by Sarah Miller
"God, this is great!" Cullen shouts.
Gideon shifts uncomfortably.
"I'm serious," Cullen says. "Don't leave anything out. What kind of body did she have?"
Gideon squeezes the underwear, thinking of Danielle's bare olive skin and sincere hazel eyes, which became more sincere, often disturbingly, the more naked she became. "Thin, maybe three inches shorter than me, normal, uh...chest," he says. "Dark hair. Anyway...uh..." Telling this story can't possibly enhance his reputation. But he's already started.
"I actually had no idea how long we'd been going out," Gid continues. "But when we were saying good-bye, she told me we had been going out for seven months, two weeks, and three days." This gets a snicker from the crowd, and from me too. Girls are supposed to be bad at math, but we're excellent at counting. "So, the night before I left...Well. I guess I should go back."
Cullen rubs his hands together with coarse greed. "Only if it involves anything remotely dirty!" Nicholas is flat on his back again. With every outburst from Cullen, his eyes dart to the side in annoyance.
"So once we'd been together for about two months, we basically started doing everything," says Gid. "But she always had her clothes on. Her pants had some weird thing about them...where I would have my hand in them, and they would kind of...expand?"
Nicholas and Cullen don't know, either.
Is he talking about Lycra? Oh my God. Guys are such retards!
"But she never took her clothes off, and then..."
Cullen leaps off the bed, screeching as if in pain. "For how long did she never take her clothes off?" he asks. He holds his head, bracing himself for the answer.
What, Gid wonders, has Cullen so confused and upset? "The whole time. The whole time we were...until the night before." Gid looks helplessly at Nicholas.
"No!!!" Cullen wails. "That's so horrible!"
"Cullen, just let him fucking finish," Nicholas says. "I think that what Gid's saying is that they did a lot of shit for a few months, but she always had her clothes on. I think it's sort of a boarding-school thing to just get totally naked and go for it."
Gid wants to know more about boarding school and nudity but doesn't know how to ask without sounding too eager.
"So the night before. We're in her basement."
"Don't leave out all the details," Nicholas advises. "I like a little atmosphere."
"Ass-mosphere!" says Cullen. "You like that?"
"The carpeting was green, shag. Her couch was like, tweed or something. And upstairs, I could hear her brother, Kevin, getting himself a bowl of ice cream. I knew something was different because her parents were out at a Kiwanis dance and her brother, he won't come downstairs because of his mold allergy..."
"Okay," Nicholas says. "Details can overwhelm."
Strangely, Gid is enjoying himself. Being the center of attention. "So sure enough, instead of just, like, unzipping her pants and, like, letting her bra just kind of hang off of her, she just jumps off and takes off all her clothes."
"Fucking finally!" Cullen shouts.
"Quiet!" Nicholas commands. His eyes take on that lightness, that sea-under-the-sun quality that indicates his rare excitement. "This is when it all happens."
This is indeed when it all happens. Gid takes what he hopes is a courage-stealing sip from his mug of bourbon. Stalling, he reads it. Midvale: Class of 78 Twenty-fifth Reunion. Cullen's dad went to school here too? Gid continues through a pang of outsiderness. "She's naked. Except for these." He holds up the underwear. "And she says, looking right at me, It's time.'"
Cullen jumps up and sits down, jumps up and sits down, delighted. Nicholas nods and smirks with real pleasure. Gid had been willing himself to say that Danielle said, "I want you to do it to me." But he chickened out. He's glad they're enjoying the story, but he can't help kicking himself, wishing he had the balls to embellish, make it even better.
"So was this the first you'd heard of it?" Cullen asks. "Were you like, 'What's it time for, cookies and ice cream?'"
"Oh no," Gid says. "I knew what she meant. She had said, 1 want my first time to be with you.' But I thought that was, you know, for some future date."
Nicholas and Cullen nod to each other. Gid senses vague, if not entirely genuine, approval. He also hopes this is over.
"How many girls have said that to you?" Nicholas asks Cullen.
"I don't know, eight? But each time I hear it, it's like the first time all over again."
"That's not true," Gid says, before he can control himself.
"Which part?" Cullen asks. He smiles. Gid watches him. His smile is innocent. This is a guy, Gid realizes, who could persuade a girl to part with just about anything.
Everything about Cullen suggests that Gid is one hundred percent right about this.
"They all say the same thing?" Gid asks.
"No," Cullen whispers. "Each one says the same thing very differently."
I would bet my place in Gideon's head that Cullen is lying.
"Did you two do it or not?" Nicholas asks. So it's not over.
Gid can't run away from the truly interesting, incriminating part of the story any longer. This is bad for him but good for the story. "We...started to, I mean, that was definitely the idea. I mean, I tried to get it off her, and then, you know, I couldn't, so we just kept doing it, but I kept fussing with the underwear, and..." He trails off. "I don't know how to say this."
"Let me help you," Nicholas says. "The underwear, and not what the underwear promised, ended up being the thing that ultimately drove you...urn...over the edge. The underwear, and not the thing that the underwear promised, was the place where this particular spasm"—he lets the pure phonetics of the word sink in for a second, the soft S coming up against the harder M— "of passion found its final resting place."
"What ever!" Cullen says. "I come on girls' underwear all the time."
Gid winces.
"Dumbass," Nicholas says. "It's because he's a virgin."
"No way," says Cullen. "That sucks."
"I don't think I am technically a virgin," Gid protests.
Gid knows he told a good story. But good story or not, this virgin label, if at all possible, has to go.
He reaches for the bourbon, hoping to loosen the tightness growing in his rib cage.
"Not so fast," Nicholas says. "It's not Mountain Dew."
Cullen takes a few shirts to his bureau and drops them in a drawer. Everything he owns is old, cotton, and ripped in such a way so as to casually display his incredible physique. Gid decides that he likes Cullen, but that his particular brand of cockiness is going to become extremely annoying. "1 don't think I am technically a virgin," he repeats.
"None of this matters," Nicholas says shortly. "What matters is what you, or rather we, do with these underwear. And I say, these underwear are a challenge."
Cullen agrees, "Yes! A challenge. Absolutely!"
Nicholas continues, "These underwear don't ask a question about the past. They ask a question about the future. Who cares whether you sort of got laid? When are you definitely going to get laid?" Nicholas paces the room, warming to his subject. He stops, facing Gideon with almost military precision. "I say the end of the year. June. It seems like a long time, but really, when you think about the fact that you have the rest of your life to have sex, it's not so bad."
"December!" Cullen shouts. "No, fuck that. He's going to get laid by Halloween." Cullen leaps onto the bed on his stomach again and humps it. "Workin' overtime!" he shouts.
Gideon wonders what this carnal outburst is regarding. I know it's really just that. A carnal outburst.
"I have to say I am impressed that the girl offered to have sex with you without your asking for it," Nicholas says. "Lack of desperation bodes well for your long-term success."
"Thanks," says Gideon, thinking, that's not the right thing to say to someone who thinks that even in an environment teeming with luscious girls, it's going to take you a whole ten months to get laid.
Now Nicholas does something really cold. He turns to Gideon and sizes him up. "The white Chuck Taylor low-tops are trying too hard to be old-school; the jeans are too neat. The shirt is the same color as the jeans, so you kind of look like a blueberry."
Cullen nods slowly, impressed. "Great call. But I still believe in October."
Okay, I feel bad that they said Gid looks like a blueberry. But I'm not going to say it's not true.
"You're just not doable yet," says Nicholas. "And that's not, like, me, that's just the truth of the universe filtering through me."
Oh God. Now, that is too mean. Girls have nothing on boys when it comes to outright cruelty. Behind-the-back stuff, we're better with that, sure. But saying it right to your face? Boys rule on that one.
"You've made your point; I've made mine. I say Gideon gets laid by the end of October," says Cullen.
"I say no way," Nicholas says. "But he definitely gets laid by June."
"I think you're making a mistake there," Cullen says. He backs up, and they regard Gid once again. "If he doesn't get laid by the end of October, I say there's no way he gets laid by June. I think you either have it or you don't."
"And I think that you definitely don't have it yet, but you could have it," Nicholas says. "So, to reiterate, you say by October or never. I say not by October, but definitely by June."
"I believe we have clearly defined our terms," Cullen says.
They shake hands.
"Wait a minute," Gid says. "You guys are making a bet about me?" He's still holding the underwear in his hand. God, that trip to the bathroom. That was his first mistake. The underwear would have been safe in his drawer, and they'd be talking about...Forget it, Gideon, the truth is, something equally awful probably would have happened. "I don't know. I mean, obviously, I'm going to try to have sex with girls, right. But I'd prefer to not have anything riding on it. I think it might...mess me up."
Cullen and Nicholas eye each other nervously. I can see that partly they don't want to hurt Gid's feelings. But also that they really want this bet. Bets are fun. Nicholas said he hoped they could find some way to entertain themselves this year, and this is it. "If you're going to be doing it anyway," Nicholas says, "what does it matter if we have an interest in it?" That was a pretty smart way of presenting it to Gid. Making him the star of the show.
"Last year, we bet our friend Liam Wu that he couldn't have sex with both Marcy Proctor and Erica Dewey, who were roommates, in the same week, in their room. We gave him a month to do it," Cullen said.
Marcy Proctor! That's the girl from this afternoon! She's pretty. And she was the only one who was vaguely nice to him during his father's asinine little episode. "Well, did he pull it off?" Gideon asks, hoping for a no. Poor sweet little Marcy Proctor.
"It took him three weeks," Nicholas says, smiling at the memory. "But he did them both...on the same day."
Gideon sits down on his bed. Liam Wu. "What does Liam Wu look like?"
Nicholas, as Gideon suspected he would, describes the Asian guy who honked at him this afternoon.
"He did that? You guys bet him that he couldn't do it, and he did, just for fun?"
Cullen looks at Nicholas, who shrugs. "Well," Cullen says, "we did give him Nicholas's mom's car. But look, what he was doing was really, really something to pull off. I mean, it was truly magical. Stunning entertainment. What you're going to do is what you're going to be doing anyway. Or trying to do."
"You gave him Nicholas's car?" Gideon and I are on the same page. Shocked about the car, also shocked that Liam Wu was so handsomely rewarded for pussy hounding.
"Yep," Cullen says. "He wouldn't do it otherwise."
"Well," Gideon says, "I won't do this. Not even for a car."
Though we are both wondering what kind of car it is.
Nicholas sidles up to Cullen and whispers to him. Cullen scowls, shakes his head, and whispers back. "Excuse us, won't you, for just a minute?" Cullen hides the bourbon under his bed. As he's doing so, his cell phone rings. "Answer that," he says to Gideon, then adds, "please." He and Nicholas leave.
Cullen has a silver flip phone. The caller ID says Madison. Before Gid can even say hello, a young female voice asks, "How's the new kid?"
God, this girl sounds pretty. Her voice is teasing, with a little layer of gravel in it. Gid bets she smokes, and even though he's watched a lot of filmstrips and ads that tell him to think otherwise, he finds this sexy. "I am the new kid," he says.
"Well, I guess he must not hate you, 'cause he let you answer his phone," the girl says.
"Yes," Gid says, "I guess."
"Are you guys going to come over tonight?" the girl asks. "Oh shit, I gotta go."
Cullen comes back into the room first. Nicholas follows. "That was someone called Madison," he tells Cullen. "She wants us to come over."
Cullen nods and starts to pack himself another bowl.
"We've decided that if you get laid by October, we're going to give you the car," Nicholas says. Cullen does a little dance, a sidestep, snapping his fingers, swinging his arms in little loops.
"What car?" Gid says. "Is there another car?"
"The car is the car is the car," Cullen says, twirling around. "A 1991 seven-series BMW. Sunroof. Five-speed, of course."
Holy shit. The car that honked at him today.
"You can drive a standard?"
"Of course," Gideon says.
Thank God. That whole both-hands-on-the-steering-wheel thing is so Rust Belt.
"But you guys gave Liam the car, right?" Gid says. "You can't just take it away from him."
"Sure we can," Cullen says breezily. "By the way, this is a cool car, but it's also white. So it's not like, wow, totally bad ass. But you definitely should win it."
Gideon imagines a world where he has proved to his roommates he can get laid, actually gotten laid, and won the prior instrument of his humiliation. This is a world he wants to live in. It seems too good to be true. And of course, well, none of it has happened, but it could, right?
"You guys are going to give me the car? That's great," he says.
"Well, I wouldn't go out and buy your BMW racing jacket yet," Nicholas says darkly.
"Ha! Yeah!" Cullen says. "Better get some condoms first, and see if you use one of them."
Gid thinks about the girls on the quad. There were so many pretty ones. One of them is going to have to like him, right?
"I think this calls for a celebration," Cullen declares, pulling out the camera from this afternoon. Nicholas looks unenthusiastic but dutifully lines up for a pose, with Gideon in the middle.
Cullen holds out the camera with his impossibly long arm. Gid feels good here, flanked by his roommates. Then the flash goes off, and it occurs to him he's in the middle not as a gesture of support or affection, but because of symmetry. He's the shortest.
"Wait a minute," he says. "What do you guys get? Your bet is about me, but you're betting each other, right?"
Uneasy glances pass between Cullen and Nicholas.
"Uh," Nicholas stammers, "if I win, then I get the car back."
"Wait a minute," Gid says. "Doesn't your mother know the car's missing?"
I had the same question.
"She never leaves New York," Nicholas says. "She never leaves our neighborhood."
Gid looks at Cullen, who nods.
"Anyway," Nicholas says, "Liam knows that he might have to give it back. He just won't ever know why. It's our secret. He knows we're going to do something like this, but he just doesn't know what."
Gid likes the "our secret" part, but he's still not settled on this.
"Okay," he says. "So what does Cullen get if he wins?"
Cullen claps his hands together, his face brightens with eagerness. But Nicholas shoots him a stern look. He says one word: "No."
And that's the end of that conversation. Strangely, the refusal to divulge this last detail has made Gideon more, not less, interested in the bet.
more girls, more guys
Gid's so up and down; sometimes he likes himself, sometimes he doesn't. He's complicated. Most guys are so uncomplicated. They're either total nerds who look about ready to dive under the rug, or they're jock assholes who strut around like they own the world. Gid struggles with his ego. It makes me think that I could tell him anything.
I think I might have a little crush on him. But I get a lot of crushes.
On the short walk to dinner with Cullen and Nicholas, their fellow students spot them, admire, and clear to the side as they pass. Gid feels like he's riding the crest of a wave. Gideon sees beautiful girls—a swaying mane of chestnut hair here, a perfect jawline there, a set of luminous green eyes—and these girls are looking at him. It occurs to him that the attention is because of Cullen and Nicholas, but he pushes that out of his mind.
The bet scares him. But the bet is also fun, because Nicholas and Cullen made it up, and being around them, even on their terms, well, it's fairly enjoyable. Gid didn't ask to room with the coolest guys on campus, but since that's what happened, well, he'd be a fool to turn his back on the opportunity. Plus, he doesn't totally believe the bet's real.
"Start looking around. I know you can do October, buddy, but you're going to have to be proactive," Cullen says. He claps him on the back and strolls ahead. He sneaks up behind a girl with black hair, dressed in pink satin pants and a tight white tank top, and puts his hands over her eyes. The girl stops and runs her hands up his arms, then squeals, turns around, and hugs him. Cullen slips his hands inside the back of her pants, and she doesn't flinch.
That, Gideon, is a lot to live up to.
Gid turns to see if Nicholas is paying any attention to Cullen's antics, but he's clasped his hands behind his back, with a faraway look in his eyes. A blonde girl, medium height, athletic, and tan, falls into step beside him. "Hey," she says. She's wearing running shoes and blue-and-white-striped pants with a soccer ball stitched over the upper thigh.
"Hi," Nicholas says, not even looking at her.
So Cullen is the flirt. Nicholas is the strong silent type. I just need to find my thing, Gid thinks. How hard can that be?
