I say, “Yes.” I can feel a weak blue vein throbbing in my neck.
“Good,” he says. “I’m not in the habit of ruining little girls. You’re not a little girl, are you?”
“No.” My voice is very low, as though it’s come out of my stomach, or out of that dead pond at the center of Freedom Crest.
“Well, you’re lovely to look at, sweetheart,” he says, and I cannot help but think of a sign I saw in a china shop, Fun to hold, but if you break it, Consider it sold, and, scrawled under that, as if it might be too poetic for customers to explicate on their own: “You break, you pay.”
When I look up he’s looking at me, head cocked. “I like your little haircut there. Is that what they call a page boy?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper, “but thanks,” and push my bangs out of my eyes.
“And I like your little titties, too,” he says in a different voice, a voice that fills me up with blood. He leans forward and looks hard at me. Where his shirt is unbuttoned at the neck, I see dark hair on his chest. He says, “I want to taste your little titties,” and I look down at my blouse, where my face is repeated over and over again in my gold buttons—hot coins of myself. Not even for a moment does it seem wrong to be here, or do I wonder why I am.
“Maybe I should come and sit over there,” the detective says, and I move over an inch to make room for him on the leather couch, which makes a naked, human sound against my suede skirt. He puts his Heineken bottle down on the coffee table. Before he kisses me, he pushes my blouse a little farther open, looks at my white bra, and says, “Yummy.”
He reaches in and feels my left breast, which is small and light in his palm. He even growls a little, pressing his face into mine.
“IT WAS EASY,” I TELL MICKEY. SHE’S WASHING HER HANDS at the sink in the girls’ bathroom at school. On the mirror above her face, in red lipstick, someone has written “Anne Platt is fucking Mr. Fogarty.” Every morning, the janitor washes it off, but by afternoon it’s always back, and has been since September, scrawled in hard, loopy cursive—
I have no idea who Anne Platt is, but I’ve heard she’s a freshman with enormous breasts. Mr. Fogarty is the assistant principal. His eyes are Aqua Velva blue, and he likes girls. Once, when I got caught smoking in the parking lot before school, I had to go to Mr. Fogarty’s office, where he gave me a pamphlet about lung cancer and winked at me. “Don’t get caught again,” he said.
Now, whenever I pass him in the hallway, he smiles at me and lifts an invisible cigarette to his lips.
It’s never seemed like much of a revelation that some freshman girl, Anne Platt, with big boobs, might be fucking Mr. Fogarty. The real mystery is the other girl, the one who must be sneaking into the girl’s bathroom every single day, writing that sentence in lipstick on the mirror again and again. All that loopy, feminine fury over what? Who could sustain a passion like that for so long? She must have had to skip classes to do it: Between classes, there were too many girls at the sinks to get away with that. Was it jealousy, or outrage, or something else?
Sometimes I wondered if the writer might not be Anne Platt herself.
Mickey hands me a stick of gum in a light green wrapper. “What was easy?” she asks, bending down to tie the lace of one of her shoes. The pleats of her skirt settle around her, and she looks like a pom-pom, dropped.
“The detective,” I say.
She looks up at me. The gum is so minty in my mouth as I chew it, I can hardly inhale. It’s like inhaling the steam off a block of ice, too fresh.
“Oh my God,” Mickey says, standing up.
I nod. I look at myself in the mirror. My face is lost inside fucking, as if the word is written in lipstick on my forehead. I fluff up my hair, then look back at Mickey and smile.
“You’re kidding,” she says.
I say, “I’m not.”
“Wow, Kat.” Mickey shakes her head. “I’m truly, truly impressed.”
FOUR
January 1989
FOR A FEW DAYS NOW, THE WEATHER HAS BEEN WARMER, turned the snow to damp rags—ruined, dirty, christening gowns. Phil is slopping through it on the way to our house in his muddy boots, taking big, slow steps, like a cartoon character stuck in tar—exaggerated, as if the thawed ground is sucking him down. His coat looks old, plaid, and scratchy. It was probably his father’s.
Since graduation last June, since he’s started working at Sears full time, Phil has begun to look more and more like a boy who could be his own father. His gangliness has turned, almost imperceptibly, almost overnight, into an old man’s stoop. Now, when he comes to visit me at college, driving his father’s Dodge four hours north, smoking Marlboros all the way, listening to the frenzy of WKLL, then WKSS, then WZZZ—all those stations playing music that sounds like flimsy, brilliant sheets of tin being drilled together in factories all across the Midwest at once—there are ashes on his collar, and that coat smells like exhaust, pollution, a rest stop.
By the time he gets to Ann Arbor, Phil has passed through some of the dirtiest places on earth—gray weather hanging over the highway, heavy with grime, and it’s settled on him, in his hair, which is too long now. The flip at his collar, too blond, the yellow-blond of a school bus. As Phil and I pass by the girls on the hall in my dormitory, they look at him sideways, as if he is a spy from another world, the world we’ve exited, at least for a while—the world of the suburb, the parent, the mall—or as if he might shed that dull world, walking, as if the stagnation of the place he’s driven up from were a virus in his tears, in his blood.
All weekend, Phil will drink beer in my room, play heavy metal too loud on the stereo next to my bed. He’ll look uncomfortable in the cafeteria with his guest ticket and a white plate of Swiss steak on a tray. He’ll go to the library with me while I study, sitting slumped in a reading chair, looking at a magazine, then looking up, scanning the students with no expression on his face.
My roommate doesn’t like him.
He doesn’t look like a college boy.
“What does he plan to do with his life?” Cindy asks.
Cindy’s from Oak Park, Michigan. Her father is an ophthalmologist. Her hair is red—deep, autumn red—and she’s decorated our room with posters of Baryshnikov, arty black-and-white photographs of the dancer in tight tights, arms outstretched like a masculine bird. You can see the bulge that is his balls and penis stuffed into those tights—that stilled masculinity, that muscular dancing.
Sometimes, studying, I look up at Cindy’s posters and feel a flush of blood spread across my chest.
When he came to visit the first time, Phil looked closely at those posters and said, “Gross.”
“He’s got to take care of his mother,” I tell her.
“So?” she says, chomping gum.
Cindy plans to be a genetics counselor and wastes no time on excuses. To her, everyone’s destiny can be plotted out on a graph of X’s and Fs. Some of us should never have been born. She dates a graduate student from the school of natural resources, who believes our natural resources will soon run out, and twice she’s tried to fix me up with his friend, Aaron, who wears hiking boots and bandannas and spends his summers on a research boat off the northern shore of Lake Michigan, looking at muddy weeds under a microscope.
At first, we didn’t hit it off, but on our second date, just before I left for Christmas break, we drank a lot of warm, imported beer, and when Aaron kissed me good night, our tongues flitted wet and silky into each other like the coincidence of fish in a large, murky lake, accidentally touching.