Chapter 38
Mallory
Harvard University
Twenty-One Years Before the Outing
Dead presidents weighed down Mallory’s pocket. Ones, fives, tens, even a fifty. Suckers. Drawn in by Mallory’s smokey eyes, round breasts, and knowledge of how to use them. Drawn in by Ilena’s everything.
In their new room on the top floor of Straus, Mallory counted their winnings. The story of a boy duct-taped to a wall had
spread fast. And opened wallets. More bets had been made—these of the cold, hard, glorious cash variety. The longer the duct
tape held and the more freshmen who’d found out, the higher the bets went on if the duct tape would last longer than the pompous
kid. He’d made it to dinnertime before he begged to be ripped free.
At his side was the roommate forced to carry their stuff. Even under that tightly drawn hoodie, Mallory could feel his contempt,
especially when the resident adviser he’d appealed to agreed to let the results of the bet stand. Ingenious, he’d said. Just what Harvard was looking for.
Though, honestly, what he’d been looking at hadn’t hurt. Christ, Ilena was gorgeous. Lush black hair as thick as wool but smooth as silk, a slender frame curved in exactly the right places, and peacock blue eyes that challenged you, that made you want to prove you were worthy of her looking at you.
Mallory had hated her instantly. Ilena had rolled that stiff new suitcase of hers into their dorm room as if it were a judgment
of Mallory’s black duffel and cardboard box. She’d smiled deferentially, clutching that anemic white lamp and offering Mallory
her choice of bunk as if Mallory arriving first didn’t shut that shit down. She was a fucking tourist. Mallory had laughed
at them her whole life as they passed through the Yard, rubbing John Harvard’s bronze toe for luck, duped that it was some student tradition. Mallory had shoplifted lip gloss and NyQuil from the drugstore
across from the circular newsstand. Mallory had reached her first orgasm in the Radcliffe boathouse when she was sixteen.
Mallory owned this. Mallory was owed this. Eighteen years living with the grind and screech of the Lechmere trolley to living across from Urban Outfitters. She
wasn’t going to let some chick who lucked out in the DNA department ruin her freshman year.
And then she’d said it. “Did you know Straus was William S. Burroughs’s dorm?”
Mallory had stared at her.
“Oh, sorry, William S. Burroughs is a famous writer from the beat generation—”
“I know who Burroughs is.” (She didn’t.)
“Of course.” Ilena gently rested her tony tush on her suitcase. “Supreme Court Justice David Souter too. And Darren Aronofsky,
you know that movie, Requiem for a Dream?”
“Are you a tour guide?”
“No, I just like to be informed. They all have one thing in common.”
“Besides penises.”
“Maybe because of their penises.” The word didn’t quite roll off Ilena’s tongue as easily, but that it did at all impressed Mallory.
“They each had one of the big rooms on the fourth floor.” Ilena surveyed the anchovy tin of a dorm room attached along with three others to an only slightly larger common room.
Shared bathrooms at the end of the hall.
“A double the size of a quad. With its own bathroom. Two sinks.”
“Is that so?” Mallory had said, trying to figure out Ilena’s angle. Everyone always had an angle. At least, Mallory did.
“I saw the guys assigned to it.”
“And?”
Ilena had lifted herself off her suitcase and unzipped it. “And so I had an idea.”
And she’d handed Mallory that roll of duct tape.