(You) Set Me on Fire (8 page)

Technically, I mumbled to myself, I could just leave. Shar was a big girl who could get home on her own. Cher, of course, had a long and fruitful career without Sonny.

But then Shar/Cher returned as suddenly as she’d left. She crept up behind me and wrapped her arms around my waist. Leaned into me and put her chin on my good shoulder. “You’re watching me,” she blurted into my ear.

“Um. NO,” I said, spinning around, “I’m not watching you. Where have you been?”

Shar pressed forward, heavy lips curved up into a grin, eyes bent under the weight of plastic lashes.

“You’re WATCHING ME. ALWAYS. Right? You like WATCHING me?”

My body buzzed with alcohol. When I run, sometimes the feeling of having my feet move so fast when my head feels so still makes me dizzy.

This sensation was not dissimilar.

“I’m just here with you,” I said aloud.

“What?”

“I SAID, I’M JUST—”

“Hey!” It was Carly in her little leather jacket and jeans, looking very much like a tiny Travolta and very much unlike herself.

“What can we do for you, Superstar?” Shar slurred, gripping my arm even tighter.

“I think we’re going to the other party!” Carly shouted at me, ignoring Shar.

“WHAT?”

“Are you guys COMING?”

“NO!” Shar screamed, leaning forward, almost toppling Carly over. “We’re STAYING because THIS party is the BEST!”

The B-52s came on and there was a rush. Shar pulled
my arm and backed into the crowd, all the while shouting at Carly, “BYE, SUPERSTAR!”

Bodies pogoed around us. It was like being an egg in a pot of boiling water.

“You want to dance with me, RIGHT? RIGHT Sonny?” Shar’s eyes were completely dilated. Hard dark circles that jittered with the music.

“Okay!”

Dropping her body weight onto me, Shar/Cher planted her face by my ear. “I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

Pulling back, she yanked me out the other side of the dancing crowd. “Come here.”

They say that when a person looks at your lips it means they’re about to kiss you. Unless the person is a dentist. As far as I know, this is true. The first time I kissed Anne I’d been staring at her lips for hours, sitting on the couch next to her while we watched soaps. I remember reaching forward and touching Anne’s knee, feeling the tiny prickles of the spots she’d missed shaving. First kiss. Body shaking. basketball">OH

With glittery dance lights swooping overhead, I watched Shar/Cher’s eyes shift down to my moustache. Watched her eyelashes with the tiny
rhinestones on the rim twinkle as her weight shifted forward, into my arms, and her lips pressed against mine.

“WAIT!” something inside me screamed. But then Shar/Cher’s fingers pushed into my back and whatever ideas I had for self-preservation floated up into the rafters like so many soap bubbles, popping against the bass of the music while a little piece of me slipped out of my mouth, into hers.

Shar’s kiss was ravenous and overwhelming. Her arms wrapped around me, pulling me tighter.

“Let’s go, Sonny,” she mumbled, her breath pushing against mine. “Let’s get out of here before I change my mind.”

We ended up messing around in my bed, mostly kissing. I think. I tried to focus and steady myself but my brain was awash with lips and ss="body-text_

SEVEN

Sex is a problem

The day after Halloween, I rolled out of bed and into the bathroom where I barfed. Violently. Several times. After a period of recuperation, a swig out of a pop bottle of mystery brown fizzy contents, and a shower, I managed to collect myself and find my way to Social Problems.

One twenty-five p.m. Time for my “morning” class.

I was late, and fumbled my way into a seat as Professor J paused to take a couple of chugs from her giant bottle of green Gatorade. The auditorium was a mass of hungover students, clearly unable to sit up unaided. The seats closest to the walls were in high demand. I caught sight of top hat, a.k.a. Pumpkin Head, a.k.a. Jonathon waving at me from his perch in the top row.

“Sorry.” tcking to " aid="BE6O8">
I wondered if he smelled like pumpkin. I immediately stopped wondering when it became clear that thinking about food made my stomach want to turn itself inside out.

“The question we must ask ourselves, of course,” Professor J was saying, “is whether we as a society even
know
we have a problem. Or, better yet,
how
we know when something is a problem.”

In the seats next to me, two girls were doodling back and forth on a notebook. One girl drew a sperm and the other started making a jacking-off motion in her lap.

“You’re going to say, ‘There are symptoms.’ Of course there are. How do we know we have an economic problem? We have symptoms. We have a rise in unemployment. Debt. But what else? How else do we know we have a problem?”

College professors ask a lot of questions they don’t want answered. I’d had no idea what a rhetorical question even was until after a couple of weeks at college when I went back to my room and out of boredom searched “questions you don’t answer” on Google.

I got a page about talking to kids about sex and a page on “rhetorical” questions. Rhetorical questions sound like questions but they’re not. They’re leads
people use for talking about something they want to talk about.

On the screen behind the podium, a series of posters flashed. Propaganda. Pictures of kids smoking pot with the word “MARIJUANA” in big monster-green letters. World War II posters of the “ORIENTAL MENACE.” A pamphlet about promiscuity with a girl sitting in a doctor’s office weeping.

“We know we have a problem because people tell us we have a problem. Not always so bluntly. It’s not every day that someone comes up to you on the street and TELLS you that you have a problem. No. Society tells us we have a problem in other ways.”

I wrote down in my notes,
How know if have problem?
And then promptly scratched it out because it seemed like the stupidest thing ever written.

Especially on that particular day.

“Sex is a good thing to talk about with regard to this phenomenon,” Professor J noted. “And when I say sex is a problem I’m not saying what you think I’m saying.”

Baffled-slash-hungover silence.

“That was a joke.”

More silence.

No one ever laughed at Professor J’s jokes. Ever. Listening to her tell jokes reminded me of being in grade five. My parents had given me a subscription to
Jokes, Jokes, Jokes
magazine with the idea that it might make me loosen up and/or gain more friends at school. All it did was give people the impression that I was insane. A chronic teller of unfunny jokes. To this day whenever anyone utters the phrase “Knock, knock” I get queasy.

Professor J was not unfunny. I sometimes thought about catching her in the hall and saying, You know, I think you’re funnier than that class would indicate. Although I had the impression she didn’t give a shit whether people thought she was funny. I was also pretty sure that if I was to approach her anywhere outside that classroom she’d have no idea who I was.

At that point, I hadn the Tower of Power, c’t seen Shar all day. She wasn’t in class and hadn’t called me and I basically hadn’t called her either, given that I was totally freaked out. Because?

Because sex with people who are your “friends” messes things up. Sex with girls, especially, messes everything up.

That’s not what Professor J’s lecture was about, but that’s what I was thinking that afternoon: sex with girls. Sex with girls, I thought. Problem?
Which is a question I should have known the answer to by then.

Like, take Anne for example.

About a week after Anne and I slept together, which happened a little after Christmas break, she told me she’d realized that the whole thing was a horrible accident and that she was really upset about it. This conversation will always stick out in my brain as one of the worst verbal exchanges I’ve ever had. Even better, it happened on the PHONE. January 15. At Starbucks. Like, four o’clock in the aft, I was getting a hot chocolate and I had her on the phone, crying, while I was paying. She was crying so loud that the girl giving me my change actually stopped and tried to listen in.

“JESUS CHRIST I’m not a LESBIAN. JESUS you didn’t tell anyone I’m a lesbian, did you?”

“No.”

“Did y—” There was a series of choking and sobbing sounds.

The barista smiled a weak smile, leaning so far forward she could have grabbed a sip from my hot chocolate.

“WHAT? Did I what?”

“Tell anyone about—THE THING?”

“What thing?”

“THE THING! The
thing
we
did
.”

More sobbing.

Messed up.

I spent an hour sitting on the curb next to my quickly cooling beverage, talking Anne down, reassuring her that everything was cool. That what had happened between us was not only a distant memory but a non-issue. Like, it never happened. I was erasing it from history as we spoke. Every word felt like chewing on a dirty caramel, hard against my teeth and throat.

“It’s okay. Anne. It was just like, a little mistake. Seriously.”

After that phone call, Anne was only, like, grudgingly my friend. She’d invite me to things and then cancel. In March, she got a boyfriend and texted me a message.

I have a BF now. So you know.

Then she didn’t speak to me at all.

Which is to say that after the St. Joseph’s Halloween party I basically tied my stomach in a knot and hated myself all day for having been a stupid asshole. Of course, I thought, I’ve done it again. I’ve royally
messed up AGAIN and now I’m just as screwed. AGAIN.

And then. And then, that night, Shar just sort of showed up at my door. She looked like how she always looked. Not nervous or weirded out or anything. She said she wanted to go find hair bleach.

“So are you coming or what, Allison?”

“Uh, coming. Yeah, okay, let’s go.”

It was dragged him back to apologizeOIAFn’t until later, sitting in the bathroom on Shar’s floor with her hair all wrapped in Saran Wrap in a chemical soup, that she finally turned to me and said, “How long have you been gay?”

“What?”

“You’re a lesbian, right? Or. Are you bi?”

I’m not really sure what bi is, to be honest. Like, to me it sounds as if you know you’ll sleep with the same number of boys as girls. But how would you even know that? Does it mean you have to sleep with a boy after you do it with a girl? What if all the boys in your town are stupid?

“I guess I’m a, uh, into girls.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

I must have looked stunned.

“You have a girlfriend?! You just cheated on your girlfriend.” Tapping the plastic wrap to check for heat, Shar looked suddenly satisfied.

“Yeah. NO. I didn’t. I don’t. I mean, I had this girl I went out with for a while in high school.”

“Ooooo, Allison! High school girlfriend.” Shar grinned. “You break up with her?”

I pictured Anne sitting in a huddle with her other friends while I sat in my little homosexual seat. OutCAST. Why would anyone want to reveal that experience? Like, yeah, I slept with this girl and she instantly regretted it and then decided she hated me. And then I totally flipped out and couldn’t talk to anyone, which was fine because by then I was a complete social pariah. Now I’m here.

I had a brief thought that somehow, if I told Shar about it, she might do the same thing.

Like, hate me.

Everyone knows that people hate/dump people who get dumped all the time. I have this feeling that it’s easier to dump someone you know someone else has dumped. It’s like throwing out something you bought at a garage sale.

The other side of the lie being, of course, that I didn’t want to be that desperate lesbian dumped
by a clearly non-lesbian anymore. And lying was the easiest way to make that true. In, okay, a very superficial way.

“Yeah, well,” I sighed, “you know how it goes. I’m not really a commitment person.”

“Ha. You fucker. You’re all, ‘See ya!’”

Outside, Shar’s floormates were screaming the lyrics of a pop tune I didn’t recognize. It was nine p.m., and they’d just come off of watching their weird singing sitcom. Sitcoms made Shar’s floormates crazy.

“Your floormates are weird.”

“Allison. My floormates are neanderthals. Some idiot THREW UP in the hallway last night. Little upchucked candy corn and Bailey’s right outside the bathroom. How high school is that? Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s too much trouble to walk two steps and barf in the sink like everyone else?”

“Totally.”

“If I knew who it was I’d barf on HER door, see what she thought of that. I think it was Asian Patty.”

Shar turned and looked in the mirror, then stroked the underside of her chin with her finger. “I dragged him back to apologizeOIAF’m not into girls, but I mess around with them sometimes.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I probably should have told you that, but I figured you were gay so you wouldn’t care.”

“Oh. Right. Sure.”

“It’s because I think they’re safe, you know? Girls. After having so many messed-up boys in my life.

It’s like, I know that girls won’t turn crazy on me or mess with me. Also. I had a boy in my life who was very fucked up. Like, abusive. He used to, you know, hit me.”

“Fuck. Shar. I’m so sorry.”

“It totally wrecked me up for a while.” She stopped for a moment to stare at her reflection, like she was looking for something, checking for something. “But I’m over it now.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” Shar turned from the mirror to look at me. Whatever she saw on my face made a tiny smile feather into the corners of her lips. “I’m so glad I can tell you this shit, Allison. Seriously. I’m so glad you’re here. I would shoot myself in the face if you weren’t here.”

“Same.”

It took a while to rinse all the bleach out of Shar’s hair, but when we were finished her already blond hair was, like, translucent. It made her look like a ghost.

When she disappeared to get her hair dryer I took a long look in the mirror. I’d probably never had as many mirrors in my life as I did in that dorm. Everywhere you looked there you were, reflected in the walls, looking back. I’ve pretty much always hated looking at myself in the mirror. I look weird. Like, even though I’m seventeen, I have grey hairs. Not a ton but enough. I’m like a faded version of a person, really. Even my clothes, because I washed them in the crappy dorm machines, were faded: black T-shirts gone grey, dark jeans, light blue. I wondered how Shar could even believe I’d had a girlfriend, let alone dumped one.