Mrs. Fletcher(54)
Dude, I asked him one night. Are you in love or something?
What? he said, chuckling to himself as he tapped out a reply.
Forget it, I told him. It’s not important
I was excited about seeing Becca after all this time, but also kinda nervous. She was the one who’d been pushing for a weekend visit—I was fine with waiting until Thanksgiving—but now that it was a done deal I figured I’d make the best of it. I was juiced about getting laid, because after almost two months at BSU, I’d had exactly zero sex (except solo), which did not seem like an auspicious start to my college career.
But fucking a girl is one thing, and spending a whole weekend with her is another, and Becca and I had never been one of those couples that hung out together very much, or had a lot to talk about when we did. So I can’t say I was all that crushed when she Skyped me on Wednesday with her eye makeup smeared from crying and told me that the visit was off. Her parents had talked it over and decided that she was too young to be spending the weekend with a college guy—even if the college guy was actually her high school boyfriend—and wanted to know why, if I was so keen on seeing their daughter, I didn’t just come home for the weekend and hang out with her there.
“Damn,” I said. “That really sucks.”
“I know. I wanted to sleep with you so bad.”
“Yeah, me too.”
She sniffled and wiped her nose, staring at me with this wounded bird expression.
“It’s not such a terrible idea,” she said.
“What?”
“You could take the bus, right? And your mom would be really happy to see you.”
“You want me to come home?”
“Why not? I’ll split the cost with you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“It’s not the money.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I knew I was in dangerous territory. There was no non-asshole way to tell her the truth, which was that I was happy enough to see her if I didn’t have a choice, but even happier not to if I did.
“Let me think about it,” I said. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”
And then, like ten minutes after we hung up, Amber called. I hadn’t heard from her since the meeting of the Autism Awareness Network, where I’d humiliated myself by crying like a little bitch.
“What are you doing on Saturday night?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
She made a sound like the buzzer on a game show.
“Wrong,” she said. “We’re going on a date.”
*
Amber was painfully aware of the mismatch between her politics and her desires. She was an intersectional feminist, an advocate for people with disabilities, and a wholehearted ally of the LGBT community in all its glorious diversity. As a straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, first-world, middle-class white woman, she struggled to maintain a constant awareness of her privilege, and to avoid using it to silence or ignore the voices of those without the same unearned advantages, who had more of a right to speak on many, many subjects than she did. It went without saying that she was a passionate opponent of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape culture, bullying, and microaggression in all its forms.
But when it came to boys, for some reason, she only ever liked jocks.
It kind of sucked. She wished she were more attracted to men who shared her political convictions—the tree-huggers, the gender nonconformists, the vegan activists, the occupiers and boycotters, the Whiteness Studies majors, intellectual black dudes with Malcolm X eyeglasses—but it never seemed to work that way. She always fell for athletes—football players, shotputters, rugby forwards, heavyweight wrestlers, even an obnoxious golfer, though he was definitely an outlier—almost all of them hard-drinking white guys with buff, hairless chests, marinated in privilege, unable to see beyond their own dicks. And of course they used her like a disposable object, without regret or apology, because that’s what privilege is—the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you’re a good person.
What was it her father always said? The definition of crazy was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Well, that was the story of Amber’s love life so far, and she’d had enough. She’d vowed over the summer to stop the madness, to either start choosing her partners more wisely or, if need be, to opt for celibacy and self-respect over empty sex and the self-hating sadness that came with it.
And then, as if the universe were testing her resolve, she met Brendan at the Activities Fair on the very first day of her sophomore year. He was a bouquet of red flags—a handsome, self-confident, broad-shouldered, inarticulate, politically oblivious lacrosse player—the exact type of guy she’d sworn to avoid. But it didn’t matter: her heart did its usual, incorrigible somersault and gave the middle finger to her brain. It amazed her how weak she was, like a smoker who’d vowed to quit, but couldn’t get through a single day without lighting up.
To her credit, she put up more resistance than usual. Freshman year, she would have texted him right away, inviting him to hang out, maybe smoke some weed and watch a movie. At the time, it had seemed like the feminist thing to do—why shouldn’t a woman pursue sex as freely as a man?—but for some reason it always ended up with her staring pathetically at her phone, wondering why Trent or Mason or Royce (the asshole golfer) hadn’t even sent her a thanks for the blowjob! text, as if that would have made her feel any better.