Josie was wearing flip-flops even though the temperature outside could not have been over forty-five degrees. It was one of those deep-pewter late October days during which morning lasted until it finally bled without a whimper into twilight. Shelly had, herself, pulled her suede boots out of the back of her closet for the first time that year. Not only was it too cold for flip-flops, but flip-flops had been the one item of clothing Shelly had asked Josie, when she’d first hired her, not to wear to the office.
And she was over an hour late.
“Hey,” Josie said breathlessly, pushing open the door to Shelly’s office with her hip. “Sorry I’m late!”
Shelly tried to look away as nonchalantly as possible, returning to her computer on which she’d managed to call up a blank Word document as soon as she heard what she’d assumed was Josie coming up the stairs.
“You’re not mad, are you?” Josie asked, but she was out of the door’s threshold before Shelly could turn around and say anything, her flip-flops making a husky whisper as they slapped against the heels of her small white feet as she sauntered down the hallway toward the restroom.
It had been two weeks since they’d first slept together, and there’d been two dinners (both at Shelly’s house, cooked by Shelly) since then. Three other times, they’d left the office together, gone back to Shelly’s for drinks, and ended up in bed. These assignations had been initiated casually enough by Josie (“Hey, Shelly, are you up for a glass of wine after work?”) and, after each time, Shelly swore to herself that she wouldn’t let it happen again.
Too risky. Too risqué. Too unseemly.
But simply saying no seemed impossible. At least once or twice a day now, Shelly found herself nearly doubled over with longing for the girl:
The small hard nipples under her hands. The soft palpitating at the base of her throat. The way Josie (who required sometimes a steady, blissful hour of tongue and fingers to reach an orgasm) would throw her head back in the final seconds, and Shelly could glimpse just the bottom of her bright white front teeth between her parted lips, and a hissing sound would escape from Josie that sent what felt like a shockwave ripping through Shelly’s body, bringing her to her own climax without even needing to be touched.
It was only when they were in bed that they discussed the fact that they had ever slept together before or that they ever would again, so each “date” was like some kind of extreme sport—the rush of not knowing what would happen next.
In the meantime, Josie’s work ethic had dwindled down to nothing. She’d stopped bothering even to apologize for leaving early. She simply announced that she was leaving. Twice, she called in sick, depositing scratchy-voiced messages on the voice mail, having clearly timed her calls so that Shelly wouldn’t be in the office to actually answer the phone.
This morning, the flip-flops. Late again.
It didn’t surprise Shelly. (Why would it? Josie had been a bad work-study student from the start.) But it frightened her. She knew that the sexual relationship meant she was no longer in a position to reprimand Josie, or even gently critique her. That first morning, after that first night, Josie had shimmied her jeans on, zipped up her hoodie, and said, before sliding out Shelly’s front door, “Shelly, I’m going to have to make up tomorrow for missing my Chem Lab yesterday afternoon, ’kay? So, I won’t be in. But I’ll see you soon?”
Shelly had found herself unable to remind Josie that she had responsibilities related to the St. Crispin Quintet concert the next day. Someone needed to walk them from their hotel to Beech Auditorium (because it was written into their contract that the St. Crispin Quintet did nothing without an escort), and it was the work-study’s job to attend to these details. It was, in fact, the whole reason Shelly had been given a work-study student in the first place, because the experience of rubbing elbows with these professionals was supposed to be so beneficial to the student’s education.
But that morning Shelly had stood in the doorway holding her robe closed around her and said, “Okay,” to Josie, while any last shred of denial about the new dynamic between them dissolved as Josie cocked her head and blew a kiss in Shelly’s direction. Shelly could feel herself flushing, but also could not stop herself from reaching out the door (in full view of the mailwoman across the street) and taking hold of one of the dangling pompoms on Josie’s pink hoodie, and gently urging her back inside.
Josie had smiled sleepily, dreamily, allowed herself to be lured back through the screen door and into the foyer, where she kept her eyes open as Shelly pulled her to her and put her hands in the silky black hair and kissed Josie’s lips with as much restraint as she could (and still found herself trembling, making little noises in her throat, her tongue running over those perfect little teeth, her hands, as if they belonged to someone else, traveling up to Josie’s waist to her breasts again, running clumsily over them as Josie sagged passively, pliantly, against the screen door and let it all happen). When Shelly had finally managed to step back, there was what could almost have been a look of triumph on Josie’s face.
She’d narrowed her eyes and licked her lips, sighed, and reached out to touch Shelly’s throat, and then said, “See you next time,” before turning and leaving (for real this time), swaying down the walk, surely aware that she was being watched, without turning around once to look at Shelly in the doorway.
In the other office, Shelly could hear her talking on the phone. Every sentence ended with the sound of a question.
“And then we went to the bar? And Crystal and Stephanie were there? And so anyway I guess tonight we’re supposed meet back at the house and take away their privileges, you know? And after that, we’ll vote? So, like, tell them not to wear any shoes, okay? Everybody else can wear shoes?”
Jesus, Shelly thought. What could Josie be talking about, or did she even want to know? Was this some sort of hazing? No “privileges”? No shoes?
Maybe a punishment for having been at the bar when they were supposed to be home making doilies for the Founders’ Tea?
It was, Shelly thought, possibly Trials Week—which had been renamed Spirit Week by the Pan-Hellenic Association after the scandal a few years ago when a drunken sorority sister had been driven forty miles out of town and left on the side of a rural highway.
It was, apparently, a common prepledge trial these days. You were taken to a party, where you were prompted to get drunker than you had ever been before in your life, and then your sympathetic older “sisters” pretended to insist on driving you home because of their great concern for you—but, instead, they dropped you off in the middle of nowhere and told you, as their car sped away, to find your way back to the house.
Maybe most of the girls did make it back to the house, and lived long enough to inflict this trial the next year on a new generation of sisters. But one year, a victim panicked and tried to chase the car that had dropped her off, managing to run fast enough to toss herself against the bumper and hit her head and die.
The administrators and the parents and the Pan-Hellenic Association swooped in screeching, as if they hadn’t known perfectly well that this kind of thing was taking place on a regular basis. There was a great deal of “shock” and “outrage” among the university community—especially since this was a sorority. “Girls Hazing Girls!” was the headline, as if it were news.
Not a single woman Shelly knew was surprised by the ruthlessness of girls toward one another—and certainly no one Shelly knew who’d ever been in a sorority could manage much more than the raising of an eyebrow, if not a stifled yawn, at the news that sorority sisters were dropping each other off in the dark, drunk, and laughing as they sped away. Shelly herself had never been dropped off drunk on a highway, but she’d had to go two weeks without brushing her teeth, and was required to arrive every evening on the front porch of the Eta Lambda house to have the scum on her enamel approved.
Over a cup of tea after their third time in bed together, Shelly had asked Josie if sororities still did things like that, and Josie had laughed pretty hard while recounting how, as a newbie, she’d had to wear the same underpants every day for four weeks—period to period—and take them off in the living room, standing there bottomless in front of the Pledge Board, while they passed her panties around and either sniffed them or screamed about them and threw them from one sister to the next until they were given back, and Josie had to put them back on.
“I cheated,” Josie said. “I washed my panties out in the sink a few times, and then I put toothpaste on the crotch to make it look really yeasty, so they just freaked when they saw it, and didn’t smell it—luckily, since it smelled like mint!”
“Jesus,” Shelly had said, rubbing her eyes.
Although, as a hazing practice, this sort of thing happened only during the prepledge part of sorority life, the spirit of it was part of the very air they had breathed in the Eta Lambda house. Every few weeks some sister would find your hairbrush matted with hair on the bathroom sink, or some clump of something crusty in the shower after you’d just gotten out, and she would scream Ee-w-w-w! for everyone to hear.
And these little humiliations called up everything:
The filth of being human, of being female, of being alive, of living in a body, of having the shame of that exposed to prettier, cleaner, better girls.
Shelly looked up, and was startled to find Josie standing in the threshold, leaning against the doorjamb. One thin strap of her little tank top had slid down her shoulder. Her hips looked so thin that the denim skirt she was wearing seemed to be held up over her pelvic bone by some sort of antigravitational force. Shelly tried to keep her eyes on a spot just over Josie’s shoulder as she said, “Oh, hi, Josie. Did you call the School of Music yet, about Jewett Smith?” Shelly could hear the thinness of her own voice as she spoke, and it made her want to crawl away somewhere to die.
“No,” Josie said. “But I will.”
“Thank you,” Shelly said, and turned back to her computer, stared at the blank document on which she’d only managed to type, “Funds Request.”
“Um, Shelly?”
Shelly turned and saw that Josie was chewing on the shiny pinkie fingernail of her left hand. What Shelly felt, seeing that pinkie between the girl’s teeth, could only have been described as a sharp pain in her chest—a kind of sexual agony. If she’d been standing up, her knees might have buckled. When she tried to form the word yes, nothing came out of her mouth.
Was she losing her mind?
Was this what happened to old dykes? Was this some sort of peri-menopausal insanity? She hadn’t even blinked, but there before her eyes was a flash of Josie on her back, hips propped up on one of Shelly’s flowered pillows, sleek thighs open, and Shelly parting the pink shell between her legs with her fingertips, leaning in with her own lips parted as Josie writhed beneath her—and Shelly felt a kind of terror that was so much like ecstasy that, sitting there at her desk in front of her computer, she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.
“Shelly, I have to tell you something, and I’m really sorry.”