Relatively Honest Read online

  “I can’t. We shouldn’t,” I whispered. “I’d be taking advantage. I really, really think we’d regret it.” She sulked, but agreed, and soon was asleep with her arm over my chest.

  Almost never had I said such a thing to a girl I actually found attractive. And with my four sexual partners I had never had occasion to spend the night. This was therefore a first in more ways than one, although a lackluster first.

  I didn’t sleep well, with Liz’s knees and arms and breasts prodding me in one place and another. At eight o’clock on Saturday morning I slipped out of bed, whispering to her that I had to be going – lots to do, you know. I crept out of her room.

  No one would be surprised, I’m sure, to learn that at that exact moment, Julie French came out of her room opposite. We halted and looked at each other. She wore her overcoat, and had her knapsack on her shoulder, and looked freshly washed. I, in comparison, probably looked like a stray dog.

  “Morning,” she said, with a quirk of a smile.

  “Hi.” I hooked a thumb back toward Liz’s door. “This, er, isn’t what you think.”

  Her eyes took in my rumpled shirt, my socks, and the shoes I held in one hand. “I’m sure you were just serving them breakfast. In yesterday’s clothes.”

  “Honest, Liz just asked me to stay because…well, it doesn’t matter, but nothing happened. Really.”

  “Of course.” She tucked her room keys into her pocket. “I have to meet a study group at the library, and I’m already late…”

  I followed her down the corridor. “Come on. Don’t be cold. I swear, she kissed me, but that was all.”

  “None of my business.” She lifted a hand to block out my speech.

  I got ahead and opened the stairwell door for her. “But we’re friends,” I challenged. The word reverberated between the concrete walls.

  She was already descending the stairs. She sent me a patient smile. “Then I wish you a very nice Saturday, Daniel.” She wiggled her fingers goodbye, and was gone.

  “BECAUSE THERE’S really no way I can explain it to her without still sounding like scum,” I complained to Sinter over lunch in the dining hall, later that day.

  “The ‘sympathy shack-up’ doesn’t score many points,” he agreed.

  “I don’t even think she was jealous, so it was a complete waste.”

  Sinter sprinkled salt onto his mashed potatoes. “Why do you care? She’s still with Patrick.”

  It was a touchy point, and required some resentful silence while I chewed on my toast. “Because I need to be adored,” I said, sardonically. “Didn’t you read Miriam’s email?”

  He leveled a wise look at me. “That’s why you like Julie. She doesn’t fall for your tricks like all those others.”

  “Shut up. I know.”

  Chapter 8: Halloween

  SINTER’S GUESS was bang-on: Julie’s cleverness and resistance made me all the more determined to win her. Though I didn’t admit it out loud, I wanted to make her regret what she had said about me. I wanted her to lay her head on my chest some day and say, “I used to think you couldn’t treat a woman right, but now I see it’s not true. I’m so sorry I ever thought it!”

  It was a vain reason to want her, yes. But I also couldn’t get her out of my head, and was convinced she could make a really excellent girlfriend for me, one of my favorites yet, if she would only get rid of that great nuisance Patrick. She would be so much better off. I couldn’t rest until I had accomplished that. But since she was on to me, this task was going to take a lot of time and delicacy.

  I also couldn’t shake the idea that my mother might be seeing someone behind my father’s back, and I knew I would not like that breakup at all. Even though you couldn’t compare a married couple with a son to a pair of legally unattached eighteen-year-olds, this possible adultery in my own family made me very conflicted about the idea of inspiring infidelity in a nice woman.

  So I glowered in indecision through the next couple of weeks, stressing out over my homework, dodging Liz, exchanging fake smiles with Julie on our way in and out of the dorms, and trying once more, unsuccessfully, to get my mum to tell me what was wrong with her.

  “Nothing at all, Daniel,” she said. I was on my mobile, sitting in the dorm lounge while Sinter and Clare did some clothing-optional “studying” in my room. “You’re only worried because you’re away from home. I’ll send you some goodies that just came in to the gift shop. How does that sound?”

  I even tested the waters with my grandmother, Mum’s mother, when she called me to say hello a few days later.

  “So, Nanny,” I said, after she had learned what classes I was taking, and advised me not to drink any alcohol like those wicked, wild uni boys. “Has Mum seemed all right when you’ve talked to her?”

  “All right in what way?” Her tone sharpened.

  “I just worry she isn’t adjusting very well to the move. And I’m wondering if anything else is wrong. I’m a grown-up now, right? You’d tell me. Right?”

  She uttered a dry laugh. “If you think my children ever tell me anything important – well, think again, dear boy. Oh, I have my suspicions regarding what they’re up to, but they never tell me outright, oh no.”

  “What are your suspicions, then?”

  “Never you mind, dear. You don’t need the theories of a senile old woman.”

  “Nanny, you’ve never been senile and never will be.”

  “Flatterer.” Now I could tell she was smiling. “That’s the trouble with our family. Always too good at flattering, never good enough at truth.”

  Which apparently was true in itself, as she soon rang off without telling me anything useful.

  On the 30th of October, as I sullenly munched crackers from Mum’s package of goodies, scattering crumbs all over my trigonometry book, Sinter came in and said, “Got plans for Halloween?”

  I stretched back in my chair. “A pair of girls from leisure studies invited me over to Carson Hall for a pirate-themed party. But just between us, the girls are sort of tarty, and anyway, I refuse to wear eye-patches. Plus I hate the taste of coconut. So, to answer your question, no, I don’t have plans.”

  He slithered out of his leather jacket. “Then come with us. Julie and Clare and me. Julie’s put us all on the guest list for this frat function.”

  “Has she?”

  “Yeah. Her sorority’s hooking up with Beta-something.”

  “Somehow I can’t imagine you wanting to go to a fraternity.”

  “I don’t, really. But as Clare pointed out: A, it’s the one day I can look like a freak and the frat guys won’t beat me up and B, dude, a frat party on the campus where they filmed Animal House? You have to say yes to that.”

  “Well…I could go, but I don’t have a costume.”

  “We’ll throw something together. I have ideas.”

  So the next evening, without having even spoken to Julie, I found myself gluing pigeon feathers to the eraser end of a University of Oregon pencil, while Sinter opened a tube of dark red lipstick and applied it unsteadily to his lips. I glanced up. “So you do own lipstick after all?”

  “Nuh-uh.” He pursed his lips in the mirror, smearing the color around. “Borrowed it from Gretchen. All right. Come here.”

  I stood up reluctantly and stepped toward him. “Couldn’t we have got her to do it?”

  “She was on the phone. Hold still.” Sinter put his hand at the back of my head and planted a kiss on my cheek.

  We stepped apart. “How does it look?” I peered into the mirror.

  “Not bad. Here, let’s give you one more. Neck, maybe.” He slathered on more lipstick.

  “Fuck, Blackwell.” I laughed as he pushed my face aside and smacked another kiss onto my neck. “Are you enjoying this?”

  “I thought you wanted to be adored.” Grinning, he turned away, plucked a tissue to wipe the lipstick off his mouth, and returned to the mirror to install his fangs.

  I unbuttoned the old white shirt I was wearing, tape
d a square of styrofoam to the middle of my chest, and rebuttoned the shirt. “Blood?” I asked, looking around.

  “On my desk,” Sinter said.

  I found the tube of fake blood and smeared some onto my shirt, concentrating it over my heart. Having made sure the feather-fletched pencil was sharp, I stabbed it through the shirt and into the styrofoam, where it held. Arrow through the heart accomplished.

  The four of us met up at the girls’ room at 8:30. Sinter, with his fangs and a floor-length black cloak, was of course a vampire.

  “You don’t look any different!” Clare said.

  “I have fangs,” he protested.

  Clare was a corpse, wrapped in shroud-like layers of fabric, her hair dusty with sprayed-on white dye. Julie, who was preoccupied with looking at the campus map to locate the frat house, was a shimmering vision of a Greek goddess: she wore a sheet draped about her, gold-painted sandals, and a wreath of ivy in her hair.

  As we started walking, Clare looked at my arrow wound and asked, “Okay, so what are you? Saint Sebastian? Boromir?”

  I gestured to the lipstick marks. “I’m a victim of love.”

  “And here I thought you’d only ever been a victim of lust,” Julie said.

  I saw Clare suck back a grin. Sinter looked away, trying to whistle through his fangs. I only smiled at Julie calmly. She returned the smile innocently. Sinter asked a question about the Greek houses, and we kept to safe subjects like that for the rest of the walk.

  Animal House had only scratched the surface, I realized when we entered the fraternity. The house, decent enough on the outside, was stripped of most of its furniture on the inside, including details like carpeting and light fixtures. The floor was sticky stone and battered wood. As the crowd shifted, I spied a couch against the wall, but you could only imagine it hadn’t been washed in decades. The music was ear-splitting, the whole place smelled of beer, and you couldn’t see anything very well since the only lights were strings of glowing plastic pumpkins along the walls. As some bloke dressed as Rambo took our coats and threw them onto a card table, a group of sorority women surrounded Julie and started babbling to her. I turned to make a comment about the décor to Sinter, and when I looked back, Julie had been whisked away.

  For the next hour I shadowed Clare and Sinter, talked to one after another of Julie’s “sisters” who popped up to introduce themselves, and attempted to enjoy a cup of whatever ungodly concoction the frat boys had poured into the punch bowl. I knew from London parties what alcohol tasted like and how much I could safely drink. The Betas’ “jungle juice,” as they called it, made my throat suspiciously warm after just one swallow, which led me to guess it was about half fruit punch and half grain alcohol of concentrated strength, and that I should not drink more than one cup if I wanted to walk home under my own power.

  “Careful with that,” I told Clare as she dipped into the punch. “It’s strong enough to strip wood floors. Think they’re counting on the innocent girls not to notice.”

  “Like I’m an innocent girl,” she said, and strolled away.

  It was easily the most depressing party I had ever been to. I wasn’t about to get drunk or start chatting up any of the girls, since Julie was there and I had evidently disgusted her enough. There’s only so long you can watch other people engage in drinking competitions. Clare and Sinter sat on a hay bale in a corner, talking in one another’s ears and looking too cozy to interrupt. I wandered out into the back garden, but it was dismal and cold, so I came in again.

  I decided I would walk back to the dorms alone, and went in search of Julie to tell her so. When I found her, I stopped in disbelief. She was in the middle of the crowded dance floor, dancing with not one but two fraternity men, one bumping up close to her from the front, the other snaking his arms round her from behind. She had a punch cup in her hand, and was laughing. As for the two blokes, they clearly had had more than one cup. Balance and rhythm were out of their realm of capability by this point.

  The one holding her from behind, who appeared to be dressed as a flasher, said something in her ear. She shrugged and agreed. He made a gesture, looking like Let’s head upstairs to the other bloke (dressed as Elvis), and the threesome stumbled off the dance floor. I lost sight of them almost at once. I pushed forward, running into people, apologizing, fighting through the crowd, until I found myself at the foot of a dark staircase. I jogged up it, and arrived in a long corridor of doors: the frat boys’ bedrooms.

  “Julie?” I called. Different music, equally loud, blared up there from one of the rooms. There was almost no chance she would hear me. I began opening doors. After five doors leading to startled yells on the parts of the inhabitants, and more apologies from me, I encountered one that was locked. I pounded my fist on it. “Julie?”

  “She’s not in here,” called a guy, laughing.

  “Who is it?” called Julie’s voice, a little anxiously.

  “It’s Daniel. I need your help. Could I please talk to you?”

  “Go away, dude,” said the other guy. Pressing my ear to the filthy door, I heard a murmur of protest on Julie’s part, and what sounded like a scuffle.

  I pounded on the door again. “It’s really important. There’s a fight going on – they’re beating up Sinter and Clare.”

  Someone came to the door and unlocked it. The flasher stood there, looking interested. “A fight?”

  Behind him, Elvis was sitting on the bed next to Julie, his arm tight around her. She looked scared when she met my eyes. “Yeah, they’re out in the back,” I said. “Started arguing, and then, bam, Sinter and this bloke are punching each other, and Clare’s jumping on his throat, and…really, we’ve got to get down there and get them out.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Julie. She escaped and hurried over to me.

  Elvis rose as well, and teetered his way to the door. “Cool, dude, I’ve got to see this.” He and the flasher stumbled past us. “They had a fight at Sigma Chi last month, but we haven’t had one here since, like, ’97!”

  Julie started after them, but I took her arm and said, “This way.” The two of us went the opposite direction, to another staircase that led down to the front of the house.

  “Are Sinter and Clare…” she said.

  “They’re fine. I made it up. Are you all right?”

  We were halfway down the stairs. She came to a stop and stared at me. “Made it up? You lied?”

  “Those two were about to rape you! If that sounds like your idea of fun, then by all means, go straight back up there.”

  Shaking, whether in anger or fear I couldn’t tell, she folded her arms and glared at me. “And who are you to haul me out of there, like I’m helpless, like –”

  “Oh, I am not having this argument,” I said. “I’m going home, thank you for inviting me, goodnight.” I left her behind, went down the stairs, and dug through the heap of coats on the card table until finding mine.

  Out in the cold night air, I had barely reached the pavement when her voice cut across to me. “Hey!”

  I turned. She was running toward me, wrestling her arms into her coat, looking furious. “Yes?” I said.

  “Well, you’ve ruined the party for me, so I might as well leave too.” She fell in step beside me.

  “Of course. I’ve ruined it. Darling, I never like to say this to a nice girl, but you’re drunk.”

  “That doesn’t matter! You were just jealous. You couldn’t stand seeing those guys dance with me.”

  Drunk girls who hit on the truth are the worst sort. “It wasn’t the dancing,” I snapped back, “so much as the notion that my friend was about to be violated by two strangers in a locked bedroom.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Hah. Believe me, sweetheart, I do know.”

  “Because you’ve done that kind of thing?”

  Now I was the one to stop in my tracks. I looked at her until she showed a glimmer of remorse, then I answered, “Never. Now, for the last time, if you want to rejoin
the gentlemen of Beta-thingum, be my guest. But I do think Patrick would be glad I stopped things when I did. Don’t you?”

  She swallowed, and looked aside. Her mouth was thin and her eyes glistened in the streetlight, like tears might be brimming there. “Please don’t tell Patrick,” she said, meek and solemn.

  “As if I ring him every weekend.” I turned and began to walk again, wearily. She joined me. “Of course I won’t tell him.”

  “Thank you,” she mumbled.

  “What on Earth got into you, anyway?”

  “I was trying to have a good time. Like a normal sorority girl.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if I ruined it for you.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” She rubbed at her eyes with a shivering hand. “You’re right: I don’t feel good, and…I can’t believe I fell for the fish-tank line.”

  “Is that like falling for something hook, line, and sinker?”

  “Kind of.” Julie tugged the ivy out of her hair, leaving strands in disarray. “They asked me if I wanted to go up and see their fish tank. Lamest trick in the book.”

  “Good God.” I shook my head. “I need to teach these lads a better approach.”

  She smiled a little, and we walked on in silence. “So what made you choose that costume?” she asked.

  “Sinter told me about the arrow trick. We devised ‘victim of love’ around it because it was easy to put together.”

  She nodded. More silence for a minute or so. “How’s Liz?” she asked then.

  “Don’t know. I only stayed that one night because she begged me to. Nothing really happened. I realize that makes me a horrible person, all the same.” I laid a nasty tone across the last sentence.

  “It doesn’t. I didn’t mean that either.” She picked leaves off her ivy and dropped them as we went. “And…how’s Miriam?”

  “Not sure. Haven’t got an email in a while.”

  She nodded. She looked ill, exhausted, and unhappy. Feeling bad for my part in it, I asked, “Are you all right? Really?”