Loner (15 page)

“Ben Stafford,” Suzanne remarked with authority. “Liam thinks they were flirting before. But it was all Ben. She was just humoring him.”

“Maybe so,” said Christopher. “But she's certainly got the hot girl's need for constant male attention.”

“You're such a misogynist,” Suzanne said jovially.

Er'uoy hcus a tsinygosim.
Words had been reversing in my mind with greater frequency and celerity lately. I was nearly getting back to my preadolescent facility.

Andy cocked his head in consideration. “Actually, I'd say Christopher's pretty gender blind in his contempt for people.”

“And anyway, I don't think it's a misogynistic observation,” Christopher defended himself. “It's the fallout of sending your daughter to an all-girls' school.”

“You should've seen her at Chapin,” Jen piped up. “She'd flirt with
any
guy that walked in the building. Totally indiscriminate. Even our Guido track coach.”

(This was how your friends spoke about you behind your back, by the way. Now you know.)

I decided it was best to keep quiet and maintain a low profile so as not to betray my inexperience with drugs, final clubs, and socializing with anyone outside of the Marauders. I managed to elude scrutiny until Andy asked, without a transition, “Remind me, how do you know Veronica?”

Everyone's eyes found me. Now I felt coke-addled: heart palpitations, dry mouth, jittery leg.

“From class,” Suzanne answered for me.

“Your guys' feminism class? What's it called, again? Women Be Shopping?” Andy waited for a laugh. “
Nutty Professor
, you philistines.”

“Gender and the Consumerist Impulse,” Suzanne said.

I hadn't realized Suzanne was also in the class. “English,” I told him. I was going to leave it there, but wanted to prove I had a personality, that I wasn't just a body taking up space on the arm of the sofa—that someone was in here. “I'm pretty sure to take a feminism class here you have to be either a woman or flaming.”

“Flaming?” Andy repeated in a campy voice.

“Excuse me,” I said, smirking along. “
Queer
. I need to brush up on my microaggressions dictionary.”

The joke didn't land. Andy and Christopher shared a glance.

“Can you believe we're already halfway through the semester?” Suzanne asked. They began gossiping about someone named Eliot as I grew insecure about my failed attempt at humor.

You reappeared without Liam. “I'm leaving,” you announced, and grabbed your jacket. No one attempted to stop you as you stormed out.

“If they're done, I call first dibs on Liam,” Andy said.

“That man is a beautiful specimen,” said Christopher.

“No—a beautiful
species
,” Andy said. “He's like his own ­category.”

Only then did I realize why my joke had flopped. I wondered how best to redeem myself, but your departure was more pressing. Without a word I stood up and left.

You were marching down Mt. Auburn Street, cigarette in one
hand and phone in the other. Maybe it was best to leave you alone, judging by your brusque exit and speedy gait.

“Hey!” I called when you missed the turnoff to our dorm.

Spinning around, you looked taken aback, though I'm sure you would've been upset to see anyone at that point.

“Matthews is this way!” I pointed to the Yard.

“Shitty sense of direction,” you muttered, walking back toward me.

Even with your drunkenness I struggled to match your steps for the remainder of the walk to our dorm, and my conversational gambits were met with grunts or silence. The night that had held the most excitement for me, ever, had meant absolutely nothing to you, and why should it have? You'd had hundreds of these evenings in the past, you'd have thousands more in the future, and you had no interest in a romantic present with me; you had Liam, a beautiful specimen and species unto himself. That you'd allowed Suzanne to invite me to the club without much of a fight probably wasn't indifference, I conjectured with cocaine-fueled reasoning. It was fear: you were afraid that I'd rat you out for plagiarism, though doing so would be incriminating myself. But mine was the lesser transgression, and therefore you'd offered me narcotics to even the score. Now you had something on me, too; if you went down, so would I.

As we headed upstairs in Matthews, your phone chimed, and in the scramble to fish it out of your bag, you stumbled and fell forward.

“
Fuck,
” you said.

“You okay?” I asked, bounding up behind you.

Trying to stand, you clutched your knee and moaned. You accepted my arm and gingerly rose to your feet, wincing with pain. I led you up the rest of the way, safeguarding you from another fall. First it was the accidentally-on-purpose elbow contact in lecture; already we had graduated to this.

When we reached the fifth floor, you listed in my direction and leaned slightly against me, your shoulders grazing mine.

“Are you okay?” I repeated. “Do you need to go to the emergency room?”

You shook your head no and whimpered. I became aroused.

“What is it, then?” I asked, my lips skimming your hair. You choked back a sob and I grew more erect.

“You wouldn't understand,” you said, shaking free from my grip and limping down the hall to your room.

You'd allowed yourself to be vulnerable, for a few seconds, against my body. You weren't totally indiscriminate—not anymore, at least; you'd picked me for the role out of all available suitors. And even if you were, I would find a way to show you that I was much more than some guy who walked in the building—that you could tell me things, and I would understand.

In my room, under the covers, I revived my erection and cocooned it inside your bathrobe belt with an opening at the top. But I didn't want to bring myself to orgasm with it, as I usually did; no, this time I would use a light touch, just enough to sustain the engorging bloodstream, delighting in the tactile sensation and the memory of you on the stairs, extending my priapic ecstasy for hours.

But after a few minutes I was overtaken with eagerness and consummated my lust with the banal satisfaction that comes after getting what you so fervently want too easily.

Chapter 10

I
was awoken the next morning by Steven passing through my room on the way back from the shower. Dripping wet with a
Doctor Who
towel around his waist, he stooped to pick something up.

“This Sara's?” he asked.

Your bathrobe belt. I'd carelessly left it beside me in bed as I fell asleep. It had slipped onto the floor overnight and was now dangling from Steven's hands.

“No,” I said through a phlegm-clearing cough. As I reached out to take the belt, he retreated a step and examined it more closely.

“What is it?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I just found it.”

“Where?”

If I named a Harvard building, upstanding-citizen Steven would recommend I bring it to a lost and found. “Au Bon Pain.”

“Mind if I take it?” He balled it up in his palm. “I'm learning this trick for my magic show in the common room Sunday night. I want
to pull a long strip of material out of my mouth, and I haven't found anything that can fit inside.”

He brought it up to his open maw.

“Don't!” I said. “Your braces will tear it!”

“What do
you
need it for?”

“A sweatband,” I told him.

“You don't even exercise,” he grumbled, dropping it on the floor as he proceeded to his room. I got out of bed and returned the belt to its proper place in the dresser.

That night at dinner, as I ferried my tray out of the food area, I considered ditching the Matthews Marauders and sitting down at your table with manufactured self-assurance. But that would raise understandable questions from Sara. Furthermore, the previous evening had been a bust with the others; I needed to focus on only you before trying to ingratiate myself with your group again.

And you seemed disenchanted with them anyway. As my tablemates debated whether they'd rather time travel to Renaissance Italy or Ancient Rome, you aimlessly twirled your fork in your pasta while resting your face on your fist, the graceful sweep of your jawbone meeting the sine wave of your knuckles. The distracted pose of someone wishing she were elsewhere, the same look you'd had that very first night at Annenberg, when I knew you wanted someone to rescue you, even if you weren't yet aware of it. Now you had a better idea.

“Speaking of Pompeii, anyone else worry that this place is a fire hazard?” Steven canvassed the table, where silently amused grins anticipated his answer to his own rhetorical question. “Its legal seating capacity is six hundred and seventeen students, and there are approximately sixteen hundred freshmen, not including staff. Granted, dinner stretches two hours and forty-five minutes, so the population density ebbs and flows, but there's still a high probability of exceeding carrying capacity at any given
point—assuming, of course, that everyone's body mass averages out to predicted levels.”

“Steven Zenger, everyone,” said Kevin. “Steven Zenger.”

The pronouncement of the full name; Steven Zenger was
such a
character
, the type of guy who often said things
just like this
, that's
so Steven Zenger
, they'd grown to love him for his habitual expressions and quirks. None of my so-called friends, including Sara, had ever even said my surname. When they spoke my first name, they floated it charily, as if still unsure of it. What would precede a “David Federman, everyone, David Federman”? My lurking mutely in the hinterland of a conversation?

“What?” Steven smiled goofily, relishing the attention. “You don't think we all together have average-massed bodies?”

“Your mom has an averaged-massed body,” Kevin said to more laughter.

“That's not even an insult,” Steven said. “It's a compliment. You're saying my mom has a normal body weight.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you guys this idea I had,” said Justin. “All my mom's e-mails were going into my spam folder, and I was going to fix it, and then I was, like, this should be an app.”

Hilarity ensued.

“Mom-Spam,” Kevin said in a smooth commercial announcer's voice. “For when you don't want to deal with your mom.”

The hooting escalated.

“The spam folder is the collective id of late capitalism,” I said.

Silence.

“O
kay
,” Ivana said. “Now
that's
random.”

After dinner I went back to my room, having told Sara I had to work more on my essay. I needed to let the air clear for a day or two. Raising the possibility of exposure so soon after the final club outing could shatter both relationships: Sara would want nothing to do with me, and you might independently decide you were better off without the complications I was adding to your dorm life.

But alone in my room I grew restless. You weren't allowed to be the one who called all the shots. I shouldn't have to be afraid of seeing you.

I knocked on Sara's door. “I realize I can just work here,” I said. “And I'll sleep over, too.”

You weren't home, it appeared. We spent two hours intermittently speaking, Sara at her desk, me on her bed reading for my art history class about staffage, the secondary, ornamental figures in a landscape.

“Oh, my God.” She turned from her laptop. “Tiffany Gersh just friended me on Facebook!”

“Who's Tiffany Gersh?”

“We were best friends in elementary school, and then she grew breasts in seventh grade and became popular and dumped me. I hold her responsible for my low self-esteem.”

“Huh,” I said. “Kids are cruel.”

“Especially middle school girls. And she didn't
just
dump me. She got all these other girls to pretend to befriend me one by one, then drop me and tell me I was a loser who'd never have a boyfriend or any friends.”

“Sucks.” I flipped the page of my book.

“You know who reminds me of her, a little?” She jerked her thumb toward your uninhabited room.

“Hmm.”

“Did you ever have someone like that?”

“Fortunately not,” I said. “Are you going to accept her friend request?”

“Yeah, right.” Sara clicked her touch pad angrily. “I'm an extremely forgiving person, but screw her. She had all of high school to make amends.”

A key jiggled in the lock outside, setting off contortions in my stomach. You entered without saying anything and vanished into your room, no signs of a limp. I was needlessly concerned to think
my presence might be a problem. Of course you'd keep last night under wraps.

I finished my art history reading and took out my laptop to begin working on the Ethical Reasoning paper. I hadn't gotten very far when the lights in the room cut off and the hum of electronics ceased.

“What happened?” asked Sara. I quickly backed up my paper on my keychain flash drive. She opened the door to the hallway, where other perplexed residents fumbled in the dark. No lights out the window, either; the entire Yard had suffered a blackout. Within minutes the Harvard police were outside, urging us via bullhorns to stay indoors while they resolved the problem.

Sara had a candle in a jar and a matchbook on her bookcase. After lighting the candle, I held the match, letting it burn down just before the flame licked my skin. Then I struck another match and did the same.

“Don't waste them,” Sara said when I went for a third match. “We may need more.”

Your door opened and you poked your head out. “Hey, my phone died,” you said. “Can you check if this is just Harvard or all of Cambridge?”

The Internet indicated that the blackout had hit a substantial portion of Cambridge. Hearing this, you stepped out with a bottle of vodka and another of club soda.