Mother May I(62)

When he left, they didn’t notice. He went back to his room and passed out naked in his own bed.

In the morning he woke up grainy-eyed but less hungover than he would have thought. The whole night felt unreal. He lay in bed, wishing it were the next day or the next week. He wanted distance.

He thought, This will fade. In a few months, I’ll graduate, and then I’ll go to law school. This will become my wildest college memory. Embarrassing. Weird. Definitely drug-fueled. But an experience. And maybe, he thought for the first time, this is the sort of thing that happens to people who are close with Spencer Shaw. Maybe I ought not be that close.

He went downstairs to the kitchen. Spence was already there, drinking coffee with a couple of their brothers, all of them hungover. Trey hesitated in the doorway. He was relieved that Lexie wasn’t there. She must already have gone home. Even so, it was difficult to meet Spencer’s eyes.

Spence grinned right at him, unabashed, saying, “It lives! Me, I feel pretty good, except I think a cat snuck in and shit in my mouth while I was sleeping. Want to go to Waffle House with us?” Like everything was normal.

No jokes, no references. Like it hadn’t happened, which was what Trey wished. Perhaps Spence knew Trey well enough to understand he had regrets. Or perhaps it was only his regular discretion around all things Lexie.

They all went to Waffle House to sop their hangovers in grease. It was so normal. It reassured him, made his discomfort fade.

That should have been the end of it. A pebble dropped in a lake, disappearing at once, with ripples too small to rock anybody’s boat. And so it might have been. Except for the pictures.

There had been rain that night, but not a storm. No lightning. The flashes had been Ansel’s Nikon camera. Trey didn’t remember Ansel coming into the room, but then again he also didn’t remember shutting the door behind himself. Ansel had gotten really busy in his darkroom, too. There were a lot of copies getting passed around. They were everywhere.

The campus stayed the same for Trey and Spence, but it changed almost instantly for Lexie. Her job especially became hell. Young men came to her as if she were made of magnets. They looked at her with avid eyes, as if they could see right through her clothes. Every one of them knew exactly what was under there, after all. They told her so. They made suggestions and asked questions. When she bent to wipe a table, they would dash to stand behind her and mime pumping. The boldest and the meanest came in twos and threes to surround her, hem her in, put their hands on her. When she slapped the hands away, they’d laugh and offer train rides.

The girls were awful, too. She was slut-coughed in a wave that followed her around the dining hall as she bussed tables. Her friends stopped hanging out with her. She had multiple nicknames catcalled at her when she crossed the quad. Choo-Choo. Corn on the Cob. Double Horny. The one that stuck was Knotty Pine. Because she’d had all her holes filled.

Trey and Spence knew nothing of this at first. Lexie didn’t show up at the diner or the coffeehouse for a span, but that happened sometimes. Trey got a few elbows in his ribs, but these were more like attaboys, and only from brothers. He assumed that Ansel had dropped some hints. He shrugged it off until a couple of weeks later, at a party, when he caught two sorority girls staring directly at him over the rim of a picture. They were flushed and giggling.

“What?” he asked. They only giggled harder, until he held out his hand. “Can I see?”

One gaped, blushing, but the other said slyly, “Sure. We’re trying to figure out who this is right here.”

She passed it over, her finger pointing to the trunk and upper legs of a man, kneeling and headless. Trey’s whole body flushed with red shame as he recognized his own small potbelly, the trio of freckles on his hip.

Spence was also kneeling, headless, but not anonymous to Trey. Lexie was between them, legs splayed open, the photo taken from a gynecologist’s brutal angle. It was not artful or even attractive, nothing like his memories of the night. It was clearly Lexie, halfway into a sit-up, so her face was still visible in profile. Her pretty features were distorted by the things she was doing, but not enough to shield her identity.

Trey left with the picture and went immediately to the frat house, storming down into the rec room. Ansel was there, alone, still on probation. Trey yanked him up off the couch and punched him so hard he collapsed back onto it. He went to hit him again, but Ansel curled into a ball and cried out, a high-pitched scream like a child’s. He stayed in a defensive ball until Trey finished cussing him out. Then Trey threw the picture down onto his quaking body.

“I didn’t print any of the ones with your face in them. Or Spence’s,” Ansel sniveled when Trey finally let him up. He added, “You’re my brothers,” in a way that made Trey itch to punch him again. He frog-marched Ansel all the way back to his dorm room and burned the negatives in the metal dorm trash can. Trey made Ansel throw in every print he still had, too. He didn’t look at them. The one had been quite enough.

It was too late. The multiple copies Ansel had already passed out had assumed a life of their own, moving from person to person, all over campus. The one Trey had taken from the girls had been bent-cornered and floppy from handling.

This was the dawn of 1993. Most of the girls Trey knew had never seen anything more pornographic than a Playboy centerfold, where beautifully lit girls, airbrushed to perfection, lay on rose petals or silk sheets or perched on horses. Most guys had seen blue movies on VHS, but the women in those films seemed far away and almost fictional.