Chapter 3 #2
“It happened last weekend on Saturday night, after I saw you,” I said.
Then I started to tell him the story, the parts that I remembered and other details that I didn’t (but couldn’t escape now).
“A guy named Corbin asked me to go to a party at his frat. I didn’t know him very well.
I didn’t know anyone there,” I said. I had always been too busy to hang out with the other students, to try to make friends…
also, it wasn’t a skill that I seemed to possess. “I’d never been to a party like that.”
“Never? Not in college, not in high school?”
I looked over at him and thought of what my mom had said about how cute he was.
He had such nice blue eyes, almost the same color as wintery Lake Michigan.
He also had great hair, light brown and slightly unruly due to some wave but also shiny, like a shampoo commercial.
He was tall and muscular, how I imagined a Roman soldier from the Roman soldier era and with the same features I pictured on them: a strong jaw, high cheekbones, and straight nose. Kind of regal. Definitely handsome.
Shane was exactly the kind of person who would have gone to a lot of parties in high school, college, and the present. But I definitely wasn’t and I shook my head to answer his question. “I was busy working a lot,” I said. “I never did sports or clubs and I never seemed to meet a lot of people.”
“What happened on Saturday?”
“I drank a lot.” It wasn’t the first time I had tasted alcohol, but it was the first time I’d ever had so much. “Corbin handed me a shot when I came in and then he got me another one. He kept giving me cups of beer and mixed stuff.”
“Was he trying to get you drunk?”
“Maybe.” I tried to find a dry part of the napkin wad because more tears had started to fall. “I didn’t have to take it from him, but it seemed fun. It was what everyone else was doing, too. I wasn’t considering how I’d drive home later. I just wanted to have a good time.”
“Did you?” he asked.
No. No, I had not. “I got sick after a while. I went outside and some of the guys from the party followed me, and they were laughing. A bunch of people took pictures and there’s a video going around of me puking.
I’ve been at that college for more than four years, trying to finish my degree, and no one noticed me until Saturday night. ”
“Vomit? That’s all? It’s not so bad,” he told me. “They’ll stop watching soon enough.”
“It’s not just vomit.” I swabbed my eyes with the wet napkin.
“There are other things, too. Before I went outside, I was dancing on a table. Tables,” I corrected myself, because I did remember a variety of elevated surfaces and hands lifting me up and down.
“It’s all spliced together in the video.
And when I went outside, there was an interview.
” Before he could ask, I plunged ahead. “They had a bunch of questions, like, when did I lose my virginity. What was my body count. Did I spit or swallow. All sex stuff.”
He squinted and frowned. “Yeah, that’ll linger longer.”
“I answered everything. I can’t believe I did that,” I silently shook my head but it was much too late to stay quiet now. “Are you going to watch?”
“What?”
“If I were you, the first thing I would do is look it up. Are you going to? Of course you are. You’re human!
You’re going to be curious about all the incredibly embarrassing, juvenile, asinine stuff I said.
I totally humiliated myself. Utterly. Unequivocally.
I’m…” Well, “ashamed” wasn’t really strong enough for what I was feeling.
“I’ve been walking around campus and hearing strangers whispering and talking about me.
It’s not some kind of delusion. I wish I was being delusional,” I told him. “I feel so stupid.”
“Here.” He reached into the back seat and grabbed a T-shirt. “Go ahead and blow your nose on that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t give a hang. What happened to those frat boys?”
“Nothing. They didn’t really do anything,” I said.
“They didn’t touch me or pour the liquor down my throat and I’m legal to drink.
I’m twenty-three, much too old to go to a party and try my first shot and then throw up on my shoes.
I’m too old to sit in someone’s car and cry into a T-shirt, too.
” But I did use it to wipe away some snot. “I’ll wash this for you.”
“Quite a few people have cried in this car.”
“Why? What are you doing to make them upset?”
“This is my first year working for the Woodsmen,” he said.
“After I graduated from college, I spent some time with the Crawfish football organization in Baton Rouge as an unpaid assistant. I got money from running camps for kids,” he explained.
“Around the team, I had to do everything that everyone else avoided. One of those things was to tell the players that they were being let go, not signed, however you want to call it. I had to fire them.”
“That was your first job out of college?”
“It was awful,” Shane said fervently. “Terrible. The head coach didn’t want me to do it in the building because he thought it brought bad energy.
It meant I had to take them outside and I hated being in the parking lot where other people could watch it happen, so I would drive us around in my truck.
The guys all got to know that if I wanted us to go for a ride, it was bad news.
I used to keep a box of tissues in here, but I used them all up when I came to Michigan. ”
“You were sad about moving?”
“What? No, this is a much better job,” he told me. “I caught a bad cold and my nose ran for about a month.”
I nodded and patted my cheeks with the T-shirt.
“People will forget about the video and everything else,” he said. “Someone will do something even stupider, then you’ll all graduate, and you’ll move on with your lives.”
“But every time someone searches for my name, that will come up.”
“You gave them your name?” He squinted again and then reached for his face, as if he was going to rub his eyes. But he put down his hand.
“They asked my name and age in the interview. I wasn’t thinking straight enough to lie. I wish I had just left.”
“How did you get home if you were so drunk?”
“Another girl saw me trying to order a car to come pick me up but I think I was already over the limit on my credit card, so I couldn’t get one.
I know I was already over it, because my mom had taken it to pay for a delivery…
it doesn’t matter. That woman drove me and she was really nice.
I should bring her flowers or something. ”
When I’d gotten home, I’d stumbled inside and fallen face-first onto my bed, feeling sick but not knowing how bad things would turn the next morning. I wasn’t hugely into social media, mostly because I was so busy and also because it pissed me off to see my sister constantly glued to it.
In fact, Morgan had been the one to tell me that there was a video.
Then my brother Max had come barging into my room, saying that I was an idiot and laughing at the same time.
At least we’d been able to keep it from my mom so she didn’t get upset, and Dad had ignored my brother when he’d tried to share the joke.
At one point, he would have hung on Max’s every word but those days were long gone.
We still weren’t heading toward Woodsmen Stadium—Shane hadn’t even started the car yet. Instead, he was frowning at the mucus- and tear-covered shirt I held. “I’ll wash it,” I told him again.
“No, I really don’t care. I was just wondering why people act like that. What was their motivation?”
“They thought it was funny,” I explained.
“I guess they had planned it out beforehand. That was why Corbin invited me in the first place, so I could be the joke. It worked out perfectly for them and I’m glad I don’t remember everything.
I still have some sequences stuck in my mind, like when I tripped on the steps going outside and I fell.
I remember people laughing but they didn’t put that part into the video. ”
“Did you get hurt when you fell? There are trainers at the stadium.”
“No, I don’t need anything. But thanks.”
We still sat in silence.
“You don’t have to take me there,” I said. I figured that he deserved an out after listening to that long, ridiculous, shameful story.
But Shane started the engine and drove slowly over the ice. Then he started talking about something that had happened when he was in high school, when he’d had a friend who had gotten her period and had bled through onto her pants.
“I have three sisters so I was pretty clear about what had happened and I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but she was crying, so embarrassed that everyone had seen,” he said.
“What did she do?”
“Another girl got her a pad and I gave her my sweatshirt to wear. It was really long so it covered the stain and everyone forgot about it that same week, because we found out that the vice principal was having an affair with the art teacher. They were both married to other people.” Then he told me more about his family, his three sisters and his parents.
Two sisters had also moved away from Arkansas, but they got together for holidays and his dream was to buy a cabin on a lake they all loved so that they could vacation there together.
He did a great job of drawing my thoughts away from the party and its aftermath as we continued our slow drive toward the stadium. “You choose to spend your vacations with them,” I stated, and he nodded. “You all like each other.”
“We fight. We argue,” he corrected himself.
“Sometimes, I still have to take my second-to-youngest sister and hold her over the edge of the dock because that girl has a very, very sassy mouth.” He smiled as he spoke, so apparently, he thought that sass was funny and they still got along even after he had threatened her with a dunking.
“You have siblings, so you know how it is.”
“We’re not the same way.”