Again (4 page)

He sat back in his chair. “I
study at the library every night at seven if you change your mind.”

I didn’t respond. He was the
kind of guy I would have “studied” very closely in my college-take-one days.
That could not happen now.

As Professor Parker reviewed
the syllabus I realized he reminded me a lot of David. He had the same
I can
kick your ass in and out of the courtroom
confidence, the same solidity to
his frame that only being handsome and intelligent can bring.

As much as I hated to admit
it, I kind of missed David, the arrogant asshole.

We had never been in love,
but we had most definitely been in lust. His body taut and muscular from
bi-weekly squash matches, his perfectly pressed suits, his blue eyes reminding
me of vast desert skies.

When class was over, I
rushed down quickly to introduce myself to Professor Parker. I was doing things
right this time and maybe I was also trying to avoid walking to my next class
with Carter.

 “Professor Parker,” I said,
trying to slouch. Having good, poised posture wasn’t something I learned until
my mid-twenties. It was still something I had to force myself to remember
sometimes.

“Questions already?” he
asked, turning to me.

“No, I wanted to introduce myself,”
I said, with a small wave, “I’m one Kate Townsend. You’re my faculty advisor.”

It wasn’t something the
average freshman would probably do, but I wasn’t the average freshman anymore.
This time around I was going to be the model student. I was not going to slink
out as soon as class ended because I was hung over, or leave because I was
rushing to do what you did before you got hung over.

“Oh,” he said, “how
forthright of you. I rarely even meet my advisees.”

“I plan on attending your
office hours.”

“Good for you. You may actually
get to call me Greyson,” he said with a smile that almost made me fall
backward. It wasn’t intentional. He was that good-looking.

“I don’t drink,” I blurted
out, needing to remind myself of rule number one so I didn’t break rule number
two. Why was I even thinking about breaking rule number two?

Because I wasn’t really
nineteen.

Because it had been over a
month since anyone had touched me.

I should have had sex with
David one last time before I left New York, though I was pretty sure he would
have said no. He probably would have said
hell no
. He might have missed
me too, but there was no doubt he thought I was a hot mess.

When you’re used to having
sex on a regular basis and then it’s gone, I guess this is what happens. Or
maybe that was just me?

Or maybe my problems with
alcohol actually had covered up other addictions.

“Good to know,” Professor
Parker said, confusion permeating his face.

I winced. I was such a jerk.
I might not have been able to control my thoughts about him, but he clearly
wasn’t having the same problem when it came to me. To him I
was
just any
other freshman.

I forced myself to walk
toward the door. Anything so I wouldn’t have to think about how
twenty-nine-year old Kate would not only want to call him Greyson, but would
want to repeat it like a heartbeat—after she drank six hella-huge glasses of
Riesling, of course.

Kate

After I emailed my mother that
I was alive and safe in Senegal and there would be very little correspondence
going forward, I headed to the student center to grab some lunch before my next
class.

I heard the words she’d said
to me when I told her about my decision to enter the Peace Corps.

Your biological clock does
not stop ticking on the other side of the world.

Considering my life was in the
crapper, I guess at least she hoped for a grandchild she could be proud of.

It was amazing the lengths I
was willing to go not to tell my mother she’d been right about me. Admit that what
she said when I flunked out of college the first time had finally come true.

You will regret your
failure.

If standing in the student
center of Hudson University, reaching for a cheese sandwich and trying my
hardest to be any other lost freshman wasn’t enough proof.

I stepped away from the
sandwich station. I needed a glass of…water. Yeah,
water
. Between Carter
and Dr. Parker, I had my proverbial hands full and I hadn’t even made it
through day one yet.

I guess I’d forgotten how
much sexual energy existed on a college campus. It bubbled under everything
like a shaken beer waiting to blow. Maybe I should have made “no guys” rule
number twelve because then at least I wouldn’t have to feel so bad about
breaking it.

It seemed fairly inevitable I
was going to.

Mentally it was already
pinned to the mat. I shook the image of Professor Parker emerging from a hot
tub and Carter walking down our dorm hallway freshly showered on GIF repeat
from my head. I needed to stay strong.

I glanced around the table
area for somewhere quiet to sit. Somewhere I wouldn’t have another man or guy
who was, in every way that counted, a man fighting to get into my GIF loop. Yet
another person I had to keep myself from trying not to picture with his shirt
off.

Who was I kidding—with his
pants off.

Luckily, Dawn was sitting at
a table alone sketching into a black leather notebook. I could have sat alone
too, but sitting with Dawn was safer. Her Halloween wardrobe and bitchy
attitude would scare even the most eager boy, man, or man-boy away.

It wasn’t like I was
super-hot shit or anything, but every encounter in college had the tinge of an
invitation to it. At least with Dawn around I wouldn’t have to keep avoiding
RSVP-ing.

I headed to her table and
pulled out a chair.

“Don’t you have somewhere
better to sit?” she asked, focused on her sketch—a very accurately rendered
rotting skull, complete with moldy brains and goo dripping eye sockets.

Blond roots shone out from
her tar-black hair in the overhead lights.
She colored her hair
. She was
playing a role just like me. Not that her custom fit vampire fangs didn’t
indicate a flair toward the dramatic.

“Is there anyone better
who’s going to sit with you?” I replied. I was starting to understand dealing
with Dawn was about meeting her on her level. I could handle that. I mean I had
eleven years on her. I had more sarcasm and angst in my pinky nail than she had
in her whole black heart.

“I don’t want anyone to sit
with me.”

“Then you should have drawn
a KEEP OUT sign.” I dove into the chair across from her amid the hum of
students talking around me. “Instead of your self-portrait,” I added.

“It’s supposed to be you,”
she retorted.

We sat in silence, her
sketching, the sound like the scratch of a rodent, me chewing on my sandwich, a
moist insistent chomp.

“How was your first day?” I
asked, regretting it immediately. This was not on her level. I should have kept
my mouth shut and eaten my sandwich, or maybe hurled more insults at her so she
could toss similar ones back, but what the hell? We were roommates. We had
three more months together. We could spend them in contemptuous silence or we
could try and make the best of it.

“It’s not my first day,” she
said, her mouth puckered.

“Right,” I said, pulling the
crust off my sandwich. She had already been here for a semester.

She went back to her sketch.
She didn’t bother asking me how my first day was, it was abundantly clear she couldn’t
care less.

If she had asked I would
have said
fine
. Even though with each passing minute, I wondered if
starting my life over to make up for my mistakes might have been my biggest one
yet.

So far all college-take-two
had given me were a massive case of lady blue balls and more guilt than I knew
what to do with.

 “Why the hell are you
starting second semester anyway?” Dawn asked, watching me closely. It was only
then I noticed she wore colored contacts, the darkest brown.

Wow, what was
she
hiding
from?

Dawn was the only person
here who had given me even a second glance. It made me wonder if she suspected
something, or maybe she’d forgotten what someone without a shitload of white
pancake makeup and black lipstick looked like.

I’d already told her I took a
year off, but that didn’t answer why I was starting second semester. There
would definitely be more people than Dawn who would view it as questionable. I
wasn’t in the mood to deal with it now.

 “What happened to your last
roommate?” I asked instead.

 “She thought I worshipped
the devil.” The sound of her shading increased like the pencil and paper were
about to come to climax.

“Was that why she moved out?”

“No,” Dawn replied curtly, “she
was a stupid whore who liked beer and dick more than school.” Her eyes rolled. “She
dropped out.”

I nodded, trying to ignore
my stomach falling to my toes. In college-take-one I had been her ex-roommate
almost to the letter. Who was I kidding? It would still be me now without my
rules.

I took a sip from my water,
a small bite from my sandwich. “Do you worship the devil?”

She shook her head, “Not
yet, but I’ve heard junior year is pretty hard. I might need his help then.”

I laughed heavily, loudly;
people at other tables turned.

Dawn squinted, practically
cracking her eyes in half. Clearly, she didn’t like making people laugh. I was
curious about what she did like, besides freaking me the fuck out.

The thing was, having her as
a roommate might be the only thing that kept me safe. She didn’t want to talk
to me, hang out with me, bother me, or be friends with me.

She would not deal with me
bringing a guy back to our room, especially a professor. Though I was pretty
sure they didn’t come back to dorms with students anyway, and I was absolutely
positive Professor Parker wasn’t that kind of professor. As long as I stayed in
our room any time I wasn’t in class, I would have to follow rule number two.

Hot guy GIFs on repeat, or
not, Dawn would literally be my gothic chastity belt with fangs.

Carter

Walking to my next class, I
thought about how I would have answered Kate’s question about what had happened
my freshman year if I could have told her the truth.

Back then, I was exactly
like most of the students I was an RA for, a completely spoiled, snot-nosed
brat. I was invincible and I lived that way. How else would an eighteen-year-old
who’d had everything paid and taken care of for his whole life act?

Nothing could touch me.

Growing up rich makes
everything easy. Whatever you want is just in your reach and if not, you can
buy it. Or your father can, and my father did. I never complained about his
money, until he used it to pay for Jeanie’s silence.

I would probably be a
totally different person now if I hadn’t rushed TKE, if I’d gone to a different
school, or even been born to different parents. If my father wasn’t, as Tristan
had put it so eloquently, a “prize-winning dick hole.”

Tristan was lucky, as a diver
he basically had his own frat in the diving team. He didn’t need to try to find
a group of people who would accept him. Freshman year, while I was pledging, he
would watch me from his bed, his hands propped behind his head as I ran around
doing everything my older frat brothers told me to do.

“You look like a chicken
with its balls cut off,” he said.

“Wouldn’t that be a very
sexually frustrated rooster?” I joked, even though it was exactly how I felt.

I guess it was the price I
was willing to pay to belong to something. Like Tristan, I craved a tribe. The
guys in TKE seemed as good as any. They were wealthy like me, with fathers who
were pushing them to be something someday so they could push their kids to be
something someday. It was a welcome place to hide and drink and play video games
until that someday, until I made my own son’s life a living hell.

“You could always be my
towel boy,” Tristan said, wiggling his brows.

“That will be great for my
future, a towel-tote for the Hudson University diving star.”

“
Gay
diving star,” he
corrected. his eyes sparkling. “The big law firms eat that shit up.”

I personally didn’t care
that Tristan was gay. He did, though. Back then he mentioned it hourly. I
guessed it was because he finally could.

I should have taken his
invite, or accepted any of the other invitations I’d gotten from frats who’d
asked me to pledge. But, my father had been a TKE man, so that was what I had
to be.

I’d hitched my wagon to a
falling star.

The night I started wearing
the
D-Bag
scarlet letter had been like any other party as a pledge. The
TKE house was filled with guys and girls, with music, with the welcome
dangerous energy only freedom and breaking the rules can create. Truthfully, I
could have been wearing it for weeks beforehand.

At the TKE house, being a
pledge meant drinking any time one of the older brothers told you to, going to
get them a new beer when they demanded one, and doing your best not to pass out
in the bathroom you had to clean with a toothbrush the next day.

I hadn’t thought anything of
it when the older brothers walked that girl upstairs. The girl I would only
know later as Jeanie Pratt,
plaintiff
.

I watched them suspend her
wobbling body, guiding her up the wooden staircase.

“Pledge Chazz, you like?”
Brother Randy asked, running his open palm up and down in the air behind her
like she was a car he was showing off.

“Of course,” I nodded. What
was there not to like? She was a tight-assed little brunette with tits as big
as soccer balls. If she was a car she’d have been a ruby-red vintage Corvette.

“Come on, then,” he’d said,
indicating with his chin the top floor where the bedrooms were.

I could say my choice of
following them up the stairs was when my fate had been sealed, but it had been
choosing to be there at all.

The story I would have told
in court, if I’d testified, was that I had followed them, but only because I
had to. You didn’t deny a brother’s request. I knew nothing good was about to
happen, but I still went anyway because I was weak.

We walked into Randy’s bedroom
and they closed the door. I watched as two of my fellow brothers picked Jeanie
up and put her on the bed, as another one of my brothers took her shoes off.

I stood back and waited.

She was simply a heap of skin
and bones they were moving and bending. Her eyes were rolling back in her head.

“Is she okay?” I asked, even
though it was clear she wasn’t.

“Nope,” Brother Randy said, “but
she will be very soon.” He tickled the bottom of her foot.

She jerked, her head rising.
She tried to focus on him and attempted to roll away, kicked her legs out. A
couple of the guys took her arms and held them down. Her body went slack.

She seemed like she’d been
drugged, but toxicology reports later showed only alcohol in her system—a whole
shitload of alcohol.

“What the hell are you doing
to her?” the pledge standing next to me asked. That question had been deep in
my throat, but hadn’t made it to my tongue, my lips.

“Exactly what she’s asking
for,” Randy said, going for her belt.

I should have pulled him off
her. I should have punched both the brothers holding her down in the nose or
the nuts. At the very least I should have taken out my cell and called 911.

Instead I walked out of the
room. Headed down the stairs and out the front door of the party, trying to
pretend I hadn’t seen what I’d just seen.

Tristan knew something was
wrong when I got back to our room, but I wouldn’t talk about it. Instead I
drank all the alcohol I could find, hoping maybe when I awoke the next morning,
for me, as much as for poor Jeanie Pratt, it had been a dream.

The truth I would have told
Kate was a coward’s truth, but it also didn’t make me guilty of what I’d been
accused of. I wasn’t an accessory to a sexual assault. I hadn’t been there when
it actually happened.

But I did deserve to bear
that cross for leaving. I probably deserved even worse.

When I finally reached
Fulton Hall and took my seat in Political Justice class, I wondered if anyone
would ever hear my truth. If I would ever be brave enough to say it out loud.
To admit I had known exactly what was going to happen to Jeanie Pratt and,
instead of stopping it, I walked away.