“Yes,” he said almost before a word was out of her mouth. He fumbled for less than a second before locating the familiar condom and tearing it open.
“Do you want to…?”
“I don’t know….”
She loved him. She knew she did.
And then in a moment, simple and pure, they were together in a way they hadn’t been before.
Opening night came and went. Carmen wore dark clothes and knocked herself out changing sets and managing props. She kept her focus tight; there was no room for error. Although she did good work, it was the kind of job where people only noticed you if you screwed up.
Of all the people Carmen clapped for, she clapped the loudest for Julia as Annie Sullivan. She made sure there was a bouquet of roses to be presented to her onstage. She was proud of her friend. With Julia, even pride took on the tint of gratitude.
Carmen had worked hard. She’d learned things. She’d answered her own questions without needing help. She was largely invisible, granted, but there was something to be said for plain competence.
Afterward she gave Julia a silver bracelet. Julia countered with a plate of brownies for Carmen, which she brought to her room late that evening.
“Hey, did you get your room assignment at Village Theater yet?” Julia asked. She had her paper in her hand.
“I think so,” Carmen said, finding the letter on her desk that had arrived that morning from Vermont.
“Forte House, room 3H,” Julia read. “Did they put us together?”
“3H. Yep.”
“Oh, good.”
Once again, Carmen felt fortunate and also relieved. How lucky she was that Julia wanted to room with her. She’d been half afraid when she got the assignment that Julia would prefer a stranger.
“My brother said he’d drive me up. He’s visiting some girl at Dartmouth and it’s not too far out of the way. Do you want to come? Do you have a ride yet?”
Julia’s brother, Thomas, was a conspicuously handsome senior at Williams. Carmen was too overwhelmed in his presence to chirp out a single word. She was not only invisible but mute. “That’d be great. I hadn’t planned a ride yet.”
“Oh, good,” Julia said again, looking genuinely pleased. “Do you want to go get coffee?” she asked.
“Sure,” said Carmen, and as she wandered along next to an exuberant Julia, she felt herself in awe of Julia’s Mexican skirt, of the particular dark red color of her tank top, of her thinness and her confidence to wear a tweed cap that would have fallen pretty flat on almost anyone else. Again Carmen felt the gladness to have someone to do things with. Not just any someone, but one of the most striking people in the school.
Carmen stood in line at the student union to get them both lattes and arrived back at the table to see Julia holding court among a bunch of sophomore boys. Carmen slipped in silently beside her. She laughed at Julia’s witticisms and admired her ease.
For the hundredth time she wondered what Julia saw in her. This friendship was an incredible boon to Carmen, but what was Julia getting out of it? There were other girls around campus as glamorous as she was. As friends they would have suited Julia a lot better, and yet she hung around with dull, mute, invisible Carmen.
Carmen stared into her coffee cup while Julia told a funny story about the sound system going haywire in the second act of the play. Carmen felt bad for not being a worthier friend. She should think of things to say too, not sit there like a moron. She should have something to offer.
Julia did not belong with a loser in an oversized sweatshirt. If for no other reason, Carmen determined she would pull herself together for Julia’s sake.
Lying against Brian, her face sticking to his sticky chest, Tibby felt warm, thin tears dripping from the corners of her eyes, running over the bridge of her nose, tap-tapping onto his rib cage. They were some of the truest and most mysterious tears she had ever cried. When she put her hands up to his face, she realized his eyelashes were also wet.
She wanted to stay like this forever. She wanted to sink into his body and live there. She also realized she really had to pee.
Sometime or other she rolled onto her back and he sat up.
She touched her flushed cheeks.
“What—” An odd sound occurred in his throat.
She sat up too, caught by it.
“What?” she said, dazed.
“I—there was—I’m not sure—”
“Brian?”
“The condom—I think it was—It’s not—”
“Not what?” She didn’t even want to look.
“Not…on.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice was flat, but her muscles were coiling.
“God, Tib. I’m not sure. Maybe it broke. I think it broke.”
“You do?”
He was investigating, his hair falling forward over his face. He reached a hand toward her, but she had already stood up, dragging the covers with her.
“Are you sure?” Her voice was rising. Worries were seeding and spreading, pushing up stems like in a time-lapsed movie.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll—I’ll—”
“Are you sure it broke?” She was clutching the covers around her with two hands. She thought with hatred of the incompetent condom that had lived in his wallet all these months.
He sat like Rodin’s Thinker on the bare bed. “Yes, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know when it happened.”
She could get pregnant. She could be getting pregnant right now. What about STDs? Herpes? What about, God, AIDS?
No, he was a virgin. He said he was a virgin. He had to be. He was, wasn’t he? “It happened when we were having sex,” she said sharply.
He looked up at her, trying to understand the strange tone of her voice.
She could get pregnant! Easily! This was exactly how it happened! She needed to think. When was her period? These were the things that happened to tragic girls who weren’t nearly as cautious or practical as Tibby.
What should she do? What did this mean? For all this time, being in all these strange places in her life, she had taken a certain refuge in the fact that at least she was still a virgin. At least that category of fears was not hers to fear. It was the single transom she had not crossed.
She wasn’t a virgin anymore! Why had she let herself forget that it mattered?
She looked at Brian, almost as far away as he could be in a room so small. She should be having these worries aloud, with him, not just alone. But she couldn’t help it.
She wished she could dress without his seeing. She turned away.
“Tibby, I am sorry. I’m so sorry this happened. I didn’t even know—”
“It’s not like you did anything….” Her words were backed by minimal breath and floated to the wall.
“I just wish…,” he said.
Bridget’s stomach had been groaning since she’d woken up that morning, but when her father put a plate of eggs on the table for her, she fitfully roved around the kitchen instead of sitting down with them.
“Dad, why did you let Perry quit school?” she asked.
Her father was dressed in shapeless twill trousers and a tweed jacket, the same outfit he’d worn to work as long as she could remember. He was a history teacher and associate dean at a private high school, and he was clueless in the way she imagined only a longtime high school administrator could be. He’d made a career of tuning out teenagers. He was in good practice when it came to his own.
“He didn’t quit. He took some time off.”
“Is that what he said?”
Her father adopted his look of silent retreat. He didn’t like to be demanded of. He resisted her in his passive way. “You should eat if you want me to drop you on my way to school,” he said quietly. He was always eager to drop her places.
“Why is he taking time off? Did you ask him that? Three courses at Montgomery Community College is not exactly overwhelming.”
He poured his coffee. “Not everyone belongs in the Ivy League, Bridget.”
She glared at him. He was trying to f
orce her to back off. He knew she was neither a scholar nor a snob, that she felt defensive about going to Brown. He probably calculated that this would shut her up, but it wasn’t going to work. “So he’s going back to school in the fall?” she said volubly.
Her dad put forks on the table. He sat down to eat. “That’s what I expect.”
She tried to grab hold of his gaze. “Is that really what you expect?”
He salted his eggs. He paused, waiting for her to sit down. She didn’t want to sit down. When it came to him, she was a passive resister, too. It was one of the few things they had in common.
He’d made these eggs as a gesture. He’d done it for her. And yet the sight of them turned her stomach. Why couldn’t she receive what few overtures he made?
He refused to give her what she wanted. She refused to take what he gave.
She sat down. She picked up her fork. He ate.
“I’m worried about him,” she said.
He nodded vaguely. His eyes wandered to the newspaper on the table beside him. On most mornings the Washington Post was his breakfast companion, and she sensed he wasn’t enjoying the break in routine.
“It seems like he’s just…rotting away in his room.”
Her father looked at her finally. “His interests are different than yours, but he does have them. Why don’t you eat?”
She didn’t want to eat. She didn’t want to do what he said. She felt that if she ate, she’d be acceding to him, to this life in the underworld, and she wasn’t willing to do it.
“Does he see anyone? Does he leave the house? Do his interests include anything other than staring at a computer day and night?”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Bridget. He’ll be fine.”
All at once she was furious. She was standing and her fork was clattering around on the floor. “He’ll be fine?” she shouted. “Just like Mom was fine?”
He stopped chewing. He put his fork down. He looked not at her but through her, past her. “Bridget,” he said in a low rumble.
“Why don’t you look around! He is not fine! Why won’t you see it?”
“Bridget,” he intoned again. The more times he said her name, the less she felt she was even in the room with him.