Mother May I(59)
At Georgia State, Betsy was often out all night, meeting nocturnal people, talking for hours in bars like smoky holes, listening to start-up bands. She dabbled in drugs, even trying absinthe in a Waffle House parking lot at 4:00 a.m. The real thing, illegal and life-threatening, smuggled in from France. Or so the motorcycle boy who passed her the bottle said.
She’d come home smelling of mango hookah smoke and cumin, lips chapped from kissing, her eyes as puffy as they could get, given that she was nineteen. She’d stare at herself in the mirror, laughing, saying, “Hag,” before bouncing off to a new adventure. Like Lexie, she kept her wildest moments on the down-low, telling only me, as if freshman year were her personal Vegas. I think even then she knew she would go back to Marshall. She told me stories that he would not want to know. Stories she would not want anyone else to know.
Lexie was the same. She didn’t go to Greek parties. She barely drank. Quiet Lexie had to protect her scholarships. The one that bought her books was for winning a Christian essay contest. The one that covered the gap between the school’s financial aid and her housing costs was from a church organization. It came with a morals clause.
Her discretion meant Spence could slip off with her and do “loser shit” that would have hurt his status with his brothers had it been known. He and Lexie would smoke pot and go to the midnight showing of Rocky Horror, or eat shrooms and sit on her dorm roof blowing bubbles.
They test-drove harder drugs together, Ecstasy and acid and Special K. Spence had the funding and Lexie had the hookups. These were experiments, not habits, though. They also tried a few things, sexual in nature, that Spence had only seen on the small collection of VHS porn the brothers kept hidden in the basement.
In October he bought her a pricey silver slip dress and took her to a French bistro downtown that had live jazz and twenty-dollar entrées. It was a Pretty Woman move, and she loved it. The next weekend she instigated a threesome with her pot dealer, a lush brunette whom Spence called Crazy Bonnie.
Bonnie wasn’t a student. She lived in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of Charlottesville. She was at least twenty-five, and though she was overly wise in how threesomes worked, she was not a pro. Nothing Spencer did with Lexie was directly transactional. But he’d given her a special night. She wanted to give him something special back, and a threesome was a thing Spence had been talking about with a gross and hopeful fervor since middle school.
All that fall, at any all-male gathering, Spence would tell the story of the threesome. When guys asked who the girls had been, Spence would scoff and say, “Please. I’m a gentleman,” and then go into extremely ungentlemanly and graphic detail. Trey heard the story often, and each time, in the way of such things, it got a little kinkier, a little more mind-blowing.
“Barbarella sex,” Spence said. “Sex in motherfucking space. Two girls, no gravity.” Never names, though. Just, “So, there’s this crazy girl I know. . . .”
Some of the brothers might have guessed Lexie, but if so it stayed a boys’-club secret. Maybe they’d exchange a knowing look before offering her coffee on the rare mornings she slept over in Spence’s room. But they were sweet to her. She was under Spencer’s broad wingspan. By then she and Spence were seeing each other every week at least, though never at the frat’s official mixers. He stayed at her place, mostly.
He liked visiting her world. He even dragged Trey to an open-mike poetry night at a run-down coffeehouse. Sober. The whole place stank of mothballs and jasmine incense. But Lexie was reading, so he was there, whooping and clapping when she finished.
Lexie herself developed a small, hungry way of glancing at Spence when she felt unobserved. Trey thought she’d agree to be his bona fide in a heartbeat. He also thought a steady girlfriend would be good for Spence. Settle him, or at least channel all his wild in one direction. But it never came to that. She didn’t have the pedigree, and that mattered to Spence. Probably because it sure as hell would matter to his parents.
There was a diner near her dorm, a hippie spot with vegan sausage and a lot of tea choices, where Spence often met Lexie after her breakfast shift. He’d buy her café au lait and a chocolate croissant. Once she showed up when Spence was sleeping off a bender. It was not a frat hangout, but Trey was there, avoiding friends and grunt-pumping coffee, trying to care about fall finals with a bad case of senioritis.
He waved her over, happy for an excuse to close his textbook. She shook her head, a pink flush coming to her cheeks.
He understood at once that it was a money thing. He called, “Come on! It’s my cousin who stood you up. The family honor is besmirched. I have to buy you breakfast.”
He called the order to a passing waitress, not really giving Lexie a choice. She came and perched lightly opposite him, shy but pleased, he thought. He learned she wanted to study English lit and be a teacher. That surprised him. He realized how little he knew about her. Only what Spence had told him. That was mostly weird sex stories, but he’d gleaned a few facts. Like, he knew that her mother was a religious fanatic who’d hounded Lexie about both her grades and her virginity all her life. If she ever got a B, it was as bad as being pregnant. If she ever got pregnant, she might as well be dead.
“Her mom told her she’d been born in a little white dress that she could never take off. It would grow with her, and anything she did to stain that dress would stay. On her wedding day, she would have to wear it as she walked down the aisle at church. God and her husband would see it clear as day, so she must keep it free of blood and filth. Crazy, huh?” Spence had told him, and then cocked an eyebrow, grinning. “I gotta tell you, Trey. I have done some damage to that dress.”