by Lola West
As if on cue, I heard a whistle and then a holler from the front room. “Yoo-hoo? Anybody home?” It was Katie, the proof that I had women friends. She didn’t have to yell. We could hear her as if she was standing right next to us. Apparently, the old house where S.A.F.E. is located has paper-thin walls.
“Who would respond to that?” That was Pete. “Yo! Dipshit! Are you here?”
I had forgotten that I told them to meet me. We had made a plan to go to the mall. New school year, new duds. There was no way they would understand me inches from Lua, laughing and yukking it up with some Jack and Jill from my community service assignment. Propelled into action by their impending presence, I jumped up from my chair and took a step back, pulling my earbud from Lua’s ear.
“Sorry,” I said, awkwardly shoving the headphones into my pocket.
Raina and Isaac were both staring at me with furrowed brows. Lua sighed and shook her head slightly, just enough that I could register her disappointment. Katie came through the door first.
“Hell-low… There you are.” Her smile was plastered to her face. “Lua, Raina, so lovely to see you both again.” She turned to Isaac. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.” She extended her hand. “Katie Sullivan, and you are?”
Issac stood, his etiquette on par with hers. “Issac James, and the pleasure is mine.”
Pete busted a gut. “Jesus Christ, what is this, the eighteenth century?”
Without turning to face him, I pointed over my shoulder with my thumb. “This is Pete.”
Pete waved.
I needed to get out of there. The intros and hellos were bad enough. I was starting to get a tension headache, and I couldn’t look at Lua because I knew that if I did, I’d see scorn in her eyes. Literally, as soon as my life came knocking, I weirded the fuck out. She was right. Her and I was a no-no, too big, too complicated.
“Well, thanks for an interesting day,” I directed my comment to Isaac and Raina, but it was really for Lua. “I guess you’ll email me my hours and obligations and stuff.”
Raina nodded. It seemed like she was pissed. Somehow, I let her down too.
“Great, later then.”
No one answered me. I turned, heading for the door, Pete instantly on my tail. Of course, Katie said goodbye, but she didn’t linger either.
Seconds before I could pull open the front door and be out of Raina, Isaac, and Lua’s earshot, Pete said, “That green-haired one’s a little hottie, but man, the curves on the senator’s summer nightmare. Whoo-wee. And what about you, Kate, you in for a little taste of chocolate? He seemed right up your alley, circa an era before casual behavior.”
I knew they could hear him. He sounded sexist and racist and like everything they hated. There was no way to tell them that Pete wasn’t really a bad guy. There was no way to explain that he was acting, throwing around his bravado because he trusted no one and felt inadequate around people who had purpose, people who liked themselves. I couldn’t even explain my friendship with him because divulging the fact that time and time again he acted like my flak jacket and jumped in front of the senator’s distaste for me, meant telling the secret truth about what a fucking douche the senator was. So, there was no fixing it. There was nothing I could do. It was just another reason that I didn’t belong at a table with them, casually shooting the shit and sharing my earbuds with Lua.
But even so, I couldn’t just let it lie, so I snapped at him, “Shut up, asshole, and don’t be such a fucking dick.”
He wasn’t expecting my response, but he took it in stride. “Jesus. Sorry. I didn’t know you were on your period.”
Not better.
From behind the paper-thin wall, Lua started to laugh.
It dawned on Pete that they could hear him, and then he was laughing too. He hollered, “Shit. Sorry.”
Raina answered him, “No worries. You’re not half bad yourself, that is, if I was into pasty white frat boys with a not so subtle racist and sexist attitude.”
“Alright-y then, if that ever is a fetish that you’d like to explore, Drew knows where to find me.”
I grabbed him by the elbow. “Out. Now.” Thankfully, he did as he was told.
Katie followed him out, and as I shut the door, I heard Raina call out, “Bye, Drew. We love you!”
26
Lua
Hanging out in Raina’s office had become the norm for me. Having an office was one of the perks of being part of S.A.F.E.’s leadership. That said, the offices provided are pretty perfunctory—big metal desks, two chairs, a wastebasket, not enough square footage to move. It took Raina less than a week to become wholly unsatisfied with her surroundings and declare that if she was going to work then a ‘spatial makeover’ would be required because her office needed to ‘emotionally resonate’ her leadership style. Isaac and I helped her move out the monster desk that Hamilton provided, and Raina salvaged an area rug and a coffee table from somewhere and then surrounded the table with cushions for lounging on the floor. She’d also gotten up on a ladder and hung multicolored sarongs over the fluorescents. Now, it basically looked like Moroccan harem, only like the best, most empowered harem ever.
Hanging in Raina’s office was pretty much my go-to when I wasn’t actually going to school. I was taking five classes, but they were more time-consuming than complicated. The subject matter of my classes was pretty mixed, one journalism course, an intro to media studies class, a pottery class, and two political classes, one focused on the civil rights movement and an intro to women’s studies class. Admittedly, I could have easily passed both the intro to women’s studies and the pottery class when I was ten. I’ve had posters of Bell Hooks and Gloria Steinem hung on my bedroom walls since preschool and there is a potter’s wheel in one of the art studios on the thrive. Any thrive kid can make basic cups and bowls and stuff, mostly because it’s a useful skill and it’s fun so we teach everyone how to throw clay. My pottery isn’t spectacular, but it’s technically on point. The civil rights class and the media studies class were also in my wheelhouse, but those professors were more demanding, so I think they would have suited fifteen-year-old me. I took all these classes that didn’t really challenge me on purpose. It was Joe’s idea. He said I should make my first semester as “easy as pie.”
When he regaled me with this idea, we were lying in my bed, side by side, reading, him, some weird avant-garde art journal and me, my Hamilton course catalogue. At first, I thought he was insane, and I told him as much. “I’m going to college to upgrade my brain, Joe. Why on earth would I take classes that I could pass in my sleep?”
“So you don’t get tripped up on the transition.”
“What?”
“I love you, Lu, but going from a full-time thriver to a full-time college student sounds pretty dicey to me. Why not reduce the initial collegiate stress-load so that you can get the A’s you will so clearly desire, while still leaving space for your mind to adjust to living in the mainstream, surrounded by mainstreamers?”
All I can say is thank God I listened to him. While my classes weren’t demanding, my day-to-day life at Hamilton was totally overwhelming. First, there was Chrystal, who, despite the occasional flicker of humanity, remained endlessly unwelcoming. Mostly, she was temporarily normal when she wanted something from me. For example, she and I had a borderline civilized discussion when she realized that Drew’s community service and my work-study were one and the same, but after a few questions, she seemed unimpressed with my knowledge about Drew, and we returned to the status quo of crazy-crazy-might-make-you-cry-and-may-be-stealing-your-socks-and-possibly-your-mascara-Chrystal. Considering I know more about Drew than Chrystal could possibly imagine, I decided that this particular exchange actually ended in my favor; however, Chrystal did not see it that way. She called me selfish and unmotivated, noting that if she were in a similar situation, she would have helped me further my goals or at the very least try to elevate her own social status by gaining his favor. Her exact words, “gain his favo
r.” As my father would say, Chrystal was a peach a half. Processing my exchanges with her was more time-consuming than I’d like to admit. She often got me so revved up that I had to hide in the stairwell and call Joe just to get my heart rate to return to normal.
Raina said that learning to deal with a nightmare roommate was a collegiate rite of passage. Obviously, Raina and I had become close. I adored her and by some miracle she thought I was the cat’s meow. She let me complain about Chrystal ad nauseam and she really got a kick out of all the idiosyncrasies and unusual talents that come with growing up on the thrive. In almost every meeting when something came up that S.A.F.E. needed, like someone to paint faces at the fall carnival or someone to design and build a structure, like the ‘soapbox’ for the November anti-turkey day, ‘No Thanks For Taking’ performance, Raina, with smiling eyes and pixie-like energy that I couldn’t deny, would turn to me and stare, waiting, letting the quiet fill the room until I piped in and said, “I know how to do that.” My renaissance-like mastery of stuff had become an inside joke. Every time it happened, she clapped her hands with glee, like she’d won the damn lottery. It made me feel wanted. But sometimes my new friendships also felt like pressure.
Raina and Isaac were friends before I met them and to their credit, they welcomed me with open arms. They included me or at least tried to include me in everything they did, and I honestly liked them, but while I’d made new friends from time to time in my life, I was not used to counting on relative strangers or trusting them. Growing up, all my friendships were something like the one I had with Joe. I knew everything about my thrive friends. I knew who their parents were and what their most embarrassing moment was. I knew what they were like when they were hungry, tired, or overwhelmed. I knew what pissed them off and who they lusted after. I knew that we were family and that they would be more likely to sink with me than to pull me under. That feeling, an utter wholeness in terms of your sense of community, that was what the thrive was all about.
You can’t have that feeling with new friends. I never expected that I would. I mean how could they compete with every day since birth, but I wasn’t prepared for how unsettled it made me feel. So, secondly, in addition to winning the roommate lottery, I felt like I constantly had to be on guard, like at any moment my new friends would change their minds and kick me to the curb because I wasn’t cool enough or thoughtful enough or creative enough or something totally ridiculous like I ate all the jelly beans and they were saving them for a jelly bean party that they were secretly having without me. This was particularly trying because I had secrets I couldn’t tell, which felt like lying. It sounded worse than it was; I just felt like the only person that I could trust one hundred percent was me. It was isolating.
Finally, and perhaps most complicated, there was the issue of Drew. He was everywhere. I was very clear with Raina that there was no reason to worry about both Drew and I working at S.A.F.E. I was so clear, and apparently so believable, that she scheduled us both for our weekly overnight shift together. An overnight shift was something you agreed to do if you worked at S.A.F.E. Basically, the peer hotline and emergency resources that S.A.F.E. provided were available twenty-four hours a day so every night two people manned the phone lines and the front desk from twelve a.m. to six thirty a.m. The schedule for your shifts was based on your class schedule. If you didn’t have class on Wednesday or your classes on Wednesday were in the late afternoon, well, then you worked the Tuesday night/Wednesday morning shift. I had one class on Wednesday at four p.m. Apparently, Drew’s schedule was similar. When I found out that we were going to be at the same college, I imagined that we would cross paths. I pictured us bumping into each other in the library and trying to not make eye contact. I saw half smiles across rooms filled with people at parties and ‘excuse me’s’ in line at the cafeteria, not the two of us sharing a desk every Tuesday night for six and a half hours. In my head, I have come to refer to Tuesday evenings as Torturously Tumultuous Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings as Wired Wistful Wednesdays.
Manning S.A.F.E.’s hotline was a catchall. So, anytime the phone rang it could be something as serious as date rape or something as uncomplicated as how do I find the health center. Our goal was to be the peer point of contact. The people our fellow students trusted to lend an ear and provide appropriate resources without our judgment. Our motto was listen and refer. Callers were anonymous. I hadn't mentioned it to Raina, but Drew never answered the phone. I didn’t notice it at first because I took my job at S.A.F.E. so seriously that I instinctually grabbed the phone whenever it rang. After my first few calls, I noticed that I was doing that and the next time the phone rang I nodded toward it, offering the call to Drew. He shrugged his shoulders, scrunched his nose, and gave a little nonchalant shake of his head, as if to say, ‘oh no, that’s okay, I’ll get the next one.’ Only there was no chance of that happening. I recognized the tone of his behavior right away. Go-ahead-and-answer-the-phone-Drew was the not-so-distant cousin of another Drew I was familiar with, Of-course-I’ve-ridden-the-subway-Drew. Drew acted nonchalant about not answering the phone because he was embarrassed and afraid, or he felt he couldn’t answer the phone and he didn’t want me to see that side of him.
So far, we hadn’t gotten two calls at once, so it wasn’t an issue. I knew I should have talked to Raina about it, but despite myself, I didn’t want her to think he couldn’t do it because I knew he could. I tried to lead by example. I answered calls and after I hung up, I conferred with him about what I did under the guise of checking my own responses. I hated catering to his silly machismo behaviors, but it was so much easier than getting him to admit that he felt inadequate and in need of coaching.
Honestly, we didn’t get tons of calls on Tuesday nights. Supposedly, the weekends were really busy, because people were partying and that could lead to both physical and emotional turmoil so there were lots of bleak calls and lots of I’m wasted and need a ride home calls, but on Tuesday, if anything it was mostly thoughtful calls. People who couldn’t sleep because they felt overwhelmed by stress or people who wanted to chat about safe sex or their love lives or their fears. Deep stuff, but also stuff that wasn’t dire and could have waited till tomorrow if need be, and honestly, most of the calls tapered off after one thirty a.m.
This meant that I spent hours alone with Drew. At first, I thought being alone with Drew would be crazy awkward. But mostly, we watched television. I’d never watched so much television in my life. Drew used his different instant watch accounts to provide us with this seemingly endless distraction. In the first month we binged The Man in High Castle, and then we were on to Netflix and Orange is The New Black. I brought snacks and there was very little talking. Well, that’s not exactly true. We talked but only about the television we were watching and the calls I was answering, nothing personal. No questions about my transition to college life, no mention of our past, just conversation that was completely in context. Occasionally, when the television we were watching drifted toward something sexy, I would think that there was a certain tension in the room, but honestly, I wasn’t really sure. Mostly, it felt like when I said that we were going to be friends, Drew committed and committed hard. So, my time with Drew was very friendly. He was professional. He was kind. We laughed and enjoyed each other’s company, but as usual our interactions were like an island, isolated to the moment at hand, separated from the land mass that was our past and our feelings. And it had been that way all semester.
Of course, Drew was better at that kind of turn it on/turn it off behavior than I was so for most of our Tuesdays together, I would catch myself drifting off into dreamy-Drew land. He’d be sitting there, intensely focused on whatever we were watching, nibbling at the popcorn I brought. (Bringing snacks only seemed appropriate considering he was paying for all the instant watching that we were doing.) Anyway, he’d be there, being all engrossed in whatever show, and I would catch myself letting my eyes trace his jawline or lingering on how his thighs filled out his jeans after
he shifted in his seat or seeing his fist close around a handful of popcorn and wishing it was a handful of me. On these occasions, I would excuse myself to go to the bathroom and hyperventilate. Sometimes, I was blood-boiling pissed off that he could just be fine and appear uninterested and other times I was damn near hysterical that I told him we should just be friends.
Then, a couple months in, right before Thanksgiving break, Raina asked us if we would mind unpacking some supplies that had arrived in the mail because she just hadn’t gotten around to putting them away. The task seemed easy enough and we agreed but then, when we were both in the supply closet with three big boxes of stuff, it became apparent that there was going to be an issue: proximity. There was a lot of waiting and scooting and sucking in breath or hugging the walls. It was then that I realized that Drew intentionally never made physical contact with me at all. I had noticed right away when he didn’t talk to me, and I intuitively understood that was some misguided effort to make it easier for me, like he wanted me to devise the nature of our interactions, but this no touching thing was different. It crossed my mind for a second that maybe he didn’t want to touch me, but I quickly dismissed that idea as lunacy derived from the newest voice in my head—recently mainstreamed and strangely self-conscious Lua. Real Lua, thrive-bred Lua, knew that Drew had outright told me he wanted me, and I said no. He didn’t stop wanting me. He started controlling his want for me because I asked him to.
And so, I figured he wasn’t touching me because it tempted fate, no pun intended. Touching me would trigger Drew’s desire, so he’d sworn off it. Which was all fine and good, only his no touching rule was all kinds of triggering for my desire. Literally, once I realized that there was absolutely no physical contact between us, not even a mistaken brush here or there, even the tiniest glimmer of a touch made me wanton. That night in the storage closet, I was basically in heat; if humans were like dogs, then every guy for miles would be howling at my windows. Every time he would go for more supplies and have to squeeze past me arms up, like a cactus, abs tight, the warmth of his breath pushed against my neck, I would wind up, my breathing would quicken, and my skin would flush. And then when he returned, I could feel every stir of air when he shifted to stack the rolls of paper towels or plastic silverware behind me. My tongue felt thick in my mouth and I wanted the heel of my hand against the throbbing between my thighs. But I didn’t. I took a deep breath and prayed for the strength to maintain the status quo, because even if I wanted him and he wanted me, it didn’t work. It would be ugly and painful. Drew had proven time and again that he didn’t know how to be the man for me.
