The Mockingbirds (3 page)

But the mere thought of cradling my pillow, tucking my feet under me, and sharing with my best friend every single detail of my first time makes me queasy.
Oh my God! Can you believe it? I had sex for the first time, with a guy I don’t even know! And I don’t remember it! Wow!

After holding out on Daniel for six months, I threw it all away on a guy I met one random night. There must be something seriously wrong with me, like a defective computer where the hard drive crashes. This unit no longer works properly, sir. Please repair it and make it normal again.

I lie down on my bed with a pink-, orange-, and purple-patterned bedspread and place my hands beneath my head,
pulling my messy brown hair, badly in need of a brushing, into a mock ponytail. There’s silence for a minute and I picture a tennis ball sputtering away, rolling to a standstill at the edge of the court.

“So…,” T.S. says, raising an eyebrow. “Did you have a good time last night? I heard you had a blast after you started Circle of Death.”

When she says those words, a memory races up.

“Nine of Diamonds!” Carter shouts, then brandishes the playing card for the group to see. There’s a bunch of us crowded around a coffee table. “Rhyme time!” He strokes his chin, as if in deep contemplation. “Coral, C-O-R-A-L.”

Then voices chime in. “Oral.” “Floral.” “Laurel.” “Moral.” “Quarrel.”

“Damn,” I say loudly. “That was my word.”

Carter leans in close. “Guess you’ll need another rhyme.”

I look at the ceiling for a second, thinking, trying to pull another word into my brain. “I got it! Choral! Like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the
Choral
Symphony?”

“Nice try,” Carter says. He gives me a look, kind of sweet, almost a wink there too. “But I don’t think homonyms count in Circle of Death, and coral was my word.”

I slam my palm on the table
.

“Drink, drink, drink, drink,” they all say in unison
.

Sandeep takes his cue and fills my red tumbler with orange juice and a splash of vodka
.

I take it, drink it down in one gulp—I am tough, I am
cool, I am invincible. Vodka doesn’t burn my throat, I’m not even drunk, I’m totally sober. I’m back from winter break, we finally have Friday Night Out privileges, I just saw Artful Rage rock out in their live awesomeness tonight, and I am still on a mad music high. So I lean closer to Carter, my leg brushing up against his, my thigh near his thigh
.

“The Ninth Symphony is my favorite piece of music ever written. I love Beethoven,” I say to Carter. Or maybe it’s a slur. “He’s my boyfriend.” Then I laugh, like a drunk person
.

A thin coat of slime, muck covers me. I
flirted
with him. I came on to him. I wanted this to happen.

“Are you okay?” T.S. asks. “You just kind of spaced out there for a second.”

“I’m fine,” I say quickly, then ask, “you weren’t there for Circle of Death?”

“I left after the concert. I had to work on my blog and get to bed by ten thirty,” T.S. says. “Don’t you remember?” she adds quizzically.

“That you’re religious about going to bed early when you have practice with the Williamson girls’ team? Yeah, that’s been etched on my brain since freshman year.”

“The Williamson
women’s
team,” she corrects, because evidently the second you graduate from high school and move on to college you’re deemed a woman, no longer a girl. Anyway, the Themis
girls’
soccer team practices with the nearby Williamson
women’s
team every other Saturday in the winter to help each team keep up their skills in the
off-season. “But what I meant was, don’t you remember starting the game?”

I ignore her question. “So, where did we play the game, oh-roommate-who-knows-all?”

“Sandeep told me you started the game in the common room over at his dorm.”

Even though Sandeep is T.S.’s boyfriend, she doesn’t use that word. She calls him her “relevant other.” He calls her his “lady friend.” They think their nicknames are cute and countercultural. Not surprising for someone who refuses to use, let alone acknowledge, her full name. She tells people
T.S.
stands for
Thalia Svetlana
because it sounds so ridiculous. She’s been saying this ever since our freshman year, when we were first paired up as roommates. She says it seriously too, so everyone believes her and instantly gets why she’d go by
T.S.
instead.

“Hmm…”

“Hmm, what?” she asks. She stops stretching and sits down next to me, her regular routine suddenly taking a backseat.

“Hmm, nothing.”

“So what happened with Carter?”

I sit up straight, ramrod straight. “You
know
him?”

“I don’t know him. But he plays water polo.”

Water polo boys are cocky assholes. Slick, showy, insincere, bred to be bankers. They’re like junior frat boys.

“He’s a wing,” she adds. I give her a blank look. “That’s the position he plays.”

“Right. How could I forget how you know the roster for every single Themis sport?”

“It’s one of my many adorable talents. Anyway, Sandeep said you went back to his room. That’s where you were last night, right? In his room, fooling around?”

She assumes that’s all I did. She knows me, knows I never slept with Daniel, knows I would never sleep with someone I just met. She figures Carter and I just made out.

I wish we just made out.

Nothing happened,
my brain says quietly. But my head roars, protesting my game of make-believe again. I can feel this vein on my forehead pulsing harder now, practically popping out. I hate that vein. It’s so ugly and it’s so prominent when I get excited or riled up about something. I sometimes even notice it in photographs. I lie back down on the bed, press my fingers hard against my forehead, trying to forcibly push the headache out. I never get headaches, but now there’s a jackhammer on my skull.

“That’s where you were last night, right?” she repeats. “That’s what Sandeep told me after you left.” She says it like a statement, but it’s more of a question. She’s waiting for the answer, her green eyes boring a hole into me.

“Alex…” Her voice is low this time, nervous.

“Yes, I was there last night.”

I was there with Carter and those two condoms. The proof. The evidence that doesn’t lie. Carter used two condoms last night and thought it was great. He used two condoms with me last night.
With me
. There is no pretending, there is no
nothing happened
. We didn’t just make out. We did
it
and I can’t undo it. I can’t even block it out because I’ve been tagged now by Natalie, marked for the rumor mill.

I should have just slept with Daniel. Then at least my first time would have mattered.

“You had me worried. I was picturing you wandering the streets or something.”

Wandering the streets would have been wholly preferable. Hell, being homeless would be better right now. I can see myself sitting cross-legged on a sidewalk, hunched over beneath an awning, my psychedelic comforter wrapped around my shoulders. Passersby toss me dimes, nickels, sometimes a quarter. It’s a rough life, but at least no one knows me.

“So do you like him? I saw you guys chatting at the concert, but then I left.”

“What did you blog about last night?” I ask, changing the subject as I fix my eyes on the exposed brick wall in front of me. The other three walls are cream-colored, conducive to studying, Themis says. I glance down at our carpet. It’s thicker than Carter’s and has a floral pattern in peach and beige. I take some small comfort in this.

She shakes her head. “Nope. I want to know if you like him. Are you going to see him again? Are you going to go out with him?”

I picture Carter’s crusty white mouth, his sharp nose. I picture my simulated kiss downstairs by the lost-and-found bin. My stomach twists. “No.”

“Why not?” she asks.

I say nothing.

“What, did he smell or something?” she presses on.

I shake my head. “I just don’t want to see him again.”

“That’s a bummer,” she says. “You didn’t have a good time with him?”

“I have
no idea
what kind of time I had with him.”

I didn’t mean to say that out loud. I don’t want her to know I was so drunk, or so stupid, or so out of it, or so something that I can’t remember. T.S. doesn’t get smashed, she doesn’t lose control. She sets rules for herself, then adheres to them. It’s the athlete in her. She’s rigorous and disciplined about everything. I’m only regimented about music.

“No idea?” T.S. asks. She pulls away from me a bit, making room for what I just said.

“No idea,” she repeats. “What do you mean
no idea
?”

I shrug.

“Are you saying you don’t remember?” she asks.

I flip over on my belly; the right side of my face is against my pillow. Immediately, her hand is on my shoulder. T.S. tries to right me, but I resist, staying facedown.

“Do you remember any of it?” she asks.

“Not really,” I say, muffled into the bed.

“Alex, not remembering a night with someone isn’t good.”

More silence.

“You kissed him, right? You made out with him, but
that’s all, right?” T.S. asks anxiously, like she’s leading the witness, like she wants me to say
yes
.

Yes,
I’m dying to say.
Yes,
that’s all.

But I can’t say that, so I shrug faintly.

“Look at me,” she commands.

I place the pillow over my head this time, my face now pressed into the bedspread. T.S. won’t stop though. She tugs at the pillow. I’m no match for her. She’s strong, so she pries it off me.

“Alex, you’re not three. Cut the crap and look at me.”

I turn back over, facing her. Something in her voice reminds me of the time I learned her real name last semester. It was a Saturday morning in October and she had woken me up. “I’m late,” she whispered. “How late?” I asked. “I was supposed to get my period yesterday. I’m totally freaking out because I was stupid. We did it without a condom once. Just once,” she said. Her shoulders were shaking and she twisted a strand of her hair tighter and tighter. “I’ll go get you a test,” I said. I didn’t have any weekend points then to go off-campus, but I didn’t care. I ran to the nearest drugstore a mile away, bought her a test, and held her hand when she peed on the stick. She covered her eyes and made me look at it first. “Negative!” I told her. Then she said, “My name’s not Thalia Svetlana. It’s Tammy Stacy, but don’t ever call me that.”

I never have.

“Did you have sex with him?” she asks again.

I picture the condom wrappers.

“Yes.”

“Wow, you had sex for the first time,” she says, nodding slowly.

I say nothing.

“And you don’t remember it,” she states heavily.

“Evidently not.”

“That’s…,” she begins, and then her voice trails off.

“That’s what?” I ask.

“That’s”—she tries again—“odd.” Then she shakes her head.

“Odd?”

She doesn’t answer. She just looks at her watch. “You know,” she begins, going for a kind of casual tone, “our game doesn’t start until ten thirty. Why don’t we see if Casey wants to come visit?”

Casey is my sister. She’s a junior at Williamson so we were never at Themis at the same time. She was a big-time soccer star when she was here, and now she’s a big-time soccer star at Williamson, so she and T.S. know each other pretty well. The weird thing is Casey took a few years off from playing, stopped right in the middle of the season in her senior year at Themis. Maybe she got bored with it for a spell, but she started soccer again, came roaring back last semester at Williamson, better than ever.

Now T.S. sees my sister way more than I do during the school year. They discuss plays and strategies, since T.S. will be captain of the team next year. She wants to take Themis to nationals and then land a soccer scholarship for
college, even though she doesn’t need one. (If football players can get a free ride, she damn well wants one too.)

“Casey,” she says quietly into the phone. “Can you come over?”

I could be wrong, but I don’t think T.S. is calling Casey right now for the secret to landing the game-scoring goal each time she hits the field.

“We never just hang out with Casey before your games,” I say as T.S. pulls on sweatpants over her soccer shorts.

“Change your clothes,” she instructs, reaching for a pullover fleece next. “You can’t go out in the same clothes you wore last night.”

“Why are we going out? I thought Casey was coming here.”

“She is. But we’re not meeting here. We’re meeting in the Captains’ Room.”

“What the hell is the Captains’ Room?”

She gives me a look like I’m stupid. “In the athletic complex. For team captains. She still has her captain’s key.”