Inside The Mind Of Gideon Rayburn

by Sarah Miller

  Afterward Gideon wraps his towel around his waist and stands in the window, letting the fresh air dry him off—he read (so did I!) that P. Diddy air-dries. Perhaps it invites success. He takes in the world below: backpacks carried on young, sturdy bodies, slow-moving shiny German imports, the tops of pretty trees. He feels his heart soaring out above it all. His mind-set is positive, defiant. Why not Madison? Why not any of them? Not only is he going to get laid before Halloween, he's going to get laid well before Halloween.

  When he opens the door to the room, he's surprised to see Cullen and Nicholas seated in their desk chairs, waiting for him. Nicholas is already showered and dressed in khakis, a white shirt, and a red tie; Cullen's still in the ripped hockey shirt he slept in and a pair of plaid boxers. Their expressions are grave. Cullen flips his cell phone over and over in his hand. He's clearly just gotten some information.

  "Madison," Cullen begins, in a tone mixing sarcasm and affection, "wants to have sex with you."

  "Madison? Madison likes me?" Gid sits down on the bed, exhaustion forgotten, adrenaline flowing. "It's so weird. I was just thinking about her in the shower." Nicholas wrinkles his nose in distaste at this image. Gid's too excited to care. "She wants to go out with me?" he says.

  "No, dumbass. She wants to sleep with you. She goes out with Hal Plimcoat."

  "Very funny," Gideon says. Hal Plimcoat is the lead singer of the Rutts, a British rock band.

  Cullen gets up and goes to the closet, pulling off his underwear. "I'm not joking, dude."

  Gideon averts his eyes. "Afraid of facing the giant monster, huh?" Cullen says. "I dig it. Hey, it scares me sometimes." Gideon doesn't say anything. He isn't afraid of seeing Cullen's, as he calls it, "giant monster," but he definitely doesn't need any more proof of Cullen's superior being. But who cares about that? Madison's boyfriend is famous! Rich! And she wants Gid instead!

  "So," Nicholas says, "what this presents is a problem."

  "A problem!" Gid has visions of Hal Plimcoat collapsing onstage in grief. And would this make the papers? He opens the drawer to take out his brand-new khakis and in the back sees the little paper bag. Three days ago, he was lying on Danielle's canopy bed, surrounded by her "wipes clean!" flowered vinyl wallpaper, and now he's being pursued by a leggy brunette who dates rock stars and dresses like a rich hooker. "I don't see a problem."

  Nicholas and Cullen have this shorthand when they don't know what to say where they make their lips disappear into their mouths and raise their eyebrows. In Gid's case, I think it means, What the fuck are we going to do with this country bumpkin? I feel bad for him. There's nothing worse than being around two people who don't even have to speak to understand each other, especially when you don't understand them when they're actually speaking.

  Gid repeats, "I don't see a problem."

  Nicholas puts his hands together and bows to Cullen. Tm sure you will put it best," he says, meaning, I guess, that he might put it unkindly.

  Gid is quick to detect Cullen's smile as a member of the blow-softening variety. "Nicholas and I agree we made a mistake in not making the bet specific enough," Cullen says, half-dressed now, his red tie in his hand. "You can always get girls to sleep with you. You can always fall in with this one or that one. What's difficult is getting a specific girl, setting your sights on someone, and getting her to sleep with you. Especially girls out of your league," Cullen says.

  "But Madison is specific and out of my league," Gideon says. "Why can't I just sleep with Madison?"

  Nicholas ignores the question and continues. "We need to find a girl tailored to you. A girl who really might sleep with you, who isn't below your level, but who isn't above it. A good challenge, but not an absurd one."

  Hapless Gid still believes he just hasn't made himself clear. "I don't understand," Gid says, "why I can't—"

  "If you say 'sleep with Madison,' I promise you, you will be killed," Nicholas says, now casting a dark eye on Cullen and a look that says, "Sometimes, no matter how painful it is, you have to spell it out."

  "This campus is crawling with freaky girls who will sleep with you once just for the weirdo factor," Nicholas says.

  "Wait a minute," Gid says. "I'm a weirdo?"

  Nicholas waves his hands in front of his face. "No, no. I wouldn't fixate on that."

  Everything Nicholas tells Gid not to fixate on is exactly what any sane person would fixate on.

  "Anyway," Nicholas goes on, "when we made the bet, we forgot about all these freaky girls, so now we're changing it to accommodate this fact. It has to be one girl. And, until her, absolutely no other girl."

  Cullen presents Gideon with a large maroon leather book. "Open this to page 132."

  The large maroon book is Timepiece, the Midvale yearbook. Page 132 is a dorm photograph, with thirty or forty girls standing on a lawn, squinting into the sun, some hugging each other like sorority sisters, some aloof and angling for the glamour shot. One photograph is circled, a slim girl with dark hair and a perfunctory smile. He's seen this face before...was it at dinner? No. "Wait," he says. "I know her...that's the girl we stopped to ask for directions...Molly something."

  "McGarry," Nicholas says. He runs his finger along the bottom of the photograph, where the names are listed. McGarry, Molly E. Second from left, row three. It's her.

  "Her?" Gid says. "There are four hundred girls going to school here, and I have to have sex with a girl that curtseyed to my dad?" Why did they even dangle Madison in front of him, to what frustrating end? So he sleeps with

  her and becomes her funny story. He's totally up for it.

  Cullen pulls his tie through his collar, grinning. "She curtseyed at your dad? Why?"

  "It's a long story," says Gideon, miserable. "I only met her for, like, forty seconds, but she seems like she has...an attitude problem."

  "That is such a totally excellent call," Cullen says, clapping him on the back. "I have never quite figured out what it is about her, and hey, you got it."

  I can't tell whether Cullen's being sarcastic or not. Neither can Gideon. He's also trying to take a step back from Madison's hotness. Maybe they're really protecting him from her. She did drink that wine a little fast. Not that he'd have to marry her, but still.

  "Look," Gideon says, "I can maybe understand the whole Madison thing, and I understand, she's off-limits. Fine. But can't we just have it the way it was?"

  Both Cullen and Nicholas are fully dressed now, and back in their chairs, and emanating an imperious, tribunal quality. "Molly McGarry is the logical subject for this bet," Cullen says. "She's pretty enough that you wouldn't be grossed out to have sex with her..."

  Gideon wants to laugh here, kind of. Because Molly McGarry, well, she is pretty. These guys, being around so much of it, have just gotten so warped about pretty. And being so pretty themselves.

  Okay, that again. An extremely cute thought. Shit. I've had crushes before. But you know, I could, like, go for walks in the woods, drink schnapps, and get away from them. Ha. Not this time.

  Cullen continues, "But not so pretty that it's ridiculous. That attitude makes her a little hard to get, but she's also available. She's our girl, no question. Of course, we don't have to do the bet at all, right, Nicholas?"

  Nicholas stands up, smoothing his pants. "No, we don't. We could call it off."

  Gideon doesn't know if they're calling his bluff. (I don't think they are, for what it's worth.) Here he was thinking he didn't like the bet, that if he was going to enjoy his life here it was going to be in spite of the bet. But could it in fact be true that the bet is the heart of his life here? After all, for better or worse, these guys are his life on this campus. And what other than the bet ties them to him? What else, since they made the bet, has been discussed?

  "Don't forget about the car," Cullen says.

  Oh, right, the car. What if Gid wins the bet, and a year from now he is driving me around in that car? Will he tell me where he got it? What if he borrows the car from Liam and wins the bet
in it? Will he clean it? Will I be grossed out anyway?

  Gid squares his shoulders and feels the pleasantly achy buzz left in his body from this morning's workout. He didn't think he was going to like running, and he actually did, quite a lot. Maybe these guys are on to something.

  "I can get Molly McGarry to like me," he says. The boys cheer. He likes the sound of them cheering. But over

  it, he remembers trying to make a move on Mija, how his apathy turned his limbs and mouth to stone. He has a premonition. One that, having observed him, I share. The success of this bet will not only hinge on how much she likes him but also on how much he likes her. He just can't lie to girls the way some guys can. He considers this a fault. I, of course, do not.

  "No other girl?" Gid says. "But what if...?"

  "Just get Molly McGarry to sleep with you," Cullen says with affectionate weariness. "Then you're free to do what you want. That's the story. You get it. I know you get it. It's not hard."

  Cullen has loaded up the Vaportech for a smoky, pre-class send-off. Gideon steps up, hopeful. Nicholas waves him away.

  "You can't smoke pot during the day," he says. "You're around too many people, and it will make you too paranoid."

  Cullen nods and smokes more. "What about him?" Gid asks.

  "I don't get paranoid," Cullen says. "Paranoia's just nature's way of saying, 'Hey, you really are a dork.'"

  of the buffalo mcgarrys

  So. Molly McGarry. Gid recalls the knowing way her smile slid to the left side of her mouth, the smug sparkle in her brown eyes. Gid didn't tell Cullen or Nicholas this, but she intimidates him.

  Gid, hello. They know a girl like that would. It's why they picked her.

  He strolls across the quad, head down. Nicholas gives him a bottle of ,green tea to take off to class every day—antioxidants, possibly fat-burning—and he's clutching it in his hand. Yelterday, he was glad classes were starting, because he wanted to have something to think about other than girls. Now, he thinks, she better be in one of my classes, because I can't spend all my time trying to subtly run into her. One, because I haven't got much time, and two, because I don't know if I know how to be subtle.

  Gid's first class is English. It is in the basement of Hull Hall, an ancient building that smells of old books and disinfectant. The hallways are lined with sepia-toned photographs of old men frowning in three-button suits and young men with toothy, carefree smiles, rowing crew. All this makes Gid forget about Molly for a few minutes and feel serious and important and smart.

  English is taught in a cramped basement-level room with wood paneling and a rim of windows looking out at the grass. Gid sits at the far end of the long oval table. His classmates are achingly pretty girls and infuriatingly handsome guys. The teacher is an austere black man named Jake Barnes. "I am aware," Mr. Barnes says, pacing slowly, deliberately, "that my name is the same as the main character in The Sun Also Rises. A character who has a certain...sexual dysfunction. So let's all laugh about that right now."

  Gid, as I suspected, has no idea what the guy's talking about. He taps his pencil against his notebook. He likes this whole sitting-in-a-circle thing but not for pedagogical reasons. Usually in class you can look only at the girls next to you and the rather sexually uninspiring back of the head of the one in front of you. This way, you can look at all of them: Across from him, Edie, Molly McGarry's friend, sits with her ankles crossed and two fingers pressed to her mouth. Gid considers her. She might be pretty when she's older. The other girls in the class are more obviously arresting. One has a mass of dark hair piled on top of her head, held there with a red lacquer chopstick. Another has wide-spaced brown eyes and curly lighter hair tumbling down her shoulders. She's wearing pink boots, with thick platform soles. There's a dress code that says all girls need to wear skirts, but apparently it doesn't say anything about them dressing like total sluts.

  Copies of A Tale of Two Cities are passed around. Gid weighs its heaviness in his hand. The girl in the pink boots shifts in her seat. Gid watches the shadow between her knees optimistically. Then he catches Edie looking at him and quickly averts his eyes and starts to thumb through the novel with great interest.

  Mr. Barnes wants them to read seventy-five pages, which seems to Gid like an awful lot. He considers asking Lacquer Chopstick about Cliffs Notes, but something about the tilt of her chin and determined gaze makes him think she's not a Cliff's Notes kind of gal.

  Art History is held in a small theater underneath the dining hall. The teacher, Mrs. Yates, is ash blonde and lanky and humorless, with large-lidded eyes behind giant glasses. The lights go out. The first slide is a winged woman with large breasts, no head, and no arms. Back in Virginia this would have been cause for some vulgar commentary, but here, everyone just nods and types into their smugly tiny little laptops. Gid just has a notebook. "In the year forty-seven B.C., Thrace came under Roman control," Mrs. Yates says. Gid tries to writes this down, but he can't see in the dark, and he knows he won't be able to read it later.

  Lunch is like dinner was yesterday except Gid is less surprised by it all. No sign of Molly in the cafeteria. Pink Boots is there. I love her, Gid thinks. Relax, Gid, you're just hungry because you're living on beans. Once again, it is the five of them—Cullen, Nicholas, Liam, Devon, and Gideon. Gid sees that it will always be the five of them. Devon gives them pieces of a Toblerone candy bar. Liam doesn't talk to him, but he doesn't insult him. "Any sign of Miss McGarry?" Cullen whispers when the other three are embroiled in an argument about which, if either, of the tennis-playing Williams sisters they'd like to have sex with.

  "No," Gideon says. "I'm a little concerned."

  "What have you got next?" Cullen asks.

  "Spanish," he says glumly.

  "Hmmm." Cullen presses his mouth together. "Molly seems like a French kind of girl to me."

  Yes. Gid was thinking the same.

  But they are both wrong. Arriving in Spanish class, Gid takes a moment to be sorry that the chairs aren't in a circle, largely because in the second row sit several entirely straight-haired slim brunettes, all of the same pleasing species. He sits in the fourth—close enough to look but not too close. In the midst of this row of brown heads, Gid sees a flash of red. Molly McGarry's hair. Molly McGarry. The prize. The goal. Or whatever she is, other than, of course, herself. She turns around and looks right at him. She recognizes him.

  Gid's having trouble interpreting the look on her face. At first, he thinks she's sneering at him. Then he decides she's actually trying to look sexy. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between. Meanwhile, Molly McGarry and her sneer/whatever have turned back around.

  Liam Wu appears in the doorway and stands there for a moment, pretending to survey the room when he's really letting people survey him. And in fact, every girl present is looking at him. Every girl except Molly McGarry, Gid notes with satisfaction. Surely not every girl in the world would prefer Liam Wu to him, and maybe Molly is one such girl. But then, of course, Molly looks too.

  Liam spots Gid and moves confidently in his direction. "Hey," he says, sliding into the seat next to him. "In about five seconds, the reason I take Spanish and the reason you're going to be glad you did too is going to walk in."

  Gid looks up to see a preternaturally beautiful dark-eyed blonde woman with very large breasts, walking on crutches.

  "Check that shit out," Liam says under his breath. Gid knows exactly what he means: The crutches are fantastic cleavage creators. She leans the crutches against the wall and hops to the teacher's desk. No way! She's the teacher? She's wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and an orange corduroy blazer, cut—and to Gid's credit, he knows even teachers are capable of such calculation—to show off her slamming body.

  She hops up to her desk and smiles briskly. "No te preocupes,"she says. "Estoy bien. 1N0 creo quejuege otra vez futbol con hombres Americanos, si?" (Don't worry, I'm fine. I don't think I will play football again with American men.)

  Everyone laughs. Gid has no idea what she
just said. He took Spanish for two years back in Virginia, but while he studied the textbook, all the rest of the class did was make pinatas and watch videos of people tangoing or tending goats. He passed the tests, but he's never actually conversed with another person in this language.

  Her name is Laura San Video, and with her left eye one quarter shut in perpetual amusement, she takes attendance.

  "Pauline Mellon?"

  One of the players on the Hot Brunette team.

  "Molly McGarrrrry?"

  Gid tries to get a good look at her, but the angle is all wrong.

  "Geedeon a-Rrrraaay-burn," she calls his name with one eyebrow raised.

  "Yvonne a-wel-stead?"

  This is the pixieish blonde.

  As a book with a blue cover is passed around, Ms. San Video stands in front of the room, smoothing and resmoothing her blazer over her hips. "This class," she announces, "is not just about learning to speak Spanish but coming to comprehend the mind of the Spanish speaker, how this language has shaped the philosophies and culture of people from Spain to the Caribbean to South America."

  Gid frowns. This sounds like a lot.

  "I," Ms. San Video says with a flourish, "am from Venezuela."

  I've heard that among South Americans, Venezuelan women have a reputation for wearing slutty clothes. I've seen sluttier clothes for sure, but truly never on a teacher.

  She has them turn to a Julio Cortazar story. Each student reads a paragraph out loud. Gid is blown away. Five minutes into class, and they are already working? At his school in Virginia, there were at least two or three days, sometimes even a week, of throat clearing and orientations and covering your book with paper bags before you saw an actual assignment. For a little blonde girl, Yvonne Welstead has a fantastic Spanish accent. At the story's end, Gid knows this: The guy in the story was at some point riding a motorcycle. That's it.