“Well, I should probably study more than I do.” He dragged a hand across his eyes. Was he mistaken, or was the light getting brighter the longer it lingered on Nicole Werner’s hair and face? He inhaled, and said, “So, want to walk back to Godwin?”
“Like I said, I’m waiting for Josie. Want to wait with me?”
“No,” Craig said. Too quickly. For a second there he’d forgotten about Josie. “That’s okay.”
He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell and took a step backward, but Nicole said, “What about your coat?”
She sounded alarmed, as if he were about to walk off a plane without a parachute—but maybe she always sounded alarmed. He remembered the way she’d waved Perry over in the cafeteria one night. Perry! she’d said. I forgot to tell you! I went home last weekend, and I saw Mary. She said to say hi!
Perry had just grunted. He hadn’t even looked up from his tray. Whoever Mary was had seemed like a really big deal to Nicole, but when Craig asked Perry about it, he said, “Who cares?”
“Nicole seems to care,” Craig pointed out. “She made this Mary sound like a long-lost cousin, or somebody risen from the dead.”
“Well, Nicole always sounds excited.”
It had occurred then to Craig, again, that Perry was nursing some unrequited love grudge, but he also thought he had a point. Nicole, and girls like her, did usually sound excited, or alarmed, or semihysterical, when they weren’t. It was something about the hard vowels and the crisp consonants and the way most of their sentences ended with “you guys!” And sounding like a question: “I’m, like, so hungry, you guys?!” You’d think some girl was starving to death, but she might just mean she wanted to borrow some quarters for a roll of Lifesavers.
“It’s not a problem,” Craig said, still backing away. “I’ll get it from you back at the dorm.”
“Wow!” Nicole said. “Thanks so much, Craig. You’re so nice!”
“Sure,” he said, trying to smile like a nice guy but imagining his own mug shot on a sexual predator website.
Josie had not, it seemed, told Nicole about the other night. Maybe, he hoped, she wouldn’t. But why wouldn’t she? Briefly he’d held out some hope that she’d been so drunk she didn’t even remember the incident, but that hope had been dashed when he’d passed her in the courtyard on Sunday morning, and she’d stopped dead in front of him.
“Hi,” he’d said.
“Yeah,” Josie had said. Craig had tried hard not to look her in the eyes, but they just bored straight into his own, and then he couldn’t look away. It was a bright morning, too, and his eyes started to water in the glare. He hadn’t left the dorm since Friday. He’d been pretty much either stoned or sleeping since he’d last seen her. “So, ‘hi’ is all you have to say to me?” she asked.
About a hundred bad jokes flashed through Craig’s brain, like having Eddie Murphy or Lenny Bruce shuffling a deck inside his skull, but he managed to keep his mouth firmly shut. The morning sun was making Josie’s hair look so black and shiny and smooth it scared the hell out of him. He couldn’t have spoken if he wanted to.
“You’re a great guy, Craig,” she’d said. “Really exceptional. I hope you rot in hell.”
And then she was gone so fast he didn’t know in which direction she’d left.
Shit, he thought. She definitely remembered.
He didn’t see her again for at least a week, but that was mostly because he’d been staying away from anywhere she might be—avoiding the stairwells near her hall, slipping out the side entrance to Godwin instead of going through the courtyard—and when he did see her again, luckily she didn’t see him. She and Nicole were together in the cafeteria, dressed up for some sort of Greek tea or soiree or salon or something equally feminine and mysterious and inane. (Rush Week started as soon as midterms were over, and half the girls in Godwin Honors Hall were joining sororities, appearing suddenly around the dorm every evening in pearls and skirts, while the guys who were rushing stumbled around looking disoriented and hung over.) As soon as he recognized Josie’s black hair, he’d scrambled to the back of the cafeteria as fast as he could.
The next week, he didn’t go looking for the study group on the night he knew they’d be down in the Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room, although he missed the group. He missed Nicole, and it pained him to think he’d never be in that room with her again, listening to her breathe through her nose as she read her textbook. By then, he assumed she hated him and that Josie had given her some ugly Cliffs Notes version of the events:
The way, in his bed, Josie had asked, “Are you wearing a condom?”
It was the first whole sentence she’d uttered since she’d stripped off her clothes and, standing shiningly naked in front of him, had whispered, “I want you to fuck me. I’ve wanted you to fuck me for a long time.”
“Condom? No,” he’d said, sounding more annoyed than he’d meant to. But when would he have put on a condom? Did she think he’d come out of the shower wearing one?
Her dark eyes, bleary as they were, shot open then, and Josie put her hands on his chest, shoving, and said, “Get off!”
“What?” Craig asked.
“I said get off of me!”
Craig rolled off of her, although every nerve ending and instinct he had—his brain having been turned into a kind of strobe light—was telling him to stay on top of her and to keep going.
“I’ll get pregnant,” she said. “Or a disease!”
“Huh?” Craig said. “Aren’t you on the pill or something?”
“No,” Josie said. “Why would I be? I’m not even sexually active right now.”
At this, Craig had snorted, and said, “I’d say right now you’re pretty sexually active.” He hadn’t intended to sound so sarcastic, but the whole thing was just so fucking stupid. He’d been minding his own business when she’d come into his room and taken off her clothes and pulled him down onto her in his bed.
But at that point, she was already out of his bed, pulling her little silky panties up over her wildly lush and dark-haired pussy, and then she was looking around for her top, and Craig sighed, too loudly, and flopped down on his back and said, “I’ll go see if somebody on the floor will give me a condom,” before he realized she was crying.
“I can’t believe this,” Josie said, pulling her lacy tank top down over her breasts.
Craig sat up at the edge of the bed then. Luckily, he’d completely deflated, but he pulled his towel up off the floor and put it over his dick anyway. “Can’t believe what?” he asked, but by then she was dressed, and she’d unlocked his door, slipped out of it, and slammed it behind her. For just a second, in the space she opened as she left, Craig could hear the party going on in the hallway—all the hardworking students celebrating the harvest. Somehow he pictured them in plaid shirts and gingham dresses—ruddy with good health, living their productive lives, while he searched the dresser for clean boxers, put them on, got back in his messed-up bed, and shoved the buds of his iPod as deeply into his ears as he could.