My Last Innocent Year(57)

Amos Jackson was manning the keg. “Welcome, ladies,” he said. He had on a greasy black fedora and Ray-Bans, a lace scarf tied around one ear.

“Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” came on. “I love this song!” Debra shouted. She grabbed Crashy’s hand and pulled her onto the dance floor, leaving me alone with Amos.

“Hey, I saw your boyfriend,” he said, handing me a cup of beer.

“Who?”

“That professor filling in for Maxwell.” He laughed. “Whitney calls him your boyfriend.”

My face got hot. “Where did you see him?”

“In the general store near my great-grandpa’s farm.” His eyes kept moving from my face to the dance floor where Crashy and Debra were making large, slow movements with their bodies. “He was hard to miss. The only other people who hang out there wear bib overalls and are about a hundred years old.”

“Huh,” I said. I couldn’t imagine Connelly would be that far upstate, but I couldn’t ask him because I wouldn’t want him to think people were gossiping about him, about us. Plus, Amos was probably wrong.

I sipped my beer, which tasted vaguely of socks, and saw Amos’s eyes grow wide as Debra and Crashy moved closer together, Debra’s thighs scissoring Crashy’s long leg. In 1998, Agora may have been the most subversive thing about Wilder College. Once part of the Greek system—back when Wilder was all-male, it was known as the only fraternity that would accept gays—it broke away in the eighties and became a coed “undergraduate society” instead. I forgot this was why some straight boys came to Agora, because they thought the girls who partied there were kinky. Crashy was flinging her hair back and forth. I saw one of her fake nails fly off and slide under a sofa. I imagined someone finding it later, much later, after we were all gone and out in the world.

I noticed someone watching me from across the room. It was the guy in the rainbow wig, the one I’d seen dancing when I walked in. He took a swig from a small glass bottle and started walking toward me. There was something shiny on his chest, a sheen of sweat mixed with glitter. He was more than halfway when I realized it was Zev. I looked over my shoulder, but Amos was gone.

“Isabel Rosen.” Zev’s voice sounded thick, like his tongue was swollen.

“Hi, Zev.” We hadn’t spoken in a while, not since that day at the information booth, but I felt more relaxed around him now, either because I was a little drunk or because he looked so stupid in that wig.

“How come we never talk anymore?” He moved closer to me, and I caught a whiff of him.

“You’re drunk.”

“Yeah.” He took a long swig and smeared his hand across his chest. “I am. But seriously, I thought we were friends. Now you don’t call, you don’t write.”

I tried to catch Debra’s eye. She was still dancing, now in a small group that included Amos. “Were we friends, Zev?”

“I thought we were.” He scratched his head, knocking the wig askew. “I liked talking to you. You have all these opinions, things you believe, but you can’t defend any of them. Your whole worldview is based on feelings. It amuses me.”

I could tell he was trying to provoke me, but I decided not to let him.

“If you liked me, why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Would it have made a difference?”

“It might have. Maybe things wouldn’t have gotten so messed up if you did.”

“Hey, the only reason things got messed up is because of what your friend did.”

“I disagree.”

“You disagree?”

“Yeah. I think they got messed up because of you.”

Zev started to respond, but then I remembered I didn’t have to talk to him, not now, not ever, so I turned on my heel and walked away.

He followed me into a big room at the back of the house. It appeared to be a kitchen—there were cabinets and a greasy range top and something that looked like a refrigerator. In the corner, a group was gathered around a large metal mixing bowl. A girl with straw-colored dreadlocks looked up as we walked in.

“Don’t run away from me,” Zev said.

I stopped in front of the refrigerator. “Why not? I don’t owe you anything.”

“You don’t owe me anything? Nobody would even talk to me after what you and your friend did.”

“You think that’s why nobody would talk to you? Nobody talks to you, Zev, because nobody likes you.”

From the expression on his face, I could tell I’d hurt him in some soft, secret place, the same way he had hurt me. But it didn’t give me pleasure. All I felt was sad, as if this was all life was, an endless, interlocking chain of hurting people and being hurt in return.

“You came to my room,” he said. “I didn’t force you. And then, while we were … you didn’t say anything. I thought you wanted to. I thought—”

“I know.” I did know, had known it ever since that night, when Debra and I went back to his room and I’d seen his face when he opened the door. He was happy to see me, happy I’d come back, as though I were coming back for more. For him, that night might have been the start of something, while for me it was the absolute and irrevocable end. If it was true what Roxanne said, that women cry when they’re angry, perhaps it was also true that men got angry when they were sad.