loose (15 page)

Will directs me through the streets of Englewood, my high school’s wealthy town, until he tells me to slow in front of a large, modern ranch.

“Thanks for the ride,” he says. He clicks off the seat belt.

“I guess I’ll see you back at Jennifer’s.”

He nods, but he doesn’t get out. I wait, the air growing thick between us.

“Well,” he says. “Good night.”

He leans toward me for what I assume is a good-bye kiss on the cheek, but his lips land on mine. I kiss back, and his hands go to my back, my waist, my legs. I put my hands in his hair, pulling him toward me. We pull apart and start to laugh.

“What the hell was that?” I ask.

“Oh, come on,” he says, reaching for me. “It was bound to happen.”

I smile.

“Take me home with you.”

On the drive to my apartment, he keeps his hands on my body.

He finds the hole in my jeans again.

“You wore these purposely to make me crazy.”

“What are you talking about?” I laugh. I am high, no longer tired. I’m not thinking about Jennifer. No way. I’m not thinking at all.

We barely make it to my bed before our clothes are off.

After sex, he falls asleep beside me, but I toss and turn, unable to

• 110 •

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n drop fully into deep sleep. I am too energized, overwhelmed by what I’ve done.

Late morning we wake, and I drive him home. He kisses me on the mouth when we reach his house.

“What about Jennifer?” I ask.

“What about her?”

“Aren’t you guys sleeping together?”

He shrugs. “It was nothing. She won’t care.”

It was nothing. Sex with Jennifer was nothing. Maybe, after me, he doesn’t want to do it with Jennifer anymore.

I think of Jennifer the night before, the way her voice went up just slightly when she asked if he was staying. “You can’t tell her.

She’d hate me.”

He smiles, not bothered at all. “No problem.”

I call Jennifer later, just to force myself to be normal.

“You have to come back tonight,” she says when I tell her I’m staying in. “It won’t be the same without you.”

I light a cigarette, the guilt digging at me. Will most certainly will be back there tonight, and this frightens me. Regardless of his use of past tense, I don’t have any idea of his intentions, if he’ll have sex with Jennifer again now that we’ve had sex. I am smart enough to know it would be good for me to stay away, let Will wonder about me. But if I do, I know I’ll wind up pacing the apartment and smoking, frustrated I can’t control what’s happening over there. Plus, Jennifer’s words feel good. Maybe I matter to her, to all of them. I blow out a long stream of smoke.

“OK,” I say. “I’ll come for a little while.”

I don’t want to think too much about Jennifer after we hang up, so I wander out to the living room. Dad is there, smoking too, the TV on. I sit beside him.

“I haven’t seen you much since you’ve been home.” He stubs out his cigarette. The smoke sits in a hazy cloud above us. Someone is always smoking in this apartment.

• 111 •

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When Tyler and I first moved here six years ago, I brought home a kitten from a friend’s house. I didn’t ask Dad. I knew not to. Dad had already made us give away our cat. Right after we moved her to a friend’s house, she ran away, traumatized, and no one ever saw her again. I hated him for that, for letting Tyler and me lose our cat on top of everything else we lost that year. And I figured if I didn’t ask, just let him see how cute it was and how much I loved it, he would let me keep it. But I was wrong. Dad didn’t want a cat he said he knew he’d wind up having to take care of eventually. I begged to keep it, but Dad refused and he drove us to the pound to give it away. I wouldn’t talk to him the whole way there. In the short time it had been living with us, it had developed a wheeze. I didn’t think much of it until the man at the pound asked whether it was the cat or me breathing like that. I could tell by the man’s expression he would have to put it to sleep. I screamed and cried, but Dad made me hand over the kitten. I figured the cat had gotten sick living with Dad’s constant smoke, and I hated him even more.

Now that seems far away. I settle back into the couch, looking at the game he has on the television. “I’ve been busy,” I tell him. “With friends.”

“Why don’t you have your friends come over here?”

I light another cigarette. I don’t really want it, but I’m annoyed.

“Because,” I say, “we want to hang out somewhere else.”

He smiles, not catching my mood. “I like it when your friends come over. It’s fun.”

Dad thinks I’m proud when he hangs around my friends, trying to get laughs, telling me later which ones he thinks are cute, but it’s embarrassing. Once, after he sat with my friends while they passed around a joint in the living room, I told him to get out and he pouted. Another time he came crawling into the living room on his hands and knees, just to be silly. I wish he would just leave us alone like a normal parent. I want to say, “Get your own damn friends,”

but what I say is, “Well, they’re not coming.”

• 112 •

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n His smile drops. “I’m just trying to have a normal conversation with you.”

“Is that what this is?” I ask, smart-mouthed.

“You’ve got quite an attitude for someone who prances through here just to eat and sleep.” When I don’t answer he says, “So glad you could come home for the holidays.” And he leaves me there alone.

At Jennifer’s that evening I try to act ordinary. Having Will near me, knowing there is something between us, something no one else knows, is electrifying. We pass each other to go to the bathroom or get a drink, and the movement of the air between us makes my throat flutter. Our knees touch when we’re on the couch. Our eyes meet every so often. The arousal is so strong, my guilt fizzles beneath it. I can’t wait to get him alone, and I don’t have to. I take him home again that night, and the next one as well.

“You’re not going to sleep with Jennifer again?” I ask a few nights later in my bed. I’m still amazed he’s chosen me over her.

“Nah.”

“Just me?”

He laughs, not at all bothered by the neediness I’m so bad at keeping hidden.

“Just you,” he says, and pushes my knee, opening my legs again.

I spread them willingly, thrilled.

Back at school, I tell Zoë. She listens wide-eyed and laughs, and I tell her she cannot tell Jennifer C, no matter what.

“Why?” We are in her room, as usual, eating the chocolate-chip granola bars she and her roommate keep stashed in a desk drawer.

She eats these instead of candy when she wants something sweet, but I know she’ll probably feel bad about it later and make herself throw up. Sticking her fingers down her throat is apparently not new for her. She held off for the first few months, perhaps hoping to be someone different when she first got to college, like me. She is not secretive about it. Not at all. In fact, she urges her friends to join her. “It

• 113 •

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makes you feel so much better,” she says. But I hang back in the room when they head down to the bathroom. I like the idea of controlling my weight, but puking doesn’t make me feel any better, only out of control.

“I stole him from Jennifer,” I explain now. “They’ll hate me.”

“He wasn’t her boyfriend,” she says, opening another bar.

“That doesn’t matter.” I know I can’t make Zoë understand the way it is with the Jennifers. There’s them, and then there’s me. It’s always been that way. “Just don’t say anything,” I tell her.

She shrugs. “All right.”

But I wish I hadn’t told.

Will and I speak a few times by phone, and I do my best to keep it light. Still, I push things just enough to make plans to see him at Columbia University over a weekend.

I drive back down to New Jersey, where Dad is away for the weekend, and leave Will a message from the apartment. I take a shower and do my makeup. I turn up my stereo to drown out the quiet. The old anxiety is with me, the feeling I’ll be left here wanting, that he’s changed his mind. But he calls back an hour later, and soon I am on my way into the city.

He meets me in the lobby of his dorm and we go to a party. Like the university, the party is far up on the West Side, not far from the Port Authority Bus Terminal where I went with Liz and Ashley to meet Milo all those years ago. We enter a building and take the elevator to someone’s apartment. College students in cocktail dresses and button-down shirts fill the rooms. No one dresses up like this for parties at Clark. I stand on the sidelines in my jeans and cowboy boots, gripping a sweaty beer bottle that is lukewarm after half an hour. I do my best to act nonchalant, like I’m not uncomfortable at all. I watch Will chat with friends. He introduces me a few times, checks to make sure I’m OK. He’s nice enough.

I want to get back to his room, though, where we can take off our clothes, all his attention on just me. Just you, he told me that time. I

• 114 •

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n remember that, cling to it, as I sit on a brown, velvety couch and wait. When I told Zoë about us, I made it sound like we had something special, something that rose above the betrayal of Jennifer.

Our connection was irresistible. I told the story like a movie plot, like About Last Night where Demi Moore and Rob Lowe give in to difficult love, where, as much as they try, two people can’t deny the forces that bring them together.

Finally, around midnight we walk back to his dorm. He and his roommate, who is conveniently gone for the weekend, sleep in bunk beds, and Will directs me to the top bunk. I go first to the bathroom, my eyes averted from anyone in the halls. This is a boys’ floor.

No one knows me, and I’m obviously here for one reason. I brush my teeth quickly and throw some water on my face, and then I rush back to Will’s room. When I get there, he’s lying on the bottom bunk. My stomach is hollow as I climb the ladder to the top bunk. I feel out of place, like I shouldn’t be here at all.

After a minute Will comes up to join me and we have sex. He jams his hips into mine, moving like a jackhammer. Was this what our sex was like before? I can’t recall. I barely enjoy it. When he’s done he climbs back down the ladder, leaving me there on the strange-smelling sheets in the darkness. He says something about the beds being too small, some apologetic comment, but his words make no difference. I can see I’m an utter fool.

Back at school, I hang around Zoë’s room. I try to focus on my schoolwork. I get the flu and stay in bed for three days. I am sick, but more, I am sick of myself. Sick of my desperation and emptiness.

Sick of the constant defeat. I am convinced if someone will just love me I will be able to focus on something else. I’ll be able to enjoy my life. I’ll feel whole and real, released from this weight.

One evening, I head down Zoë’s hall to the boys’ side. Eli is in his room with a few of the other guys. I know Eli is attracted to me. I have thought about the possibility of liking him back. He’s a good-looking, sweet boy from a little town in Maine. Even though I slept

• 115 •

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with half the guys on his hall, he never wavered from treating me with respect and kindness. But for some reason I can’t pinpoint, I’m not attracted to him. Perhaps it’s his kindness, which I am not used to. Or else I don’t like the insecurity I see in him, too much like my own. Or maybe it’s just the outdated way he wears his hair. Whatever it is, I am determined to push through it. I want to be loved, and Eli might be the one to finally do so.

I flirt with him, and by the end of the night we are in his bed. He is both skilled and tender as a lover, which surprises me. It is a nice night, a really nice night, but I leave the next morning without the crazy feeling I usually get when I like someone. As much as I want to, I don’t feel drawn to him.

Two days later, Eli knocks at my door. He is flustered and upset, and he tells me he has some things to say. I sit on my bed as he pulls a piece of scrap paper from his back pocket and starts reading from it. How we had this night together and then I just disappeared.

How we were friends first and this matters to him. How he wants to be closer to me but I don’t seem willing to let him in.

I blink, put a hand to my mouth. No one has ever spoken like this to me. No one has ever thought of me long enough to write down notes about what they want to say. I reach for his hand and pull him down beside me. I kiss him hard on the mouth.

Eli and I date for the rest of the school year. We go to SweetTreats for ice cream, or we go to the Lebanese restaurant for falafel. We shop together at the health-food store for food. We spend lots of time cuddling on his bed watching rented videos, and his roommate sleeps in friends’ dorm rooms to give us time alone. Everything is “we.” I love to use the word. I make a point of it whenever I can. We saw that movie already. We can hang out with you Friday. I’m comfortable, almost content. This is such a new feeling, to be loved, no longer wracked all the time with wanting, no longer nervously searching for a boy. I feel for the first time like a normal girl. I’m happy and self-contained. I finally inhabit the other side of the glass wall.

• 116 •

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n There is another feeling, however. Somehow, I am not committed yet to the relationship. Eli is not enough. Before summer starts we decide we will visit each other as much as possible, but I am also hoping to see Will, maybe even Heath. I still want those boys I can’t really have, and with Eli around the wanting feels more like just that—wanting, not need. It is as though he fills my hunger just enough to keep me from feeling ravenous when I go up to fill my plate at the buffet. This is selfish, I realize. What’s more, it makes no sense. I’ve been claiming I want one boy to love me, which Eli is willing to do, yet now that I have it, now that I’m experiencing how good it feels, I won’t step fully inside.

The morning after I get home to New Jersey, I have to leave for a cruise with Mom, her new boyfriend, my grandparents, and Tyler. I do not want to go at all, but like all things with Mom, what I want doesn’t matter. The cruise is to celebrate my grandfather’s eightieth birthday, and if I don’t go, no one in the family would forgive me.