Sex & Violence

You’d think the most fucked-up part of the last year would be the moment when I read this and thought, “Yeah, that. That sounds like the way to go.”

The northern side of Pearl Lake is unusually deep, due to
its formation during the time of the Ice Age. It is near this
point that the lake links up with the Beauchant River, which
has been used as a logging route since the last century. However, not all of the intended cargo made it to a lumberyard
destination; many of these logs sank into the cold abyss. An
intrepid diver would find many of those tremendous logs
still at the bottom of the lake, in a kind of graveyard to industry. Abandoned and untouched they remain, as any microorganisms that might decompose them cannot survive at
those temperatures and depths.

You’d think that would be my low point. Not even close.

When I came out of the Connison gang shower, Collette Holmander was waiting for me. She was standing in the hallway, her long red hair splashing down her black jacket and white shirt, her red knee socks on her pretty legs beneath her little black skirt. Even though Remington Chase was a vaguely religious boarding school, the girls’ uniforms were unreasonably sexy—practically porn fantasies.

“Check out Evan Carter, skipping chapel!” Collette said.

“So are you,” I answered, all annoyed, because she’d caught me in nothing but flip-flops and uniform pants (unreasonably dorky, think dipshit caterer). While my body’s not deformed or anything, I’m not one of those douchey guys who struts around shirtless. But it could have been worse—for Collette, at least—as Connison was a boys-only dorm, and lots of guys went around in just towels, sometimes less.

“I don’t get you, Evan,” Collette said, walking toward me.

“You’re weird.”

“Thanks,” I said, pushing by her, digging through my shower stuff for my room key.

“No, really.” She was following me. “You run superfast, but only, like, 50 percent of the time.” Now, as if to live up to this accusation, I was walking pretty fast. But she kept up with me, her shoes clacking on the linoleum way too loudly.

“And you ace every test in chemistry but flunk everything else,” she added, when we got to my door. Her fucking perky-cocky voice echoed in the empty hallway.

“So?” I said, putting my key in the lock.

“Plus, you’re decent-looking, but you won’t even talk to Farrah no matter how much I tell you that she wants you to ask her out. Now the chapel skipping? What could all this mean?”

I had nothing to say about what this all meant, but that didn’t matter. Collette Holmander was the kind of girl who asked you a million questions and then didn’t give you time to answer half of them. The kind of girl who wouldn’t stop getting in your face when she wanted something. The kind of girl sent by her friends to feel out if a guy liked them. I hated that kind of shit, as a rule. If I’m looking to hook up, I don’t need any help. I’ve got my own tested methods, and they didn’t include messenger chicks like Collette Holmander.

“Farrah
always
goes to chapel. She might think you’re avoiding her.”

“I
am
avoiding her,” I said turning to stand in the doorway.

“Her boyfriend wants to smash my face in, remember?”

“I told you, they broke up,” she said.

“Try telling him that,” I said. “And what the hell are you doing here, anyway? No girls allowed beyond the common room.”

“Then let me in, dummy,” she said, standing on tiptoes to look behind me.

So I let her in my room, against my better judgment.

Collette and my roommate, Patrick Ramsey, had hooked up last year, but now they hated each other. (This was before my time, but he made sure I knew his hookup history as soon as we became roommates.) He called her firecrotch and she called him needledick and it was fucking uncomfortable.

On top of that, Collette was always pestering me about Farrah, who supposedly liked me, for no reason other than I sat by her in Spanish and I was the Fucking New Guy at this inces-tuous little prison of a boarding school forty-five minutes south of Charlotte, North Carolina. Apparently, for Farrah, the fact that I had a Yankee accent and shaggier hair than every square-faced Southern boy she’d grown up with made me thrilling and exotic. Or just more thrilling and exotic than Tate Kerrigan, her asshole boyfriend, who used entirely too much hair gel and who remained obsessive about Farrah to the point where he had nearly punched me out one night outside the dining hall because he’d heard we’d done a Spanish project together in the common room at Fountaineau, the junior girls dormitory.

***

So this was the context when I found myself cornered in my own room by Collette Holmander. Who was pretty foxy, actually. If you had to be cornered by a girl while skipping chapel, Collette was a good candidate for the job. Still, I was a little surprised. Messenger chicks don’t usually help themselves to the guys they’re sent to check out.

Collette kicked the door shut, grabbed my towel and shower kit, and dropped them on the floor. She was so close to me that my whole body popped up in goose bumps, which was embarrassing enough, but things got worse below the belt when she reached over and touched the necklace I wore. It was this flat silver circle on a silver chain. My mother gave it to me when I was eleven, the week I went to Scout camp. She died five days later.

“What is this?” Collette asked, her voice soft, her eyes locking on mine. I could smell her perfume. Or whatever it was. She smelled like a vanilla milk shake.

“Nothing,” I said, swallowing hard. “My mom gave it to me. It’s just a circle.”

She reached behind me and turned the lock on the door.

Her other hand still on the silver circle.

“Collette …” I started, not sure what to say.

Then she rose on tiptoes and kissed me.

So. All right. This was the first thing about Southern boarding school I could recommend. Alone in my room, with a cute girl who had nice boobs and made all the moves and blew my mind with her long jump during track and called my douchebag roommate a needledick.

“Did you just shave, Evan?” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

“It smells awesome.”

There was probably ten more minutes of chapel. But I didn’t want her to go. She was wrapped around me, my hands on her ass over her skirt, her boobs smushed against my chest and her hair everywhere in a big awesome mess. I thought about the box of condoms stashed in a duffel bag in my closet. The only other redhead I’d ever been with was the Cupcake Lady of Tacoma, which sort of thrilled me and freaked me out at the same time. I wondered if I could even get Collette’s clothes off in time.

But then she stepped back. Straightened her skirt and hair, pulled up one knee sock, checked her watch. “Chapel ends in four minutes. I’ll come by tomorrow.”

“Here?”

“Has to be here,” she said, kissing my lower lip one last time. “Mrs. Herst patrols Fountaineau during chapel, but Mr.

Feining always gets coffee in the canteen. And if you tell anyone about this, you will never fucking see me again. I mean it.”

Then she whooshed out, and I stood there trying to get my dick to calm the fuck down.

***

I was lucky Collette had a sense of time, because a few minutes after I’d gotten my wood to deflate and put on my shirt and tie, Patrick Ramsey came back to the room. I wasn’t particular about friends, as I’ve attended six schools nationwide since age thirteen, but Patrick Ramsey wasn’t anyone I’d pick to hang out with. Patrick Ramsey—he told me everyone called him The Rammer—was a huge, muscular guy, with a face like a spiral-cut ham. He was from Georgia, where his parents owned a bunch of factories, and he played football in the fall and wrestled in the winter and took off sports in spring, because that was when he dedicated himself to “finding some ass to nail.”

But as I transferred to Remington Chase at the end of January, I didn’t have much choice where roommates were concerned. My father’s job took him between Charlotte and London, so boarding school was his magnificent solution to his absence. Not that Adrian Carter had ever been really present in any sense since my mom died. My father has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, but his specialty is computer science. What this meant out in the world was that he either taught college classes or pimped out his skills to companies (or both). What this meant to me was that he hardly spoke or did anything that didn’t involve his laptop.

Patrick was now looking at me strangely, and I panicked that he knew what had happened with his ex-girlfriend. But he just smacked on a ton of aftershave and told me to clear out.

“You’re sexiled, Carter,” he said. “Jenna’s coming over. I made it happen during chapel. You really underestimate chapel, dude. It’s where The Rammer gets all his ass.”

I hated the word “dude” as a rule, and I wouldn’t have believed anyone would ever talk about themselves in the third person until I met Patrick Ramsey. Though I didn’t mind being sexiled. I could barely sleep on the nights Patrick whispered to some dumb chick on his phone while he yanked it. At least when you got sexiled, you could get away from that shit, sit in the common room doing homework until your roommate finished his blue-balls session. But now I just nodded, trying not to smile. Because as far as I could tell, The Rammer knew fuckall about the value of chapel.

“And fucking cut your hair, dude!” Patrick yelled as I headed out. “Everyone thinks I’m rooming with a fag!”

In these modern times, there are three types of guys who use the word “fag.” The first have been ignorantly brought up.

The second never get any chicks anyway. And the third are secretly gay themselves.

If I didn’t hear him coo into his phone in the middle of the night on a regular basis, I might have put Patrick Ramsey into all three categories at once. He was from
Georgia
, for one thing. And I doubted most girls found it too appealing how he went around insisting people call him The Rammer, which, in addition to the whole “find some ass to nail” comment, wasn’t exactly heterosexual, either. But girls are weird. I’m always amazed at the shit they put up with for a little attention.

***

It should be said that though nowhere as muscular as Patrick Ramsey, I am a decent-looking guy: black hair, brown eyes, almost six feet tall, skinny-but-okay build from track and swimming—when I could manage the timing of both sports with all the moving around. And this, along with the fact that human beings are fascinated with novelty, might explain why though I had my share of problems being the Fucking New Guy, getting girls was never one of them.

I’m not being conceited, though it might come off a little dickish. I realize common sense would tell you that getting chicks and being the Fucking New Guy don’t necessarily go together. But the novelty thing—it goes a long way for girls. Just go into any mall, where 99 percent of the stuff is for women.

Girls are endlessly fascinated with trinkets. Cell phone charms and hairbands and rings on their toes and scarves in the middle of summer and whatever the hell else. I never get over how much junk girls drag around, like those flea market people who haul all their shit around in conversion vans. Bracelets rattling on their arms and earrings up and down their ears and a million things crisscrossing over their shoulders—purses and book bags and backpacks and bra straps and tank tops and necklaces.

But it wasn’t just being new and shiny that made me suc-cessful with chicks. The selection of the target also was important. For example: Farrah. Farrah was cute and interested in me, but that didn’t make her a good target. It wasn’t that I had high standards or anything. I just looked for Girls Who Would Say Yes.

Not Yes to giving me phone numbers or hanging out. That was a Yes I knew Farrah, with all her rings and her long blonde hair fluffing up everywhere, would happily say.

I mean, Yes to getting naked—or at least naked enough.

Yes to sex. Because I didn’t live anywhere for too long and didn’t have time to mess around going on a million dates or whatever. I’ve got a profile of the Girl Who Would Say Yes, and Farrah, with her redneck ex-boyfriend and gold crucifix necklace, didn’t fit it.

Really, the best you could hope for from a Farrah type is if you endured some spectacular nightmare prom scenario where you rented a limo and a tux and suffered through a million pictures with her friends and her parents and went out for dinner and danced with her and then at the end, maybe, just maybe, you’d get a handjob out of the deal. And Farrah looked like the kind of chick who’d keep all her damn rings on while she did it.

Even though I look fairly normal myself, Girls Who Would Say Yes tended to be left of normal. A left-of-normal girl doesn’t care what you look like, beyond that you aren’t a hunchback or covered in acne. Because for a left-of-normal girl, it’s all about her, anyway. These chicks have certain, obvious quirks. Piercings, tattoos, hair dyed a color never intended by nature. Or—this sounds horrible and probably would put mothers everywhere on high alert—a really short skirt or low-cut shirt. Because left-of-normal girls aren’t allergic to risk.