by Claire Adams
“Yeah, but everyone would want to know how I know he has herpes. And I don’t want everyone thinking that I have herpes too.” Kelly shrugged, snagging a handful of Goldfish crackers.
“You don’t have to say you slept with him. That’s the beauty thing about rumors. You can just be like ‘I heard from one of the girls who slept with him that he’s totally got it. She’s getting tested.’ Or something like that.” I frowned.
“That seems a little extreme. I mean…” I worried at my bottom lip. “I really hope he doesn’t have herpes or something. He might.” I shuddered. The possibility that Devon could have an STD was almost worse than the way he’d just moved onto the next girl.
“I’m sure we could dig up something on him that’s true—but that people don’t really know.” Kelly grinned. “I mean a guy like that has to have some skeletons in his closet, right? We could just find it out and make sure to tell everyone we know. It’d be all around campus in less than a day.”
“But should I really be putting that much energy into getting back at him? Like, yeah, it’s shitty that he could manipulate me like that, but…” I put the last of my pizza aside. I was so full I was starting to get uncomfortable. I sipped at my Coke. “Besides which, people would just figure I was some kind of crazy disgruntled groupie.” The last thing I wanted was for anyone else to know that I had slept with Devon.
“Well, as to how much energy you should put into it, what went down?” I looked away. I was wrong; the last thing I wanted was to have to think about how good it had been, how hopeful I had been. But I told Kelly everything I could remember about what Devon and I had talked about; both before and after having sex. I told her about how sweet he’d been, about how he’d pulled me close and cuddled up to me.
I told her about waking up before Devon did, and the small talk we’d exchanged, as best as I could remember it. I didn’t even know how accurate my memories were. “I feel like… I know I wasn’t drunk.”
“Are you sure? I mean if you were drunk, you could totally accuse him of taking advantage of you. And he did get you drinks while you were talking before. Maybe he slipped something into yours—or had one of his brothers do that. There were some accusations like that about one of the Phi Kappa boys a few years ago.” I shook my head.
“Accuse him of rape? That’s—that’s really, really dark, Kelly. I couldn’t do that to him. He was shitty just to use me and move on, but that’s…” I exhaled slowly. “That’s not just something that would ruin his life; it’d make it harder for girls who really did get raped to come forward because once everyone found out it was fake…”
“Okay, so bad idea. I get where you’re coming from.” Kelly sighed. “Did he actually say that it was special between you two?” I racked my mind.
“He said something like that, that it was really special… I think.” I chewed on my bottom lip. “But it wasn’t like he said that he wanted to take me out or anything.”
“Not even before he got you in bed?” I shook my head.
“He suggested I could come over and watch the game with the rest of the guys, but that’s not a date.” Kelly shrugged.
“If he didn’t really promise you anything, then I guess it doesn’t make sense to do anything extreme to get back at him.” I sighed and nodded.
“Yeah, I’d feel—I’d feel like I was a worse person than him, even. Or some kind of crazy person. I’ll just… I’ll just avoid him and pretend like nothing happened. That seems like the best option.” I sighed again. “Now if only I could make myself think that nothing happened. That would be great.”
Chapter Three
I woke up the next day, and somehow I felt both better and worse. In a certain respect, the fact that I had lost my virginity was less and less important, but the fact of how Devon had seemingly gone right onto the next girl without even thinking, apparently, was even more painful. I lay in bed for a while, trying to decide what I was going to do. The weekend was halfway over, and I hadn’t done any studying at all. I had been too wrapped up in the party, in the game—and in the bullshit involving Devon—to actually do any of the things that I had been planning to do on Friday when I got back to the dorms from class.
In addition to the fact that I needed to get a good bit of studying done, I was less than interested in anything that could possibly result in me running into Devon. I didn’t even want to see anyone at all. I thought in my paranoid way that somehow, even though I had only told Kelly about what had happened, if anyone saw me, they would immediately know about it.
I still felt weepy, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to cry about the situation. I was torn between being angry and Devon and wanting simply to never see him again in my life—so that I could start pretending that I had never met him. There goes my perfect attendance at every basketball game, I thought wryly. I couldn’t imagine going and watching the team play anymore; at the moment I couldn’t even imagine watching regular basketball, just because the sport would remind me of Devon. I cringed, feeling bitter. Devon had managed to ruin an entire sport for me, at least for a little while; that seemed like the most unfair part of the whole situation.
I wandered out of my room and threw myself down onto the couch; I didn’t want to leave the dorms, but I also didn’t want to wallow around in bed all day. After a few minutes, Kelly came out, giving me a sympathetic smile. “Any better today?” she asked me. I shrugged.
“I don’t know whether I want to go to some stupid party and find a random guy and screw his brains out, or never leave this room again.” Kelly laughed.
“That sounds about normal,” she told me. She sat down on the edge of the couch, pushing my legs aside. “I can help you out with either plan, you know.” I chortled, sitting up slightly and scrubbing at my face.
“I think for now I’m going to stick with never leave this room again,” I said. “Except we don’t have enough junk food to last until tomorrow.” Kelly laughed again.
“So we’ll order in. Denny’s does togo online, and a bunch of other places do delivery. We’ll get delivery food, stay in all day and do laundry and study. How’s that sound?” I grinned, tilting my head back until it came to rest on the arm of the couch.
“Perfect. That sounds like the ideal situation.”
“You get breakfast, I’ll get lunch, and we’ll split dinner.”
“Done deal.” I peeled myself off of the couch and went back into my room to retrieve my laptop.
We took turns perusing the menu; part of me was a little disgusted at more fast food after the night before, but I had to admit that it was more appealing to order in than to go to the dining hall. I compromised and got a Slam with pancakes, eggs, fruit, and sausage while Kelly ordered a French Toast Slam. We decided to split an order of cheese fries to go with it and ordered coffee and juice to drink. I paid online, and Kelly agreed to go and pick it up on her own; I didn’t even want to leave the room to go to her car out in the parking lot.
I sorted through the textbooks for my different classes while she was away, deciding what I needed to tackle first. In spite of my determination, I found myself thinking about Devon—and hated myself for it. I was going to focus on precal, and on American History before 1865, and I was not going to think about Devon Sealy or about basketball. I turned on the TV to fill the room with noise. The last thing I needed just then was to have silence and space to think.
Kelly and I settled in, sprawled around the common area of our dorm, our Styrofoam containers scattered across the coffee table and the floor. I went into precalculus first, deciding that I might as well do the most difficult things while my brain was fighting me to think about Devon. If I could distract myself sufficiently, maybe I’d just get in the habit of not thinking about him at all.
“What are you going to do about him?” Kelly asked me when we took a break a few hours later, trying to decide on what to order for lunch. The walls in the dorms were thin enough that I could hear people beginning to move around the floor, coming a
nd going, talking to each other. I hoped against hope that none of our friends would be interested in coming by and visiting with us or seeing why neither Kelly nor I were out and about. I just wanted to be as alone as possible.
“I’m going to avoid him,” I said, shrugging. “Let’s do Fratelli’s for lunch. Their pasta is amazing.”
“I’m down.” Kelly grabbed her phone, and we browsed the menu on the site. We put in our order, and I looked at my American History books, thinking that I should just plow through the studying. Kelly changed the channel on the TV, obviously more than happy to take a break from her own literature reading.
“So you’re going to avoid him,” Kelly said. I pushed my books aside and shrugged.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. Avoid him, avoid the basketball games. Forget about him over time.” Kelly’s lips twisted in a wry grin.
“Do you really think you can do that, though? I mean—the girls are going to want to go to another party at some point, and it’s not like you’re in another city from him or something.” I considered it.
“There are like, thousands of students here, though,” I pointed out. “Besides which, he’s an upperclassman. I didn’t meet him until the night before last, I think my odds are good for never running into him again.”
“But how are you going to avoid him? You don’t know him well enough to know where he’ll be.” I frowned.
“Well, I won’t go to any more basketball games, I won’t go to any frat parties. It’s not like it’ll be difficult; I don’t go to parties that often anyway.” Kelly nodded slowly.
“But you don’t know if you’ll like—run into him in the DH or in the library.”
“I never ran into him before. I can’t even remember seeing him other than at games until that stupid party.”
“Just be prepared for it to happen.” I laughed.
“I doubt it will, but pretending like you’ve never met someone before goes both ways. On the off-chance I do run into him somewhere, I’ll just pretend like I have no idea who he is.” Kelly rolled her eyes.
“You’re transparent, though! You’ll run into him and get that hurt puppy look in your eyes.” I groaned.
“No, I won’t. I’ll just look right through him, or turn away, and pretend like I didn’t even see him.” Kelly laughed, shaking her head.
“You’re better off just avoiding him, as useless as it is.” I shrugged.
“There’s almost no chance I’ll run into him. It’s not even a big deal.” Our food arrived, and Kelly went down to the lobby to pick it up.
The next day I felt much better than I would have expected to. When my alarm went off, ripping me out of a deep sleep, I thought to myself that I had been silly all weekend; no one knew about what had happened between Devon and me other than Kelly. I would just go back to my normal life, a little wiser, and forget that Devon Sealy had ever existed. Life would go back to normal.
I got out of bed and gathered up my books for class, yawning and stretching. There was no lingering soreness from the sex I’d had; it was as if my body had started forgetting Devon, too. I packed my book bag and went down to the dining hall to grab something quick and easy to eat in class: a breakfast sandwich, a to-go cup of coffee, and a banana. It would be enough to get me through until lunch, for sure.
I was starting to feel really happy once more, relieved and contented as I walked to class, answering the waves and calls of the people I knew on campus. I’d been overreacting, obviously; I would just get on with my life, and I would find a new guy to be into. If I avoided going to games for the rest of the season, I could probably still enjoy watching on TV, as long as our team wasn’t playing, and eventually I could watch our games again once Devon graduated and left school.
I slipped into class a few minutes early, snagging my usual seat in the middle, off to the side of the room. It had been the seat I had taken the first day of classes, and it was still “mine” unless I managed somehow to get to class too late to claim it. The other students started to filter in, and the normal, routine hum of people discussing the assignment, their weekends, started to rise up in the room. I shook my head to myself, remembering my comment to Kelly that I never wanted to leave my room again; I’d been acting like such a tragedy queen.
The professor came in and started asking about our weekends as she set up for class, loading up the computer. Since it was American History, and we were covering everything through the end of the Civil War, Dr. Fewkes liked to include primary source slides in all of her lectures; she even assigned primary sources for supplemental reading. I got out my textbook and flipped to the chapter we were studying.
Everything was going absolutely the way that it had every day that I’d been in classes since the beginning of the semester. The students around me were beginning to settle in, and I had wolfed down my sandwich and had a few gulps of coffee to kick-start my brain. I figured that I would eat the banana later in class, or maybe when I trekked across the quad to get to my next class.
But just as I decided that everything was great—the sun shining, my normal routine established once more—I heard the door open, and promptly felt my stomach give a heave. Walking through the door, a guidance transfer sheet in hand, was Devon Sealy. I had told Kelly that it would be so easy to avoid him; and here he was, walking right into my first class of the day, less than twenty-four hours later. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to cry. I wanted to run.
Chapter Four
I looked away from the front of the class immediately, staring down at my textbook and taking a deep breath. Get yourself together, Jenn, I thought firmly. You told Kelly exactly how you were going to handle this. Don’t prove her right by going to pieces. I took another deep breath and glanced around the room, purposely keeping myself from looking at Devon as he spoke to Dr. Fewkes. She told him to take whatever open seat he wanted, and I said a silent prayer in my mind that he would just sit in the back, that he was just going to do what everyone said he always did: pretend like he didn’t even know me.
For my own part, I decided that my best course of action was just to focus completely and entirely on the lecture and my notes, and not even acknowledge that Devon Sealy was a person who existed. Just because we were now apparently in the same class—and what was he doing in a survey class, anyway—didn’t mean that I couldn’t just avoid him. There were plenty of other cute girls in the class for him to flirt with if he wanted to, and I was there to learn; I wasn’t there to be around Devon.
I kept my eyes on the front of the room, on my textbook, or on the notebook where I was writing notes and started to feel much better about the situation. According to what everyone had told me about Devon, he would probably be just as likely to ignore my existence as I was to ignore his—even more so, in fact. As Dr. Fewkes told an anecdote about early Colonial-Native American interactions, I found myself smiling. I was going to be fine. The flurry of panic was a normal reaction, but I had everything under control once more, and there was no reason to interrupt my normal routine.
As class wore on, and discussions started on the supplementary material we had been assigned, I no longer had the option of just looking straight ahead of me or at my desk, which was a little daunting, but I told myself that it would be fine. I paid attention to whoever was talking, and I had to be more than a little grateful that Devon didn’t seem to be interested in contributing—which, considering he had just transferred in, made sense. I caught sight of him at one point as my gaze flicked around the room and felt a jolt go through me; my heart beat a little bit faster. He wasn’t hanging in the back where he wouldn’t be seen; he was only a few seats away from me, almost at a level.
“Jenn, what do you think of the letter?” Dr. Fewkes asked me. I cringed internally as every eye in the classroom turned to me. I should have said something right away and then she wouldn’t have called on me. Fuck.
“I think it’s interesting that the early colonists didn’t all view the Native Americans as savages,
” I said quickly, feeling the blood rising into my face. I kept my gaze on the professor. “I’d be interested to kind of understand where the shift happened, because obviously they were dependent on the natives for a really long time to know how to life on the land here.” I had a moment of weakness and glanced around the room.
Devon was looking right at me, a little smile on his face, and I felt my blush deepening, my face burning all the way from the roots of my hair to the top of my chest. I swallowed against the dry feeling in my throat and pushed down the blush by force of will, returning Devon’s pleased little look with something like a scowl before I deliberately looked away and turned my attention back onto the professor.
I managed to avoid looking at Devon for the rest of the class, and decided that to make doubly sure I wouldn’t have to deal with him, I’d hurry my way out when the period was over. I was just going to grab my stuff and leave, and wait until I’d made it to my next class of the day to eat my banana. Considering the way that he’d looked at me—the pleased gleam of recognition in his eyes, the almost flirty smile—I was not about to eat a banana with him sitting only a few feet away from me. In the back of my mind, I had to wonder at the fact that Devon had even acknowledged me at all, silent as it was. If everything everyone had said about him was true, wouldn’t he have just not looked at me at all, or looked at me without any kind of recognition? Maybe he’s already forgotten that he had you. Maybe he’s that much of a player. I had to smile to myself at the thought; if that was the case—if he had literally forgotten that he’d had sex with me—it did present some interesting opportunities for revenge.
But fast on the heels of that thought was the much more angering one that Devon had either had sex with so many girls, or I was so unexceptional to him, that he couldn’t even remember taking my virginity. I frowned, worrying at my bottom lip and thinking once more that visiting the school nurse might be a good idea. My mind flip-flopped again; maybe Devon had grinned at me like that because he did remember me—and thought that I was still all gone in the head about him, like half the girls on campus. Well, if that’s the case, then he’s got another think coming, doesn’t he? I told myself that I was going to continue ignoring him. If he had been able to forget about me, I would forget about him, and that was the way things would be. It was only fair.