Ji Sun joined the group just as Walker was recommending a film whose title Ji Sun couldn’t hear, with Amy answering that she “didn’t do subtitles.” Seamus, an international student from Northern Ireland, who Ji Sun knew spoke Irish, shrugged. “Me neither,” he said, “Eurotrash.”
He laughed, but Walker frowned. “Consider how we replicate the insularity of our government with our artistic consumption.”
“But why engage with the rest of the world only through what we can consume, right?” Lainey had nudged into the conversation with an ease at which Ji Sun marveled. “You taught us that.”
Alice and Margaret sometimes watched K-dramas with Ji Sun, and Alice had picked up some Korean phrases by now, but she still seemed somewhat mystified by the fact that millions of people would choose these shows over dubbed American programming. Ji Sun struggled to explain to her that America was the only place, as far as she could tell, with so little interest in artistic imports, other than ones it could chew to bits and remake, and that everyone else on the planet was all but forced to take their entertainment with a side of the American flag. She wanted to ask Walker to repeat the title, but she couldn’t figure out how to gain a foothold in the group.
“Ji Sun, join us!” Walker said. “We could use your level head and cosmopolitan perspective on this.”
This was what she had imagined college would offer! The chance to be treated as a contemporary, to sidle up to professors at a party and debate the aesthetic and ethical merits of art. She held a red Solo cup with vinegary white wine in it, but she could almost picture it as a coupe, champagne bubbles tickling her hand as she held it aloft, laughing with Walker, positively cosmopolitan.
Before she could take her spot in the circle, now inched open to include her, she felt a hard squeeze on her left tricep. She yelped and turned to see Ruby, her friend from KCCF.
“Ji Sun, can I talk to you?” Ruby asked.
“Oh, now?” Ji Sun asked, and glanced back at Walker.
“It’s kind of important.”
“You’ll excuse me,” she said to Walker and the grad students, who’d already begun to argue about car chases as neocapitalist propaganda. “I’ll be right back.”
Ruby grabbed Ji Sun by the wrist. “Can we go in your room?” she asked.
Once inside her room, Ji Sun freed her wrist from Ruby’s grip, tried to shake out the pain.
“What’s he doing here?” Ruby asked, trembling.
“What? Who?” Ji Sun said, rubbing her wrist.
“Him! Walker, Professor Walker! Who do you think?”
“We invited him?” Ji Sun said. I’m in love with him? She almost said the words, thought they might be swallowed in the sound of the bass thrumming just outside the door.
“You really don’t know?”
“Know what?” Ji Sun said. She looked at Ruby now, her face drawn.
“I’m one of them,” Ruby said, her scowl deeper than usual.
“One of who?” The bass had grown still louder, and Ji Sun had to shout.
Ruby took her wrist again, this time gently. “Come with me!” she said. “We have to go somewhere you can hear this.”
It was too cold to go outside, so they went down to the first floor, to a private, wheelchair-accessible bathroom. Ruby locked the door and paced a little before she turned on the sink, drew the shower curtain open, and gestured at Ji Sun to step inside.
Ruby pointed at the plastic bench in the corner of the shower. “You might want to sit down,” she said, “if this is really news to you.”
In the fluorescent light, Ji Sun could see how worn Ruby looked, her eyes bloodshot and her lips cracked and flaked. Ruby closed the curtain around them, and scooted right beside Ji Sun on the small bench. Darker now with the curtain drawn, Ruby spoke softly as she explained to Ji Sun that she was one of the students filing a formal complaint against Professor Walker for sexual harassment.
The rumors had intensified that semester, but so had their inoculation against them. The sting of the incident at Walker’s house had evaporated when he’d written on Ji Sun’s final paper to “entreat” her to take his seminar, that he “couldn’t imagine the conversation without her singular voice.” She hadn’t even shown Lainey, who was also enrolled in the seminar. Alice and Margaret didn’t have room in their schedules, but reasoned they’d still get enough Walker secondhand, from their roommates, and at the antiwar protests that had increased in frequency in the new year. But they all agreed that surely, someone so righteous and good, who stood up to the man—in the man’s own house!—was not the type to take advantage of anyone, let alone someone like Ruby, who Ji Sun hadn’t even imagined capable of pinching her arm this hard.
“He’s a creep, Ji Sun,” Ruby said. “And I don’t think you want him in your room.”
“What did he do? What happens when you . . . you file a formal complaint?”
“Probably nothing,” Ruby said. She shook her head and looked like she might spit. “He’s had complaints filed against him before. Did you know that? Like a bunch.”
“For what?” Ji Sun said. “And why won’t you answer me? What did he do?”
They heard a bang on the door.
“I don’t feel like I should have to revisit my trauma right now for you to believe me.”
“Your trauma?” It sounded to Ji Sun like a line she’d learned to rehearse. “What did he do, Ruby?”
“He . . . propositioned me,” she said.
“And?”
“What do you mean, and? He asked me if I wanted to suck his dick!” Ruby put her hand over her mouth like she couldn’t believe what she’d said.
Ji Sun felt a tightening in her stomach, and lower, something that butted up against arousal but was squeezed by shame. There was another bang on the door.
“Occupied!” Ji Sun shouted, and Ruby winced and hopped up.
“I should go anyway,” Ruby said. “This is feeling really hostile.”
“Hostile?” Ji Sun said, and tried to touch Ruby’s back. She had a foggy, underwater feeling, as though the room had filled with steam. Ruby pulled back the curtain and went out the door, turned down the hall, away from her.
* * *
• • •
Ji Sun returned to a different party. The music was louder, and the furniture had been pushed to the common room’s edges. Walker and the TAs were gone and everyone else was dancing, bodies grinding and bouncing in a throng. Someone had plugged in a rainbow party light but it was stuck on red, giving the room the look of a dance club on one of the crime procedurals Lainey was always watching. Ji Sun couldn’t find her roommates in the crowd, and she needed to see them, ask what they knew.
She pushed through the dancers and found the three of them in Alice and Margaret’s room, Margaret sobbing on the bed.
“What happened!” Ji Sun asked. “What’s going on?”
Margaret wailed. “Tell her! I can’t even say it. It’s my birthday!”
“She caught Conner getting a blow job from some chick. In our bathroom.” Lainey leaned close so that Ji Sun could hear. Alice rubbed Margaret’s back.
“From that fat pig, too,” Margaret said, and sunk from the bed’s edge to the floor.
“Fuck that,” Lainey said. “Talk about him that way, not her.”
All cruel judgments of girls made by other girls were by-products of the patriarchy, and Lainey let you know it. Ji Sun noticed that when Lainey herself passed judgment on other girls, this rule did not seem to apply.
“I like Kiersten,” Margaret said. “We’re in Spanish together. But it’s my birthday,” she said again, as though she had been guaranteed that this was one day nothing bad could happen to her.
“I know, sweetie,” Alice said, a bit tipsy and trying to assume the comforting maternal role that was usually Margaret’s. “It’s really fucked up. Conner’s a d
ick.”
“Yeah, he’s a huge tool.” Ji Sun was jarred from her crisis into this one, felt a small pocket of relief to think that Conner, for whom her begrudging affection had recently worn thin, wouldn’t be around as much anymore, turning on their TV and pawing Margaret. “He’s nowhere near good enough for you,” she said to Margaret.
“Maybe so,” Margaret cried. “But I love him!”
She was so pretty in her baby blue party dress, tulle skirt that might’ve looked like a costume on someone else, but even splayed out around her on the floor, paired with the jokey party crown they’d bought her, looked almost regal.
“This is the second time he did this, too,” Margaret said. “The second time I caught him, I mean! Who knows how many other blow jobs he’s getting in bathrooms.”
“You didn’t tell us that,” Ji Sun said. “Did she tell you that?” She found a way to feel hurt even as Margaret was unraveling.
“I knew you’d just tell me to break up with him! Don’t be mad at me, please!”
Lainey wondered aloud why so many girls wanted to get on their knees for this asshole, but in truth it was not mysterious to her. She’d imagined sucking Conner’s dick herself, precisely because he disgusted her, and because he was Margaret’s boyfriend. Would sucking his dick be about hurting her friend, or becoming closer to her? Having a secret from her, but also sharing something with her? Lainey would never do it, but she’d thought about it more than she would admit.
“Of course we’re not mad at you.” Alice leaned up against the mattress beside Margaret. “What do you think, should we shut this party down? Weekend quiet curfew starts in like twenty minutes anyway. We can get in our pajamas and eat cake.” Alice was exhausted, and looked forward to shooing out the crowd, who hadn’t even noticed that their hosts went missing. It felt to her like any party, absent the four of them, would evaporate anyway.
“I’m not hungry,” Margaret said. “I keep thinking of the face he was making, ugh!”
Ji Sun thought again of Walker, of what Ruby had said, of the men and boys who it would seem were just wandering around campus looking for blow jobs wherever they could come by one: in the office of the building where they taught, in the bathroom at the birthday party for their girlfriend, while she twirled in her perfect skirt just outside the door.
Chapter 15
Lainey dyed her hair Manic Panic Hot Hot Pink for the February antiwar protest. Students at the state school had been teargassed the week before, and Lainey was secretly hoping for this, would chain herself to anything, wanted to get arrested. The rage she felt at the government was neck and neck with her rage at her own impotence, about which she felt her liberal arts education had, for all its promises, so far mainly only enlarged the scope. Some days, Margaret’s friend Mac swiped them into the law library and Lainey sat in a private cavern of books, rules, and rulings that men had made, her best hope, and even it seemed outlandish, to add a volume that would be kept in some other, dustier library with all the plays and essays until they disintegrated or were obliterated in the nuclear war her government might initiate out of sheer stupidity.
Outrage gave her an energy she couldn’t get at the library, and she was alive in her indignation. She felt a thrum of anticipation, for the crowd, for the chance to be part of something that moved and was moving, something that was beyond shifting the course of history, that also had the chance to change something right now, at this moment, for living people. At protests sometimes she felt she traveled into the future, could see herself in a photograph clipped from the newspaper, chose her outfit with an eye for the nostalgia that she already felt for her own young body: cutoff black jean shorts, tendrils licking down over unshaved legs under bright pink tights, vintage motorcycle jacket, and a cropped hot pink tank top. Showing her stomach made straight girls jealous more than it made anyone desirous, but she wanted any longing aimed at her, as much as she could get.
Margaret emerged from her room looking like a flower child gone glam. She wore one of her gauzy, long white dresses, layers of which wafted out around her like angels’ paperwork. She had on a pale pink angora sweater that Lainey recognized as one from Alice’s closet that she rarely wore, so soft it seemed to breathe. Margaret had stuck pink carnations at random intervals in a long braid that hung down over one shoulder, plenty of waves still loose. A few carnations were in her hair, too, seeming just to float there, no need for bobby pins when your hair was spun from candy floss. Lainey reached out to touch one and Margaret grinned, thick pink gloss on her lips.
“You want?” she asked, and held out the tube of lip gloss in one hand, a carnation stem in the other.
Lainey did want. She wanted to say that this wasn’t a costume party, but she looked down at her own steel-toed Doc Martens, ordered special in her size from the Army-Navy surplus store just for this, and kept quiet. She felt the urge to make her own ensemble rougher, less calculated.
“No,” Lainey said, and scrunched her nose at the lip gloss. “Why not.” She took the flower from Margaret, stuck it in her breast pocket, and zipped, let the teeth tear the thin stem, seal the flower there. Pale fluted pink on scabbed black leather made her look tougher, she reasoned, and thought that standing alongside Margaret would do the same. Lainey had had a serious girlfriend last semester, but even after all their PDA, and all the time spent at the LGBT co-op, cooking lentil dishes, the lesbians she knew still looked at her like a tourist. She wanted fluidity, but only if every shape she shifted into was one she could fully inhabit; any resistance from others and she doubled down, insisted she had always and forever been the way she was today, even as she was already imagining who she’d feel like loving, and being, next. She decided she’d shave her head after the protest, something to help people read her the way she wanted them to: angrier, uglier, and larger than she looked. Enormous.
They gathered on the library lawn, with plans to march into town and join a larger rally there. When they arrived outside the library, Lainey was disappointed to see there were no riot police, only campus security, a few of them with their hands rested on the billy clubs that Lainey hadn’t even noticed they’d worn until now, when a part of her wished they’d brandish them.
She felt like part of a preschool stroll, pink pinnies and hands on signs, stay close together kids, don’t stray. She hoped that when they got downtown the crowd would swell, and with it, her energy.
“Why isn’t everyone here for this?” Lainey stuck her hand out at the students who scurried past the protest, entered the library. “What, their homework is more important than this unfounded war?”
“Hey!” she shouted at a cluster of girls walking together into the library. One carried four coffees nestled in a to-go tray, blew at the lids. Lainey could smell nutmeg, and the girls’ tropical body sprays, so inappropriate in February in New England, when it had begun to feel as though variations on winter were the only seasons. She lifted her chin at the girl carrying the coffee. “You bring those for the protestors? Least you can do, don’t you think, if you can’t even make time to join us today?”
“Uh . . . okay,” said the girl, stunned as Lainey lifted the tray from her hands. The other girls stopped and stared, mouths open. They were a matched set: long hair blown stick straight, tight black pants, puffer coats.
“Nuh-uh,” said one, and snatched her drink back from the tray. “That cost me four bucks!”
“Buy a new one,” Lainey said, handing a hot coffee to Alice, who shrugged.
“Best not to get into it with her,” Alice said to the holdout.
“I don’t need some random coffee,” Ji Sun said. “I don’t even drink coffee.”
“It’s barely coffee,” Lainey said, sniffing the drink she passed to Ji Sun, a peppermint mocha. “And it’s the principle of the thing. If these students can’t even be bothered to register their opposition to the murder of innocent people for oil, the least they can do is supp
ort those people who can. Don’t you think there’re people in Iraq who might like to study today?”
“Whatever,” the last girl said, and handed Lainey her steaming cup. “Good luck with that.” She gestured at their signs. “I’m sure the government’s going to really wake up once they see your fucking fishnets.”
“What did you say?” Lainey yelled, head cocked. She had waffled on adding the fishnets over her tights, too much with her moto jacket. But it was so chilly that even a layer of holes couldn’t hurt, and she liked the way they felt, didn’t care if they were cartoon-sexy; they made her want to touch her own legs. Lainey felt her hand tighten around the coffee cup, a flash of desire to throw the coffee in the girl’s face. She felt herself lift her wrist, take aim. Alice saw something in Lainey’s expression and reached up for her arm, held it back. Instead of throwing anything, Lainey’s grip tightened and the coffee geysered up, popped off the lid, and sprayed down on Lainey’s hand, and Alice’s.
“Fuck, damnit!” Lainey said, licking the coffee off her hand and wrist. Alice sucked breath between her teeth, pulled off the stretchy gloves she’d been wearing and tossed them on the ground.
The straight-hairs scurried into the library, their perky little butts a rebuke.
“What the hell, Lainey?” Alice bent down to scoop a handful of icy snow from a dirty drift. “That could have been really bad. That coffee was burning hot!”
“I’m sorry, Alice. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, lucky for you my hands are made of fucking rhinoceros skin. And I was wearing gloves. Are yours okay?” She scraped off some snow for Lainey, scowled as she handed it to her.
The backs of the fingers on Lainey’s right hand felt so cold they were hot, and Lainey knew she’d think of the straight-hairs all day as her skin prickled and stung. The snow crumbled into bits as she tried to press it against the burn.
The Other's Gold Page 11