgins and a football team are mythological. Pledges have to prove that they aren’t virgins before initiation.” She sits down in the desk chair and starts swishing the mouse around to put his screen saver to sleep.
“Prove how?” William asks. Paula’s sexual-knowledge base is vast, another reason she is such a good divorce attorney.
Paula clicks his browser and it opens into Google. “Not really prove. It’s all bullshit, for hazing. They’ll call a couple of the guys cherries to yank chains, and stick ’em on the Emory Football Team. They’ve got the original jerseys in a box in the attic, with all these superstitions built in around them. Each jersey has a history. Some have lucky numbers, some are duds.” Paula is typing in search terms now while she talks. “The cherries have to wear their assigned jerseys to every social, every party, until they can, you know, get off the team. You get off by banging someone, ’scuse the pun, like, say, at a Kappa Nu party. Like, say, at the party Shandi visited, you savvy?”
The overhead light is putting a glare on the screen so William flips the office light off and leans down beside her so that he can see. She has typed in: Kappu Nu, Rush, Emory Football Team.
“They have a website?”
If Paula is correct, she and William could be solving Shandi’s puzzle definitively, when William is only supposed to give her lab reports and options. He is not prepared to deliver a specific human male. There is an uncomfortable dissonance in saying, Thank you for the soup and the post-op care you have administered. As a token of my appreciation, I have found the man who assaulted you.
Paula is grinning, the blue light of the monitor shining off her teeth. “Oh, hell yeah, they do. They take a team picture every year. It went digi maybe ten years ago? Before that they used to put Polaroids on the house bulletin board.”
“How do you know all this?” William asks.
“Please,” Paula says, with a sideways glance that tells him clearly that he is being a dumbass.
He is being a dumbass. Paula knows because ten years ago, she no doubt peeled a few jerseys off aspiring Kappa Nus herself.
Paula, Paula, Wein-ah Hop-pah, she’s your friendly Cherry Pop-pah, the rhyme began, back when they were in high school. There were multiple verses.
He and Paula met under such circumstances, at a party. He was a sophomore in high school, and it was the first night he started for varsity. His team won. More than won. At the end his teammates all pounded and slapped at him, called him William the Destroyer.
He was in the basement rec room, where Chuck K., Davis, and Chuck M. were shooting nine ball. They were drinking beer and listing their sex girls, like a contest. William wasn’t drinking because he was not of legal age to drink, and he wasn’t playing pool because he’d run the table twice already. Chuck K. had told him to sit down.
He shrugged when they asked him to list his sex girls, partly because he hadn’t had any, and partly because he’d brought a really good book about frontier orbitals. Every time one of them spoke to him, he had to put his finger in to mark his place and make his eyes look at them until they stopped talking. His therapist had forbidden him to read during peer conversations.
“You never?” Davis said.
Chuck K. clutched his heart and pretended to die of surprise. He was the Chuck that everyone said was hilarious. Chuck K. let Davis and the less amusing Chuck have the game and went upstairs to where the actual party was writhing and pulsing in its intolerable way.
A few minutes later, Chuck K. came back. Paula was with him.
William knew who she was. She was famous at his school. Famous for sex. There were a few other girls who were as famous, but they were divided into two tribes, black and white. With her reddish-brown skin, shaggy hair, and pale, canted eyes, she was too racially indeterminate to fit at any lunch table. She ate alone and walked alone and had sex with half the school, if his teammates could be believed. William believed some of them.
She came across the rec room toward him in a short, swirly skirt, swaying her hips, her fingertips brushing the smooth skin of her copper-colored thighs.
She stepped in and stood between his legs. William could feel the cold of the fresh beer on her breath. He didn’t mind her coming in this close. At all.
She looked right at him and said, “He’s too cute to be a total charity case.” The pronoun indicated she was speaking to Chuck K., but then she said, “Come on, if you’re coming.” That part seemed to be to William.
She started walking away, and William got up off the stool and followed her, in case she meant to lead him into sex. He’d played JV as a freshman, but he knew the varsity boys were often given sex.
As he caught up, she grabbed his hand and turned, tugging him down a hallway. Her hand was small inside his, the touch of it intensely interesting: he felt his way along her fingers to her palm. Her hand was dry and cool. She led him to a small guest room in the basement. He could hear Chuck K. and Davis and Chuck M. hooting as they went.
She sat him on the bed and swung her denim purse off her shoulder to plop onto the mattress beside him. She stood between his legs, weaving, looking down at him, her face framed by her shaggy black hair.
She pulled at his shirt and he
lifted his arms obediently so she could peel it off. She ran her hands over the sculpted planes of his chest and belly.
“God, I love athletes,” she said.
She leaned down, coming at him with her lips wet and already parted. He barely had time to hide his secret penny low in the back of his mouth, between his molars and his cheek.
Kissing was slippery, but he liked the foreign feel of her tongue, a strange beery muscle invading his mouth like it was looking for his penny. His body sparked to it in red, unfathomable ways. He could hear the party’s music thumping above them, and from down the hall, the faint clatter of pool balls banging into one another and the raucous voices of his teammates, too far to make out words.
She took her shirt off. He couldn’t hear the sounds anymore because his whole brain was using itself to see things. Her breasts were full on the bottom, but sloped on top, so that the nipples tilted up.
She put his hands on them. The brown skin here was paler than her other skin, and her nipples were the same color as wet maple sugar. He wanted to put one in his mouth, but he wasn’t sure if it was allowed.
She knelt between his knees. His brain was swamped with images, trying to catalog all the naked ways she was for later: Her back, bending over him so her spine bowed and her hair fell forward. Her bared nape, paler, like her breasts. Her black hair falling across his lap, covering her hands as she worked him out of his fly.
She peeled his jeans all the way off, pulling his shoes and socks off, too. His gaze caught on the flare of her hips above her skirt’s low band.
Her lips closed over him. He swallowed the penny. His spine stopped working and he fell back. He had a moment to wonder how a mouth could feel so molten hot and liquid but apply the rhythmic pressure all the same. Then his mind shut down and his body was an animal, unthinking and alive. His brain didn’t think of anything at all. He drained away out of himself and disappeared into her.
He blinked up at the ceiling, surprised.
Her head and shoulders popped up over the edge of the bed. She was grinning. “Wow, really?”
He wasn’t sure what she meant. She crawled up beside him, still topless. The tips of her breasts scraped against his side as she slid, and he felt the rhythm she’d set restarting in his hips. Her smell, her skin, her separateness, these things made the orgasm feel like more than an expedient path to sleep. He rolled toward her, his erection already back, pressing into her skirt. She laughed and said, “Wow, really?” again, but in an entirely different tone. This time, he understood it.
“Yes, please,” he said, and even to his ears it sounded dry and formal. The way he’d been taught to accept a cracker from his elderly neighbor.
“Well, since you’re so polite.”
She flopped onto her back, which made her breasts sway on top of her chest in a wholly distracting manner. She didn’t move to put him in her mouth again. He looked at her face, and she was making an expression that he recognized. It was a sports face, usually seen on someone on the other team, across the line. Someone who mistakenly believed he could protect his quarterback from William.
She was, as Chuck K. would say, daring him to bring it. The expression was familiar enough for him to recognize it, even out of context, but William had only the most clinical understanding of what this particular it was.
He sat up and assessed her, naked from the waist up. Her scuffed clogs had dropped off, leaving her feet bare. Her shoes looked small, lying amid all the parts of his abandoned clothing. Her toenails were painted pale blue. She was lying down. As he had been.
He gave her a brief nod, then slid down to kneel on the carpet where she had knelt, pushing her cotton skirt up into a bunch around her waist. She was wearing very small panties, also pale blue, so sheer he could see the dark thatch of her hair. He moved in close, so the width of his shoulders pushed her legs apart, and he pulled her hips toward him, so her legs had to bend or they would come off the bed. He pushed the flimsy center panel of the panties aside, examining the surprising complications of her in the lamplight. After a few seconds, she made a little laugh.
“Are you, what, looking at my cooter?” she said.
Rhetorical, he decided.
After another few seconds she said, “Yo, freakshow, why are you looking at my cooter?”
This did seem to require an answer. He didn’t have one, so he put his mouth on her, using his tongue the way she had when she kissed him, like he was the one looking for a secret penny now. Her breath pulled in and her back arched. In the simple, physical immediacy of her body bowing up, involuntary, he understood her. He relaxed. She was only an animal, like him. She was only another little animal, after all.
“Boys don’t really do this,” she said. Her voice sounded compressed and strange. But this wasn’t the same as saying not to, and her little thighs flexed and clenched against his ears. Her feet paddled at his back, but gently, not kicking. He stayed where he was, learning her interesting smells and textures, until she was only her body, too, the way he had been, her hands fisted in his hair, her breath ragged.
Then she started crying. He was alarmed, and crawled up to make sure he wasn’t raping her; as a freshman, he’d had a seminar in gym about no meaning no, and crying meaning no, too, but when he got up to her face, it didn’t seem to be a bad crying. She was smiling at him.
He was still hard, pressed against her bared hip. She felt him there and went scrabbling in the purse beside them for a condom. She pushed him onto his back and threw one leg over him, like she was climbing on a horse.
He’d had a therapy horse named Buck when he was very young, and what happened next was like that, except wholly different. Partially because this time he was the one being ridden, and mostly because the pleasures of this ride progressed exponentially into a madness. It felt unstoppable and oddly connective, a form of communication with cues he could read, free of the exhaustion of conversation.
Well, she talked some. She said things like, “I was only going to blow you, but, oh well.” And, “Don’t tell anyone, but I never came with a boy before.” Nothing that he had to answer.
After, he felt as if they had completed a rigorous sporting event together. He felt warmly toward her, just as he did toward his football team’s skilled kicker. And, much like in football, the team he’d formed with Paula had won, their first time out.
He knew several of his teammates had been with her in this way, and it bothered him to see she was not treated as a teammate when she carried her tray past their lunch table the next day. They sniggered and poked William with their elbows, but none of them greeted her. There was no justice in it.
He picked up his tray and followed her, sitting down beside her at her habitual table. She made a surprised face, but didn’t tell him to move along. They ate quietly, William reading and Paula doodling in a sketchbook.
At the end she said, “Do you think I’m your girlfriend now, Bubba?”
“No,” he said. Then, with interest, “Wait, are you?”
“Please,” she said. But she said “hey” to him in the hall later, that same bring it expression on her face, and accepted his returned greeting with puzzled eyebrows. He sat with her the next day, and the next. Within a month, neither of them could fathom how their lives had worked before, without the other.
They never had sex again. She moved on to the next in the long series of boys and men he would call Buddy when they came to Bridget’s brunches. All the shits that didn’t smell good, even when she liked them. Paula’s Buddies were grateful. Easily dismissed. It was Bridget who eventually explained that Paula hadn’t slept with him again because she’d decided that he wasn’t one of them.
Paula, in her thirties now, still has Buddies who require so little to be pleased that she barely acknowledges they’re breathing. Paula, in her late teens and early twenties, would have run across the Emory Football Team.
Th
e subpage of the Kappu Nu website has loaded. Paula is correct. They have team photos organized by year on a drop-down menu. This year’s team has not yet been assembled, so the page shows last year’s. Four boys stand in a line wearing football jerseys. They all hold tiny American flags and look uncomfortable.
“That’s a big team. The guys they do this to are the obligatory pledges. Legacies. The scrubs they have to take, you know?” He doesn’t know, but nods so that she won’t explain. “Natty is what, three?” she asks, doing quick math in her head. “So we want the team from four years back.”
She rolls the mouse down the menu and the picture loads. There are only two, kneeling like football players in the front row of a team shot, one knee up and one knee down. The caption says, Quarterback Marvin James and Point Guard Clayton Lilli. Both boys wear the ancient blue and gold jerseys. The guy on the left, number 66, is a soft-looking black kid with a huge Adam’s apple. Clearly not Natty’s father.
But the kid in jersey 13? He is racially appropriate, long and gangly, with wide cheekbones and a delicate chin. He has straight brown hair and a thin nose that flairs wide at the end. Thick glasses hide his eyes.
“Could be,” William says.
He still feels loathe to hand this off to Shandi in the form of a single unproved possibility with a face and a name. It’s too personal, bound to be unsettling. When she asked him to help her, she was already overwrought. She cooked while she spoke, and he’d watched her putting in at least a quarter cup of salt. He poured the inedible soup down the sink rather than upset her further. Paula’s knowledge base has complicated things.
Paula stands abruptly, walking quickly away toward the window. William takes her place in the desk chair, looking at Clayton Lilli more closely, squinting at his ears. Shandi’s earlobes dangle, and Natty’s are attached. If Clayton Lilli’s dangle, he can be ruled out as a genetic possibility as surely as the black team member. But this is a whole body shot, not a close-up, and Lilli’s limp hair hangs down, obscuring much of his ears. William needs a head shot. He opens a second browser window, and goes to Google images.
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