The Arb.
I’m neck-deep in trying to figure out how to squeeze Mircea Eliade and the intersection of the sacred and the profane into three pages double-spaced when the phone rings, so of course I leap to answer it.
“Hey,” says Jamie.
“Hey.”
“I, uh, got some really good stuff. You know? From Chris.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“And Eva’s here,” she says, but I’ve already heard her laughing in the background. Sounds like they’re listening to Tom Waits.
“I’ll be there. Give me fifteen minutes or so.”
“’Kay,” says Jamie.
“What’s up,” says John as I grab my jacket. It’s 1990. I never go anywhere without my sharp four-button green-and-black check jacket.
“Jamie’s got some good pot.”
“You hate pot,” says John.
“Yup,” I say, headed for the door.
•
I’m wrong. It’s not pot, it’s hash. Jamie pinches off a little chunk of it, brown and glistening with oil like some small crumb of a really intense granola bar, and puts it on a saucer stolen from Dining Services. She sets it smoldering with a match, then drops a big glass bell jar over it. The thick white smoke curls up inside. Eva’s shaved her hair back down to virulent yellow fuzz again, which makes her face look harsh and delicate all at once. Her eyes are swimming blue behind thick black-rimmed glasses. She’s lounging on Jamie’s bed in anonymous grey underwear and a grubby white V-neck T-shirt that says “Queen Dick,” and I don’t ask where her pants are. Jamie is dressed, at least, in baggy jeans and a flannel shirt buttoned up enough to mostly hide her bra.
“Go on,” she says, putting her hand at the top of the bell jar, and I stoop down so when she tilts it up I can suck the smoke billowing into my lungs. Whoa. Shit. I’m dizzy. I sit down heavily in Jamie’s desk chair. I don’t think I like hash much, either.
Eva giggles. It’s Jethro Tull playing now, the mouse police, you know, never sleeps. Never sleeps. Now Jamie’s giggling, breaking off another pinch.
“I never said I wasn’t a cheap date.” For some reason it seems important to point this out.
“More for us,” drawls Eva. Jamie, having set up another chunk, flops back onto the bed to watch the smoke billow thick and white, trapped and raging under the glass. Eva strokes her thigh. I’m not jealous. I’m not. I mean, Jamie’s my girlfriend and all, but I’m not the jealous type, you know?
The mouse police never sleeps.
“Hey,” says Eva, after sucking in another lungful of smoke. She blinks, thickly. “Hey. Let’s go for a walk.”
•
Back in January, it’s two in the morning, we’re walking back the three of us from the New Year’s party at the Ministry of Truth. It was warmer than usual—there was one of those amazing fogs that’s just thick enough to be beautiful, trees looming out of it in new and fantastic shapes, all the streetlamps ringed by perfect circles of colored light. But Jamie was chilly nonetheless and Eva was feeling butch and so it was Jamie twirling in Eva’s leather jacket, buckles jingling, the cuffs almost swallowing Jamie’s little hands whole. Eva looked cold in her sleeveless T-shirt. I could see gooseflesh prickling along her upper arms, the Celtic knotwork tattoo ringing one of them, a vaccine scar pocking the other.
Jamie stops twirling and dances up close to Eva. “You look cold,” she says. And Eva shakes her head and starts to say, “No, I’m not,” I think, but she stops suddenly and says, “Oh, fuck it,” instead, and kisses Jamie, and Jamie, arms outstretched in that leather jacket too big for her, is too surprised to do anything but kiss her back as Eva’s arms snake in under the jacket.
I looked away.
The thing that happened next, though—there was a crunch of gravel, a footstep, and then Eva’s kissing me.
See, that practically knocked me on my ass.
•
It’s May now. Eva buttons on, Christ, a skirt, though it’s more of a kilt, really, pleated, but in a weird yellow and red and orange plaid on black that I don’t think any Scots clan would ever claim, and she throws on a ratty black cardigan. Jamie pulls on some muddy hiking boots. “Where we going?” I ask.
“The Arb,” says Eva, as if this is self-evident.
I look down at my thrift-store wingtips and sigh.
•
The Arboretum: it’s, I dunno, fifteen? twenty? how the fuck big is an acre, anyway? It’s a big chunk of the northeastern corner of the campus, laid out half-wild more through neglect than design at this point. There are thick stands of trees mostly free of undergrowth, some big open fields, a creek, the town’s two reservoirs, big square lakes held back by tall earthen ramparts. Given that three thousand liberal arts undergraduates hang out hereabouts, going slowly mad as they study literature and music theory and political science and the weird cyclic history of Yeats and Mircea Eliade and his sacred and his fucking profane, and getting wrapped up in the soap opera hothouse of college sex, well—there’s a lot of weird shit that’s supposed to have happened here. It’s one of Those Places, you know. There’s the big house on the hill there, that’s one of the tonier dorms now; supposedly, the stables were down there, at the edge of the Arb, and they burned down one night and now the ghosts of the horses roasted alive are supposed to go galloping through the Arb with the full moon. Or maybe it’s the new moon. You can’t hear jets flying overhead, they say, or the cars on 26 just past that stand of trees, and no one knows who owns the creepy dogs that seem to bark at any time of day or night from nowhere in particular. My first acid trip, I came here and heard the trees calling my name and danced with weird lights in the middle of one of the fields, and a friend swears he woke up in the middle of the night and found a bonfire in that clearing down there with no one around to have lit it and he sat and watched it burn itself down till morning. But he drinks a lot. Witches’ Sabbats, secret trysts, handfasting ceremonies, stupid footballer pranks, open-air Shakespeare, drugged-out cliques desperate to escape overdue papers and looming exams—the Arb has seen it all.
When I was a freshman, and Eva was the RA for my floor, we used to go for long walks here, me bitching about classes and being homesick and not being able to deal with my high school girlfriend being two states away, and her doing the mm-hmm and yeah and I understand thing that good RAs are supposed to do. Her hair was a little longer then, long enough to coil into a little Kewpie curl at the top of her forehead, but it was just as yellow and her glasses were as thick and heavy and her T-shirts as grubby and cryptic (a black one, I remember, with an Indian on horseback printed in red, holding up a compound bow), her jeans as ragged and holey, her big black boots kicking up drifts of dead leaves. I was head over heels in crush.
We were scooping up those dead leaves, filling a couple of black hefty bags, when I decided the whole long-distance thing wasn’t working. Eva was helping me secure set dressing for this production of Blood Wedding I was in, playing the Groom. Lots of dead leaves scattered about the stage and candles, you know? A fire hazard, but damn atmospheric. So I made my grand pronouncement: my decision: I would, I said, call Christine, and tell her this wasn’t working. Not two states apart. I sighed, and felt, physically felt some provident angel swoop down and lift this heavy pack off my back, straighten my shoulders, pat my ass, whisper you go in my ear.
“You have to do what you have to do,” said Eva, slumping down on a log. “I mean, if you’re not happy—you can’t stay in something like this out of some sense of obligation, you know? It’s not fair to you, but it’s also not fair to her. Not at all.”
She was so—wise, you know? And so powerful. And beautiful. I sat down on the log next to her, looked at the late afternoon light gilding the edges of her face, touching her hair to a slow smoldering burn, glinting off those glasses, her lips, pale, uncolored, parted just so. I—
“You know,” she said, without really looking over at me, “that I’m gay. Right?”
“Well,” I said. “I mean, yeah,” I said. “Duh.”
•
So the sun is setting and there we are, the three of us, hand in hand at the gate to the Arb off Highway 26. A semi judders past, and Jamie squeezes my hand, and I’m still light-headed from the hash. I can’t think on the stuff, you know? See, I start this thought, any thought, and I get maybe halfway through it, and I lose track of what I was thinking, so I figure maybe if I follow my train of thought back, I’ll figure out what it was, and so I start to do that, and get maybe halfway through, and lose track, and—
Which is maybe why I’m not asking any of the questions I ought to be asking, like, what are we all doing here, now, why is Eva on the other side of me, squeezing my other hand like nothing’s happened, and why are we walking into the Arb when we all know, yes we do, what’s going to happen—
Which, itself, might very well be the reason why I smoked the hash in the first place.
•
After that confused New Year’s Eve, or rather New Year’s Morning, sloppy half-drunk kisses and chilly flesh tumbling over Jamie’s narrow dorm-room bed, tits and lips and hands and cock and skin and legs and mouths and cunts and no one ever really quite sure who was doing what to whom—after that, Jamie wanted to buy Eva a Christmas present.
“It’s a little late for that,” I said.
“So it’ll be an Epiphany present,” she said. “That’s not till January sixth. You know, the day the wise men actually showed up and gave him frankincense and myrrh and all that shit. That’s why there’s twelve days of Christmas, you know.”
I knew, but I let her tell me anyway.
So we hop a ride on the shuttle bus to the only mall worth the name in a thirty-mile radius, and you’ve got to understand—I can be really slow, sometimes. I didn’t figure it out till she pulled me to a stop outside the Victoria’s Secret outlet.
“Oh, geeze,” I said.
“You deserve it,” said Jamie. “Besides, I think she’ll get a kick out of it. Wait here.”
See, for Christmas that year, I’d gotten her a copy of Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul—but I’d also gone to Victoria’s Secret, grinning like a goon at my daring, and blown fifty bucks on a black lacey thong teddy. She’d blushed when she opened that present, the night before we all flew home for Christmas break. And then, her long lean body cupped in black lace, she’d lain back in my arms and kissed me as I fingered her, gently, her hand on top of mine.
So, that night—she didn’t wait till January sixth—they strip me naked in the overheated attic room Eva was renting and push me back onto the futon that took up half the floor space. Giggling. Giggling, they duck out down the hall to the bathroom.
And back they come, two tall blond girls in black lace, Jamie striking a supermodel pose, her golden curls snaking down her back, Eva half-insolent, half-amused, one hand on a startlingly bare hip, crypto-sexy with her short, short hair and those absurd office-nerd glasses. And then Jamie grabs Eva and starts to kiss her, and they’re wrapped up in each other, bare legs twining around bare legs, arms wrapping around bare backs, hands on blond hair, black-laced tits, bare buttocks.
“I think,” says Eva, “mm-hmm, I think he likes your Christmas present.”
“Epiphany,” says Jamie.
And there I was, the two of them kneeling by me, taking turns licking up and down my cock and each other’s mouths, my hands stroking lace and skin and long heavy curls and short, short hair like seal’s fur, and I start to laugh.
“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” growls Eva, biting my thumb.
“It’s a straight-boy thing,” I say, giggling. “Y’all wouldn’t understand. Ow!”
•
Eva stumbles down the steep slope into the dim little bower, already soaked in twilight. I follow, perch myself maybe halfway down the slope, my skin tingling with inevitability. I hold up a hand for Jamie and she takes it, and I hand her partway down the slope into Eva’s arms.
It’s already begun.
They tumble back together into the grass, all the green in it washing away into night, and they’re kissing like no one else has ever been in the world, and Jamie already has her hand up under Eva’s kilt, has yanked those underpants, pulled them down to her knees.
I stand there on the slope above them, wishing absurdly for another hit of hash smoke, thick and harsh. The first stars are coming out above us.
•
“It’s not,” says Jamie, lying back in my arms, “like I’m suddenly a lesbian or anything. But Eva…”
She’s wet with cold rain still, the winter’s morning rain that’s lashing at my window.
“I was at Eva’s all night.”
“I guessed,” I say.
“You’re not mad.”
“I told you. I don’t get jealous. It’s just not in me.”
“Because, I mean, we haven’t really talked about this. At all. And to be fair it ought to just be the three of us, all together, you know? But.”
“But.”
“It was like,” she says, squirming closer to me, “it was like I couldn’t stop coming. I mean, she would kiss me, and blam! Or I’d just be lying back on her bed, and she was lying there, half-asleep, and she would breathe on me, and I’d start to whimper. My legs, my legs were still quivering when I walked over here…”
I kiss the back of her head. “Should I call her?”
She stiffens, a little. “Why?”
“You said. It ought to be the three of us, or.”
“That’s different,” she says. “You get that, don’t you? This, this is just the two of us. We’re still—I meant, her. Anything with her. Except, last night…”
“It wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t. And that’s okay?”
“Yes,” I said, kissing the back of her head again. “It’s okay.”
And I hold her there, as she falls into a shallow sleep, and I hold her, not moving, for two, maybe three hours, till she wakes up, wanting coffee.
•
“Oh, fuck,” says Eva, her knees up, one now-bare foot planted on Jamie’s blue-jeaned ass bobbing as Jamie’s mouth works its magic on Eva’s cunt. “Oh, fuck. Hey. Unh.” She hooks her glasses off, her eyes quizzical and blue, tiny now atop those cheekbones. “Straight boy. Get your skinny ass down here.”
She’s not the best kisser in the world, Eva. Too aggressive, too pushy, too straightforward with her tongue trying to climb between my teeth. Maybe she kisses girls differently, I don’t know. Her tits are bigger than Jamie’s and absurdly soft, like slowly deflating helium balloons. She shivers as I brush a nipple with my hand, and then I’m tugging her T-shirt up and over her head. Her cardigan’s already sitting on the grass over there. And Eva’s lying back in the dark, color-leached grass, and I’m sucking one of those nipples cool and pebble-hard into my warm mouth, and Jamie is swarming up her body next to me, taking charge of the other breast. I reach down past Eva’s rumpled skirt and stumble into Jamie’s hand there, and our fingers tangle together, slicking themselves as they slip along the lips of Eva’s cunt.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, fuck.”
•
It lasts, what, most of January? And on into February, too. We all three of us went to the GLB Valentine’s Dance, Jamie femmed to the nines in a slinky black minidress and fishnets and heels you could kill somebody with, and Eva walking a couple of fine lines in her engineer’s boots and tight black jeans and her “Some of my best friends are gay” T-shirt that gets stripped off almost immediately once we’re inside, leaving her in a black satin bra with straps as wide as a thumb. A black heart’s painted on her belly, dripping black tears past her navel to her big silver belt buckle. Me, I’m doing the delicate pretty-boy goth thing: black jeans and black Chuck Taylors and a black poet’s shirt—yes, black; pride of my wardrobe—hair hanging loose, face paled with powder, lips lipsticked black, eyes rimmed with mascara. Jamie giggled at how squeamish I am about people poking about my eyes, and cursed how thick my lashes are. “You don’t need this shit,” she said. “You lucky bastard.” The music loud and fast and thick, Jimmy Sommerville singing that unreal falsetto over pounding gospel pianos, girls dancing with girls, boys with boys, colored lights flickering and flashing everywhere in the dark basement. But girls were dancing with boys, too, and boys with girls, of course, and none of it mattered at all, we didn’t think, we just did. It was Eva danced up to unlace my poet’s shirt, it was Jamie stood behind her, grinding against her, cupping her crotch. It was me between the two of them, humping to some dusty disco hit, it was some random stranger, boy or girl, nibbling my ear as I watched the two of them dancing slow, stumbling drunk, Jamie’s hands wedged into Eva’s back pockets. It was some boy named Craig or maybe it was Frank I danced with, his butt in my crotch, my hands snaking along his chest, skin stretched thin over hard ribs, tight chest muscles with no soft tits anywhere to be found. His cigarette-smokey mouth I kissed, narrow little lips nibbling at my tongue, as Jamie and Eva cheered.
“Ah,” says Jamie, “all he needs is a good fuck.”
“And I’m just the man to do it,” says Frank, or maybe Craig, and what the hell, right?
Like now: like now, we aren’t thinking, I didn’t consciously plan to be lying back in the cold grass, kissing Eva as she lies back against me, she didn’t have to think to sit in my lap, lie back in my arms, Jamie isn’t thinking as she kneels again to finish what she started, her shirt’s gone, her bra’s gone, and she didn’t care about how her bare ass would be hanging out in the night air like it is now when she unbuttoned her jeans and shoved them over her hips so that I or Eva, I forget which, could plunge our fingers into her warm, soft cunt. Her curls spill madly across her back, glowing in the eerie twilight, and I’m not thinking about how Eva must taste to her or what her knees must feel like wedged into the not exactly muddy ground. I don’t care that one of my wingtips has already fallen off, that burrs have snagged the sleeve of my jacket. As Eva begins to shudder and come, one hand pulling out a clump of grass, her head tossed back as I nibble her throat, as I look down across her heaving belly to see Jamie’s eyes peering up at me over the sparse dark hatching of Eva’s pubic hair, as Jamie’s eyes crinkle in a smile buried between Eva’s legs, as all of this is happening at once, in one single, slender moment, all I’m thinking, I think, is now, and now, and now—
•
Me and Eva, hanging out alone, sitting on the fire escape outside the old Finney building, smoking cloves and drinking Jenny Creams. It’s March, and unseasonably warm, and Jamie isn’t feeling too well, so we aren’t doing what we’d thought we’d be doing, which was seeing the 9:30 showing of The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T.
“Hey,” says Eva, and I pretty much know what she means, so I kiss her.
We don’t turn on the lights in her room and it’s like it’s the first time all over again, getting nervous as we undress each other with fumbling, frantic fingers. It is the first time, really. Because, you see—
“Did you bring a condom?” she asks, in my ear. “Christ.” She snorts. “I never have to think about that crap.”
—in all we’d done, I’d never actually, well. Not with her.
Lying back, half-lit by the streetlights, glasses gone, vulnerable and delicate and—fuck!—scared, even, this amazing lanky force of nature, waiting for me, hunched over her, suddenly ashamed of my burning cock, shoved into a latex sleeve and aimed at her like a threat. “Hey,” she says. “Hey. You chickening out on me?”
She was hot and wet and I slipped so easily into her. She wrapped her legs around my butt and her arms around my back and said, “Just hold it here, a minute, just a minute,” into my ear, and we lay there until it got to be too much, and I started to pull and push even as she started to buck under me. And then I was fucking her in a frenzy, slamming into her over and over and over again, her thrashing there on her futon, throwing her head back, growling and gasping and bellowing, raking my butt and my shoulders with her short and stubby fingernails, pulling my hair, me working one arm and then the other under her legs, lifting them up until her thighs were pressed against my chest, her knees over my elbows, her eyes wide open and stunned and grey in the dim light, my cock sliding in and out and in again, smooth, well-oiled, stroking deep and out again, and again, and again—I felt it, the orgasm, starting to build a wave in the back of my head, in my butt, in my ankles, and like a surfer I tried to swim out to meet it, not caring about where she was, what she was doing, trusting her to look out for herself, but something—the angle, the mechanics, the light, the moment, something—something went awry. The wave washed past me and left me flickering in its wake, and as I slowed, dulling, Eva began to thrash wildly under me, grabbing the sheets, bucking as she yelled incoherently about something, fuck, fuck, goddamn, goddammit all to fucking hell. Hot pain spiked the head of my cock with every thrash. I pulled out, and she nearly hit me. I caught her wrist.
“Fuck,” she said, trying to yank her wrist free. Panting harshly. “Fucker.”
“It hurts,” I said, clipped. Holding her wrist. She trembled, and hearing that, her face softened suddenly, the scowl melting away.
“You didn’t,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“Oh,” she said, and I let go. “Oh. I couldn’t. Either.”
“We could,” I said, and she nodded, “Maybe later.” But we fell asleep and didn’t wake up till morning, and Jamie had been calling my room all night, looking for me.
•
But now, now, now Jamie lies back in the grass, naked, breathing so carefully, very carefully so as not to disturb the orgasm we’re building within her, patient tinkerers that we are, our fingers and our tongues playing together on the lips of her cunt, the tense little bud of her clit, the edges of her nipples, the rippling skin along her flanks, the shivering gooseflesh of her arms and thighs, the whorled pucker of her ass, the humid cups behind her knees. I can feel it, what we’re building within her, me and Eva: delicate, intricate, interlocking crystals full of light, shutting out the night around us, swallowing us all inside it, this inhuman thing that doubles and redoubles itself, as shivery cold as the night breeze that runnels over my bare back, growing on its own now with no help from us, spiking into her like salt looked at under a microscope, and she trembles at the hugeness of it all, oh, oh—and as she comes, her mouth is open, just, her eyes are shuttered, and as she comes, I look to Eva, who built all this with me, but she is looking at Jamie, and her face is closed, sealed up, unreadable in the light of this wondrous thing we’ve made.
•
The moon. If you stare at the moon, if you fix something, a tree branch that isn’t moving in a breeze, that’s still and hanging there, between you and the moon, if you fix your eyes on that, and concentrate, you can just barely see the moon move. The rotation of the earth under you, spinning you away from it, slowly but inevitably. You can see it, and feel it all. The stars, wheeling so ponderously away.
“Did you bring any condoms?” asks Jamie.
But I’ve already come, I don’t say. Standing, my pants around my knees, the head of my cock rolling on Jamie’s lips, hot and wet, Eva behind me, her hands, only, cupping my ass, one spit-slick finger sliding inside, oh shit, oh. The come lost in the darkness. But I had brought them. Maybe John hadn’t seen me slip them into my jacket pocket, but I had. I’d known. I fish one out, my lazing cock slowly shaking off its stupor. Eva chuckles there in the darkness, her hair silvered in the moonlight.
Jamie takes the packet from me and rips it open with her teeth, squats over me, unrolls it carefully down the length of my half-stiff cock, which is more than half stiff when she’s done. I reach for her, my hand tingling, and she shakes her head, almost as if I’d known she would. And, “No,” she says, before any of us can say anything else, “not me.”
Eva sits up, in the grass. “I,” she starts to say, but doesn’t finish whatever it was.
Jamie sits beside her, and kisses her, gently, and they lie down together, Eva on her back, and Jamie beside her, stroking her thigh. Beckoning. I stand, and feel lightheaded, as if the air at the bottom of that bower is richer somehow, funkier, as if I’ve suddenly been shot to the top of a mountain, but I can’t see anything. It’s dark.
“Here,” says Eva, or maybe Jamie. “Come on,” says Jamie. I’m pretty sure.
I kneel there, between her knees. I kiss her. She kisses me. Then Jamie kisses her as I feel for her cunt, where it is, where I am. Jamie’s hand meets mine, and then Jamie’s hand is on my cock as Eva’s hands spread herself and I plant my own hands to either side of Eva, my arm brushing Jamie’s belly, Jamie guiding me inside.
Someone starts to say something, someone else stops their mouth with a kiss. Someone’s fingers are in my mouth and they have that tang, that musk, but for the life of me I can’t tell whose, whose fingers, whose cunt. My legs, Eva’s legs, Jamie’s legs all tangled together, I can’t tell whose is whose. Whose hand is clenched around my butt, whose breath is hot and thick in my ear. I’m kissing someone, and I don’t know who it is.
But I know whose cunt surrounds me. I know where my cock is.
I try to find Jamie’s cunt, try to reach for it with my fingers, to be inside her, too, but it’s too awkward. I can’t. Eva is moving under me, I catch myself, dig my knees into the ground I suddenly notice is cold and damp. Dirt grits under the heel of my hand. It’s Jamie stroking my back, murmuring something I can’t make out. It’s Eva, moaning. Coming. Coming, even as I feel it swarm up from behind me and pounce, my muscles jerking as it all comes pouring cleanly out of me. It’s over, all over. Almost before I knew it had begun.
•
March, and we’re walking through the Arb, Jamie and me, along the narrow path between the two reservoirs, random wisps of fog steaming up from the grey unruffled water. Our winter coats hanging still in the still air.
“We can’t,” she says, resting her head against me. “Not any more, okay?” And I want to ask her why she’s looking for my approval. None of this had ever been my idea, after all.
But I don’t.
“It’s just,” she says, “it’s so confusing. When it’s just you, and just me. I know. You know? I know what you want. I know what I want.”
I stoop down, pick up a rock, utterly fail to send it skipping across the lake. It sinks, and the ripples are swallowed in the slowly seeping fog.
“They say,” I tell her, “that the triangle is the most stable shape there is.”
“That’s horseshit,” she says.
“That’s geometry,” I say.
•
Eva ungainly, pulling up her underpants, her glasses already back on her face, a silvery sheen of moonlight masking her eyes. Jamie, naked, holding up Eva’s kilt.
“That’s it, then,” says Jamie, as if answering a question.
Eva freezes. Then slowly takes the kilt and wraps it around her waist. Buttons it.
“Well?” she says. “What do you have to say about it?”
And I realize with no little astonishment it’s me she’s talking to.
“Anything?” she says.
And I have no idea what they’re talking about. What’s going on? What do they want?
“Shit,” says Eva, to Jamie now. “It was never him, you know. I mean—”
“That doesn’t matter,” says Jamie. And it doesn’t help matters that I start to think maybe nobody has any idea what anybody else is talking about.
Eva pulls her T-shirt over her head. I am uncomfortably aware that I am naked, and it is chilly outside in Ohio in early May, at night. She shrugs into her cardigan, kicks a foot into a boot. “Well?” she says, to me again. “Is this it?”
Somewhere deep inside me I find my voice. “It’s not up to me.”
“All right, then,” says Eva.
And she walks away.
•
Back at the end of October, and what’s trying to pass for a homecoming party is too loud and trying too hard and there’s a whole bunch of white kids in expensive clothes dancing to “Fight the Power” and even though me and Eva are both white, and her jeans were probably a pretty penny at Unique Boutique, and I was wearing my magic four-button black-and-green check jacket, we’re both sniggering at them. That’s when the Most Amazing Girl in the World comes back from the bathroom, and shit, would you look at that? She brought me a fresh cup of beer. Damn.
“Look at you,” she says, but I can’t stop looking at her, those amazing blue eyes, that hair, that unbelievable head of shaggy gold. “I leave you for a minute and you’re already macking on somebody else.” You hear that? She says shit like “macking on.” Is that not Amazing?
“Naw,” I say, “you don’t get it. This is Eva, she’s like, one of my best friends. She’s a lady-killer, like me. Eva, this is Jamie, and I saw her first.”
“You wanna fuck anyway?” says Eva, grinning sharply.
“Some other time, perhaps,” says Jamie, and that was that.