“And then you’re going to puke in the flowerpot,” said Zachary.
“Happily. I’ll get to taste them again on the way up.”
I scooched away. Paul made space for me by moving toward Jiyoon. Their knees bumped. I hopped up to roast another marshmallow.
Later, when everyone was stuffed full of gour’mores but still roasting marshmallows—it was hard to stop; there was something entrancing about the way they slowly browned—Monique asked, “Jiyoon, are you still getting blamed for the leak?”
“Not as much as Jem,” she said, nudging my marshmallow with hers.
I winced. I hadn’t opened any social-media apps since last night.
“But you’re the one who’s got a campaign hanging on it,” said Ashby.
“I feel like we need to find out who did it,” said Monique. “Everyone wants someone to blame.”
“They should be blaming themselves,” said Paul. “Who types their crushes into the internet and hits submit without imagining something bad might happen?”
“Me,” said Greg. And me, I thought. And 118 other seniors.
“Just don’t say that in public,” Jiyoon told Paul. “The last thing I need is victim-blaming from my boyf—from you.”
“You can call me your boyfriend,” said Paul.
“AWW!” said Greg. Cilla and Monique joined in. Jiyoon flicked her eyes up, but she couldn’t hold back her smile. “Fine,” she said. “But keep in mind that I still haven’t granted you permission to call me your girlfriend.”
“Take your time,” said Paul. “I’m patient.” He was so busy beaming at her that he forgot to monitor his marshmallow, which burst into flames.
I was still thinking about what Monique had said: that until they knew who’d done it, no one was going to leave Jiyoon alone. Or leave me alone, for that matter, although that was less important. I owed it to Jiyoon to find out who did it. After all the times I’d been a crappy friend and a crappy feminist, I could do this one thing right.
“I have a theory,” I said slowly. “The person who did it must care a lot about Mack winning. They must have been able to access the data easier than just about anyone.”
“Anyone but me,” said Paul, and Jiyoon said, “Do not say that in public!”
“I think it was Andy,” I said.
In the silence, Greg said, “Accusing the big guy. Jemima, you got some balls.”
“Ovaries,” said Jiyoon. “Fallopian tubes. Uteri. Literally anything but balls, Greg.”
“Is uteri really the plural of uterus?” said Zachary, perking up.
They were off and running, chasing the topic to its ridiculous end because that was what we did. “I believe it’s uteroose,” said Jiyoon. “Fourth declension.” Firelight flickered on their faces. The neighbors had turned off their lights. Outside our circle, the sky was so black that we could have been the only living beings left on earth. Graduation was next weekend. Right now we were the most important people in the world to each other, but in the future we would be people who would catch up with one another. Who would reminisce.
“What are you going to do about it?” Ashby asked me.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll text him right now.”
Most of Quiz Team had curfews, and the ones who didn’t were the ones driving the ones who did. By midnight everyone was gone. I stayed out on the patio. The fire was burning out. I was eating a waxy tube of Ritz crackers, letting them sit on my tongue, salt-side down, until they disintegrated.
I checked my phone, even though I knew I hadn’t gotten any messages. I’d texted Andy forty-seven minutes ago: We should talk. No response. I tapped around and came across a picture of Gennifer and her crew from a few minutes before. All the girls were in that pose where you pop your butt and twist your shoulder and float your arm: you know, where you look skinny but also like you’ve thrown out your back. Mack was in the next picture, kissing Gennifer on the cheek while she made a cute, squinty face. Then there was Andy, one arm around Melanie and the other around Lily, a goofy smile on his face. I mostly looked at the girls. Their crop tops, their dipped heads, their straight hair. Their rightness. If they ever felt like they didn’t belong, they never betrayed it; they faked that feeling away. I was envious, deeply envious, and I realized I had been for a long time. I’d covered it up with disdain. “I’m not like other girls!” I’d said over and over. But I wanted to be like other girls. I did.
I texted Andy again.
I know it was you who did it
I ate another cracker.
Do you want to come over
* * *
—
“Is this a booty call, Kincaid?” Andy said as he got out of his Jeep. I’d gone out barefoot to meet him in the driveway.
“No!” I said. “I said we should talk!”
“Damn,” he said. “You’re breaking my heart. Well, what do you want to talk about?”
“Aren’t you mad at me?” I said. Last I’d seen him, remember, he’d been passive-aggressively referring to the she who’d engineered the leak.
“I kind of realized that theory was ridiculous,” he said.
“Oh.” That took some wind out of my sails. I’d been imagining that we’d go at each other with claws out, each of us accusing the other one. Like a verbal cage match. My fantasy, I guess. “You want a Ritz?” I offered him the tube.
He took a stack. “Are we going to stand in the driveway all night?”
I led him around to the patio. “Why do you trust me all of a sudden?”
“Trust? That’s going a bit far. But I know you didn’t leak all that shit.”
“You were pretty convinced.” I affected a deep voice. “ ‘You set off a bomb in our class. You’ve destroyed us….’ ”
“Okay, yeah, I was upset. But I was at this party just now—”
“Yeah, I saw—”
“Stalker.”
“You know what I hate? The whole ‘stalking’ shtick. The whole point of posting stuff is for people to look at it, but then when people actually look, everyone’s all, ‘You’re so creepy!’ ”
He laughed. “Are you going to have a problem with everything I say, or are you going to let me tell my story?”
“Sorry, I forgot. Women should be seen and not heard.”
He plopped down on the brick wall. I sat next to him but left a good foot between us and crossed my arms for good measure. “Your name came up at the party,” he said.
“I bet.”
“Yeah, at first it was…what you’d expect. But then all these girls started defending you. Like they couldn’t believe you were getting all this shit for something you didn’t do.”
“Actually?”
“Gennifer started it. Then Melanie was like, ‘She’s the only one who speaks up when Mr. Ulrich calls girls sweetheart.’ And Jess said something about how you always stand up to the assholes in econ who talk about welfare in a kind of racist way, and even Lacey talked about Latin, something about how you made a big thing of it when the textbook tried to say that this god who wouldn’t take no for an answer was romantic and devoted, instead of creepy and toxic—”
“They were listening?”
“Gennifer used her honorable-bitch line again. And I was like, Okay. I’m convinced.” He shrugged. “Even though I know you think it was me.”
“Wow,” I said. Impulsively, I put my hand on his shoulder. “I won’t tell anyone, Andy, but…was it you?”
“You’d tell everyone,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to shut your big mouth for a second.”
I considered. “Yeah. True. But was it?”
“Kincaid,” he said, gazing into my eyes, “it wasn’t me.”
I could have melted. The dying fire, the darkness, the two of us alone in the middle of the night. But I couldn’
t let him go so easily. “Convince me,” I said, dropping my hand.
“Why would I have done it? I just want to have fun. It’s the end of senior year. Now everyone’s mad at Triumvirate.”
“Mack’s going to get elected chairman. That’s why you’d have done it.”
“If I were a junior, I’d vote for Jiyoon.”
“Wh—what?”
“I love Mack, he’s my brother, but come on, he’ll be a shitty chairman. And he’d be perfectly happy without it. Probably happier. It’s a lot of work.”
I stared at the fire, barely seeing it. So much for brotherly loyalty, I thought. If it had been my brother—
Then again, my brother was Crispin. Andy’s brother was Mack.
Andy must have seen the confusion rippling across my face. “Aren’t you going to disagree with me?” he said, smirking. “Where’d you go, Kincaid?” He put an arm around my waist and pulled me toward him, and he kissed me.
I kissed him back. Of course. I felt myself collapsing, rational thought leaving the building—stop!
“Then who did it?” I said, ripping away.
“It could have been anyone.” He was looking at my lips instead of my eyes. “Anyone with the money to hire a hacker. Five minutes on Reddit, a couple hundred bucks, done.”
At Chawton, the casual wielding of two hundred dollars eliminated basically no one. “What about Jiyoon’s campaign?” I said. “If everyone thinks it was me, they’re not going to vote for my best friend.”
“Gennifer’s not going to let you take the blame.”
“Even if it means Mack losing?”
“Kincaid,” said Andy, almost gently, “you don’t actually think Jiyoon could win, do you?” He kissed me. The kiss was harder this time, and I let myself fall into him. He kneaded my back, sliding his hands onto my bare skin, and my hands were under his shirt now too.
“Come inside,” I said. We were barely inside the basement before he tugged off my shirt. My bra, hallelujah, was neither safety-pinned nor beige. It even had one of those interboob roses, which I usually cut off because although I may not shower as frequently as I could, if a plant actually took root between my breasts, I would consider it a capital-P Problem. Andy didn’t notice the rose. I don’t think he even noticed the bra. He was all about the tissue therein.
I pulled off his shirt, in part to get a break from the groping, and we stumbled over to the couch. Before he sat down, he kicked off his shoes and stepped out of his pants and boxers. Whoa. We were going there. He stood before me, unabashed as freaking Adam. I pulled off my skirt. He tugged me down to the couch. Once I was on top of him, he went to work on my bra clasp, wriggled me out of my underwear.
Naked with a guy. Maybe it’d have felt more momentous if lust hadn’t taken over. We twisted. We squirmed. We kissed wherever our mouths landed. I can’t describe—God, I mean, it’s only biology, but it was unbelievable—the force of the urge to keep at it, to go further. We were on our sides now, and I wound a leg over him and rocked back and forth like this was a sitcom and I was a dog humping someone’s leg for a cheap laugh.
He was sucking at my neck, and I was making the mewling noise that would have mortally embarrassed me under normal circumstances. He pulled back suddenly and said, “Wait. What are we doing?”
“I don’t know, but keep doing it.”
He chuckled. I kind of hated him for having enough mental wherewithal to chuckle. The pause de-lusted me, and I started feeling weird about being naked in the place my parents watch movies, and I started worrying about my stomach, which was usually puffy but not this puffy, damn those Ritz crackers. I wanted those thoughts to stop, so I started kissing his neck, and he groaned and flopped back and I gripped him between my legs and that was all the talking for a while.
He pulled away again. Before he could say anything, I said, “Let’s do it.”
“Do what?”
I knew he knew what I meant. Which was annoying. “Do I have to spell it out?”
“Spell it out, Kincaid.” Teasing me. Licking my ear. “Aren’t you good at spelling? Don’t I recall an eighth-grade spelling-bee victory—”
“I won it on pachyderm,” I said. Now I was nearly gasping. The ear thing. “Come on, Andy, you know what I mean.”
“Do you want to?”
I thought of Crispin’s advice—Keep thinking about what you want, every minute—but I couldn’t think. That was the problem. All I could do was want. “Yes. Yes.”
He hesitated.
“What’s got you so worried?” I said.
“I’m kind of a douchebag, Kincaid.”
“But I am too.”
“Hand me my pants, would you?” There were three heartbreaking seconds of thinking he was getting dressed. Then he extracted a condom from his wallet. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Because I’m not a rapist.”
“Oh, good, that’s what I always like to hear before I sleep with someone.”
He tapped my lips with the foil-wrapped condom. “Shh, shh, don’t be sarcastic, just shut this mouth, shh, shh—”
I giggled and he put a hand over my mouth. It was sexy. In a way that I wished it weren’t, in a way that had to do with power and control. He did some maneuvering, ripping foil, shifting away from me, putting it on, and I looked at the weave of the couch and thought, Here it is. The big moment.
And I thought, No! There are no borders! This moment is no more important than any other moment in my sexual journey!
And I thought, Ew, please, never think the phrase sexual journey again.
He propped himself above me and we began to kiss again. Now I was preoccupied, though. What if I bled? Weren’t women supposed to bleed the first time? I considered getting a towel, but I didn’t want to explain why to Andy. Oh well, I thought. It was a dark blue couch, and I was an old pro at removing bloodstains. (A small upside to never tracking your period.)
Soon we were back to our frenzied pitch. “Give me some help, would you?” he said.
I froze.
“Like,” he said, grimacing, “put it in.”
So I grabbed it with one hand and opened myself up with the other. There was an inevitable flashback involving tampons. And then—
Okay.
I guessed we were having sex.
There was pressure, and it felt, well, like having something inside me, something considerably larger than even a jumbo tampon. But it didn’t hurt. Probably (TMI alert) because I’d gotten so wet. He pushed in, slowly. It didn’t feel particularly good or bad. Honestly, it didn’t really feel. He moved out and back in.
It didn’t take that long. He finished with a shudder and a whimper, same as before. He fell on me and breathed hard against my shoulder, hard enough that he left a patch of moisture there, like the billow of hot tea when you’re wearing glasses. “That was so good,” he said.
“Uh,” I said, “thanks?”
“Yeah,” he said, “yeah.” His eyes were closed. “Let me do you. Hold on.” He heaved himself up and tied up the condom like the grossest water balloon in the history of water-balloon fights. Then he twiddled his fingers between my legs. “Tell me what to do,” he said, but honestly he was doing just fine, and I guess I was kind of primed for it after all that nude neck-kissing, but, well, anyway, I came so fast it surprised me, a full-body clench and release. I tried not to make any noise, but a groan escaped. He grinned into my face. “That was hot,” he said. Then he lay down between me and the back of the couch, and he closed his eyes.
I stared at the ceiling. He was taking up more than his fair share of the couch, and I had to keep my body tense to avoid falling off. I felt like a shipwrecked rat clinging to a piece of driftwood. I am a person who has had sex, I thought.
“Hey, Andy?” I whispered. “You’re wrong.”
“Yeah?” he murmured.
“Jiyoon could win. She’s got a chance. A good chance.”
He didn’t respond. I squinted at his face. His mouth was open. He was asleep.
ASLEEP!
I wanted him gone. I wanted my house and body and mind to myself. I poked him. He didn’t stir. I gave him a gentle shake, and a not-so-gentle shake. He grunted. “You better go,” I said.
He stretched. “Yeah.”
He put on his clothes. I watched him thread his belt, stuff his wallet into his pocket. He left the condom on the floor. I put on my T-shirt and skirt, no undergarments. “I’ll just go out this way,” he said, nodding toward the basement door.
“Yep.”
He gave me a lopsided smile. “See you around, Kincaid.”
“Yeah. See you.”
The Candidate Open Forum was after school on Monday. It’s usually not well attended, since almost everyone has decided who to vote for by this point, but this year it was packed. Gennifer had predicted that. “People will be looking for drama,” she had said. She’d eyed me. “You sure you can handle it?” She had to deal with the delivery of the carnival games, and Andy had a lacrosse game.
“You bet,” I’d said, but I was more nervous than I let on.
There was a hiss when I walked onstage. I ignored it and tried to hold my voice steady. “Welcome to the Chawton School Candidate Open Forum, your last chance”—someone booed; bad choice of words—“to hear from your candidates before you vote on Saturday.” I introduced Jiyoon and Mack. Keep the focus on them, I reminded myself. I was in charge of facilitating audience questions and timing the candidate responses, and that was it.
The first question, from an earnest freshman, was on the environmental impact of our disposable lunch plates. “In the big scheme of things,” said Mack, “what we do has, like, zero environmental impact. It’s not even a rounding error.” He had only one plank in his platform, so of course he returned to it. “We should focus on things that actually impact people,” he said. “For example, I want everyone to feel supported. So I want to encourage everyone to show up to as many games as possible. And if that means a little more crap in the landfill, well—”
The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid Page 18