The look on Josie’s face, standing in front of the Starbucks counter (slender fingers wrapped around a white paper cup, just turning around) froze Shelly in the threshold, holding the door open with one hand, clutching her shoulder bag to her hip with the other. There was a rush of cold air around her ankles, and it seemed that, in addition to Josie, everyone in the café had turned at that moment to look at her, to see where the draft had come from, to scowl at her for holding the door open. (When had it gotten so cold? Shelly had walked all the way here from her house in a thin dress. Was the dampness she felt on her neck that of melting snow?)
A woman with a stroller pushed past, and after she’d managed to squeeze by Shelly with her baby and her contraption and her diaper bag, she turned back around and nodded at the door. “Better shut that,” she said. There was such gentleness in her tone that Shelly looked at the woman, trying to comprehend not what she’d said but the way she’d said it. “The door,” the woman said, nodding at it again. “It’s gotten cold out.”
Shelly stepped all the way into the coffee shop and let the door swing shut behind her. By then, Josie was on the other side of the room, putting a lid on her cup, glancing furtively around her, and Shelly, despite the warnings of the university bureaucrat, was approaching her, moving her mouth, saying the girl’s name loudly enough that other people were turning at their tables to look.
Josie started to back away, but Shelly was ready for it, and reached out, took hold of the slender arm (bare, despite the cold: Josie was wearing a pair of faded jeans with holes in the knees and a little silky black top, a cashmere sweater wrapped casually around her waist, like an afterthought)—and held on.
“Please,” Shelly said.
Josie yanked her arm away, looked around, exasperated, and, under her breath, said, “What do you want?”
“I have to talk to you.”
“You’re not supposed to harass me.”
“I’m not harassing you. Josie. Please. I’ll leave you alone, I swear, I won’t”—Josie took a step back as if in anticipation of the word touch—“but I have to talk to you. Please.”
“No.” Josie was shaking her head emphatically, but then she stopped, seemed to think briefly, but seriously, about something, and then, to Shelly’s great relief and surprise, she was nodding her head. “Okay,” she said, sounding more annoyed than reluctant or frightened. “Okay, okay,” she repeated, as if in defeat, and then she lifted her chin and pointed it toward an empty table in the back corner, and Shelly followed her to it.
Josie slid behind the table and leaned back, tossing one leg over the other and crossing her arms over her chest. Shelly sat down hard in the stiff wooden chair across from her, doing everything she could not to slump. (That was something her ex-husband had accused her of: “You don’t sit in a chair, Shelly. You slump in it.”) Josie didn’t hesitate to look her straight in the eyes when she was seated, or to lean forward with her hands folded on the table between them. Shelly had expected an awkward silence, but right away, Josie was talking:
“Look, I know you’re probably pissed as hell at me, but I have to tell you this is really not my fault. I can’t help it if we had this . . . involvement, and maybe I should have, yeah, kept my pictures where no one else could see them, but you’re the older one here, you’re the authority figure. You were supposed to—” Here, Josie seemed to search for some word she’d memorized and couldn’t find. Instead, she went on with some thoughts about the nature of the student/employer relationship, which seemed both scripted and poorly delivered, and for the first time Shelly began to wonder if it had all been an act.
She reached across the table, put a hand on Josie’s wrist to quiet her, and said, “Why?”
“Why what?” Josie said, looking startled to have her monologue interrupted.
“Why any of it?”
“I was just explaining that,” Josie said. “There are certain perimeters in student/employer relations at the university—”
“Parameters?” Shelly asked.
“Whatever,” Josie said. “But, being your work-study—”
“Why me?” Shelly interrupted. “Is this some kind of hazing thing?”
Josie didn’t laugh.
She didn’t even blink.
She held Shelly’s gaze long and hard enough that Shelly didn’t need an answer to the question, and then she finally said, “I told you, Omega Theta Tau doesn’t participate in hazing.”
“What about the underwear?” Shelly asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“You told me. You said you had to wear the same panties for a month, and—”
“Oh, that.” Josie swatted her hand through the air as if to clear it of an annoying insect. “That’s not hazing.”
“Well if that’s not hazing, maybe this isn’t either.”
“What’s ‘this,’ ” Josie said, making quotation marks in the air around her own face.
“You know,” Shelly said, her voice sounding automated even to her, “an affair. With a woman. Photographs. To prove it. Maybe getting someone in trouble, getting someone fired.”
“No way. We’d get kicked out of the National Pan-Hellenic Council if—”
“No,” Shelly said. She realized that she was shaking, but her words came out of her passionlessly, as if she were reading them, and what she was reading was already familiar to her, had been read and reread a hundred times. “I was in a sorority, too, Josie. We did all the same stuff, knowing full well we’d never get kicked out of the National Pan-Hellenic Council. We knew, just like you do, that if the National Pan-Hellenic Council ever heard about it, they’d just help cover it up. People who’ve never pledged might be fooled by that, but not me.”
“You can’t prove anything,” Josie said, and the way she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair made it clear to Shelly that Josie was right.