Mother May I(61)

Every week that passed without a ring was one less week she and her mother had to plan the wedding. As January rolled on, Maura got angrier and more sullen. Trey had no idea why. Then she dumped him, and Trey found himself in the middle of the first real heartbreak of his life.

He didn’t handle it well. He started drinking more. His little pot expanded. His grades slipped. He stomped around the house picking petty fights with his frat brothers. A few of them went to Spence, asking him to calm Trey down.

So Spence invited Lexie Pine over on a night when their sister sorority was hosting a winter semiformal downtown. Maura was sure to be there, so Trey planned to sulk and drink at the frat house. He should have clocked that something was up when Spence, who never missed a party, stayed back to commiserate with him. He took it as a sign that Spence was growing up.

No one else was at the house except Vic Billings, in bed with a terrible cold, and the freshman pledge everyone called Ansel Adams. Ansel lived in the dorms still. There were no rooms for freshmen at the house, but he seemed to be there every minute anyway. He was already on academic probation, which meant he was banned from parties until his grades came up. Some of the brothers hoped they wouldn’t. The general consensus was that this mandatory legacy was a dork, pretentious and sniffy.

Ansel drooped disconsolately in the rec room with Spence and Trey, not studying, bemoaning the loss of the party until they threw a barrage of crushed empties at him. He shut up and busied himself taking pictures of the raindrops on the basement’s high-set, narrow windows.

Trey and Spence were both halfway to blasted by the time Lexie showed up. Trey hadn’t known she was coming over, but Spence’s Cheshire-cat grin, the way he said, “Oh, look. It’s Lexie,” made it clear that he was not surprised.

She accepted a beer to hold and gave Trey her tip-tilted smile, lips closed. She always smiled like that because her teeth were a little crooked and the canine on the right was chipped. Her musty clothes were damp with rain and her blond hair had darkened with it. She was so pretty.

The three of them sat on the sectional talking. Trey was too drunk to feel awkward, even though Lexie was between them, and whenever she turned to Trey, Spence flashed that devil hand sign over her head. Across the room Ansel was snapping shots of the crushed beer cans they had chucked at him. When that got old, he drifted closer, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut; they had accumulated quite a bit more ammo.

Then Spence asked her, “Did you bring us a present?”

When she nodded, he went rummaging in Lexie’s jeans pockets, making her giggle. He pulled out a Baggie of dried mushrooms, and he and Lexie each ate a couple. Trey, whose entire drug experience was limited to three bumper snorts of coke, was drunk enough to eat one, too. Spence, who’d hit the magnanimous stage of his inebriation, even offered one to Ansel. He turned them down.

The colors in the room grew brighter and louder and more luminous. Trey had never seen so many colors. He couldn’t quite remember the names of some of them. Lexie set her beer aside—she’d barely touched it anyway—and started swishing her hands through the air, dancing them, leaving trails of a thousand hands, all rainbow-colored. She smiled that tilted, closed-mouth smile, eyes shining.

“I like your hair,” Lexie said to Trey. She touched it, tentatively, then petted it, then let her fingers ripple through it. “It’s so gold. It feels like something Rumplestumpskin spun.”

“Rumblestilskit,” Trey corrected, then realized that was also wrong.

“Rump-pump-bump-skin,” Spence said, and they all laughed, a slow kind of underwater sound.

Lexie’s hands kept petting Trey’s hair, and he could feel the colors her touch left on his scalp. He reached out and touched her hair. It had dried, and it felt flossy and fine, and there was Spence, behind her, his hands on her waist. At that moment the devil’s threesome moved from a joke to something possible. Then Spence bent her head back and kissed her while her fingers were still twining in Trey’s hair. When Spence released her mouth to trail kisses down her neck, she looked directly at Trey, her gaze brazen and inviting. It stopped being possible and became a thing that was absolutely going to happen.

“My room,” Spence said, and Lexie nodded, dreamy, drifting toward the stairs.

“Come on,” she said to Trey, and his legs pushed him upright. Ansel got up, too.

Spence said, “Not you, numbnuts,” and Ansel sat back down.

Spence followed Lexie and caught her on the stairs, his hands running up her thighs to her waist, and she was arching into his touch even as they navigated up. Trey followed behind, as if pulled by the long, almost visible locks of her rainbow hair that had entwined him. He could hear Ansel’s camera whirring sadly as they left him, documenting his abandonment.

Spence had an officer’s room, with its own bathroom, but it was on the third floor. Getting there took so damn many stairs, and they seemed to stretch as Trey swam slowly up them. The other two had started before Trey got into the room, but Lexie reached her arms out to him, an invitation that pulled him over to join them.

He didn’t remember much of the act itself. It was dim; the only light came from Spencer’s ironic red lava lamp. His clothes came off or were off or she took them off, and he sank into a red and velvet darkness. Outside, the rain picked up, a drumming he felt in his body, all over and inside him.

Lightning flashed, and thunder growled in after. The three of them stopped drifting and became a storm. Lightning lit the room in blue-white moments, and those moments were mostly what he remembered, like a slideshow. Lexie on her hands and knees. Lexie on her back. Lexie on her side, facing Trey but wrapped in Spence’s arms. The arch of her spine, the curve of her hip, her tiny pink-tipped breasts. Time stopped making sense, but at a certain point he felt himself, quite clearly, becoming third. Peripheral. The two of them were locked together, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. He found himself across the room, watching, dropping back into the normal time stream, back into his body. This was Spence, he realized. Not some anonymous extension of himself.