"You go," he says, and she laughs a little, mostly out of awkwardness.
"I was gonna say that if you're gonna ask me about the draft, just, y’know, do it."
He doesn't laugh or smile. A few hours ago Willa would have been intimidated.
"I wasn't gonna ask you," he says.
She nods. He turns to face her, reaches for her, leans in to kiss her- and she stops him with a hand on his chest.
"Fuck."
He mumbles it when he withdraws, quietly enough that maybe she wasn't supposed to catch it.
"Hey, listen, it's not...I'm gay," she laughs nervously, "like really really gay, but you were right, you're really nice, and I'm sorry, but I'm just..."
"...yeah, no, I'm sorry. It's cool."
She ducks her head a little to look up into his face, which he's kind of hiding in his jacket.
"Is it? Are we cool? I don't have to go to dinner with you guys if you don't want me to, I won't be offended."
"We're cool. I just didn't realize."
She smiles at him, then looks away a little. It's not the first time something like this has happened, and it's not going to be the last time, she's sure. She ought to start telling guys when they start flirting with her, really, but it always feels like she's trying too hard when she does, so she waits. And then this happens. Only usually she's not crushing on their little sisters.
"I try to wear a lot of plaid," she jokes, "to help people out."
"Is that a thing?"
He's genuinely asking her, and she nudges his shoulder with her own.
"C'mon, no. If it were that simple there wouldn't be a single lonely lesbian on the planet."
He laughs, but he’s clearly still uncomfortable, and she thinks about trying to come up with an excuse to leave before things get any worse. She had tried not to give him the idea that she was flirting back, but she’s been in this position enough times to know that she’s naturally touchier and smilier than most people, that it gets mistaken for something else, except when she wants it to. And if she’s thinking of Riley again, she’s not about to admit it.
***
Dinner is stilted and awkward and for once Riley knows it’s not her.
Quentin, who had been so interested in Willa before, doesn’t even hardly make eye contact with her, or engage in conversation at all. It ends up being that Willa has to talk most of the time to fill the silences that Quentin and Riley keep leaving, and by the end of it even she looks tired. They split the check; Quentin pays for her and Willa pays for herself, and they sit in the car the ten minutes it takes to get back to campus and nobody even says a word.
“I’ll see you around,” Willa says to Riley, when Quentin drops her off at her car, “it was nice to meet you,” but she won’t look directly at him.
Riley waits until Willa’s closed the door to her own car before she climbs into the front seat and turns off Quentin’s radio, demanding his attention.
“What. Happened.”
He turns the radio back on. She slaps his hand out of the way and turns it off again. He won’t make eye contact with her, but he scratches at his beard and she can tell he’s going to answer her.
“Did you know she’s gay?”
“What?”
“She’s gay. In her words, ‘really really’ gay.”
“Did you- did you ask her? Jesus, Quentin!”
“No!”
Riley sinks into the passenger seat and covers her face with her hands.
“You can’t just ask people stuff like that,” she whines, blushing on behalf of Willa but also on behalf of Quentin, because it’s entirely possible that he didn’t know better. And also possibly blushing to think that Willa kisses girls, and likes it.
“I know that,” he says, indignantly, “I tried to kiss her.”
“Jesus Christ,” she hisses, trying to erase that image the second it comes up, “why?”
“Because she’s hot.”
Riley almost says, ‘I know,’ and stops herself just short of it. Instead she lifts her head out of her hands to glare at Quentin, who blinks at her, and then gets a look on his face as if a light bulb ought to be going off over his head.
“Actually, Rilo, I think she likes you.”
The first thing she does is laugh. When he doesn’t laugh with her, she stops laughing and says, a little violently, “shut up.”
“She probably doesn’t want to say anything because she knows you’re not into girls,” he says, and Riley blushes again, betraying herself no matter how much she wishes that she wouldn’t. If Quentin sees it, he doesn’t, for once, just call her out. Instead he turns the radio back on.
“But if you were ever going to date a girl, she would be an awesome choice.”
CHAPTER THREE
It feels like a setback. Riley feels far away when she comes into the gym and asks for the conference room, and for the last half hour of her shift Willa feels bad for watching, like she’s not allowed anymore. She has no way to know what Quentin told Riley, but whatever it was it’s enough to make them both mildly uncomfortable. But she’s not going to let that last.
She joins Riley in the conference room when her shift is up, plopping her books down a few seats over and smiling when Riley looks up at her.
“Do you mind?”
Riley shakes her head. It’s not progress, yet, but maybe the promise of it. Willa’s reminded of trying to introduce herself to her brother’s cat. It’s all about coming up and pretending like the last thing you’re interested in is the cat, even if that’s not the case. The comparison is actually really apt, the more she thinks about it, and she manages to keep herself from trying to start conversation. It’ll be better if she lets Riley come to her.
And she does, eventually.
“I’m thinking about maybe staying another year, you know, like being a super senior or something. I- I could apply to the business school, get a degree in something useful.”
It’s not the conversation Willa thought they’d be having, but at least it’s a conversation.
“Could you play, as a super senior?”
Riley shrugs, and now her avoidance of eye contact seems like it might be purposeful.
“I don’t know. Maybe, maybe they’d redshirt me.”
“Redshirt you?”
Riley’s ears go pink, and Willa tries again, this time with less incredulity in her
“Listen, you’re...you’re too good to redshirt. You’re too good to willingly sign yourself up for that. You can’t just give up on soccer for business school, come on.”
“Why not?”
Eye contact actually turns out to be worse than no eye contact at all. Riley looks like she’s halfway between crying and yelling, and Willa doesn’t particularly want to experience either of those things.
“Why the hell not? If you can do it, why can’t I? You’re happy, right?”
Willa’s mouth falls open, and Riley looks away again, running a hand through her hair. It’s not a question she wants to answer, it’s not a question she even knows how to answer, and it’s a question that her mother and her brothers ask her too often already. But it doesn’t matter to them, the answer. It matters to Riley. She’s just not sure which answer is going to be the most help.
“It’s not the same thing.”
“So you’re not.”
“It’s not the same thing!”
“I need to know!”
She’s not yelling, not yet, but Willa can hear the break in her voice that says she’s about to, and they both freeze. Riley blushes, and Willa reaches out before she can stop herself to touch Riley’s hand where it rests on her laptop.
Riley doesn’t move away from her, but she doesn’t look up, either.
“I need to know that it’s possible to be happy without it.”
The first thing that comes to mind is the first game she watched Riley play in and the stupid smile she could hardly wipe off her face after the goal. She was happy then. She’s happy now. She’s
happy getting to watch Riley play, and it’s not like she’s living vicariously through this ridiculous kid, but it’s close, maybe.
“I’m happy.”
She strokes her thumb across the back of Riley’s hand and then pulls back before she does something stupid like make a move to kiss her.
“I am. I’m happy right now. I’m happy in general. It took a while, and I didn’t- I wasn’t sure that I could do it, but I did it. And you could do it too.”
Riley tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and ducks her head to keep avoiding eye contact; this time Willa thinks it might be to keep herself from crying, because of the way she’s clenching her jaw and tapping at her keyboard and holding her breath.
“Thank you,” she murmurs, but Willa’s not quite done.
“You could do it. But just because you could doesn’t mean you should.”
***
They don’t talk about it much for a few days. It gives Riley a chance to think it over, and she doesn’t throw the pamphlet away, but she doesn’t spend a lot of time looking at it, either. There’s not much to do other than decide and she’s not ready to do that yet. She finds that it’s entirely possible to study and to focus on soccer and not think about her future. She more or less becomes adept at avoiding it in the four days that she gets away with it. Four days of practice, two afternoons of studying beforehand in the conference room with Willa, and then the weekend is there, and there’s a party and her mother breathing down her neck from four hours and a state line away.
“Quentin says you never go out,” she frets, and Riley mentally makes a note to kick his ass the next time she sees him.
“Quentin doesn’t even live here. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“But do you go out?”
“I do my homework. I get good grades. I score goals. Isn’t that enough?”
She’s been asking the same questions for years. She’s been asking the same questions since probably middle school, when she finally got an inkling that the anxiety she felt in social situations could be avoided, no matter what her parents said- and that she wasn’t obligated to put herself in them. She still gets guilted sometimes. She’s stopped wishing that she could be ‘normal’, stopped feeling left out when people are at parties she knows she wouldn’t be able to handle, but she hasn’t stopped wishing that her mother wouldn’t worry.
She doesn’t say that, though. Just gets agitated. It’s easier.
“What does that even mean?”
“Nothing.”
“So you don’t go out.”
Riley clicks her pen so hard that the top sticks and she has to press the point against the table for it to pop back. She chews the inside of her lip. Her mother sighs lowly from the other end of the line, the kind of sigh that means something, no matter how many times she insists that it doesn’t.
“I’m going out tonight.”
She snaps the pen again. This sigh is higher pitched- relief- and Riley knows she can’t have this be a lie.
“Oh, Riley. Good. Let me know how it goes. Have fun.”
“Yeah.”
“Be safe.”
“Alright.”
“Not too safe.”
“Bye, mom.”
It’s over just like that. Riley has to go to the stupid party.
***
Willa backs up her mother, which feels unreasonably like a betrayal. Since they’re in the gym, Riley takes out her frustration on the barbell, but Willa notices even that. Her eyebrows jump when the barbell rises more quickly, and Riley is further annoyed by how much she notices of Willa’s expression, her face.
“Obviously don’t do anything you’re uncomfortable with to a point that you’re going to be miserable,” she temporizes, and Riley takes a moment to rub the rawness of her palms, avoiding eye contact, “but sometimes it’s a good thing to step outside your comfort zone.”
“It’s not that,” Riley lies. Willa sits at the end of the bench. Their knees touch- only a little, given that their legs are splayed- and Riley squeezes her eyes shut to keep from thinking about it. Willa is patient, as always.
“I just know that I’ll hate it. I always hate parties like this. Frat parties.”
“They’re not all the same, you know. I went to a few great frat parties in my day. You don’t have to drink, if that’s what your issue is. I promise you nobody who’s worth a crap cares at all.”
“No,” Riley shifts, then regrets it when their knees touch again, “it’s not that either. I just don’t enjoy myself.”
She’s not being as honest as she ought to be. She hasn’t said the word ‘anxiety’ or even ‘nervousness’ out loud, and she knows, through her frustration, that if she had Willa would have backed off. She doesn’t want to admit it. She doesn’t want Willa to know about her life history, her therapist, her psychiatrist, her Zoloft dosage.
“You mean you haven’t enjoyed yourself so far at any of the parties you’ve been to.”
“Yes.”
“Well then it’s understandable that you don’t want to go. But again, I think, you know- if you just try it- maybe this time will be different.”
Riley reaches for the barbell, but Willa doesn’t reach to help her, just nudges her knee a little bit instead until she drops her hands to her stomach again, defeated.
“Do you know the definition of insanity?”
Willa does. It’s pasted up on the gym wall twenty feet away, a reminder to change up your tactics in order to have a well-rounded workout, or something. Riley already knows, just as she did before, that going to this party is inevitable.
“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” Willa answers, as if reading off of a teleprompter, “clever, Rilo.”
Riley wrinkles her nose, sitting up, swinging just under the barbell by contorting herself just right. Their knees press together properly now, but Willa doesn’t look bothered in the least.
“Don’t call me that. That’s Quentin’s nickname.”
“Okay. My bad, champ.”
“No,” she insists, unable to hide a smile, “just Riley.”
The look they exchange then holds. Willa’s grin seeps into her own until they’re both making ridiculously wide faces at each other, and then all that’s left to do is laugh.
***
The party is as bad as she expected it to be. By the time she gets herself there- 11:30ish- plenty of attendees are already pretty wasted. They don’t waste time here, apparently. These kids drink to get drunk, and they’re pretty damn good at it. Courtney’s been there but Riley doesn’t even have to give her name at the door. The Kappa boys take one look at her and let her right in, tripping over themselves to get her a beer she won’t drink. It’s pretty clear to her that they don’t get new girls coming to these kinds of parties too often, considering that they’re invite-and-athlete-only. Plus, it’s likely that they know exactly who she is, considering she’s the Athlete of the Week and her face and name have been pasted up all over school. She hates it. It happens once a year.
She looks for Courtney, letting the beer grow lukewarm in her clammy hands, but it’s worse than a fruitless search. She does find her roommate, wedged between a closet door and a basketball player, and immediately leaves the hallway, feeling faintly ill. If Brianna’s not there to help her awkwardly coast through social interactions, she has no idea what she’s going to do, other than panic and leave, or cry on someone.
A boy she recognizes from her Econ class notices her and she’s frozen in place while he closes in on her, like a deer just waiting to be spattered onto the road, knowing exactly what’s coming. He’s a football player, too, she remembers eventually, which is why he was invited in the first place. He notices that she’s not drinking her beer and asks if she’d prefer a Coke, but she doesn’t want to take a drink from him, even as ‘okay’ as he seems, so she’s forced to say that she just isn’t even thirsty. He’s very polite. He’s from the south, which is strange unti
l he tells her he was recruited from a private school in South Carolina; he dresses like he’s still there, in pressed tan slacks and a polo shirt in the kind of salmon that only frat boys tend to wear.
“Excuse me,” a voice says that some part of her recognizes as her own, and she disappears into the throng of people crowding the living room, making for the hallway. She thinks of trying for the bathroom, then panics again and thinks better of it; she goes outside and finds somewhere to stand with her back up against the frat house and tries to breathe. She hadn’t even taken her jacket off yet. Her heart is in her throat and she can feel the blood pounding in her ears and every other part of her body, but she can’t tell whether she’s not breathing or she’s breathing too fast. She prays fervently that she won’t vomit where someone might see her.
When Riley fumbles in her pocket for her phone, the only thing to distract her is a text from Willa asking how the party is going. The unexpected gesture of concern and kindness brings tears to Riley’s eyes, and the effort of trying to hold them back just pushes her over the edge.
She’s dialed Willa’s number before she has the presence of mind to stop herself.
Willa answers on the second ring. The sound of her voice makes Riley cry again.
“Hey champ, you okay?”
At first all Riley can only sniffle, and she can hear Willa moving around on the other line.
“Riley?”
“This is terrible,” she manages, gasping.
“Are you okay?”
Riley falls silent for a moment, considering, through the breathlessness and numbness of her panic, whether she’s embarrassed enough to apologize and try to go back inside to the turmoil and press of so many bodies. The thought makes her so lightheaded that she has to press herself into the wall, like she’s going to fall off a cliff if she doesn’t. She can’t answer at first, and somewhere, vaguely, she hears Willa ask it again. More concern in her voice now, which Riley can’t decide whether to be grateful for or mortified by.
The Things She Kept Page 3
