Chapter 14 The Boy Could Dance #2
I nodded and thanked them for showing me Kenny’s bedroom. I didn’t start crying again until I was in the car and pulling out of their driveway.
“I overheard my mom telling my dad that the great thing about Smith is that it’s a women’s college, so there won’t be any older men trying to seduce you,” Marie was saying.
My new trunk was open on my bedroom floor.
I had just told her about the group that Sharon Foster and Eleanor Catton were starting with Father Whitlock.
“Well, she’s wrong,” I said, folding a sweatshirt and flattening it inside the trunk.
Marie knew that I had been sleeping with the NYU professor who’d picked me up at that bar over Thanksgiving, but not the details of why we had broken up.
After he had eviscerated my fiction, I’d shared the fact I was writing with no one.
“There may not be boys my age on the campus trying to seduce me, but there are plenty of older men on the faculty,” I went on.
I knew I sounded like a curmudgeon, but I wanted to get stoned after my visit to Kenny’s bedroom, and Marie had mostly stopped smoking weed that summer.
She sure as hell wasn’t going to get high with me at four o’clock on a weekday afternoon.
“I promise you, if I want to, I’ll sleep with my ‘holes and poles’ professor.
” (In fact, I did. But he wasn’t married.
And I did just the one time, and only then to see if I still had it.)
“Your what?”
“It’s a course I’ve signed up for in the psych department: human sexuality. The students call it ‘holes and poles.’ ”
She nodded a little knowingly. “Our equivalent is ‘dicks and slits.’ But you have to have taken intro to psychology first, and so I haven’t taken either.” She picked up the July issue of the travel magazine I’d worked for. “Will you miss New York City?” she asked.
“I will. I’ll miss working there, and I’ll miss the independence I had.”
“You’ll have plenty of independence at college.”
Ah, I thought, but not the opportunity to snort blow in the bathrooms at a travel magazine or East Village punk club.
I suspected that I’d have to study and read and write papers at night at Smith.
At the travel magazine, I had no responsibilities in the evenings and could drink and smoke and party as much as I wanted.
“Here’s a shocker,” I said. “Kenny Foster was a pretty good disco dancer.”
“Disco? Kenny? Are you shitting me?” she said, and she threw one of the decorative throw pillows on my bed at me.
“I’m not.”
“That’s insane. And gross. Disco is so gross.”
I hadn’t expected this response. It wasn’t why I had told her. “It’s no grosser than punk. Arguably, it’s less gross. Disco dancers aren’t piercing their eyebrows or noses before getting on the dance floor.”
“You don’t either.”
“I’m the least punk person you know. I just used to go to some punk clubs because of the bands.” (A lie. We know why I went. I’ve told you. It’s a miracle I wasn’t shooting heroin between my toes.) “Anyway, why is it gross that Kenny could do the hustle?”
“Well, he could according to his kid sister.”
“I think Olivia calls it like she sees it. She doesn’t fuck around.”
“I have heard she’s kind of a little badass.”
“And Kenny had a girlfriend in Florida.”
“He did? He always seemed so shy.”
“He was with us. New kid in a place like Tallmadge? We’re a tough crowd, Marie, a tough audience.”
She got up from bed and sat beside me on the floor. “You’ve lost weight.” She was concerned.
“You sound like my mom.”
“Just saying.” She leaned into me, studied my face. “And your eyes are very red.”
“I’m not stoned.”
“I wouldn’t care if you were!”
I sighed. “I had kind of an emotional episode in Kenny’s bedroom. And in the car. And when I got home.”
“Because of the target? Because someone is trying to—is this the right word?—frame you?”
“No. Because of Kenny.”
“Why did you do it? Go to his house?”
“Because I didn’t know him. For fuck’s sake, none of us knew him.”
“You can’t know everyone.”
“We never invited him in,” I said, a shorthand for so much.
Neither Marie nor I had had serious boyfriends in high school.
None of us in that clique did. If I had not been with Theo Catton, I would have been like Marie: we predated the expression “friends with benefits,” but that’s what our posse was, a pack of entitled boys and girls who drank keg beer from plastic red Solo cups and then paired off in bedrooms and back seats.
I was that well-liked princess who never fucked for reasons everyone attributed to some inexplicable combination of priggishness and saving myself for golf.
“I am so glad you’ll be away from this place in a few days,” Marie told me, sensing how poisonous the place had become for me. “Will you have to come back here this fall because of the legal stuff?”
“A few times, for sure,” I said. “But I have no idea how much will be because of the lawsuit and how much will be because of the criminal trial.”
“You’re not a criminal,” she said protectively.
“Well, the country club and the practice net company and my lawyer and Harry Fallows’s lawyer are still arguing over whose fault it was. And the district attorney is friends with Mrs. Catton, and those two sure have strong opinions. The fact the target was in my golf bag just ain’t great.”
“Why is this all taking so long?”
“Because there are motions and discovery and more motions and more discovery.”
“And Harry is still denying he took off the target and shoved it in your golf bag?”
“Absolutely. Swears he didn’t do it. Oh, he’s happy to admit I demanded the target should go, but then says he hadn’t thought much about it. Says he never took it down and never planned to take it down.”
“But it wasn’t you.” She had phrased it like a statement, but I was sure it was actually a question, and I was offended.
“No, of course not,” I snapped.
“Damn right,” she said, as if she’d been giving me a pep talk, not confirming that I was guilty of many things, but ruining the structural integrity of a golf practice net was not among them.
“So, we know the one thing they’ll discover when this process is all over is this: it wasn’t your fault.
It was an accident. That’s pretty damn clear. ”
But, of course, in the eyes of the law, it wasn’t. All that was obvious was this: the target had been moldering in my golf bag for months.