Freshwater(14)
“Don’t eat that,” Soren said. “It’s too many eggs.”
She stared at him and laughed, then started cracking the eggs against each other, point to point, like gladiators. Whichever broke first got eaten. The winner survived till the next round.
Soren stared at her, his face blank. “I said, you can’t eat that.” He didn’t raise his voice.
The Ada frowned at him and ate her eggs, curious about the harm she could smell in his gentleness, surprised that he thought he could command her. He said nothing more and ate his breakfast, his smooth face moody, his slim shoulders curved over his plate. The next day, he called her his girlfriend.
“Wait, really?” she replied. “I didn’t know that.” Her answer made him angry, which irritated her.
“How can you not know that? What do you think we’ve been doing?” he asked.
“How am I supposed to know if you’re just now telling me?” the Ada replied, but Soren stayed angry.
That was the first thing that made us interested in him—his anger. His rich, thick blood sap anger. His nightmare childhood trauma anger. His I was taken when I was little and the men kept me in a dirty, small room and they never found the other child anger. You could taste the sharp sting of it, the salty frantic colors it had. He was angry that the Ada didn’t know she was his girlfriend; he was angry because she performed indifference, telling him he could end it if he wanted to, he could leave if he wanted to. He was angry when she suggested he wasn’t over his ex-girlfriend, angry when she tried to walk out of their arguments, angry when she ran and hid in a basement to get away from him.
We were fascinated by the ease with which he slipped into his rages, how much he looked like a little boy when he stormed off down the hallway, his slippers thick and plastic and slapping against the carpeting. None of it really touched us. The Ada was performing other things, acting the role of a normal girl in college, selling kisses in order to be held. She had many conversations with her christ, always one-sided, trying to decipher what he wanted. The abstinence was easy for her; she had always been interested in sex only from odd, indirect angles, reading the Bible for perversions, trying to learn all the words, all the pieces of it that only fit in the mind. Her body, our body, was indifferent. When the other girls talked about their lusts, she listened curiously to these hungers she didn’t have, a need neither she nor we understood. When Soren tried to fuck her, she did not understand. We didn’t understand either. We were only interested in his pain.
He was full of shame and apologies when she said no. The Ada smiled and explained her vow to the christ, explained how important it was to her while fingering the gold crucifix around her neck. Her grandmother on Saachi’s side would have been proud. After that, the Ada watched with a mild interest when Soren slid his penis between her breasts. She found herself still watching as she moved into his dorm room for the May term, still watching when he raged about his father, when he punched the walls till his hands swelled. We watched with her, observing this furious human and his hungers. One evening, Soren stood up from the bed and looked down at our body.
“You need to get birth control pills.” His voice was calm, a pool of quietly congealing blood with a skin forming.
The Ada didn’t understand. She blinked and there was a pause, a teetering moment. She had no idea what he was talking about. Then slowly, information started filtering through, edged with alarm. Plain details at first, like it was afternoon and the trees outside the window were green in the sunlight. Like he was naked but she had no idea what she was wearing. Like his penis was out and it was brown like his eyes. Like how she didn’t remember taking anything off or putting anything on. He pulled on a pair of shorts as she sat in the cheap Wal-Mart sheets, knowledge trickling like warm urine into her head, traveling down to her chilled hands. The words swirled in nausea around her. Birth control pills, because this boy, this boy with the doe eyes and the sad skin, had released clouds into her. But she couldn’t remember any of it and she couldn’t remember saying yes because she couldn’t remember being asked.
She was confused. There had been so many refusals in the weeks before, piled up like small red bricks, the weight of an apartment building that got torn down, things she thought would be heavy enough to hold him away because he knew, he knew, he knew she didn’t want to. She couldn’t remember anything, like was this the first time, was it the fifth, oh god, how long had he been moving unwanted parts of himself in her? The rush of unknowns propelled the Ada out of the bed and she slid her feet into sneakers and laced them up as fast as she could. Her burst of motion alarmed Soren; he hated when she left, so he grabbed her arms, forcing her to stay, shouting words, more words than she could listen to. She moved blindly against him, thinking only of the door, of away. He wanted her to say something, so he kept shouting. The Ada opened her mouth and all that poured out were large shapes of pain that flooded the air as her legs gave out. She crumpled to the floor and he dropped down with her. They sat together in shambled sheets as he shouted blank words at her.
She started to scream. She screamed and screamed and screamed. Her vision was numb. There was a window in front of her but it opened into a nothingness like the one yawning from her mouth. Somewhere she could hear a building sound, a wind, huge and wide, rushing out of the void, rushing toward her. The walls, the veils in her head, they tore, they ripped, they collapsed. The wind rushed over his empty voice and the Ada thought with a sudden final clarity—