Something Borrowed (8 page)

he asked me all these questions, like were you seeing anyone and

did I think you would like Marcus. And you know, was he smart

enough for you. Stuff like that. It was really cute."

I digest this information as the store clerk rings up Darcy's

bikinis.

"So what did you tell him?"

"I just said that you were totally single, and that of course you'd be

into Marcus. He's such a sweetie. Don't you think?"

I shrug. Marcus moved to New York from San Francisco only a

few months ago. I know very little about him, except that he and

Dex became friends at Georgetown, where Marcus's claim to fame

was graduating dead last. Apparently Marcus never went to class

and got high all the time. The most infamous story is that he

overslept on the day of his statistics final exam, showed up twenty

minutes late only to discover that he had thrown his remote

control into his backpack instead of his calculator.

I haven't yet determined whether he is a free spirit or simply a

buffoon.

"So are you psyched? If you get a date in with him before our

share starts, you will have dibs on him over Claire and Hillary."

I laugh and shake my head.

"Seriously." Darcy signs her receipt and flashes a smile at the

clerk. "Claire would love to sink her nails in him."

"Who said I'm going on a date?"

"Oh, puh-lease. Don't even start with that shit. You're going. (A)

he is such a cutie. And (b) Rachel, no offense, but you can't exactly

afford to be all picky, Ms. Haven't Been Laid in what?

Over a

year?"

The store clerk looks up at me sympathetically. I glare at Darcy as

I slide my tankini across the counter. Yeah, right a year.

We leave Bloomingdale's and look for a cab on Third Avenue.

"So, you'll go out with Marcus?"

"I guess so."

"Promise?" she asks, getting her cell phone out of her purse.

"You want me to take a blood oath? Yes, I'll go," I say.

"Who are

you calling?"

"Dex. He bet me twenty bucks that you wouldn't go."

Darcy's right I have nothing else going on. But the real reason I

say yes to Marcus when he calls and asks me out is that Dex said I

wouldn't go. And just in case he thought he had cast some sort of

spell over me and I was going to turn Marcus down because I'm

preoccupied with the Incident, I will go out with Marcus.

But as soon as I say yes, I start obsessing about what Marcus

really knows. Did Dex tell him anything? I decide that I must call

Dexter and find out. I hang up three times before I can dial the

full number. My stomach is churning when he answers on the first

ring. "Dex Thaler."

"So what does Marcus know about what happened last Saturday?"

I blurt out, my heart racing.

"Well, hello to you too," he says.

I soften slightly. "Hi, Dex."

"Last Saturday? What was last Saturday? Refresh my memory."

"I'm being serious! What did you tell him?" I am horrified to find

myself talking in the girly, whiny way that Darcy has perfected.

"What do you think I told him?" he asks.

"Dexter, tell me!"

"Oh, relax," he says, his tone still one of amusement. "I didn't tell

him anything What do you think this is? A high school locker

room? Why would I tell anyone our business?"

Our business. Our. We. Us.

"I was just wondering what he knew. I mean, you told Darcy you

were with him that night"

"Yeah. I said, 'Marcus, I was with you last night and we had

breakfast together this morning all right?' And that was that. I

know that's not how it works with you girls women."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I mean you and Darcy share every exhaustive detail with one

another. Like what you ate that day and what brand of shampoo

you plan on purchasing."

"And like when you sleep with one another's fiances?

That sort of

detail?"

Dex laughs. "Yeah, that would be another example."

"Or like your bet that I'd say no to Marcus?"

He laughs again, knowing that he is busted. "She told you that, did

she?"

"Yeah. She told me that."

"And did it offend you?"

I realize that I am starting to relax, almost enjoying the conversation. "No but it made me say yes to Marcus."

"Oh!" he laughs. "I see how it works. So you're saying that had she

not shared that piece of information with you, you would have

turned my boy down?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" I ask coyly, hardly recognizing

myself.

"I would actually. Please enlighten me."

"I'm not sure Why did you think I'd say no?"

"Wouldn't you like to know," he retorts.

I smile. This is full-fledged flirtatious banter.

"Okay. I thought you'd say no because Marcus doesn't seem to be

your type," he finally says.

"And who is?" I ask, and then feel instantly remorseful.

Flirting

like this is not the path to redemption. It is no way to right my

wrong. This is what my brain tells me, but my heart is galloping as

I await his answer.

"I don't know. I've been trying to figure that out for about seven

years."

I wonder what he means by this statement. I twist the cord

around my fingers and can think of nothing to say in response. We

should hang up now. This is going in a bad direction.

"Rach?" His voice is low and intimate.

I feel breathless, hearing him say my name like this.

The one

syllable is familiar, warm. "Yeah?"

"You still there?" he whispers.

I manage to say, "Yes, I'm still here."

"What are you thinking?"

"Nothing," I lie.

I have to lie. Because what I am thinking is, Maybe you are my

type a little bit more than I once thought.

Maybe I don't have a type at all. When I consider my past

relationships there is no composite picture. Not that the sample

would be considered statistically significant other than Brandon

in high school, I have had only three boyfriends.

My real dating history began my first semester of college at Duke.

I lived in a coed dorm, and every night we all gathered in the

lounge to study (or pretend to), hang out, and watch shows like

Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place. It was in that lounge that

I developed a serious crush on Hunter Bretz from Mississippi.

Hunter was scrawny and nerdy, but I was crazy about him. I loved

his intelligence, his slow, smooth drawl, and the way his brown

eyes fixed on you when you talked, as though he really cared about

what you had to say. My roommate Pam, a Jersey girl with big

hair, declared my feelings a "total fucking mystery" but still

encouraged me to ask Hunter out. I didn't, but I did work hard at

developing a friendship, cracking through his shy exterior to talk

to him about poetry and literature. I really believed that I was

making progress with Hunter when Joey Merola came in for the

kill.

Joey was the opposite of Hunter a boisterous sports guy with a

loud laugh. He played every intramural sport in the book and was

always strolling into the lounge all sweaty with a story about how

his team came from behind in the last second to win the game. He

was the kind of guy who was proud of how much he could eat and

the fact that he could get by in literature classes without ever

reading a book.

One Thursday night, Joey, Hunter, and I were the last three in the

lounge, talking about religion, the death penalty, and the meaning

of life, the stuff I had imagined discussing in college, away from

Darcy and her more shallow pursuits. Joey was an atheist and for

the death penalty. Like me, Hunter was Methodist and against the

death penalty. All three of us were unclear on the meaning of life.

We talked and talked, and I was determined to outlast Joey and

end up with Hunter. But sometime after two, Hunter threw in the

towel. "Awright y'all, I have an early class."

"C'mon, man. Skip it. I never make my eight o'clock,"

Joey said

proudly.

Hunter laughed. "I figure I'm payin' for it, I should go."

This was another thing I liked about Hunter. He was paying for

his own education, unlike most of the rich kids at Duke. So he said

good night, and I wistfully watched him amble out of the lounge.

Joey didn't miss a beat, just kept yapping, rehashing the fact that

we were both from Indiana just two towns apart and that both of

our fathers had attended Indiana (his dad had been a walk-on for

the basketball team). We played the name game and got two hits.

Joey knew Blaine, Darcy's ex-boyfriend, from reading the local

sports page. And we both knew of Tracy Purlington, a promiscuous girl from the town between ours.

Finally, when I said I really must get to bed, Joey followed me

upstairs and kissed me in the stairwell. I thought of Hunter, but I

still kissed Joey back, excited to be getting some real collegiate

experience. Annalise had already met her now-husband Greg (and

lost her virginity to him), and Darcy had hooked up with four guys

by my latest count.

The next morning I regretted kissing Joey. Even more so when I

spotted Hunter hunkered down in the library stacks, his head bent

over a textbook. But not enough to keep me from kissing Joey

again that weekend, this time in the laundry room as we waited

for our clothes to dry. And so it continued until everybody in our

dorm, including Hunter, knew that Joey and I were an item. Pam

was psyched for me said that Joey blew Hunter away and had the

cutest butt in the dorm. I wrote to Darcy and Annalise, telling

them about my new boyfriend and how I was over Hunter (only

partly true) and how happy I was (happy enough).

They both had

one question: was I going to go all the way with Joey?

I was ambivalent on the subject of sex. Part of me wanted to wait

until I was deeply in love, maybe even married. But I was also

intensely curious to find out what all the fuss was about, and

desperately wanted to be sophisticated and worldly. So after Joey

and I had been together a respectable six weeks, I marched over to

the school health clinic and returned to my dorm with a prescription for Lo/Ovral, the birth-control pill that Darcy

guaranteed would not cause weight gain. A month later, with the

added protection of a condom, Joey and I did the great deed. It

was his first time too. The earth didn't move during those two and

a half minutes, as Darcy claimed it did during her first time with

Carlos. But it also didn't hurt as much as Annalise had warned me

it would. I was relieved to have it out of the way and happy to join

my hometown friends in all their womanly glory. Joey and I

embraced in my bottom bunk and said that we loved each other.

Ours was a better first time than most.

But that spring, there were two red flags indicating that Joey

wasn't the man of my dreams. First, he joined a fraternity and

took the whole thing way too seriously. One night when I teased

him about the frat's secret handshake, he told me that if I

disrespected his brotherhood, I was disrespecting him.

Please.

Second, Joey became obsessed with Duke basketball, sleeping out

in tents for tickets to big games and painting his face blue,

jumping up and down courtside with the other

"Cameron

Crazies."

The whole scene was a bit much, but I guess I would have been

fine with his enthusiasm if he had been from New Hampshire or

another state with no huge basketball ties. But he was from

Indiana. Big Ten country. His father played for the Hoosiers, for

God's sake. And there he was, this sudden die-hard

"I've liked

Duke since the dawn of time and I'm all tight with Bobby Hurley

because he once drank at my frat house" kind of a fan.

But I

looked beyond these imperfections, and we forged ahead to

sophomore and then junior year.

Then one night, after Wake Forest beat Duke in hoops, Joey

showed up at my place in a foul mood. We began to argue about

nothing and everything. First it was petty matters: he said that I

snored and hogged the bed (how can you not hog a twin bed?); I

complained that he consistently mixed up our toothbrushes (who

makes that mistake?). The arguing escalated to more significant

issues. And there was no turning back when he called me a boring

intellectual and I called him a shameless bandwagoner who

actually believed that his painted blue face contributed to Duke's

championships. He told me to lighten up and get some school

pride, before storming off.

He returned the next day with a solemn face and his scripted "we

need to have a talk" introduction followed by the "we'll always be

close" conclusion. I was more stunned than sad, but I agreed that

maybe we should be having a more diverse college experience,

which really meant dating other people. We said we would always

be friends, even though I knew we didn't have enough in common

for that to happen.

I didn't shed a tear until I saw him at a party holding hands with

Betsy Wingate, who had also lived in our freshmen dorm. I didn't