Chapter Seven #4
To someone like Laura, the cost of the wine was negligible.
I was sure that she didn’t slosh. She just drank.
That meant I should also stop sloshing and just drink.
After all, she wasn’t better than me, and I’d prove it.
I stopped doing mental math on the second glass.
The second glass turned into a third, and when the waitress asked if we’d like another bottle, I immediately responded yes.
By then, I couldn’t even count how many glasses I’d had, let alone the monetary equivalent of what I drank.
When the check came, I offered to pay for half, but unsurprisingly, David volunteered to cover the whole thing.
I pretended to be disappointed. I suggested we go back to his apartment and he responded “yes” a little too enthusiastically.
By now I was really feeling the wine. I was not used to being so drunk in a setting that wasn’t a party, that familiar burst of confidence that seemed wasted on the fact there was only one person to witness this bubbly, charismatic version of me.
When he unlocked the door to his unit, I walked straight to the bedroom, but not before accidentally opening the bathroom door.
I took off all my clothes before David even made a move.
At first he wasn’t sure what to do, but then he took off his clothes too.
“I have an idea,” I said, giggling. I felt like the room was spinning a little bit, and I grabbed onto David’s shoulders to orient myself.
“What’s your idea?” he asked while running his hands down my bare back.
I almost changed my mind about what I was going to say next, but the look in David’s eyes told me that there wasn’t a lot I could do to turn him off from this moment.
I was a naked twenty-one-year-old standing in front of him in his apartment.
I hadn’t thought about this before, but I remembered that I was a bit younger than him, so my 70th percentile attractiveness to him was probably more like 80th. So to him, I really was sexy.
“How do you feel about role-play?” I asked, impressed with the confidence in my own voice.
“Oh. Uh…I mean, I’m open to it. What do you mean, exactly?”
I giggled. “Okay, but promise you won’t be weirded out.”
He sat on the edge of the bed. “Weirded out by what?”
Even in my current state I knew I couldn’t reveal everything. I’d keep it vague, make up a much more vanilla backstory. I knew from last time that I didn’t need much; my mind could fill in the gaps.
“I just love the idea of pretending to be someone I’m not. Pretending to be a specific…persona, I guess.”
“Okay, I could be into that,” he said, an amused expression on his face. “And what persona is that?”
“So,” I said, plopping my hands on my lap. “I want you to pretend that my name is Laura.”
“That’s it?” He furrowed his eyebrows. “Just like…call you Laura while we’re doing it?”
I giggled some more. “Yes. And I guess the rest of it doesn’t make too huge of a difference…but pretend I’m like a rich trust fund girl. Like a really hot, rich trust fund girl that you’re just super grateful to be with.”
“Uh, okay. Yeah, I think I can do that. But then, who should I be?”
“Just yourself. Except you’re like, really really into the fact that you’re hooking up with this really hot girl with the perfect body.”
“Well.” He looked around self-consciously. “I mean, that shouldn’t be too hard. I am into this.”
I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. “That’s very sweet of you. So yeah, just continue being into it and pretend I’m the hot trust fund girl.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “I can do that.”
“Great!”
In the beginning I had to remind him to say my name.
He stumbled a couple of times, started calling me Elizabeth, but it wasn’t long before he got the hang of it.
I closed my eyes and imagined my body morphing into Laura’s.
I imagined it was Laura’s hair that was pressed against the pillow, that it was Laura’s skin that was being touched by David’s hands.
I imagined David’s excitement in fucking someone so beautiful, so out of his league, and I became excited by his excitement.
Eventually I realized that I could maintain the fantasy even with my eyes open.
I enjoyed watching David’s lips part to form the shape of Laura’s name.
I could tell he liked all of it too; maybe the fantasy was contagious, maybe he thought that he actually was fucking Laura too.
Afterward I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.
I was surprised and disappointed to see that it was not Laura’s face staring back at me.
It was just my face, Elizabeth’s face, bloated and red from the alcohol.
I suddenly felt overcome by shame, shame that trickled down my spine like a shiver.
It was one thing to imagine myself as someone with attributes that belonged to Laura; it was another to request someone else partake in this fantasy with me.
What if David told someone about my request?
What if he already thought I was a freak?
I was too drunk to go back to my dorm so I stumbled back into bed.
David was already asleep with his mouth open, a line of drool connecting his lower lip to the sheet.
The next morning, I woke up to sunshine spilling out across crumpled white sheets.
David was still asleep, sprawled across the bed, and to temper my splitting headache I stumbled into the kitchen and downed a glass of water, gagging a couple of times over the stainless steel sink.
In the bathroom, I looked for a pink bottle to ease the nausea from my hangover and found nothing except some razor blades, a half-rolled-up tube of toothpaste, and a blue toothbrush that had seen better days.
In the clarity of daylight (and sobriety) I realized that I had been overreacting the night before, or at least focusing my attention on the wrong problem.
David was a guy, and guys didn’t talk about the details of their sex lives with other people.
He was probably too ecstatic about getting laid to care too much about my request. It wasn’t like I asked him to pretend I was a specific Laura; only a person named Laura who could be a figment of my imagination for all he knew, not an actual person I knew from school.
The real problem was how much I enjoyed pretending to be Laura, how it felt so right, as though in a world that was fair and in which everything made sense I would be Laura, or at least have all of the positive attributes of hers, and none of the negative attributes of Elizabeth.
—
Later that afternoon, when I had already returned home, Leah texted me to come to her dorm right away. My mind immediately jumped to the direst possibilities: someone had died or was about to die.
Are you hurt? Do I need to call 911? I texted her.
Just come, she said. When I got there, she was sitting on the floor sobbing, black mascara smeared across her cheeks.
I was the first to admit that I never was the best at comforting people.
It wasn’t because I didn’t care; in fact, sometimes the more I cared, the more awkward I would feel, and I would freeze up and not know what to do.
But it seemed like my own friends always knew how, just naturally, without even thinking about it.
Like when I was sick with a cold and Alex brought me Gatorade and snacks to my room and wouldn’t let me even reimburse them.
Or when my computer broke during finals week and the only appointment available at the Apple store was at 4:00 a.m., and Leah insisted that she go with me.
Or like when I had my mental breakdown over the Harvard rejection and Eunjin stayed with me until I felt okay.
I still didn’t think it had been necessary for her to call the EMTs, but in retrospect it was the kindest thing that she could’ve done.
So I thought about what my friends would do if I were the one sitting on the floor sobbing, and I realized that they would first ask what was wrong. I sat down next to Leah and patted her back.
“Tell me everything,” I said. At first she was hiccupping so hard that it was difficult to understand her.
“Do you want a glass of water?” I asked.
When she didn’t respond, I realized that she probably didn’t even want to think about whether she wanted water, so I just took out the water bottle from my backpack, unscrewed the lid, and handed it to her.
She gulped down the entire contents and started to talk.
It turned out she had discovered after looking through Alex’s phone that Alex had been cheating on her with an ex.
The ex had been in the same Eastern Civilizations class as Alex; at first, Leah had been jealous, but Alex told her she was being paranoid and had nothing to worry about.
It wasn’t until she read some texts on Alex’s phone that she realized her instincts had been right all along.
Alex had been in the shower when Leah snooped through the texts, and after they came back, the two of them entered a screaming match. Alex packed up some clothes in a duffel bag and agreed to stay with a friend for a few days until they figured out the rooming situation.
“I just feel so stupid,” Leah said. “Everyone warned me to not room with Alex in case something like this happened. God, everyone’s probably going to be saying behind our backs ‘I told you so.’ ”
“Well, if they are thinking that or saying that, they’re the ones who are stupid,” I said. “You and Alex were in love, and who in the world doesn’t make a questionable decision when they’re in love? There would literally be no good art in the world if that were the case.”
I knelt down next to Leah and rubbed her back. Her shirt was lightly damp with sweat. I didn’t speak for the next few minutes, just continued to sit next to her while her sobs turned into whimpers.
“Why am I not enough?” she asked through labored breaths.