“Happy?” It seemed a strange word.
He flicked his wrist. “Your play. Your big amazing play. Everyone loved it.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I am.” A big swell of feeling hit. I buried my face in my hands. “I think everyone hated it.”
“No, no.” He reached out but did not actually touch me. “They loved it,” he said softly.
What I said next I can only attribute to the fact that we were alone. Right into his vulnerability I spoke. “Everyone is kind of weirded out by me.”
“What do you mean?” His voice was gentle.
“I actually just felt really exposed during the play. Like, really exposed. Even though you guys were the ones onstage, and it was just, like, a bunch of parents, I felt so exposed.” I reached for another word, but only visions of X-rays came. “It actually just made me feel really emotional.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing.”
“It doesn’t feel good.”
Idly Leo made the automatic window go up and down. In the silence my words came echoing back to me, shaming me. I was emotional, but I was also performing my emotion for him.
“Look.” He sealed the window tight. “Do you want to come inside?”
I glanced furtively at the dark second floor, the blue shutters like faces. “What about your mom?”
“She’s cool.”
And so I parked the car and followed Leo Kupersky up the drive. As he unlocked the front door I winced at the jangle of keys. “She’s cool, she’s cool,” he repeated. “Don’t worry.”
Through the darkened living room we went, and upstairs to his room. While he plugged in his Christmas lights I slowly walked around, taking in the lava lamp, the crooked poster of Phish, the incense holder with its crumbly trail of ash. The tiny white lights twinkled.
We weren’t looking at each other. Though everything was completely absurd—Leo and I alone in his bedroom at night—we were acting as if it were normal.
He sat on the bed and began to roll a joint. I crouched down by the bookshelf and pretended to be absorbed in studying his CDs. I was nearly trembling, and yet some other part of me felt calm, intent on memorizing everything, squirreling away each detail to feast on later.
“Rose.” He had finished rolling his joint. “What are you doing over there?”
I turned to him and curtsied. “Just looking at your music.”
He held up his joint. “You want?”
There really was nowhere else to sit but the bed. As I approached I must have flinched, for he chuckled, a lower sound in his throat; or maybe he was just amused at how far from him I sat. He had to lean over to pass me the joint.
All the time Lacie had been with us, I’d been finding excuses to touch him: letting my hand linger on his arm, or our shoulders bounce when we walked home. He had done the same: with the pressure of Lacie keeping us apart, we had leaned toward each other. But now she was gone; now we were shy. On the bed, our knees faced out, two sets of headlights shining in different directions.
Carefully I snuck a glance at him. He was staring at the wall. Probably he was thinking about Lacie. We both spent so much time thinking about her; we were both caught on her hook, squirming, trying to win her attention. I knocked my leg against his. “Hey.”
He didn’t pull away; no, he leaned into me. Then he took my hand, and unfolded my fingers, and it was strange, the delicate way he put the roach down on the book; it was strange, the way he said, “Rose.” He never called me by my name. He never kissed me; that really was the strangest part of it all.
Soft, delicate lips. He flicked his tongue over my teeth. His hand stroked my hair. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, or move; then I threw myself at him, and cupped his head in my hand fiercely, sucking on his lips.
For a while we stalled out at kissing. But eventually, my shirt came off, his shirt came off, and I was on top of him and squirming around. I felt nothing beyond a kind of ruthless mechanical focus. I just wanted it done. There was this thing in his pocket, as if he had forgotten to take out his pen, but no matter how frantically I rubbed at it, he wouldn’t take off his pants. Finally I said in a weirdly businesslike tone, “I was thinking we could have sex.”
“Oh, do you want to have sex?” he asked brightly.
We were both trying not to break the dream of what we were doing, but when we were ready to start, when he had rolled the condom over his dick (I could barely look at it, I couldn’t even think the word “dick”), when he had said, “Are you sure this is okay?” and after he had pushed inside me, so that I thought I would split, so that I thought This can’t be right, this can’t be what people are so hyped about, I began to laugh—I mean it was so absurd, so unwieldy, so ridiculous to put that there, and when he met my face, his eyes were at first worried, and then he was laughing too, we were both giggling, I mean, it was ludicrous, what we were doing, it was obscene. His bare ass moved above me.
Afterward tears welled in me. My eye sockets burned. I wasn’t sad, or happy: there was just a tightness in my body, or a tightness in me. It was like he had turned me inside out for sport. Softly he patted the side of my face, and then his breathing—just as Lacie had said it did—got soft and even and regular. Keeping him with me was as futile as pinning a wave to the shore. Out, and out, and out he flowed, while I lay beside him, seething.
While he slept I stared at the ceiling. The tiles had five rows of five holes each: twenty-five. Across the ceiling, there were seven, eight, nine tiles…my cheeks were wet and cool with tears. Down there were six, seven…I tried to look without moving my neck. Maybe eight tiles. Which made…seventy-two times twenty-five…I carried the one…eighteen hundred holes above us.
When he woke something had shifted between us. The room was darker. I could feel him roll out from me, like the tide. He ran his hand along my back, but there was something disinterested in it. His touch was impersonal again.
“God,” he muttered. “What time is it?”
I wriggled away. Found my underwear and pulled it up. Sticky damp. “No idea,” I told him, and the coldness in my voice surprised us both. I, too, had gone away.
He sat up, put his feet on the floor, and squinted at his pager. “It’s weird Lacie hasn’t paged me.”
The air snagged on her name. Quickly I pulled on my old training bra. Thrashed into my giant Belle & Sebastian T-shirt.
“I should go find her.”
“Why? I’m sure she’s fine.”
He sighed. “I should go.”
I crossed my arms. “What, you want to make sure she’s not cheating on you?”