Not That Kind of Girl

by Nia Forrester

  “Derek’s hardly even a friend. Like I said, he’s just a TA from one of my lectures.”

  “Whatever. Let’s go check out his party.”

  Chapter Nine

  Derek’s house is a small bungalow, about a quarter mile from campus with an overgrown yard, and bushes that threaten to take over the path that leads to the front door. The exterior paint is chipped and worn, and there are several holes in the screen door. On the front stoop there is a planter, but it contains no plants. Instead, what sprouts from the arid soil are cigarette butts and burnt matches. The house, which is not that far from Patrick and Wayne’s place, is without a doubt, the neighborhood eyesore.

  I’ve been here before. It’s like a homely friend who nevertheless endears themself you with their warm personality.

  The front door Ian and I get to by skirting around spindly branches. It is flung wide open and the distant sound of classical music drifts out toward us. The screen door slapping shut announces our arrival and then Derek is there, hugging me and welcoming us in.

  Derek is biracial, half-Asian, half -white and has androgynous features that could be either handsome or pretty depending on a trick of light. When he releases me, he turns to Ian and offers a hand.

  “Hey there, friend of Terri’s,” he says.

  He’s kind of corny. But he’s also one of those people who are very easy to know. The kind who sits down and starts talking to you, completely unselfconsciously from the moment he meets you so you’re left wondering whether you met him before and just can’t remember when.

  “Ian,” Ian says shaking the hand that’s offered to him.

  “Ian and Terri, we’re eating out back.” He turns and walks to the rear of the house.

  Derek’s backyard is an oasis compared to the wasteland in the front. He has something like a tarp tent erected and a long picnic table under it. Platters of food are set out. People are walking around the table and filling their plates—real plates, not the disposable kind—heaping them with Mediterranean food. There are goblets in jewel tones, and pitchers of a dark red drink that could be wine, or sangria. Once their plates are full, people choose one of several clusters, groups sitting around the lawn which is verdant and surprisingly well-maintained.

  “Help yourselves,” Derek says. “Then come join us.”

  Ian and I are alone at the picnic table, walking around it and trying to choose things to eat. I get a little of everything, but Ian hovers, undecided by the couscous, wrinkling his nose at the roasted eggplant and tahini and finally getting shredded beef, a piece of chicken, and the seasoned rice with lentils. There are also roasted onions and peppers. I grab a generous tong’s worth and heap them onto his plate like a mother chiding her kid to eat his vegetables.

  “This is some pretty grown-up food for a college party,” Ian says leaning into me and speaking into my ear.

  “Derek’s in the master’s program” I explain.

  “Oh.” Ian looks around, now taking everyone in with more focus. “Makes sense.”

  College students—be they undergrads or grad students—generally look pretty much the same age-wise, but Derek’s friends are more self-possessed. There is none of the showiness, nor the desperate attempts to look like you’re having a good time that there was at Wayne and Patrick’s party. No one is visibly intoxicated, though more than a few look like they might be high.

  Ian and I choose the group that includes our host, and when I sit, he remains standing and hands me his plate.

  “Want something to drink?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  As he walks away, I notice how confident he is, how easily he settled into this new vibe with these new people who could not be more unlike his friends.

  In this crowd, there are no squealing blondes and twerkers. The girls here are the kinds who believe that overt sexiness or prettiness is vulgar and irrelevant. The girls here play down their good looks with shapeless sackcloth-like clothing, large glasses and careless hair. Their nails are bitten to the quick and they don’t get pedicures. They think this makes them feminists.

  Two such girls are sitting with Derek. One I recognize from class and she acknowledges me with smile and nod. Her name is Alex. The other Derek introduces as Gail. When Ian returns, introductions are made again.

  “Gail just went off her meds,” Alex announces matter-of-factly, looking at me and Ian. I guess she’s filling us in on what they were talking about before we got there. “She thinks it makes her … clear when she’s not on them. I think it just makes her crazy.”

  “Crazy is relative,” Gail says, not sounding at all insulted. “It’s my parents who make me nuts. Being away from them, I don’t need all the Vicodin and the Percocet and all that crap. Honestly, I think they’re trying to turn me into a drug addict. Like my mother.”

  Gail gives a bitter laugh. Then she looks at Ian.

  “What do you think? Should I take the drugs?”

  She’s only just met him. She doesn’t care about his opinion really. She just wants him to notice her. That’s another thing about girls in this intellectual-crunchy-granola scene. They don’t attract mates through preening or appearance, they challenge them, they may even insult them to get them to take notice. This, also, they think makes them feminists.

  By singling out Ian, Gail makes it obvious, at least to me, that she noticed him right away, is attracted to him and wants him to notice her.

  Ian, who has a drumstick in his hand and is about to bite into it says, “I have no idea.”

  “You don’t think America is being over-medicated?” Gail continues. She sounds disdainful.

  “Of course America is over-medicated,” Derek chimes in. “The only real question right now though is whether you are.”

  Gail sucks her teeth and sets aside her plate. She reaches into a pocket of her long skirt and pulls out a rollie and lights it.

  “I think this will do me just fine.”

  She lights and takes a deep drag of her joint and Alex and Derek go on conversing without her. Gail takes a few more puffs and tosses her hair from her face then extends the joint in my and Ian’s direction. But really, she’s only offering it to him.

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “Did all your intoxicants last night, huh?” Ian says looking at me.

  He grins and his teeth pull in his lower lip, making it impossible for me not to look at his mouth. He has a perfect mouth, lips like pillows. He kisses me and I swoon. Swoon, when just two weeks ago I would have sworn that ‘swoon’ is a nonsense word that means absolutely nothing.

  “I was not that drunk,” I say smiling back at him.

  For a few seconds we’re in our own little hazy cocoon of highly charged sexual energy. If he grabbed me right now and stuck his tongue down my throat, I would respond without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Okay, so she’s not into it, but how about you?” Gail breaks in, raising her voice a little to return the focus to her. “You want some?”

  “Nah,” he says. “I don’t indulge in that.”

  “Why not?” Gail presses on. “It’s like, you know, spiritual and stuff. Isn’t that something you’d be into?”

  Ian freezes for a fraction of a second and I do, too. Derek and Alex, though they’re doing their own thing, seem to become a little more tuned-in, maybe hearing a tone in Gail’s voice they’re familiar with.

  “Why would I be into that?” Ian asks, narrowing his eyes a little, subtly emphasizing the word ‘I’.

  Gail meets his gaze and smirks a little. She retracts the hand extending the joint and takes another long puff.

  “No reason,” she says in a singsong voice.

  Ian stares at her for a few beats longer and she stands, stretching her arms above her head. Her pits are unshaven—of course—tufts of reddish-brown hair visible against her pale skin.

  “I’m so bored,” she intones, then she turns and wanders off to the buffet table, standing over and then picking up a square of baklava wi
th her hands, licking her fingers as she eats it.

  “This is why she needs to stay on her meds,” Alex says under her breath.

  We all laugh, politely to recognize that something amusing has been said, but not in a way that could be interpreted as ridiculing Gail. Only Ian doesn’t look amused.

  “At the risk of sounding like your middle-school girlfriend Emery or whatever, that was pretty awkward,” I say when Ian and I are alone.

  We’re sitting near a large tree, leaning against its trunk. When we did, Ian made a crack about hoping it wasn’t where Derek’s dog went to do its business, but we sat there anyway, drowsy from the heavy food, the heat, and last night catching up with us.

  Someone is playing a guitar. And everyone’s attention is turned in that direction, rapt. The entire party has begun to feel like a cliché. Soon, we’ll all be swaying back and forth and singing Bob Dylan’s greatest hits.

  “Her name was Everly. And I’m used to it,” Ian said.

  “But what is … it, exactly?” I ask. “I don’t know for sure what was going on there, but it sounded like she knows who you are, and that you’re … I don’t know. It was just weird all around.”

  “I don’t sweat it. That was just some forbidden fruit stuff, that’s all.”

  I narrow my eyes. “Some forbidden fruit stuff?”

  “Yeah. You know. When you want something you think you shouldn’t want. Something you deep down think is wrong for you to want. So you get hostile toward the object of your desire.”

  Like I want him. He could be right. I want him, and he belongs to someone else. And I’ve always been intermittently hostile toward him. I wonder if he sensed that about me. Maybe that’s why he even risked kissing me in the first place.

  “You sure seem to have given this forbidden fruit theory a lot of thought,” I say.

  “You have no idea,” Ian says dryly.

  “And that’s why that Gail chick was being a bitch, you think?” I say. “I thought it might just be average attention-seeking but then she said that thing about spirituality and I wondered if she knew you were Native or something … I don’t know. Anyway, it was weird. She’s weird.”

  “Nah. Probably just some regular ol’ mommy and daddy issues.”

  “You think?” I say, laughing.

  “How ‘bout you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Any mommy and daddy issues?”

  “If I had them, do you think I’d know?”

  “Yeah, I think you would,” he says, his eyes fixed on mine. “Your mom’s passed you said. What’s that been like?”

  I blink, momentarily taken aback by the way he asked the question. Most people shut down when they hear about a dead parent and then carefully skirt around the subject forevermore. That suits me fine.

  “It’s … it’s not like anything,” I say, shifting and pulling a twig from beneath me, where it was digging into my thigh. “It just is what it is.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eight. Almost nine,” I say brusquely.

  “That’s young. Must have been rough. How’d it happen? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  It’s weird. I can’t say it’s comfortable that he’s asking me these questions, but I like that he is. That his expression is extra-focused while he waits for the answers, and he leans in closer, zeroing in not just on what I respond, but on me.

  I can’t recall the last time I’ve felt so … attended to. That sounds strange, but I don’t know any other way to put it. It’s like he’s reading my expression and body language to make sure he doesn’t push too hard, or too far.

  “Car accident,” I say. “She was an ER nurse and sometimes worked late shifts. They say she probably fell asleep behind the wheel. It was a head-on collision with an SUV. One of those ridiculous big ones that don’t have any business on city streets in the first place.”

  Ian nods and his brow furrows.

  “My dad was great though. He is great. And I don’t …” My voice breaks here, unexpectedly. “I mostly don’t remember much about my mom.”

  “Sorry, baby,” Ian says. He puts a hand on my thigh.

  I nod.

  I don’t comment on the fact that he’s called me ‘baby’. I pretend not to notice, and try to ignore the deep, twisting sense of longing that single word opens up inside me.

  “This party really sucks,” I say. “D’you want to go?”

  “I’ve been wantin’ to go,” he admits. “But I thought I’d wait a solid two hours after we ate up all their food.”

  “There you go again,” I say.

  “There I go again what?” Ian looks bemused.

  “Good, Southern boy.” I shake my head.

  “I’m not that good,” he says.

  I stand first. I brush off my shorts and reach for his hand. He doesn’t need me to pull him up obviously. I just want to hold his hand.

  “So … those your people?” Ian asks as we’re walking away from Derek’s house.

  We tapped him on the shoulder as we left, told a bald-faced lie about having someplace else to be and then slipped out just as the guitarist was strumming the beginning of a new folksy song.

  “No. Those are definitely not my people,” I laugh.

  “I didn’t think so,” Ian says with narrowed eyes.

  “Are you trying to categorize me?”

  “Yeah,” he admits. “Only reason I wanted to go. To see who your peoples are.”

  “Maybe I defy categories.”

  “Maybe you do. But … you shall know them by the company they keep.”

  I think about the company Ian keeps. Wayne, whose girlfriend calls him a pig to strangers, and says she thinks he cheats on her every chance he gets.

  I glance at him. “I could say I’m a loner, but I don’t think that’s true. I just haven’t found my tribe here, I guess. I’m sort of thinking I probably never will. At least not before graduation.”

  “Now you just tryna sound pitiful. And I could take offense to your use of the word ‘tribe’, but …”

  I look at him stricken for a moment and then he laughs at me. “Chill. I’m just messin’ with you.”

  “Oh.” I’m relieved. Under no circumstances do I want to be lumped in with the Gails of the world. “And I’m not trying to sound pitiful about my … people. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’ll find them later. Wherever I go to grad school maybe, or if I move to a different city. Unlike a lot of folks, I don’t think college is like the climax of my life or anything.”

  “But some of us climax earlier than others,” Ian says, stifling a smile.

  I give him a look, trying to be stern but can’t pull it off. So instead I just look away again and keep walking.

  “Hey.”

  I don’t look at him, so he says it again.

  He’s misinterpreted me, thinking I’m genuinely annoyed. This is just one of those moments where we misstep because we don’t know each other that well yet. We go back and forth between being at ease and then overly careful again, never sure whether we’ve offended, or should take offense.

  I wish we could fast-forward past the hundreds of awkward moments that come at the start of a relationship and have a full and complete relationship. That’s not too much to ask for, right? I want the whole she-bang. And I want it to have had it all by Monday.

  He holds my arm to stop me and I turn toward him.

  “That was stupid,” he says. “We were havin’ a moment and I made it about … It’s not just about that, y’know? What we got goin’ on here ain’t just about …”

  “What is it about?” I ask.

  “I don’ know,” he admits, shaking his head.

  I don’t know either. Ian pulls me against him. He puts his face in my hair.

  “I just know … it ain’t just about the sex.”

  I smile.

  “But real talk? Been thinking about it all day,” he adds.

  I smile even wider, and it’s because he isn’t looking right at
me that I can say it.

  “I can’t stop thinking about it either.”

  Chapter Ten

  It’s around ten-thirty when a group text comes to Ian’s phone telling him about a bonfire near Whipple Dam State Park in a field about fifteen minutes south on PA-26. Wayne, Patrick and Kwan are heading down there with a bunch of other people and want to know whether Ian is into it. They’re borrowing a friend’s van, stocking it with beer and snacks and heading out in about a half hour.

  “Want to?” Ian asks me.

  I can tell from his expression that he wants to.

  I shrug. “If it’s something you usually do with your friends …”

  He sighs and picks up his phone, speaking aloud as he types. “See you in a short. Me and Tee are in.”

  Then he sets his phone down on the table between us.

  We walked to a nearby Starbucks after leaving Derek’s dinner party and have been here for a while now. It’s almost empty because it’s a Friday night in a college town and people have much more exciting things to do. Like burn things in fields near a state park apparently.

  We went inside the Starbucks just to get water originally, both too full from Derek’s dinner to contemplate any of those thick, high-calorie, masquerading-as-coffee drinks. And even though the sun has gone down, the humidity meant that the walk back to campus would make us sweat. We grabbed one of the sofas in the corner near the door, sipping our ice water, making fun of the mournful Lilith Fair-esque music being piped in.

  “What kinda music you into?” Ian asked. “If this ain’t your jam.”

  “I like hip hop, R&B, the usual Black folks’ stuff,” I said.

  “I’m not into hip hop so much,” he said grimacing as if expecting to be dragged for this unpopular opinion. “But that ain’t for e’rybody to know.”

  “So you front when you’re around the cool kids?”

  “It’s a shameful thing, but I sure do.” His Alabama accent came out real strong with that “sure do”. It made me want to kiss him.

  Instead I laughed. “Your secret’s safe with me. What’re you into then?” I sat up.