You were that girl.
“Don’t drink anything served out of a trash can.”
That’s what my big sisters told me before the party.
“Which will be a change from Batesville,” one of them added, winking mean at me.
I was the only Batesville Chi O. Mom had the plan long ago, all those weekends I spent babysitting for her boss at South Panola Veterinary, Dr. JoAnn Kitts, who also happened to be president of the local Chi O alum chapter.
Once she knows you, Mom said, she will love you, everyone does, and then you’ll get your bid and you’ll live in that big house white as coconut cake with such grand pillars.
After I pledged she had me take pictures of her standing on the porch wearing her Proud Chi O Mom sweatshirt, waving and waving under the sky-high pillars.
At the party, there was no trash can I could see, only the sunshine punch in the plastic bowl made to look like crystal.
Do you know it was you who served us first, me and my Chi O sister Briane, giving us two plastic cups apiece, saying to me, Pretty gals shouldn’t have to wait twice?
The music was shaking through us and the punch tasted like Country Time, but I saw the jugs of Everclear behind you.
Soon, we were dancing. Time shook us free and our bodies leapt and writhed for hours.
Chi-O, my ho, it’s off to bed we go, some of you boys were singing. Were you one of them?
Midnight struck with Briane puking great golden gushes on my shoes in the bathroom.
In the tight stall, she cried hot shudders against me and told me all about you. Did you see the boy who gave us the cups? she sobbed, sputtering. Then saying she couldn’t believe you didn’t recognize her because you had loved her one weekend last spring. How she met you in this very house for a boots-and-bowties mixer and after many vodka sodas you took her on the roof and persuaded her with such honeyed words to dip her dainty duckling neck into your lap and gave you everything her little motor mouth could. Later, she passed out in your room and in the morning you were gone but left her a half-full bottle of Gatorade and an empty trash can in case.
Which she thought was sweet.
But she was a Jackson girl, and what did she know of love?
Her breath sweet and rank in my ear, she confided that, the next day and the next, she texted you and texted you — dirty things she thought you might like, and romantic thoughts too because you’d told her the night you two met, her head resting wearily in your lap after her task, her mouth suffused with your love: You are my girl, aren’t you? you’d said. Ah, you are, hot thing.
You never texted her back, not even when she sent you that picture of her Chi-O-My! thong twirled around one sparkly fingernail.
When Monday came — or so she told me, her gritty teeth clicking in postvomit chill — she walked into the student union, the air thick with the sour yeast from the Subway’s ovens gusting through the pipes, and saw you sprawled across one of the crusted lounge sofas with a ponytailed girl in shearling boots and the shortest of MissBehavin pom shorts and probably hailing from Texas. Oh, how she wriggled and cuddled against your Kappa Sig shirt, the same one against which Briane had pressed her cheek two days before, doing your business for you in your frat boy lap.
That was all there really was to Briane’s sad story except for a dry heave or two. So I cleaned her face with a paper towel and tried to winch her upright, but there was no doing. I would have to call for backup.
I waited on your staircase steps, Briane huddled at my feet. That was when I saw you again and you were so drunk you tried to hand me another cup of that selfsame party punch that had been splashed on my ankles as Briane had relayed her tale of woe.
I said a foul thing to you, but you didn’t seem to hear.
But what you said, frat — do you remember? You said, I’ve seen you so many times. Like, my whole life.
And I didn’t know what it meant, but it moved me.
Well, I never cared much for Briane anyway, or any of the Jackson girls with their pearls and buttery purses.
Me, I hold my heart with great care. I do not tender it lightly, over soft words.
The party after the LSU game, and there you were, in my own house.
You were holding that stubby Chi O’s hair back as she heaved SoCo punch down the front of herself like a little girl spilling lemonade on her Sunday dress.
The church, the library, and now here: I guess it came to seem you were always doing honorable things: praying, studying, helping people.
Later, after king’s cup and the glass leg of beer, I looked for you. I hunted the house for you, calling your name, bawling it, shantying it. I sought to conjure you, but you had gone.
It never would have happened if you hadn’t left the party. In that way, it was your fault, in part.
Searching on the sagging back porch, so heavy with red-faced partiers it seemed to undulate, a ship on a stormy sea, I came to see that Sigma Nu derelict (oh, I knew his kind, played against them in high school, those tufthunters from Jackson Prep). He was swinging high his solo cup and shouting for all to hear, his arm flailing back and swatting that little white-blond girl, who collapsed like my grandma’s lung.
I had to hit him, you see. I had to hit him every time I did. All those times.
I did not have to kick his head on the porch floor, his body curled S-like, like the snake he was. But it felt at the time that I did.
It turned out the white-blond girl had only been bent over laughing, her beer cup knocked from her hand by that Sigma Nu in a way that made her laugh.
But when she saw what had happened — the guy, the dude, the date-raper-type miscreant lying there on the planks, his face swirled red — she stopped laughing, her hand to her once-loud mouth. She did not even have the words to thank me.
There was the feeling that I should leave, and Keith put his baller hands on me and made it so.
His bros will be here soon, he said. They will hunt you, dude. They will take you down and bury your bones in the Walk of Champions.
I wasn’t afraid.
I took a long stroll and fell asleep a while on a sofa in the student union. When I returned, everyone was gone. My shirt had red dots all over the front and I tore it off, hulk-like, and hid it in the dumpster behind the house.
The dude was fine. Mr. Sigma Nothing. I saw him in accounting on Monday.
The blood collecting under his cheekbone, well, it looked impressive. Like a Purple Heart.
Two days later, there you were, frat, sitting two tables away at the library Starbucks. You came over, hot chocolate for you, skinny mocha for me.
Is that what we all drink? I said. And I told you I’d heard some things about you that I did not care for.
You said it was probably all true. Regrets, misdeeds, bad temper, and careless love. But you weren’t like that anymore, everything was changing inside you.
Then, like in a bad song lyric, you fingered a heart in my foam.
I rolled my eyes, but stilclass="underline" I felt a shiver on me. Inside, I was afraid. Because it seemed to me you didn’t know yourself at all. Like others, my brother, my loudmouth dad.