Who Do You Love

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I know,” she’d said. “I know.”

  He’d picked up his bag, put his backpack on his shoulders, and walked through the airport’s automatic doors, to the gate, and to college, the next step in the future he’d mapped out for himself years ago. Oregon was the best place in the country for college runners. He’d train and race and impress the coaches with his skills and speed and, most of all, his attitude, his capacity to work hard, to push through the pain, to take whatever they gave him and keep coming back for more. He’d win the NCAAs and the Nationals and the Olympics; he’d get paid to endorse things, to give speeches and lead clinics and coach; he’d buy Lori a house someplace warm, so that she could relax, enjoy herself, not have to wait on other people all day long. He wondered how she’d look when he gave her a gold medal, or the keys to a house that he’d bought; how it would be to have his mom completely happy, entirely approving, glad that he was her son. Work hard—he heard Coach Maxwell’s voice in his head. Do your training, run your laps, and maybe someday you’ll find out.

  •••

  The Beaumont campus looked like a small village; a rich little village made of old brick and marble buildings crawling with ivy, of plush green lawns and weathered wood benches, wide stone walkways, and students who looked like they could all be Abercrombie & Fitch models. Rachel had lived in the dorms for her first year. Sophomores were allowed to live off-campus, or in their fraternities or sororities, and that was where she had moved. “Here we go,” she said, leading Andy down a street lined with stately mansions, all with Greek letters hanging over their doors and wide, carefully tended lawns, and tall trees that had been planted to shade the paths to the front doors. The Gammas were housed in a three-story white building with marble steps that looked like a smaller version of Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation house in Gone with the Wind, with its pillars and its deep front porch. Inside, it was cool and smelled like furniture polish and roasting chicken. Rachel’s room was on the third floor, and the first thing Andy noticed was that it wasn’t just one room but a suite of rooms, a bedroom and a sitting room with a desk and a couch and a little refrigerator and a fireplace, an actual, working, wood-burning fireplace, with a neat stack of logs in a round iron holder beside it.

  A fancy dress in dry-cleaner’s plastic hung on the back of her closet door. A pair of shorter dresses were draped over the back of her chair, and her tops and pants and shoes were folded in stacks, all of them in cream and teal, the sorority’s colors.

  “It’s Pledge Week,” she had warned him back in early September, when they’d gone over his schedule on the phone.

  “Which means what?” he’d asked.

  “Formals,” she’d said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I’ll be crazy busy.” Rachel had been elected the pledge cochair, in charge of recruiting PNMs, which Andy had come to learn meant potential new members. Disappointed and trying not to sound that way, he’d said, “We can try another time,” but immediately she’d said “No,” and “Please come,” and “Don’t be silly,” and “I want you to come to the dance.” Then, before he could ask for specifics about what Pledge Week would involve, she’d said, in her creamiest whisper, “Guess what I’m wearing right now.” The words, the tone, just the whisper all had their usual effect, sending every drop of blood from the waist up racing down south.

  “Hey,” she murmured, looking up at him from underneath her lashes. Andy noticed that while there were clothes on almost every available surface, hanging from every hook and covering all the furniture, the bed—queen-size, thank God, a welcome change from the singles they’d been grappling on for freshman year—was pristine and bare. “Come,” she said, throwing herself down on the mattress. “Let’s burn this one off.”

  He shook his head, trying to look disapproving, but she pulled him down, kissing his neck, then his ear, and he knew that she was right—they’d been apart for so long that the first time probably wouldn’t last long enough to be any good for her. She was just as eager as he was, shucking off her sweatshirt and her jeans until she was naked against him. He could feel her ribs and clavicles when he touched her—she’d gotten thinner since going to college. Every morning she and her sisters would gather in the living room and put some step aerobics video on and all exercise together. It had sounded like hell to him, working out indoors, without the air and the sunshine, without going anywhere, and he didn’t think she’d needed to lose any weight. “Come on,” Rachel had groaned when he’d made his case. “My butt was enormous.” It had been bigger, but he’d liked it like that, liked stroking it and squeezing it, filling his hands.

  Rachel was squirming against him, one leg thrown over his so that he could feel her against him, the wetness and the heat. “Oh, I can’t wait,” she whispered. He put his hand over her mouth, knowing that if she kept talking like that it would put him right over the edge. Parting her lips, she sucked at the pad of his index fingertip. He used his knees to wrench her legs apart. “Ow!” she squealed as he jabbed at her, too hard, desperate to be inside. Then she rolled her hips and he slid forward, up and in, and could almost hear the click as they fitted themselves together.

  When they were finished, and lying side by side, still breathing hard, she said, “Okay, let me see ’em.”

  “They’re fine,” Andy protested. Rachel gave him a stern look as she sat up and beckoned until he swung his legs into her lap. Every time, after they’d been apart for a while, she’d ask to inspect his feet, then act horrified by what she saw, and every time he’d demur, but he thought that she was secretly pleased—or at least impressed—by their condition, and he knew that he enjoyed her careful attention.

  Rachel gasped, and frowned, and ran one fingernail lightly up the sole of his right foot. “Can you feel that?”

  Andy shook his head—the calluses were too thick. “God, you’re like a mountain goat or something. These aren’t feet, they’re hooves.” She cooed over his battered toes, saying, “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy has no toenail, and this little piggy has no toenail either . . .”

  Pulling his feet out of her lap, he gathered her into his arms. “Ooh, am I about to be ravished?” Rachel asked as she started kissing his chest. She’d twisted her hair into a coil on top of her head, so that he could see the shape of her skull, her sweet little ears, slightly pointed at the top. He ran his hands over her shoulders, down to the small of her back, then stroked his way slowly back up, listening to the throaty noises she made, feeling her breath quicken. They had probably made love dozens of times since the first night in Philadelphia, and it was never less than wonderful. Not that there weren’t missteps—times he finished too quickly, or when they’d be in the throes of it, Rachel on her hands and knees and Andy, slick with sweat, behind her, when she’d get embarrassed about the noises they made, and the more he tried to assure her that he hadn’t noticed them, the more ashamed she’d get. She’d elbowed him in the eye once, in her haste to climb on top of him. He’d given a startled yelp and she’d said, “Quiet down, you’ve got two of those,” and then she’d gripped him, stroking him slowly, rolling her thumb over the head, and added, “but only one of these,” and he’d forgotten all about his eye, forgotten all about everything as he’d grabbed her and pulled her down.

  “Rachel?”

  “Hang on,” she said, and hopped out of bed, pulling on a robe and walking to the sitting room. Andy half dozed as he heard Rachel and another woman talking. “Everything okay?” Andy asked when Rachel came back to the bedroom, and Rachel, rolling her eyes, said, “I don’t know what part of ‘French manicure or a short, neutral nail’ they don’t understand.”

  “Are you kidding?” he asked, but she shook her head. She was adorable, with her soft brown eyes, her pert little chin, the sprinkling of freckles on her nose and cheeks. Andy even loved her little white teeth. My little honey, my little sweetheart, he would call her, an
d she’d stand on her tiptoes and say, “I’m full-grown!” Now she was looking at him, trying to look authoritative, not adorable.

  “It’s important that people really commit to this. If the sisters don’t take it seriously, the potentials won’t take it seriously, and we won’t get the best girls.”

  “The best girls,” Andy repeated. He’d known that was a mistake even before Rachel raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth, then shut it, turning calmly toward the makeup mirror at her desk.

  “How is wanting the best girls for our sorority any different than a track team having cuts?”

  “But what does the best mean?” He had wondered, ever since she’d rushed the year before, how his funny, merry Rachel who could make a joke about everything could take all of this, all the rules and guidelines, so seriously. Not to mention how thin she’d gotten, and how he never saw her anymore without a full face of makeup. He could picture the evening yawning ahead of him, all those long, empty hours to fill, Rachel off at the rush party downstairs while he stayed hidden in the bedroom like some kind of male Anne Frank. Guys weren’t invited tonight, not until Saturday’s formal. He saw himself trying to get some homework done in this frilly, scented girl-den, trying to make a meal of the yogurts and SlimFast shakes that were all Rachel ever kept in her fridge. (“What would happen if you put a beer and a burger in there?” he’d asked her once and she’d said, completely deadpan, “They’d take me out back and shoot me.”)

  But now her feathers were ruffled. “We do charity work,” she’d said, spacing her words out, speaking each one distinctly. “We volunteer. We tutor. While you’re off running laps . . .” She paused and made her index and second finger take a little jog around the edge of her desk, “we’re trying to improve the community. We want girls who are committed to what being a Gamma means, to what it stands for.”

  As far as Andy could tell, being a Gamma stood for being one of the pretty, popular girls at Beaumont, a girl more interested in having the right clothes and dating the right guy than she was in tutoring inner-city kids or raising money for the battered women’s shelter, but he knew better than to say so. It wasn’t an officially Jewish sorority, but plenty of its members were Jewish, and almost all of them were white.

  Once, he’d asked why the sororities were so segregated, and Rachel had acted like he’d accused her of something awful. “The black girls have their own sororities,” she’d said. “They don’t even want to join, but if they did, of course we’d treat them the same as anyone else.” Andy had nodded, but he’d wondered. A few times he’d started asking Rachel whether she’d told people that he had a black father, and every time he’d stopped himself. Of course she did, he’d think. It doesn’t matter to her. Still, he thought about it, when he walked through Beaumont by himself and felt strangers looking at him; when he saw, or imagined that he saw, the security guards watching him with special interest when he went into the coffee shop or the convenience store at the center of town; when the guys who joined Rachel and her friends in the dining hall always wanted to talk about rap music, assuming he’d bought every CD and knew every song; when in fact, in his experience, it was the nerdy Jewish guys who could quote every N.W.A. lyric perfectly.

  Maybe his race didn’t matter to Rachel, like she’d told him every time the topic came up, but he was sure there were girls in the sorority to whom it mattered a great deal. Even if Rachel had never lied about it, she could have used a little strategic silence here and there, let people think that Andy was Hispanic or Israeli or Greek. She’d told her parents, and they’d been nothing but polite and nice to him when he’d been visiting during Parents’ Weekend last spring, but he wondered about them, too, and whether they wouldn’t be happy if Rachel ditched him in favor of one of those Dr. Dre–quoting Jewish guys.

  Even if he’d never asked her specifically about race, he had asked lots of questions about the girls she hung around with at Beaumont. They all dressed the same way, the same brands of jeans and shirts and shoes. “It’s like they got a memo,” he’d once said to Rachel. He’d meant it as a joke, but then Rachel explained that a version of such a memo actually existed.

  “It’s just suggestions, really,” she’d said, looking embarrassed, which meant she at least knew how ridiculous it was, and Andy didn’t want to fight, but he wondered sometimes about whether he could actually have a future with a woman who handed other girls instructions about Girbaud versus Guess jeans, and how many buttons’ worth of cleavage they could show.

  “You look nice,” he told her as she sat in front of her light-up makeup mirror and assaulted her eyebrows with her tweezers. The year before, she’d cut her hair in that face-framing, short-in-front, long-in-back style that the Friends actress had somehow convinced every woman in America to get, but now it was long and curly again, the way it had been when they met in Atlanta, the way he liked it best. She pulled on a short white skirt, a blue silk blouse, a scarf at her throat in the sorority colors, and a pair of beigey high heels that matched the color of her skin and made her legs look impossibly long.

  Her kiss was brisk, almost impersonal. “See you at midnight,” she said, and then, in a swirl of hair spray and perfume, she was gone.

  Andy sneaked into the bathroom, marveling at the array of stuff, enough scrubs and lotions and masks to stock a drugstore. He spent a long time in the shower, enjoying the water pressure—the showers at Oregon usually felt more like a trickle. He used exfoliating cream for his legs and deep conditioner for his hair, and considered a leave-in olive oil treatment before deciding that it might be missed. Back in his jeans and sweatshirt, he slipped down the back staircase, which Rachel told him had once been for servants to use, and roamed around the campus, buying a few slices of pizza for dinner, then sitting on one of the benches to eat them and watch the people go by. Ten black girls in blue suits and black shoes, all in a line, were balancing potted plants on their gloved hands as they marched by him. They were followed by half a dozen guys, each pledge carrying his own books and a second backpack, no doubt laden with a senior brother’s texts. Andy decided, again, that fraternities and sororities were the stupidest thing in the world.

  Finally it was midnight. Andy lay in bed while Rachel paced around the room, shoes off, hair loose, telling him the story about some potential getting drunk and puking in the ladies’ room—“She told us she was on antibiotics, which, I’m sorry, but shouldn’t she have remembered that before she, like, drank three glasses of punch?”—and how she’d heard that some other sorority was ripping off the theme for their formal, which was One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “They’re doing Midnight at the Oasis, which is basically the same thing. And I heard they rented an elephant,” she fretted.

  “That’s—” Awful, he’d been going to say, but Rachel jumped in with “I know! God, I could kill myself for not thinking of it!”

  “Maybe you could just get a fat person.”

  Rachel paused, halfway through unhooking her bra. “Huh?” Even though she’d gotten thinner, her breasts, in profile, were round and heavy as some kind of fruit. Melons were the cliché, of course, but hers reminded him of peaches, from the tawny pink-gold color of her skin to the sweetness when he kissed her.

  “A fat person,” he said, mostly kidding. “You know, so a fat person could come to your parties.”

  He could see her making up her mind, deciding whether to be amused or combative. “We have fat people,” she finally said.

  “Who?”

  “Missy Sanders.”

  “Missy Sanders isn’t fat,” he said, hoping they were talking about the same person, a bosomy, rosy-cheeked blond whose thick legs were more muscle than flab and who was an all-conference field hockey player.

  “She isn’t thin,” said Rachel.

  “And isn’t her father a senator?” Andy asked.

  Rachel slipped on her pajama top, a stretchy cotton button-down imprinted with red h
earts. Freshman year, she’d bought out Victoria’s Secret, and had worn some kind of weird new outfit every time he visited, lacy bras and panties, sheer, short nightgowns, garments made with hooks and wires to pull her waist in and push her breasts up. Finally he’d told her that his favorite outfit was a plain white tank top and pajama bottoms loose enough that he could slip his hands inside of them.

  Rachel made a face as she pulled on her bottoms. “State representative,” she said.

  “So if her dad was a senator, could she be actually fat?”

  Rachel shook her head. “Nope. If her dad was president, maybe. And that would only be if she had a gorgeous face and a four-point-oh, and her mom was a legacy.” She crossed the room, went to her closet, slipped her gown out of the plastic and held it up against her, frowning at her reflection in the full-length mirror. The dress was turquoise and strapless, with gold embroidery. “Are you getting ‘Princess Jasmine,’ or just ‘slutty’?” she asked.

  Andy didn’t answer; wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t pretend that this was an actual problem. Rachel frowned, and then her face brightened. “Oh, and look! Look what I found for you!” She rehung the dress and stretched to reach the top shelf of the closet, letting Andy enjoy the view of her rear in the snug pajama pants. Then she handed him a little round beanie with a tassel on top. “Um, yeah,” he said, getting out of bed and setting it back on her desk. “No.”

  She pouted in a way he normally found adorable. “It’s a fez,” she said. “It’s authentic.”

  “Not wearing it.”

  “But . . .”

  “Rach,” he said, feeling the familiar itch, like he was going to jump out of his skin if he didn’t find a way to start moving. He loved her. She was sweeter than any girl he’d ever met. She made him laugh, took him out of himself, made him feel light when he could feel so weighted down sometimes, being angy about old grievances and insults, real and imagined. He’d thought about her constantly during the two years after they met again in Atlanta, when he’d get letters that told him everything about what she was doing, what she was thinking, how she was feeling. He knew his letters were less revealing—she’d always teased him about writing like he was being charged for every drop of ink—but on the phone, he’d talk about practices and track meets, which of his teammates were working hard and which were goofing off, and she would listen to him, asking questions, recalling things he’d said weeks or even months before, indulging him with a patience he’d never imagined and certainly never experienced from anyone except Mr. Sills.