Mrs. Fletcher(55)

With Brendan, she hung back, playing hard to get, as her mother would have quaintly put it, waiting for him to make the first move. She didn’t text him, didn’t orchestrate a “chance” meeting in the Higg, didn’t even friend him on Facebook, though she did do a fair amount of stalking. He posted lots of shirtless pictures of himself, and, she had to admit, he looked really good without a shirt.

It turned out to be an effective strategy for not hooking up, especially since Brendan made no attempt to contact her, either. But even at a big school like BSU, they couldn’t avoid each other forever. About a month into the semester, she’d walked into the library with the newly formed Student Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality, and there he was, cute as ever, reading a book about climate change.

He’d surprised her in the best possible way. She couldn’t imagine any of her former hookups joining her to protest the shooting of Michael Brown, or weeping in front of a roomful of strangers at a meeting for people with autistic siblings. He seemed like a decent guy, and maybe even boyfriend material, definitely worth taking a chance on.

What are you going to do on your date? her mother had asked.

We’re going to a movie. After that we’ll probably go to a party where everyone gets naked.

Ha ha, her mother said. Very funny.

*

I didn’t hate the movie. It just wasn’t the kind of movie you were meant to like, and not the kind you normally went to on a date. But Amber was really into feminism, and one of her good friends, a Vietnamese girl named Gloria, was in charge of the Women’s International Documentary Film Festival, so there we were.

It was an eye-opener, that’s for sure. The movie focused on a bunch of depressing third-world hellholes where women were treated like garbage. In one African country, young girls got raped all the time and nothing ever happened to the men who did it. There was this one victim—she was twelve, but looked older—who was raped by her “uncle” who was not actually her uncle. He was a family friend, and a very important man in the village. The white people who were making the film convinced her to press charges, but it backfired. She and her mom ended up getting kicked out of their house and the rapist denied everything.

I am not that kind of person, he said, like the accusation had hurt his feelings.

There were other stories—girls sold into prostitution by their own parents, girls forced into sweatshops to support their families, girls who were “engaged” to be married to disgusting old men before they’d even reached puberty, girls who were genitally mutilated while their own mothers held them down. I could hear Amber sniffling next to me and I reached for her hand. She turned and gave me this sad little smile.

After a while I just kinda zoned out. There’s only so much misery you can take in one sitting. Normally, in a situation like that, I would’ve checked my texts or played a game of Hitman, but the girl who introduced the film had made a big deal about asking everybody to turn off their phones and devote their full attention to the screen.

Please, she said. This is important. Please don’t look away.

The movie was long, which meant I had a lot of time to think. I thought about my mom, and how happy she would’ve been to know that I was watching a serious documentary like this, getting educated about the world, which to her was the whole point of being in college. And I thought about Becca, who wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in that theater, because why should she pretend to care about stuff that happened to people she didn’t know in places she’d never heard of? I understood why she felt that way—part of me even agreed with her—though I knew it was selfish, and not the kind of thing you were allowed to say out loud, especially not at the Women’s International Documentary Film Festival.

Amber was quiet after the movie ended. We left the lecture hall and headed outside. It was a chilly night with a light drizzle coming down, but I think she was as grateful as I was for the fresh air. We were still holding hands, and I wondered if I should try to kiss her. But then I looked at her puffy eyes and stunned expression and realized that it probably wasn’t such a good idea.

“What did you think?” she asked.

“About the movie?”

That made her laugh just a little.

“Yeah,” she said. “About the movie.”

If I’d been totally honest, I would have told her that the movie had made me realize just how lucky I was. To be a guy. To be an American. To have a healthy body and enough money that I never had to wonder where my next meal was coming from, and to know that I would never have to sacrifice my own happiness and freedom for anyone else’s. To wake up every morning knowing that something fun could happen. The movie made me want to get down on all fours and kiss the ground. But I knew that was the wrong way to go.

“It fucking broke my heart,” I told her.

*

Amber had been looking forward to the party all week. A lot of her friends from the Feminist Alliance were going to be there, and everybody was excited. It was one of those rare situations where you could have fun and make an important point at the same time, at least that’s what they were all telling themselves. But now, after the movie she’d just seen, the party suddenly seemed ridiculous, a bunch of privileged college kids pretending that they were making a political statement, fighting the patriarchy by getting drunk and taking their clothes off.

“You okay?” Brendan asked, laying his hand gently on her shoulder. They were standing out on the quad, getting rained on.