You Think It, I'll Say It(42)
The next morning, while Kirsten was standing by the orange juice dispenser in the mess hall, Lucy approached her, set a hand on her forearm, and said, softly, “Hey.”
Kirsten, who was intensely hungover and sleep-deprived, recoiled, and she saw Lucy see her recoil. “I’m not gay,” Kirsten muttered.
If Lucy had done anything other than laugh lightheartedly, that might have halted things. But Lucy’s willingness to act as if neither their hookup nor Kirsten’s homophobia were a big deal—it made it seem okay to keep going. The whole whatever-it-was was so clearly short-lived, so arbitrary.
During the next five nights—the counselors stayed an extra forty-eight hours to clean the grounds after the kids went home—Kirsten and Lucy were naked together a lot. The second night was both the first time someone went down on Kirsten and the first time she had an orgasm; the orgasm part happened more than once. She was less drunk than the night before, and at one point, while Lucy was lapping away at her, she thought that, all things considered, it was good that it was happening with a girl first, because then when a guy went down on her, when it mattered, Kirsten would know what she was doing.
After Kirsten had basically spasmed in ecstasy into Lucy’s face, she said, “Could you tell I’d never done that?”
It was less that Kirsten was confiding than that, with Lucy, she didn’t feel the need to feign competence. Lucy was lying on top of her, propped up on her elbows, and she seemed amused—flirtatious-amused, not mean-amused—as she said, “Seriously? Never?”
Kirsten said, “Well, I’ve given blow jobs.”
“Then that really doesn’t seem fair.”
The sureness of Lucy’s hooking-up personality, the way it might even have been more confident than her regular personality, impressed Kirsten; the nearest Kirsten got to such confidence was when things felt so good that she forgot herself.
Lucy added, “Just in case none of the recipients of your blow jobs ever mentioned it, you’re very, very fun to have sex with,” and Kirsten said, “This isn’t sex.”
As she had by the juice dispenser, Lucy laughed. “I mean, it’s fooling around,” Kirsten said. “I’m not denying that.”
“You think if there’s no penis, it doesn’t count?”
Lucy’s apparent lack of anger surprises Kirsten more in retrospect than it did at the time. Lucy explained that she was a gold-star lesbian, which meant one who’d never had sex with a guy; in fact, Lucy added proudly, she’d never even kissed a guy. Kirsten asked how she’d known she was gay, and Lucy said, “Because, even when I was in grade school, the people I always thought about before I fell asleep at night were girls.”
That what was transpiring between them would be kept secret was both understood and probably not very realistic. Before they lay down on the red couch, Kirsten would block the door with a chair, but sometimes dim figures, other couples in search of privacy, opened the door partway. When this happened, Kirsten would freeze, and Lucy would call out sharply, “There are people in here,” and a retreat would occur. Once, someone very tall opened the door all the way and just stood there, not moving, someone else behind him, and Kirsten realized, with one of her nipples in Lucy’s mouth, that the person in front was Sean, and Kirsten’s fixation with him, a fixation that had lasted until just a few days before, seemed distant. Lucy lifted her head and said, in a firm voice, “Can you please leave?” Sean and Renee did go away, but the next morning Renee asked, with what seemed more like curiosity than disapproval, “Was that you with Lucy?”
All these years later, while driving to work and considering ruining Lucy’s life, Kirsten thinks that Renee would be her corroboration, and maybe Sean, too. Conveniently, Kirsten is Facebook friends with both of them, privy to the extremely tedious details of their separate suburban lives.
At the time, fake-casually, fake-confusedly, Kirsten said, “With who?”
That fall, back at school, Kirsten opened her mailbox in the student union one day to find a small padded envelope, the return address Lucy’s, the contents a brief, unremarkable note (“Hope you’re having a good semester…”) and a mixtape. Kirsten was surprised and very happy, which made her inability to listen to the mixtape perplexing; the first song was “I Melt with You,” and the second line of the song was “Making love to you was never second best,” and though she tried several times not to, Kirsten always had to turn off her cassette player after that line. She never acknowledged Lucy’s gift.
The next summer, Kirsten returned to the camp, and Lucy didn’t; someone said that she was volunteering at a health clinic in Haiti. Kirsten had a boyfriend then, a guy named Ryan, who was working in the admissions office of their college and to whom she hadn’t mentioned Lucy.
After that summer, Kirsten’s only source of camp updates was a winter newsletter, which she read less and less thoroughly as the years passed. She became aware of the Prairie Wife, in the amorphous way one becomes aware of celebrities, without having any idea that Lucy Headrick was Lucy from camp, whose surname had been Nilsson. She even saw pictures of Lucy online and in magazines and didn’t recognize her. But last December, Kirsten read the camp newsletter in its entirety. It was the day after Christmas, and she was trying to get Jack to take a nap, which he didn’t do much anymore, but he’d been cranky, and they were due at a potluck in the evening. She was sitting halfway up the steps of their house so as to intercept Jack whenever he tried to escape from his room; she’d pulled the newsletter from a stack of mail by the front door to occupy herself between interceptions.