Then again, what if, instead of being so defensive, I’d been open to the lesson Robin had to teach me? It took years before I got what she meant, but eventually her comments about the pervasive insistence of male musicians on portraying women only as sexual beings or, even worse, as less than human at all, sank in. I’d start listening to Suzanne Vega, Patti Smith, Pat Benatar—women who owned their sexuality, but who also made it clear they were people. Artists. Men could be both, and so could women. That belief came out in the songs I wrote—and in the songs I refused to record.
* * *
Robin gave me something after Christmas break too—a special message.
“It’s never going to happen again,” she announced.
Of course I knew what she was talking about. I’d rather die than let her think it mattered to me, that she mattered to me. We’d tried so hard to not talk about it, we’d ended up talking about it. All I can say is that it was painful, to say the least.
“I told you, it was a mistake,” I said, with arms crossed for protection. “I drank too much that night. So did you.” I had to remind her of her part in the whole thing.
“Yes, I did.” She hung her head, as if in shame.
It was sad how something magical had been transformed into a crime. And not just any crime—that night had become this hideous transgression that seemed to threaten Robin’s very identity.
I went back to Sean Voight, who I now proudly called my boyfriend. I made sure to call him whenever Robin was around. He’d ask me up to his room, and of course, I went.
Why? Because I wanted to feel wanted. In the face of constant, daily rejection, I needed someone to touch me without apologizing for it or explaining it away. To be desired was way better than begging for crumbs from the ice princess. Never mind that I was doing some of the same things to her. I never said my behavior was rational.
On weekends I’d slip out of the room early in the morning, tie my hair in a ponytail and attempt to go for a run. It was way out of character for me, since my idea of exercise was lifting a beer can. But it was a way to clear my head, to pretend I was running away from her for good. As I hit the pavement, I’d put as many miles between myself and the dormitory as I could. I’d reach a point where I couldn’t go any farther, and I’d bend over, gripping my knees, letting the sweat pour down off my nose. I was so out of shape from drinking and smoking, I’d be sucking wind before I could go a respectable number of miles.
By spring break, it was clear. I couldn’t stifle the intrusive thoughts, the uneasiness, the desire for my roommate. Everything I felt toward Robin turned to a dull ache that I could never quite relieve. It got so bad I didn’t want to be in the room at the same time she was.
* * *
Looking back at my college days, images cloud my memory, like the smoke from the bonfire one night. It was the first week of spring, and I’d gone to meet my friends down at the beach. Robin had come with me, and I’d hoped she’d let down her guard again. I’d always hoped for that.
I used to play a video game, Space Invaders, where you have to hit these enemy things marching toward you, and it feels like you can never clear them away. That’s how it felt at the beach. Nancy and Becky kept coming closer, their faces blocking my view, when all I wanted to do was talk to Robin, to find a way to draw her inside the circle of lawn chairs.
“Hey, y’all!” Nancy called. I put my arm around Robin to keep her from leaving and Nancy snapped a photo of the two of us in front of the blazing fire.
It would be the photo that ended up all over the news.
How Nancy remembered the picture years later or was able to locate it, I don’t know. Obviously, there was something about it that fascinated her because she gave me a copy of it at the time. I kept it, like a treasured memory. It was always with me no matter what apartment I was living in. It occupied a place of honor, albeit a secret one, inside my nightstand drawer.
“So how y’all doin’?” Nancy asked.
Robin didn’t answer. She always had plenty to say in our dorm room, but get her out among the “common folk” and she was mute. It annoyed me. She didn’t seem to even make an effort.
“Fine,” I finally answered, trying to hand a beer to a reluctant Robin.
“I don’t want one.” She spoke after all.
“Just one won’t kill you,” I insisted. Was she afraid I was going to take advantage of her or something? Suddenly my annoyance turned to hurt, then quickly to anger. It’s funny what a thin line there is between hurt feelings and explosive rage. On the surface, both emotions seem so different.
Robin spotted Boyd, the guy I’d pushed on her, the guy who looked to me like he was just about to cross that line between hurt and rage. She’d brushed him aside, as I was sure she would. I decided to keep an eye on him, to make sure he wasn’t going to harm her in some way.
I watched them argue in between walls of flames from the bonfire. More beer flowed, and the vision of their bodies began to ripple in the heat and my unreliable vision.
“Where you been, Austen?” It was Sean, with a smile as always that looked like he’d just gotten away with armed robbery or something equally bad. Maybe he was a male version of me.
“I’ve been right here.” I grinned in a playful way I knew he couldn’t resist.
He moved closer and took off his shirt, muttering something about it being too hot near the flames.
“You tryin’ to turn me on?” I laughed.
“Nah. I guess I don’t.” He took a sip from his can.
“Whaddaya mean?” I asked, straddling a lounge chair in a way no straight teenage boy could resist.
He glanced me up and down, and I could tell he was trying not to notice the space between my thighs.
“You don’t come around much no more,” he said.
“I can’t party every day,” I said. “I can’t flunk out, you know.”
“Didn’t know you cared about that,” he joked. “What’s with you girls? Why you always such teases, then you leave a guy with blue balls?”
I winced at the “you girls” comment. I didn’t feel bad about flirting, though I had led him on for a while. He’d been an unwitting player in my drama, caught up in my storm, and it wasn’t his fault. I didn’t think too much about it because we were in a crowd. Besides, Robin was fearful of everyone and everything and I didn’t want to think that she’d rubbed off on me. I had learned, however, that when a guy started to accuse all girls of something, his resentment could easily turn to aggression.
Becky and Nancy quit laughing about whatever drama was going on behind my back. Then Nancy leaned a little too heavily on my shoulder and shouted in my ear. “You guys back together?”
“We aren’t together,” I said. I winked at Sean, knowing it would make him want me more.
How did I know this game so well? How did I learn to be the elusive chick who could drive guys wild? I just knew what to do, like when you try a new dance with someone and you can feel how they move when you move a certain way.
I pulled out the old acoustic guitar my dad had given me when I was home at Christmas, the only proof I had that he didn’t entirely hate my guts. He’d spotted it at a garage sale and thought of me for some reason. I spent most of the break in my room, picking out chords, ignoring him and his new girlfriend. I strummed it softly at the beach, playing a song I’d been working on for a while: “A Horse with No Name.”
“Oh, no!” Nancy moaned. “Why not some Skid Row?”
“Yeah,” Becky said. “That’s way too 1970s.”
“Piss off,” I said, trying to find the next chord. I became so focused on what I was doing, I started to not notice everyone around me. It was better that way. When I looked up, I could see them talking but not hear what they were saying, like when you switch off the sound of a bad TV show.
Several minutes had passed by the time I looked down the shore and realized I’d lost sight of Robin. She’d just vanished somewhere in the dark. Panic rose in me. It ease
d a little when I saw Boyd sauntering back up the hill to our circle. At least she wasn’t with him.
Then I saw something that made my heart sink—two silhouettes walking together on the shore. A sliver of moonlight peeked through the clouds just in time to illuminate the vision of Robin and that film chick, Carol, who seemed too crazy to be at school. What did she see in her?
Of course I was jealous. They had their own language, something I’d never understand. And whenever Carol was in our room, I became the outsider. She’d stand in our doorway, as if she didn’t want to get cooties by stepping too far inside. They’d talk about going to a Hitchcock screening or something by some director I didn’t know. I’d try to make conversation if it was a director I knew.
“Oh, yeah,” I’d said. “I loved Psycho.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Carol said in a way that didn’t sound positive.
I ignored her tone. “The shower scene was cool,” I said.
“Yeah,” Carol said dismissively. “We’re doing a study of the bird theme in that movie.”
“You mean The Birds?” I asked.
“No,” Robin interrupted. “There’s a bird theme in Psycho.” She explained in a kinder way than Carol.
“Really?” I didn’t believe it at first.
“It’s actually very interesting,” Robin said.
“Can we go now?” Carol already had one foot out the door.
But Robin continued, “The main character lives in Phoenix, drives a Ford Falcon and there are pictures of birds…”
“And camera angles that mimic a bird’s-eye view,” Carol said in the most pretentious way.
“Cool,” I responded.
It was exchanges like that one that made me dislike Carol. Watching them walking together by the water that night was too much. So I did the only rational thing a lovesick, confused, self-loathing eighteen-year-old would do—I drank more.
Before the night ended, something bad went down. I didn’t know about it ’til it was too late.
* * *
In the room the next day, Robin got dressed but didn’t finish buttoning her shirt, something very out-of-character for her.
“Last night your friends beat up my friend Andrew,” she spat, as if accusing me.
Andrew Bennington was a guy in her film classes. She talked about him every now and then. She liked what she called his “distinctive” laugh. I didn’t know he was gay, though, something Robin made sure to tell me that day.
“I’m sorry.” I tried not to look at the exposed skin underneath her open shirt. “You know,” I continued, “you ignored me the whole night, and now you’re all pissed off about something I didn’t even do.”
“Ignored you?” she squeaked. “I couldn’t go to the hospital to see my friend because I had to drive you home. You were too drunk to stand up!”
I stretched out on my bed. “You know, some of us can’t be as perfect as you!”
“What do you see in a guy like Sean?” she demanded. There it was again, the judgmental tone.
“Oh, please.”
She started throwing things. I guess she didn’t like my response.
“You call people faggots,” she said, “which is kinda ironic, you know. That’s what they called him as they tried to kick him to death.”
I didn’t know what to say. She was right. I was a fool.
Of course, Andrew made it. That time. But years later he was murdered for getting married to a guy. They tell us not to think of blue and red states, that we’re all just people. But driving through Mississippi, Andrew being married to a guy would get him killed.
* * *
Robin had told me “it would never happen again.” With that and her anger about me and Sean, I decided to give her space. I spent a few nights in Nancy’s room. Oddly, it was a much more relaxing place to fall asleep.
That didn’t mean Robin and I didn’t have our conflicts. There was this one time…
We’d gone to a petting zoo together. It was my idea, to get her to lighten up, to recapture whatever there was left of our friendship. But she accidentally stepped on a caterpillar, got all upset about it, started sobbing actually, right before we left. Her tears seemed like a big overreaction to what had happened. Either that, or she was a major animal rights activist. I’d never seen much evidence of that, so it seemed strange to me.
“What’s your problem?” I asked.
“You’re my problem!” she exclaimed, slamming the door shut on the passenger side of my Camaro.
Coming around to the driver’s side, I figured it out. I had gotten under her skin. It wasn’t my fault that she was all in a twist about her religion, her conservative politician father and her own inner problems.
“It wasn’t me who ended it,” I said, turning the key. It was a risk to make the assumption, but I was now pretty sure.
“It wasn’t right,” she said, arms crossed. She wouldn’t look anywhere but out the window.
In the days that followed, the more time I spent in Nancy’s room, the more Robin seemed to get upset. One morning, before I left for class, I’d grabbed my backpack and headed for the door.
“Wait,” she said, coming up to me. “I miss you.”
She stood there, never looking more vulnerable, more honest. Of course I kissed her. What else could I do? One kiss became another, and another, and before I knew it, I’d missed my Western Civ class.
We stayed in a bubble for a while after that, repeatedly discovering each other in that dorm room and only coming out for meals. We’d go to the cafeteria for dinner, unable to look at each other across the table, fearing that everyone would automatically know. Everything was written on our faces.
The night of a big storm, we lit candles all around the room and snuggled together on her bed. Shadows flickered across her face as we talked. Sometimes she looked so pretty, I just wanted to die.
“I love you,” she said. I knew she meant it.
I could barely hear the crashing sounds of thunder and swirling rain outside beating the windows over my pounding heartbeat that I heard inside my ears. She’d said the words. Of course, I was too chickenshit to say them back. It was too major, and I was still a coward. But I reached for her and kissed her hard as though I’d never let her go. And that’s how it went for the rest of the semester. Most of it, at least.
My doubts about what kind of life I’d have with a woman began to get the best of me. People I knew back home, friends from high school—they’d never understand. They weren’t liberal, to say the least. They might even run me out of town, not that I’d planned to stay there. It might work if Robin and I moved far away to a big city. But her dad was a big deal politician who crowed about family values and other bullshit. It wasn’t like she could bring me home for dinner.
I was experiencing all the classic signs of being in love, but the actual word, saying it…that was another story, even though I thought Robin might be hoping for it.
“What happens when we leave here?” I asked her in the dorm on another rainy night. “I mean it. We can’t stay in this room, in a bubble, all our lives.”
“Why do we have to decide things now?” She took my hand, caressing it with her fingertips.
“Because we do.” I drew back, glancing at the perfectly round drops of rain on the glass. “What’s your dad gonna say about me?”
Robin seemed to recoil at the mention of her father. I knew in my gut he wouldn’t be okay with this.
“It doesn’t matter what he says,” she answered defiantly.
“I don’t believe you. Or are you planning to keep me a secret forever? Until he dies?”
“Shut up.” She lowered her eyes. “Why do we have to do this now?”
“Because I don’t like getting my heart broken.” If she wasn’t going to deal with this, I would. I’d make it all easy for her. “It’s not like I’m queer or anything.”
Her face blanched with shock. I knew what she was thinking—how could I say such a thing? But I had to.
There was no happy ending here. At least this way I’d make it easier for her, and myself.
Back then, when I was eighteen, the world had to be either black or white. There was none of the stuff everyone talks about today. Words like fluidity? Screw that. So while I came closer, sitting beside her on her bed, I was pulling back on the inside. It seemed logical to me. Then she said it again.
“I love you,” she said.
I swallowed the rocks in my throat and tried to pretend she never said those words.
Chapter Twelve
Adrienne
The next afternoon I ran into Sean in the Student Union. It was always a bustling place, with crowded tables and tall windows. His hair was longer, reminding me how long it had been since I’d seen him.
“How you been?” he asked.
“Fine. Good.” The more I nodded, the more it seemed like I was lying. “Great.”
I’d forgotten about him, forgotten about everyone who wasn’t Robin. That’s how I knew she was my first love.
“You still with that other guy?” he asked.
I’d told him a few months ago that there was someone else. He just assumed it was a guy.
Suddenly I felt defiant. Robin didn’t own me. Sure, my every waking and sleeping thought was of her, but she didn’t own me. Besides, there was no way our being together could ever work.
“No,” I answered firmly. I laced my arm through his, and we walked by some gardens on campus.
“What do you want?” he asked suspiciously.
“I’m like you,” I said. “I want what I want. Does it always have to mean something?”
He smiled. He knew he was going to have me, if only for a few minutes. Knowing him, it would be about ten minutes.
I was sure Robin had finals, so I brought him back to our room.
Why did I do that? I’ve asked myself that hundreds if not thousands of times over the years. Maybe it was a last-ditch effort to try to be with a guy the way I thought I was supposed to—even for a short while. Or maybe…
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