Author: Robin York

I watched a lot of TV and bad movies with Bridget. I went to Quinn’s room with Krishna and split two six-packs and laughed at Harold & Kumar.

I didn’t think about what I was doing.

I didn’t go to the bakery, either. I would have on Tuesday night, but West usually texts to ask if he’s going to see me, and he didn’t. So I didn’t. I slept instead. Straight through the night, like a normal person.

I did it again Wednesday night.

Thursday I sent him four texts, but he didn’t answer them.

Friday I sent him a fifth. WTF, West?

He wrote back three hours later. Sorry. Busy.

Saturday, Sunday—nothing. I went to rugby practice and accomplished my first really great tackle. I hung out with Quinn and Bridget after. I asked Quinn if she’d seen West since break, and she said, “Yeah, why?”

No reason.

By Monday, though, all the stuff I didn’t want to think about was making its existence known. I was starting to feel shitty. The Asshat Chorus was getting loud.

You knew when you invited him over, the men said. You knew when you had him bring the weed. You wanted him to fuck you on top of that roof.

Did I? I can’t remember. I can’t decide. Everything seems so murky.

That night, I broke down and told Bridget what had happened, and she got so pissed at West.

“He can’t treat you like that! It’s not right!”

She convinced me to call him. I left an angry voice mail. I texted again, demanding he get in touch with me. Bridget grabbed my phone out of my hand and called him a “fucker,” which I then apologized for, but he still didn’t text me back.

I couldn’t sleep after that. Bridget snored softly in her bunk above me, and I pulled out my phone and wrote: I feel terrible about what happened on the roof.

I feel dirty.

I feel ashamed.

Why aren’t you talking to me?

In the morning, I wished I could take those texts back. Overdramatic much, Caroline?

But they were sent, and that was that.

It’s Tuesday after class when he texts me back. The phone chimes when I’m lying on my stomach, staring at my fingernails and trying to work up some enthusiasm for lunch.

Nothing dirty about it, West writes.

A whole sentence fragment. How about that?

Then why are you avoiding me?

I’m not. I’m busy.

That never stopped you before.

Sorry.

I wait to see if he’s going to give me a better explanation, but he doesn’t, and I’m so sick of it. I’m sick of him.

I’m sick of myself, too. How am I letting this happen? After what Nate did, I didn’t let the misery get me down. I took action. Now one kiss from West and I’m reduced to this text-groveling?

Fuck that.

Come over to my room and talk to me, I text. Right now.

I have class.

I look at the clock. Not for an hour.

Nothing for a moment. I scroll back through the blue and green bubbles of our conversation, trying to recognize myself in these demands. Trying to recognize the West who rubbed my neck in the apartment, who put his hand on my thigh and asked me what he was going to do about me. The West who said, “This is completely my fault,” right before he kissed me senseless.

Ok, he texts.

And then I wait.

Well, all right, I change into jeans and put my hair down and then I wait.

I don’t know why we have a cliché about watched pots and boiling water. Clearly there should be one about waiting for a boy you kissed while stoned on a roof to come by and explain himself.

A watched West never shows up.

But, you know, less lame.

Finally, after an eternity, he knocks twice. I open the door, and I don’t know. I don’t know. His pale eyes are West’s eyes, and his face is West’s face, and how did I not see him for nine whole days? How did I forget what he does to me?

I want to sink into him, weave our fingers together, kiss his closed eyelids, and welcome him back.

I don’t do it. I’m not completely crazy. But the wanting is there, oppressive as a hand pushing me under.

Kind of beautiful, too.

I look away, desperate to get ahold of myself. He’s wearing a coat that seems gray at first, but when you get close up you see it’s made of black and white stripes close together in a kind of chevron pattern. I can’t imagine where somebody would get a coat like that, except maybe my grandpa’s closet. It should be strange or ugly, but it’s like everything West wears—he makes it seem sexy. Like old-man coats are the thing this year.

“Nice coat.”

He gives me that blank look. As though I’m the woman at the dining hall who swipes his ID. Some anonymous person he barely knows. “Thanks.”

I step back. He’s never been in my room before. It’s a little surprising how small he makes it, just by walking into the middle of it.

“You want me to take that?”

He shrugs off his old-man coat and drops it on the couch. Then drops himself down next to it.

One of his eyebrows is a little lifted, which I guess is supposed to mean, Well, Caroline?

I sit on the bed. I pull my pillow onto my lap, pluck at the pillowcase, which has Smurfs on it. They’re supposed to be ironic Smurfs, but maybe that’s like ironic whale pants. An impossibility.

I remind myself why I made West come over here. Because I kissed Nate and he put my naked pictures online. Then I kissed West and he stopped talking to me. I’m tired of this shit.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re mad at me.”

“I’m not.” He’s fixated on this spot on the floor, like all the world’s secrets are written there, pinhead-small.

“You’re disgusted with me.”

“No.”

“You wish you’d never kissed me.”

He meets my eyes for a fraction of a second. Looks at the secret spot again. “Yeah.” But then he looks back at my face. “No.”

“Which is it?”

“Both.”

“What am I supposed to do with that, West?”

He sighs. His hair falls forward, covering his eyes, and he clasps his hands between his knees, that bracelet at his wrist spelling out the letters of his name, a symbol of everything he won’t share with me. “I told you from the beginning how it’s going to be with us.”

“You said you wouldn’t touch me.”

He nods but doesn’t look up.

“You did touch me, though.”

“I fucking know that, Caroline.”

“Don’t get snippy with me. You don’t have any right. We were both up there. We were both kissing.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one who had to jump off the balcony, aren’t I?”

“That’s why you’re pissed at me?”

“I’m not pissed at you!”

Finally he’s looking at me, but it’s not any help. His indrawn eyebrows and scowling mouth mean he’s mad about something. If it’s not me, then what? “You sure seem like it.”

He stands up. Paces back and forth a few times. Glances at the bunked beds, Bridget’s empty desk, my cluttered one. He picks up the framed picture of me with my dad and my sisters at my high school graduation and sets it back down.

He points to the picture. “You know what I said to him?”

“Who, my dad?”

He crosses his arms. “I said, ‘So that’s your daughter?’ This was after I’d carried you up the stairs and laid you out on the bed. I stood right over you, staring at your tits, and I said, ‘I’m right across the hall. Coed dorms, man. This is going to be sweet.’”

He uses his drug-dealer voice, his stoner voice—utterly fake if you know West but convincingly awful if you don’t. I can hear exactly how it must have sounded to my dad. Like his baby girl was moving in across the hall from a date rapist, or at the very least a lecherous creep.

It’s a miracle Dad ever left Putnam.

“Why?”

“So you’d have a good reason to keep the fuck away from me.”

“Yeah, I get that, but I don’t understand. And don’t try to feed me any garbage about me being rich and you being poor or you being too noble or whatever.”

He makes a face. Walks away toward the window, turning his back on me. “I’m not noble.”

“Then what are you?”

No answer. The silence spins out, Bridget’s Putnam College clock ticking out the seconds—one, two, three, four, five, with no answer—until suddenly West spins around and says, “I’m fucking selfish, all right? I’ve got plans for the future, and you’re not in them. You’re not ever going to be in them, Caro, so it just makes more sense for me to keep away from you so I can focus on what’s important.”

What’s important. Which is not me.

I gaze at Smurfette on my lap, her golden puff of hair and her stupid fuck-me shoes and her dress, and I want to punch her. I want to punch myself, right where it hurts, right where West’s words lanced into the old burning pain beneath my lungs, that vital spot he keeps hitting me in without even caring enough to mean to.

He’s not trying to hurt me. He’s just selfish.

“Don’t look like that,” he says.

“I will look however I want.” I enunciate every word, slowly and carefully, because I don’t want him to know that he’s hurt me.

I turn the pillow over. I trace the outline of Brainy Smurf’s hat. I always identified with Brainy.

“Caro—”

“Maybe you should go.”

He picks up his coat. He walks over to the door. I wait for it to open, wait for him to walk out, wait for the part of my life that doesn’t have West in it to begin.

But he stands there, and then he leans into the door and kicks it viciously, three times. He kicks the door so hard that I jump.

The hair on my arms lifts.

The violence is a bell ringing inside me. An announcement that something is beginning, something’s been unleashed.

He turns back toward me. “I don’t want to go. Okay? That’s my problem, Caroline. I never want to go.”

“What do you want, then?”

I’m almost in tears. I’m almost shouting, because I don’t know. I’ve never known.

He walks over, drops his coat on Bridget’s bunk, braces both hands on the metal framework of the bed. His feet are wide, straddling mine, blocking out the ceiling light. I can’t see his face, but when he says, “I want to kiss you again,” I can hear the softness of his mouth. I can almost feel it.

West nudges my foot with his, boxes in my knee. “I could feed you a line about how I want that because I think you need somebody to show you you’re not broken, how you’re beautiful and sexy and if you’re dirty it’s only in the good way, the way everybody is dirty. I could tell you that, and it would be true, but what’s really true is that I’m selfish and I want you. I don’t know how to stop wanting you. I’m just really fucking tired of trying.”

He shifts slightly, letting the light loose around his head. It brightens his ear, shows me his eyes. They are hard and glittering and full of something I’ve seen there a hundred times but never knew what to call it.

Need. Greed.

This is what West looks like when he’s greedy.

His greed is for me.

I can’t think. Breathing is all I can handle. Breathing and watching him.

“I wanted you from the minute I saw you,” he says. “I want you right now, and you can barely stand me. I can barely stand me, so I don’t know why you put up with my shit, but even right now, when I hate myself and you’re pissed at me, I still want to push you down on the bed and take off your shirt and get inside you. Get deep inside you, and then deeper, until I’m so deep I don’t even know what’s me anymore and what’s you.”