by Emily Layden
Right away it provided her with a kind of anonymity that she did not have on Twitter or Snapchat or Instagram. She didn’t know anyone besides Laurie on Tumblr, and so she followed accounts based on how they presented themselves. Unlike the forums she ghosted—watching but never posting on Reddit and Empty Closets—here she felt she could participate without revealing too much of herself; here she could communicate in JPEGs and GIFs. She didn’t intend for it to be a secret—so many times she thought about showing Laurie on the bus—but the longer she went without telling anyone, the more it became her private life. Sometimes she wonders if Laurie will find her on the platform—if one day some algorithmic magic will cause them to like or reblog the same post. It’s possible.
Her notifications light up, a satisfying little bubble of tallied alerts. Beyond-the-binaries liked a string of posts from the past week. Lezbianlibrarian posted a new quote, set in a sort of contemporary calligraphy: an Emily Dickinson poem about stepping from plank to plank. Something about the final lines—or maybe it’s the typeset, “This gave me that” in small, narrow capital letters, “precarious gait” in flourished cursive—gives her the deep-bellied sensation of being seen, seems to fill her up and empty her out at the same time, like a meditative breath, and so she clicks the arrow square to reblog. It doesn’t really fit next to the GIF of Anna Kendrick imitating Kristen Stewart or the image of soft, manicured hands linked at the pinkies against a millennial pink background, but Emma is not very good at Tumblr. She envies the users whose pages look like baby websites, sleek aggregates of carefully curated content, not a single post off brand.
She wishes she had more time to check her messages, more time to spend in the right-angled ether that is her DMs. She had been on Tumblr for six months or so before she received her first message, and when it appeared in her inbox she’d been gripped with a mild panic: she didn’t know anybody on here; who’d found her? But 525600minkas just wanted to say hey, I like ur vibe, and so Emma said thx, thinking it would end there. But then Minka started asking Emma about regular things, and Emma answered, briefly at first—only the basic details—until she felt more comfortable. Minka was fifteen and lived in Kentucky, which was cool because it meant they were in border states; it didn’t take long before their conversation wandered into one about their sexuality. From Minka Emma learned that a person could identify as queer, broadly, that it was okay to not necessarily be more specific, because specificity was just a construct like everything else. Margo_on_the_gogo messaged in response to a piece of Mary Oliver poetry Emma blogged: MO is the best, she said. From Margo Emma learned that a person could define as asexual, which was not something Emma knew about at thirteen, and still seems a little bit fuzzy in her mind, if she thinks about it too hard.
She still talks to Minka and Margo, but also mcphillivanilli and rbg-is-my-homie and annasbananas and a dozen more. It wouldn’t be entirely true to say that these people feel as real to her as her friends at Atwater or her friends from home—real, three-dimensional, breathing and heart-beating people she’s touched and smelled and tasted, even—but they do feel real to Emma, like she’s communicating with characters from her favorite books. In some corner of her brain she knows that she has invented them, each and every one, taken what they’ve told her about themselves and put a body and eyes and voice and height and smile to their usernames. When they type “haha” or “lol” she hears their laughter, high and giggly or low and throaty. Each time she meets a new user she is consumed by the task of rendering them real, of molding them from the clay of their digital selves.
* * *
Although it is barely 3:00 P.M. when Emma returns from the library—and the first vans will not leave for the private estate that is hosting Atwater’s prom for four more hours—Whitney has descended into some kind of controlled chaos. Music thumps from every other room, and as she moves down the hall her ears catch alternatively diva pop (Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”) and synth-laden Robyn (“Call Your Girlfriend”) and swagger-inducing Nicki Minaj (“Bang Bang”). The cacophony is enough to induce a seizure, Emma thinks. The hallways swell with the heat of a hundred warming straighteners and curling irons and blasting blow-dryers; the windows in the first-floor common room are literally fogged with humidity. Her classmates race from room to room, most half-dressed, some in bathrobes or wrapped in towels. It smells like hair spray and perfume and just-finished showers.
Upstairs, Karla and Priya and Addison and Collier have fully monopolized their end of Whitney. There are piles of shoes in the hallway. Priya has positioned herself in front of the only full-length mirror on the hall, palettes of eyeshadow at her feet, gently buffing dimension onto her eyelids. Behind her, in a black lace thong and a matching strapless bra, Collier does a badly executed version of the “Single Ladies” dance, barely in step with the music that thunders from Addison’s room.
Collier spots Emma before she can do anything about it. She shouts her name, louder than she needs to, announcing her arrival to the entire dorm, and Emma is suddenly grateful for the cover of music and blow-dryers and running showers. “Towne!”
Collier has already started drinking, Emma thinks.
“I told your girlfriend—” she lowers her voice as she draws closer to Emma: “Come pregame with us. Sixish.”
Emma tries to say something noncommittal, but Collier cuts her off.
“Shh! Olivia already said you would grace us with your presence.”
“Ah, well—in that case. I better start getting ready.”
“Seriously! You’re way behind. Olivia said you were working on your econ project? Did you finish?”
“Not quite,” Emma says, before making her exit. “I’ll see you in a bit.”
The door to her room is open, and Olivia sits at her desk, scrolling through a Spotify playlist. “Freedom,” from the new Beyoncé album, thrums in the background. As Emma fills in the doorframe, leaning against the left side, Olivia doesn’t even look up.
“Song requests?”
“Well, I know we love her, but you’re, like, the eighth person on this hall playing Beyoncé and every single one of you is playing from a different album. It’s like a mash-up gone wrong.”
“No such thing, my dear, where Queen Bey is concerned.” She stands, and Emma notices how her T-shirt hangs over her chest. When Olivia kisses her, she lingers before pulling away. “Did you finish your project?”
Emma shrugs. “Not quite.”
“Well, we’ve been having much more fun here.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Mm-hmm. First of all, Collier and Addison have been drinking since noon. They went to get their nails and hair done and came back smelling like fancy prostitutes. Second of all, I didn’t want to watch Friends without you—”
“—thank you—”
“—so I watched like three episodes of The Good Wife, and I am afraid to tell you that I will be leaving you for Archie Panjabi.”
Emma, whose hand is at her girlfriend’s hip, pulls Olivia closer. “She’s not really your type, is she?” she asks.
“Do I have a type?” Olivia asks, playfully.
Emma steps squarely inside the room and swings the door shut behind her. Olivia smells like lotion and the perfume her mother gave her, something complicated and adult that she says reminds her of a family vacation in Japan. Emma didn’t like it at first, but now the smell is indistinguishable from a million memories.
Olivia presses Emma back against the door, moving one hand behind her head, ensuring her aggression is playful and not hurtful. She steps away, slipping easily out of her boxer shorts and T-shirt so that she is completely naked. She moves to the bed, stretching herself out, waiting for her girlfriend to catch up. Instead, Emma climbs over Olivia, pressing her lips on her collarbone, the place where her rib cage arches to its highest point, the soft spot to the left of her belly button.
The first time Emma went down on Olivia, she had only a rough idea of what to do. She’d trie
d to read about it online, first in the euphemistic language of women’s magazines and then in forums, where if you looked hard enough you’d find more clinical instructions. Neither of them came; it was six months before Olivia gave Emma an orgasm, a shuddering that was not immediately identifiable to either of them, not until the feeling grew in duration and intensity and they both could trace that first quivering to a kind of infant pleasure.
* * *
The dress looks better than she remembered. Emma is not thin and lanky like her girlfriend; she has swimmer’s shoulders, broad and muscular, and swimmer’s boobs, too—small, not much to write home about. Dresses tend to make all these things more noticeable, what with their plunging necklines that are supposed to hang over cleavage or thin straps that are supposed to enhance a delicate bone structure, tethered over protruding collarbones like cables on a mountainside.
But Olivia has managed to pull Emma’s hair back into a kind of low and messy bun, with little wisps of hair pulled loose next to her ears, and she’s contoured Emma’s eyelids with black powder and dabbed highlighter—despite Emma’s protestations that highlighter is not for white girls—on her cheekbones and the tip of her nose and the highest points of her forehead and across her clavicle and the result is, remarkably, that Emma is wearing the dress rather than vice versa.
Olivia is not even wearing a dress. She’s wearing a kind of jumpsuit, also with a vague 1970s vibe, with wide legs and a neckline so deep it nearly grazes her navel and a tie around the waist that Olivia positions just so. It’s from a brand that’s based out of San Francisco; at one point, Emma made her way to the company site, and, as far as she could tell, they design exclusively for six-foot-tall, one-hundred-pound twentysomethings. Their models all looked a little like Cara Delevingne.
* * *
They stand like birds on a high wire, perched delicately at angles: Karla is propped against the edge of Collier’s desk, a hip half on the hard wood corner; Priya leans next to her, one arm stiff and flat-palmed on the desktop; Collier and Addison rest against Collier’s neatly made bed, the comforter smoothed underneath them. The delicacy with which they stand is both due to the heels in which they each teeter—four or five inches, some with sturdier platforms but others pencil-thin—and the desire to preserve the perfection of their dresses, to not add a single crease or wrinkle until the photos are done.
Karla deejays from the MacBook on Collier’s desk, clicking through a playlist titled “Getting Ready.” It’s a mix of Top 40 and nineties and early-aughts throwbacks, with a heavy emphasis on the pop queens: Britney, Mariah, Lady Gaga, all songs chosen by the people before them. Next to the laptop are two water bottles, each half-full with a liquid whose precise color and opacity is difficult to determine through the tinted polycarbonate of its container. It does not matter: it is, surely, some combination of clear liquor (vodka, probably) and juice or an otherwise sweet and alcohol-free beverage, like Crystal Light.
Priya, looking a little bored, her eyes not yet shining the way Collier’s and Addison’s are, thrums her nails against the desktop, a specific plastic trill. “Let’s play a game,” she says.
“Which one?” Olivia asks, by way of agreement.
“Something that doesn’t involve any kind of mess,” Collier says, likely remembering the time they all tried to play flip cup by shoving their desks together in the middle of the room. It smelled for days, a stale and sour rot they tried to hide from their Dorm Parent with open windows and bottles of Lysol.
“What about ten fingers?” Karla offers, toggling between songs (she lands on TLC’s “Waterfalls,” slowly windshield-wiping her shoulders to the opening beat).
“What are we, in eighth grade?” Addison laughs.
“Don’t we already know everything about each other?” Priya asks.
“That’s why it’s fun!” Karla explains. “You’ve gotta get creative.”
They look at one another, trading eye contact around the room. It’s not exactly tense, but there’s the sense that they’re sizing each other up, particularly Emma and Olivia, who do not, in fact, know everything about the other four, and about whom the other four know relatively little truly personal information. The longer Emma and Olivia dated, the more Emma came to realize that so many of Olivia’s friendships were a kind of one-way street: while so many of their classmates claimed to absolutely adore Olivia, they never seemed to show any real interest in Olivia’s life. Emma asked her about it once, after an hour spent listening to Olivia counsel Collier through a breakup with her at-the-time boyfriend.
“You’re always asking Collier and Addie about their lives, but they never ask you about ours,” she said, and Olivia replied simply, her chin cocked to one side with that curious smile of hers: “What would I tell them?”
Now Emma knows that Olivia engineers her conversations this way: all listening, no sharing.
Nonetheless, it’s Olivia who breaks the silence: “I literally haven’t played this game since middle school, so I need a refresher on the rules.”
Karla smiles, setting her drink on the edge of her desk. “Okay, so, when it’s your turn, you say something you’ve never done, like, ‘Never have I ever … shoplifted—’”
“That’s a lie,” Priya interjects.
“Shh! I’m just giving an example!”
“Well, that’s a bad example.”
“Okay, fine. Um, never have I ever … hooked up with someone more than five years older than me,” Karla says, shooting Priya a pointed look. “And if you’ve done the thing, then you put a finger down and take a drink. So, Priya will be putting a finger down and taking a drink.”
Olivia whistles. “Damn, girl,” she says, although Emma can tell she’s not really impressed at all, that she’s just playing along.
“Whatever,” Collier asks, “that’s not even scandalous anymore. It only counts if he’s twice your age and your teacher.” Next to her, Addie bursts into laughter, a dramatic bah! Emma stiffens, unsure about the joke.
“First of all, he was seven years older than me,” Priya says after rolling her eyes, “and second of all: I know we’re supposed to think there was something weird about Brodie dating her grad school professor, but—”
Oh, Emma thinks. They’re not talking about Karen Mirro and Mr. Breslin. They’re talking about the flyers that landed in their physical mailboxes last week, a single piece of paper printed with a page of the New York Times Vows section from 1978 announcing the marriage of Elliott Rhodes and Patricia Brodie. The stunt hadn’t landed like the rest, in part because it lacked the choreography of the previous pranks—most students only checked their real mailboxes when they were expecting care packages from home, and so the release was too subtle, initially just a trickle rather than a swift and sudden drop—but also because it required a little too much thinking. The announcement said that Brodie and her husband met at Columbia, but additional googling was needed in order to suss out, as Louisa Manning did, that Elliott Rhodes was Patricia Brodie’s professor, and then still more analysis to understand the insinuation behind it all.
“Obviously it worked out for them,” Collier says, and Addie nods. This is the other reason the maneuver hadn’t quite hit the mark, especially among the upperclasswomen: Mrs. Brodie’s relationship is a staple around campus, as much a fact of Atwater’s existence as the clock tower or the Bowl; more important, their marriage seems like a good one. Mr. Rhodes seems to know that at Atwater he is an accessory to his wife, and carefully selects his contributions to the school accordingly: he never eats in the dining hall, for example (although plenty of faculty spouses do), and only in the middle of a blizzard might you find him working out in the Atwater gym rather than at the YMCA in Canaan; for years he has made his space within the community not by taking from its resources but instead by making himself useful, lining the athletic fields or weeding the gardens outside Trask or setting up hundreds of plastic folding chairs before graduation. It isn’t that he seems like a good guy (although he does; m
ost of them see him like a kind of benevolent grandpa), but rather that he seems supportive, that his decades-long marriage to his wife seems legitimate. What did it matter that he was her professor? There he was, leaf-blowing her school’s sidewalks. Clearly, there was something real between them.
“I just feel sort of bad that her marriage got dragged into this, honestly,” Priya says. “They’re so cute, you know? Obviously they love each other.”
“I don’t think the flyers were trying to say that they don’t,” Emma says, surprising herself. When she speaks, she notices a numbness around her lips and has to bite the inside of her cheek to prevent herself from smiling inappropriately. She’s drunk. “I think the idea was that it makes Brodie biased in some way.”
Next to her, Olivia nods. “Like, she can’t fully participate in a conversation about power and consent because it, like, fucks with her own origin story.” The two of them had talked about it the night they found the flyers. Emma bristled at the suggestion that Brodie lacked nuance, that she couldn’t hold her own love story in one hand while making space in the other for the reality that girls are sometimes exploited, manipulated, made to feel as though they have freedom of choice when, in fact, they do not. They all had problems with Patricia Brodie—this year in particular—but Emma believed that, at the end of the day, she was a smart woman.