by Sarina Bowen
“Of course he is,” I said. And it might even be true. Though gentlemanliness had never been high on my list of important qualifications for a date.
And last week I’d finally paid the price.
“Good,” Mom said.
“Yeah,” I said, distracted.
“Say yes, darling,” my mother corrected. “Yeah sounds cheap.”
“Yes, Mother,” I intoned. “I should go. He’ll be here in a minute.” At least I hoped he would. It would stink to be stood up tonight of all nights. But after all that had gone wrong this week, I probably wouldn’t even be surprised.
I hung up the phone and spun around. “Okay. Last call, here. Are you sure this dress doesn’t look slutty?” My fingers worried the fabric between my breasts.
Gently, Katie swatted my hand away. “First of all, we don’t use the word ‘slutty’ when referring to ourselves. And that dress looks sexy as all hell. In the best possible way. I hope your basketball player brought a hankie to wipe up his own drool.” She got up off the bed and turned me around by the shoulders, so that I was facing the mirror again. “The dress is navy blue, K1. It’s an anti-slut color. And the contrast with your hair is just awesome. Use your eyes, babe.”
“Thanks,” I whispered, trying to see things her way. The dress I’d chosen was cut in a halter style. Until tonight, I hadn’t ever stopped to wonder why we were dressing up for this weeknight party, where charity work was supposed to happen, too. But sorority girls, I’d discovered, were always looking for an excuse to get dolled up.
Yet when guys were around (which was always) we were supposed to be grateful if they’d worn khakis instead of sweats, and a button-down instead of a faded Harkness t-shirt. In fact, if they wore their baseball caps frontwards instead of backwards, that was dressy.
Double standard, much?
I dabbed the eyeshadow applicator into the silver shadow and skimmed it across one eyelid and then the other.
Once more I squinted critically at the girl in the mirror. The dress showed a lot of shoulder. But it wasn’t too short, which was important. I needed to be able to bend over tonight without giving anyone a show. And the halter top had just enough coverage that I wouldn’t expose my cleavage if I leaned forward.
“You look great. Now go,” Katie prompted, swatting me on the rear. She gave me a smile in the mirror and slipped out of my room.
I slipped my feet into my most authoritative shoes — black suede Prada pumps with a three-inch heel. Then I took one last look in the mirror. Katie had been right. This dress was perfect. It was sexy without showing off. And my hair looked fabulous, and the jewelry was subtle.
Fine. I looked fine. Not slutty. I stood there a little longer, willing myself to believe it.
Usually I didn’t think so hard about these things. I liked to look sexy. And, to be perfectly blunt, I liked sex. A lot. I’d never been afraid to admit that to myself. Not until last week, anyway.
For the most part, coming to Harkness — and getting out from under my conservative parents’ roof — had been liberating in all the best ways. In high school, sex had to be sneaky. It’s hard to get your freak on when you’re listening for footsteps outside your bedroom door. Or — God forbid — in the backseat of your boyfriend’s little BMW convertible.
At Harkness, sexy times weren’t so fraught. And although I’d had to train my roommate Scarlet to watch out for the bandanna on the doorknob of our room, the logistics were a lot easier.
For the first two months of the semester, I’d had a blast. In September, I’d dated a freshman tight end. He had an eight-pack like you read about and gorgeous, muscular thighs. But he wasn’t much of a conversationalist, so I’d had to let him go. Then there was Dash, who I should probably start calling The Fullback Who Shall Not be Named. He was another freshman with lickable abs. But I broke up with him in November, because he wasn’t very nice to me when we had our clothes on.
I’d meant to take a break from football players after that. After all, it was hockey season now. And in the spring there would be lean, muscular lacrosse players to cheer for and party with.
But then a week ago I’d run into Dash again. And I’d done something so incredibly stupid that the humiliation was going to follow me to my grave. A few stupid hours had turned me into someone who second-guessed her wardrobe, her makeup, her life choices…
My phone buzzed with a text. Evening! I’m downstairs in your courtyard. Andy B.
Be right down, I replied. It was sort of cute that he’d added his last initial, as if I might have forgotten who I’d invited to this little party. Andy Baschnagel was a basketball player. I didn’t, as a rule, do basketball players. The sport just wasn’t sexy to me. Those long baggy shorts and even longer arms? Eh. Maybe if I went to Duke or Michigan, I’d understand the appeal.
Anyway, I hadn’t invited Andy B. to this party because he was a basketball player. I’d done it because he wasn’t an asshole (I hoped). And because I’d pledged Tri Psi and could not show up at one of their events without a date. And for extra points, he had to be A) an athlete and B) an upperclassman. With Andy, I could check both of those boxes.
No matter that I was suddenly having trouble remembering why I cared about checking those boxes. It was too late to wonder about that now. I had a party to survive, and a guy waiting downstairs. It wasn’t his fault that I would rather hide under the bed than face the people at this party. And I’d absorbed at least some of the ladylike manners my very proper mother had taught me.
It was time to march down there and make the best of it.
When I reached the courtyard, Andy was standing there texting someone, a smile on his face.
He looked friendly enough. And he was pretty cute for a skinny guy. But still, all that attention to his phone was not an auspicious sign. I was sick of guys who spent the whole evening texting their buddies, calculating everyone’s odds of getting some action later.
“Hi,” I said carefully. He still hadn’t noticed me.
His head jerked up, his face guilty. “Sorry. Hi.” He offered me his hand to shake. “I’m Andy.”
For a second, I didn’t step forward. I mean… what guy under forty shakes hands like that? Recovering myself, I took his hand, which was warm even on this cold night. “Hi. I’m Katie.”
“I know,” he smiled. Then he shoved his phone into his pocket even though it chimed with an incoming text.
“Don’t you have to get that?” I asked. It was a little bitchy of me, honestly. But I needed to know what I was going to be dealing with.
“Nah,” he said. “She can stuff it.”
“Who can?” I couldn’t help but ask, even as his phone rang in his pocket.
He grinned. “My sister. Sorry. Let me get rid of her.” He jerked the phone out and swiped to answer. “Delia. Go dissect a cadaver or something. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” There was a pause. “I love you too, even though you’re bossy like Hitler. G’night.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “I think you got the last word.”
“It’s only a temporary victory. She always wins eventually. But that’s okay, because she’s already doing me a big favor.”
“What kind of favor?” Together we walked out of the Fresh Court gate, heading down College Street, toward Fraternity Row. I kept our pace slow, and it wasn’t even because of my three-inch heels. I was dreading this party.
“Well, Delia is going to med school. Every Jewish family needs a doctor, see. And now the pressure is off me.”
I laughed again. That was, like, twice in two minutes. “Really? Are your parents doctors?”
“Nope. Dad is an accountant, Mom is a librarian. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a cultural thing. The deli by our house even has a platter on their catering menu called the ‘My Son is a Doctor’ plate.”
“But they won’t be ordering it for you?”
“No. I might go to law school, though. That’s second best.”
“Interesting. My mom doesn’t
care what I do, just as long as I look pretty doing it.” I shouldn’t have said that. It was really too much sharing for the first ten minutes of a blind date.
“Well…” he cleared his throat. “At least one of us is a shoo-in for meeting the parental expectations.”
My face burned a little then, because I’d made it sound like I was fishing for compliments. “That’s nice of you,” I said quietly. “Do you have just the one sister?”
“Nope” he said cheerfully, giving me another smile. When Andy smiled, his angular face softened up, taking him from ordinary to pretty damned attractive in one leap. It was kind of spellbinding, really. “I have another sister, too. Spent my whole life getting henpecked and waiting for the bathroom. I thought I came to Harkness to get away from them. But then I couldn’t figure out why my freshman bathroom was so gross and smelly all the time.”
“See, girls aren’t so bad,” I said.
“True dat.”
We were within a hundred yards of the Tri Psi house now, and I had slowed our pace practically to a crawl.
“Do your feet hurt?” Andy asked, looking down.
That made me smile, because it was so obvious that Andy did have sisters. “My feet are fine. I’m just having second thoughts about tonight, that’s all.” I stopped walking altogether.
Andy stopped too, folding his arms. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I sighed. (Even though “yeah” sounded cheap. Sorry, Mom.)
He stood very still, studying me. “Look,” he said, tugging on an ear. “Is it me? I mean, if you changed your mind…”
“What?” Oh, hell. I reached out to put a hand on his arm, giving it a squeeze. “Jeez, no. You are not the problem. This is all on me.”
But he was still frowning, and his brown eyes were filled with concern. “Then what’s the matter?”
“Well…” my eyes drifted toward the big white house on the corner. I’d always had fun there. But tonight I didn’t want to set foot in the place. “I’m pledging the sorority. And we just spent a whole lot of hours setting up a holiday toy drive. The party for the kids is tomorrow. And tonight we’re supposed to wrap the gifts, which should be fun, right?”
“Sure?”
“But the Beta Rho guys are setting up our tree on the sun porch. And I really don’t feel like seeing them tonight, that’s all.”
“Is one of them your ex, or something?”
I let out a big old sigh. “Yes. But also his friends… There are several guys that I don’t want to see.”
Andy looked toward the house, and then down at me. “Do you mind if I ask why? I mean… are they scaring you?”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that. It’s just…” The moment stretched out, because there was no way I could actually tell him why. It was deeply embarrassing to me, and if he knew what I’d done, he’d stop looking at me the way he was looking at me now. His eyes were soft, and he’d given me his complete attention. He looked at me as if I were important. And I didn’t want to see how that expression would change if he heard the stupid thing that I’d done.
But he was waiting for an answer. And I owed him one, because I was the idiot who had us standing out here in the cold.
“Okay,” I tried. “My mother has a saying that you shouldn’t do anything you don’t want reported on the front page of the New York Times. And I’ve never been very good at following that rule, although I wish I were. Because my ex and his pals weren’t very nice about… a recent embarrassing episode.”
Again, Andy’s brown eyes darted over to the sorority house and then back. But his frown lost some of its depth. With what I’d just told him, he would probably assume that I’d gotten drunk and puked all over the place, or something. “Well, okay. Going in or not is your call. We could always just go for ice cream at Scoops instead. I saw on Facebook that they made a new batch of salted caramel today. That’s my favorite flavor.”
I reached across to give his arm another squeeze. “I like your style, Andy. And it’s tempting. But then they win, right?”
Andy shrugged. “You could look at it that way. Or you could just say that life is too short to spend even ten minutes with assholes.”
Aw. This guy! I liked him already. “You are a very smart man. But I spent a lot of time on this charity thing, and if I don’t see it to completion, I’m going to feel bad about that, too. So tonight I’m going to put on my big girl panties and give it a shot.”
“Fine.” His face lit up then with another winning smile. “But if you change your mind, what’s the word? Give me a code so I’ll know when to help you bail out.”
“How about ‘scoop’? As in ice cream.”
“Deal. If you say ‘what’s the scoop?’ we’re outie.” Then he held out his arm in that formal way, as if escorting a lady to dinner inside the pages of a Jane Austen novel. That was even weirder than shaking my hand. But so what? I took his arm, and in we went.
-Andy-
Together, we climbed a set of wide steps, passing a perfect row of rocking chairs on the porch. Until tonight, I’d never been inside of a sorority house. To me, they were mythical places, where the toilet seat was always down and the air smelled of flowers instead of feet. I opened the door, then stood aside for Katie.
And then we were inside, and the place did not disappoint. Like so many of the buildings at Harkness, Tri Psi had been built about a hundred years ago. The big front room had high, beamed ceilings. On one wall rose an oversized stone fireplace, where orange flames licked the air behind an iron metal grate.
All around the room, shiny-haired girls buzzed like bees. It was just the sort of estrogen-fueled chaos that reminded me a lot of my sisters.
Katie tagged one of the girls on the elbow as she flitted by. “Amy?”
She turned to look over her shoulder, smiling at us. “Hey! You look gorgeous. And have I met your date?”
I was introduced to Amy, who seemed to be in charge. She rattled off a bunch of instructions to Katie at warp speed — there were tables to set up and rolls of paper to find and toys to wrap. Katie nodded along at this barrage of details. But when Amy moved on, Katie turned to me with a smile. “First things first.” She sidled up to a table bearing a metal tub full of ice, with dozens of bottles of beer nested inside. This was obviously not a keg-and-red-plastic-cup affair.
“Thanks,” I said when she handed me a cold beer. “What’s next? You can put me to work.” Honestly, I was thrilled that this party had a mission other than small talk or — God forbid — dancing.
In high school, I was the scrawny nerd who never got invited to parties. Even though I’d grown into my long legs and stopped getting shoved into lockers years ago, I had never mastered small talk. And we won’t even talk about what kind of a dancer I was. Because that way lies the abyss.
College had been much more fun for me than high school. Except for my nonexistent love life, I was happy at Harkness. Although our basketball team kind of sucked, my teammates were happy to have me. And on a basketball court I always knew what to do. I knew to always be ready to catch the pass. To find an opening and go for it.
But at a party? It was like I’d never received the playbook that everyone else got at birth. A party with Katie Vickery was double trouble, because her hotness made me into more of a bumbler than usual. A job was just what I needed.
Katie shifted her weight from one long leg to the other. “Well… most of the guys will be in that room,” she tilted her head toward an arched doorway at the side. “They’re putting up the tree. But if you wanted to stay here with me, you could help with the wrapping.”
For a second I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to be underfoot. But there was something hesitant in in Katie’s expression. As if perhaps she could use a little backup. “I’d just as soon help you, if that’s okay,” I said.
I knew I’d made the right choice, because the most beautiful smile lit her face. “Awesome. Then will you help me set up a folding table? Last time, mine fell down o
n one end, like a wounded camel. And all the Halloween pumpkins went rolling off.”
Well, okay then.
There was a stack of collapsed folding tables leaning against one wall. I grabbed one and let Katie show me where to set it up, which took about sixty seconds. Then I drank my beer while she went running off for wrapping paper and tape. The beehive was in full swing around me. There were girls on the old wooden staircase, wrapping strands of Christmas lights around the banister, and girls toting boxes of Christmas cookies through the front door.
Katie returned with three enormous rolls of wrapping paper. “I’ll just grab the first stack of gifts,” she said.
“Are you sure I can’t help with that?” I asked.
She waved me off. “It’s mayhem back there. I’ll be right back.” True to her word, she soon reappeared with a stack of boxes. They were rainbow looms — those things that little kids used to make bracelets out of rubber bands.
Measuring the boxes, I began cutting pieces of Santa Claus paper to size. Functioning as an assembly line, Katie and I became a wrapping machine. I cut. She folded and taped. Working side by side made it easy for me to admire Katie. As she moved, her silky hair fell over her shoulder like a curtain. It made me want to sift my fingers through it, to see if it was as soft as it looked. And the way her dress skimmed her hips was making me a little bit crazy. In a perfect world, I would have loved to fit my hands around her waist.
Down, boy. I lowered my head and cut another rectangle of wrapping paper instead.
When every box was wrapped, Katie disappeared for a minute into a closet, returning with a towering stack of… basketballs! Some of them were ordinary basketballs, and pretty good quality. Others were meant for little kids, with cartoon pictures drawn all over them.
“Now we’re talking,” I said. “Those are some lucky kids if they’re getting these.”
“Glad you think so,” she said. “But they’re not going to be easy to wrap.”
I saw what she meant. The balls were in half-boxes, which meant that one side would cave in a bit when we taped it. “It will work,” I told her. “This is just karmic payback for all those years my mother had to figure out how to wrap basketballs for me in blue and white Hanukkah paper.”
