by Mandy Berman
One at the back of the herd turned after passing Marley and Fiona. He had a broader face than most, a buzzed towhead, wearing one color in the pastel rainbow of polo shirts. He tapped Marley on the shoulder and smiled at her.
“You’re in my neuro lab, right?”
“Oh, yeah, I think so,” Marley said nonchalantly. “What’s your name again?” A ruse: Marley had an incredible memory, did not forget names.
“Billy.” He shook her hand. So seemingly polite, those prep school boys.
“I’m Marley.”
“I know,” he said. “You are brilliant in that class.”
This was undoubtedly true. Marley Dorfman, from an upper-middle-class Jewish family on the Philadelphia Main Line, had been decidedly premed from the time she sent in her college applications, and never once strayed from the major. She had been valedictorian of her public high school of four thousand students. At Buchanan, in addition to being ranked at the top of the premed major, she managed to ace the several literature, history, and Spanish classes that she took. She was a Renaissance woman, in all senses of the word; she could provide you with commentary on the homosexual themes in Swann’s Way, which would be as detailed and convincing as her nuanced understanding of and opposition to the occupation of Afghanistan, or her sound reasoning as to why she had voted for Hillary instead of Obama in the primary. And still she went out every Saturday night. She could drink her roommates under the table. Marley’s secret was that she was not driven by success but by knowledge, that she’d been an autodidact long before she realized it was cool. And unlike the rest of them, she didn’t seem to have much interest in romantic love; she saw sex as a primal need for now, a stress reliever, not a tool or a weapon. When Fiona saw Billy’s arm already placed firmly on the small of Marley’s back, it was clear to her where Marley would be sleeping tonight.
Fiona was shocked to find her drink empty once again. With no one left to talk to, she left Marley and Billy without them noticing, and made her way again toward the bar.
* * *
—
There was a young man standing there in a collared shirt that was primly buttoned and pressed, a stark comparison to the boys in wrinkled polos. He appeared to be a few years older than everyone else, tall, clean-shaven, alone. He was leaning over the bar, impatient to get the male bartender’s attention. Truckstop had become unbearably crowded in the past half hour, a line now forming outside; Marley had been right to get there early. Fiona tapped the man on the shoulder, and he turned.
“Do you need a drink?” she asked.
He looked her up and down once; she was wearing skinny jeans, a tight black shirt with a scoop back, and no bra. She knew she looked good, in that way she only fully believed after several drinks.
“Desperately,” he said.
She leaned over the bar. It felt sticky, but she ignored it, not wanting to betray her cool. She propped her breasts over the edge as if she didn’t realize what she was doing.
Mercifully, it worked. The tribal-tattooed bartender looked at her chest, and then was forced to make eye contact. She’d forgotten to ask the guy what he wanted to drink.
“Tequila soda with lime,” he said into her ear then, as if on cue, grazing fingers over her hip bone. She hadn’t realized he was behind her.
“Two tequila sodas with lime!” she yelled, and he slid his credit card across the bar.
“Keep it open,” he told the bartender, who nodded and returned with their cheap plastic cups filled to the brim with their clear drinks.
“Do you go to Buchanan?” she asked. “I’ve never seen you around.” They had to stay close to hear each other, their lips making contact with each other’s ears.
“Kind of,” he said. “I’m a super-senior. I take two classes.”
She didn’t bother to ask what they were; it was too loud, and besides, she didn’t care.
“Who are you here with?” he asked.
“My friends,” she said. “But I lost them.” This wasn’t entirely true; she could see Lula and Liv still over in the back room, Lula perched on the edge of the pool table, Liv lining up a shot. She didn’t see Marley, though; she had probably left with Billy by now.
“Same,” he said.
Soon, with small talk exhausted, there was nothing to do but dance. He put his arms around her waist and their hips moved in time to the bad song, their groins pushed up against each other. He smelled of aftershave, like the musky, sailorlike one her brother wore. His face was deceptively open and attractive, as if hiding more sinister qualities beneath it: his lips were suspiciously too pink, his skin too tanned, his smile too straight and wide—a smile that didn’t convey happiness so much as charm. She wondered why she had not seen him before. He wasn’t a great dancer, but she couldn’t help but lean into his touch as his fingertips traced gently down her lower back and briefly to her behind and up again, such a light touch that he might have been teasing her. When they kissed—and she thought she might have been the one to initiate the kiss, finally, too excited to wait any longer—it was subtle and sensual, his tongue making just the right amount of contact with hers. It was downright sexy—a rarity among the boys in these parts.
She came up from her dizzied state when she felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned to see Liv.
“Hey,” Liv said to her, briefly nodding at the guy. “Can I talk to you real quick?”
“I’m a little busy.” Fiona smirked.
“Two seconds.”
“Go ahead. I’ll get us more drinks,” the guy said, pushing through the crowd toward the bar again.
When they were alone, Liv said to Fiona: “Do you know who that is?”
“No.” Fiona laughed. “I didn’t get his name.”
“It’s Gabriel. Gabriel Benoit.”
“You know him?”
“Listen,” Liv said. “He’s really bad news.”
“What?” She looked over at the guy. His face gleamed with sweat. He towered over their classmates as he waited for their drinks. “How do you know?”
“He used to be in Zeta.” Liv lowered her voice, spoke into Fiona’s ear. “He got kicked out after this freshman girl came forward saying he had raped her. It went to the college tribunal and everything, and he got suspended for a year. The only reason he was able to come back and finish was because his parents donated the new science building that they just broke ground on.”
“Oh my God, that Benoit.”
Fiona looked over at Gabriel again, tapping his fingers on the bar as he waited. She had enough self-awareness, enough of an understanding of what drunkenness did to her, to understand that she was not in a place to make a good decision right now. That had not, however, stopped her from making bad decisions before. Her mind was fuzzy, as if there were a scrim of dust over her thoughts, but her emotions cut through the haziness like the sun at noon: she was feeling deliciously brazen. And attracted to this person who was supposedly bad news. Liv liked to be protective of Fiona, perhaps too much these days. She liked to be on the finger-wagging side of things; it defended her from situations in which she could, actually, be blamed. Fiona could very easily imagine a universe in which Liv heard one accusation about Gabriel Benoit and ran with it. And didn’t Liv, perhaps, miss being single, miss going home with whichever stranger she pleased?
“I think I’m okay,” Fiona said.
“What?”
“I said, I think I’m good.”
“Fiona, you can’t go home with him.”
“Says who?” Fiona said.
This seemed to render Liv speechless, and Fiona turned away from Liv before she could register a response and pushed through the crowd, finding her way to Gabriel.
“Perfect timing,” he said, handing her a fresh drink. In one swift motion, she pulled his head close to her mouth, made contact with his ear, and bit it.
—
They ended up at another bar, a quieter, more refined one in the artsy quarter downtown, where they ordered artisanal cocktails and he stuck his hand through the top of her jeans while the bartender’s back was turned. They stayed until the bar closed.
“Come back to my place,” he said.
“Where do you live?”
“We can walk.” He took her hand. She wouldn’t be able to get home at this point anyway; there were no cabs this late, and they were somewhere downtown, somewhere far from her house. She could feel her phone buzzing in her clutch; she took it out, saw that there were three missed calls from Liv. She didn’t have much battery left. She threw the phone back into her bag.
They ended up in his loft apartment in an old brick building, a converted factory of some sort. He threw her onto the couch, pulled her shirt off over her head in a swift motion.
“Do you have roommates?” she asked, covering her stomach.
“No,” he said, unhooking her bra.
“Not here.” She looked over to the open windows and covered her nipples with one arm while the other remained firmly over her belly.
In the dark bedroom, he passed out nearly immediately, and she felt both insulted and relieved. She tossed and turned; the flannel sheets were too hot. She woke up in the middle of the night, naked, her skin burning and slick, embarrassed that she had sweated through his sheets. Her mouth was hot and dry—she could taste her own terrible breath—and her head pounded.
She groped around the bedside table for water, but there was none. She didn’t realize Gabriel was also awake until he rolled on top of her—she could smell that his breath was as bad as hers—and abruptly stuck his fingers inside her. It was painful; she wasn’t anywhere close to being ready. She tried kissing his neck, roaming her hands up and down his back, hoping to turn herself on, but he was panting and he smelled bad and he was dripping sweat onto her. After minutes of him jabbing his fingers into her—she could feel that his fingernails needed to be trimmed—he took them out and she felt relief before he replaced them with his half-flaccid penis. He thrust several times, trying to make himself harder, grunting and sweating, and it took Fiona a few moments, in her half-drunk, half-hungover state, to realize that he wasn’t wearing a condom.
“Stop,” she said, which came out rasped at first, as she realized she had not spoken a word in this middle-of-the-night interlude. She cleared her throat.
“Stop,” she said, clearer this time.
“You don’t like this,” he said, not a question so much as a statement, with a cadence of dirty talk to it, like he was enjoying the fact that she didn’t like it, still thrusting. “Give me one minute.” He didn’t look at Fiona.
“I said no.” She pushed his hand away. “It hurts.”
He looked at her, perplexed, then sighed in annoyance and withdrew from her. He flopped onto the mattress beside her. They were silent for a few moments, breathing heavily. She thought that maybe it was over, maybe he would fall back asleep.
Then she felt him take her hand, and move it onto himself. As if she were merely an instrument, he held his hand around hers, which held his penis, and moved it up and down repeatedly.
She looked at the ceiling. It didn’t take him long.
* * *
—
In the morning, Fiona woke up first. She put on her clothes from the night before and checked her purse to make sure she had everything: keys, phone, wallet. She opened her phone to text Liv or Marley or Lula for a ride home, but it was dead. She thought of trying to find Gabriel’s phone, but she didn’t want to accidentally wake him—and besides, she knew none of her friends’ numbers by heart. Careful to make no noise, she gathered her shoes in one hand and tiptoed barefoot out of his room and to the front door. She winced at the sound as the door creaked behind her, and she slipped her high heels on, wincing again at the pain from last night’s blisters.
Outside, she found herself in a narrow cobblestone alleyway, and she walked toward the light. When she reached it, the street opened out into the main drag of downtown, and she shielded her eyes at the sudden brightness. Town was still sleepy: the streets were wet, having just been washed, and deliverymen were unpacking boxes from a bread truck and carrying them into the charming café across the street, where Fiona and her roommates occasionally came to eat sandwiches when they were in the mood to splurge. No one else was out. Cabs didn’t really roam around this little city, and unless she miraculously came upon one, Fiona would have to walk two miles back to her house. Her feet throbbing, she began to climb the hill that would lead her home.
As she crossed the busy intersection at Ellsworth Avenue, a man behind the wheel of a souped-up Camry rolled his window down and whistled at her. She walked on the sidewalk against steady traffic, still spotting no other pedestrians, past St. Lazarus, the “bad” hospital (they were all told in orientation that they were to go to County Hospital in case of emergency, and not, under any circumstances, to St. Lazarus), past the shuttered fish market that she had never once seen open, past the public elementary school where she had volunteered to help local first-graders with their reading during the first semester of her freshman year. Several more cars honked at her; she was, after all, walking along an industrial road in a tight dress and high heels at nine A.M. on a Sunday. She desperately wanted to take her heels off and thought about doing so several times, but ultimately forced herself to resist the temptation. The pain was excruciating, but even Fiona wasn’t in a low enough place to walk barefoot on Ellsworth Avenue.
The night left a sinkhole in her gut. But within it was contained the distinct feeling of an accomplishment, a conquest. This was not unusual for her after a one-night stand, that particular combination of pride and disgust in herself. For she was a late bloomer: a virgin until college, and only having slept with one person before the death of her sister, Helen (and an inconsequential one, at that—a guy on her freshman hall whom she used to get it over with). After Helen died, though, some shackles around Fiona’s own virtuousness appeared to loosen themselves.
For the first nineteen years of her life, Fiona had been studious and she followed rules. She didn’t feel important or beautiful—and she knew, in fact, that she was neither of these things—but she could at least do well within the parameters of a suburban, upper-middle-class life: play sports; join student council; make friends; get As; go to a good college. These were achievable goals, and she met them with aplomb. She could chalk up her overachieving state to being the middle child between a precocious older brother and a babied younger sister, though that wasn’t quite fair. It was rather that Fiona had a striving gene within her, and a deep understanding that she would never be noticed or loved if she didn’t excel in the only way she knew how: following the rules. Fiona lived, for those first nineteen years, in an orderly state, continually meeting the expectations she imagined the world had set for her.
And then Helen died, and rules no longer seemed to be relevant. Their family fell into disarray: her father left, and her mother holed herself up in her bedroom for months, while her older brother, Liam, took on the role of both parents. Helen had died in her sleep, thirteen years old, in her bunk at sleepaway camp. No one even knew she’d been sick—with a congenital heart defect, a dormant, symptomless malady passed on by an apparently persistent recessive gene. If Helen could die in her sleep at Camp Marigold, her favorite place on earth, before she even got her first period, then Fiona became sure there was no order to anything anymore. Life was chaos, and rules were futile. There were, in fact, no rules.
Fiona became consumed with an uncontrollable fear that she, too, had a heart problem, even though they’d all gone for advanced testing after Helen’s death to ensure this wasn’t the case. During that fall two years earlier, when Fiona had taken a sabbatical from school—supposedly to be there for her mother, a task that turned out
to be in vain—Fiona hadn’t been able to fall asleep for hours, afraid of her recurring nightmares in which Helen’s body decomposed in the top bunk, putrid in the August heat, because Fiona herself had forgotten to bury her. In the daytime, she moved through the house as if in a fugue state, underslept and haunted by images of Helen’s corpse, the eyes open and glassy and looking out into nothing.
Her body went into overdrive: her heart pounded with gusto and she was plagued with a giant clenching sensation in the middle of her stomach, as if all of her organs were tightened into a fist. Her body was all she could think about. Obsessed with her inability to control her own pulse, she spent hours on YouTube following deep-breathing videos, which never worked for her. She couldn’t eat. The therapist she briefly saw in Larchmont suggested exercise as an antidote to her anxiety, so she began to run, and discovered that it only resulted in her heart beating twice as fast. It did stoke her appetite, though, and that made the running worthwhile, because her anxiety abated, albeit temporarily, when she ate. She came back from long jogs in the late-autumn cold and devoured three bowls of cereal, feeling the fist inside of her unclench as she chewed and swallowed, only to tighten back into place the minute she was sated. She wouldn’t be able to eat again until after the following day’s run.