“Why are you playing games with him?”
“What games?” Nicole asked.
“What games?”
She was pulling on a green silk tank top, no bra, and let it linger over her breasts before she covered them, and then she turned her back on Perry.
It was exactly the cream white expanse he’d imagined with his eyes closed and his hands running down it, but he winced and turned his face away when he realized what it reminded him of: Mary. Her backless prom dress. Slow-dancing to some dumb song while she whispered to him about how in love with him she was. His hand on the bare expanse of soft skin between her shoulder blades.
Nicole came over, wearing the tank top and nothing else, and sat down on the bed beside him. She ran her hand up his chest, to his neck, let it linger there, and then lifted it to his cheek, and then up to his eyes, the lids of which she gently closed with her fingertips before leaning over him and kissing them.
Perry felt the staticky gossamer wisps of her blond hair around his face, her breath (licorice, Mountain Dew) near his ear. She ran her hand down his side, to his hip. She moved her mouth down to his Adam’s apple, kissed it, licked it, and then bit it hard enough to make him flinch, and then she sat back and laughed.
He opened his eyes. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.
“No,” Nicole said. “You didn’t answer mine.”
Perry put a hand over his eyes so he was no longer looking at the delicate curve of her breast beneath the silk top, or the cool shoulder bone, the startlingly perfect flesh of her upper arm. If he looked further, he could have found the perfect golden triangle between her legs. Who was he, to be doing this with her? Who was she?
With a hand over his eyes, he said, “Craig thinks you’re a virgin, Nicole. He thinks you’re a Christian, and some kind of white-bread Midwestern milkmaid.”
“Well, he thinks you’re a great roommate, and a true-blue Boy Scout. He thinks you’re a virgin, too.”
“Yeah. I’m a shithead, and I admit it. A shitty friend. A shitty roommate. But he just tolerates me. He thinks he’s going to marry you. He thinks you’re the future mother of his children. Pure angel. He thinks it’s his duty to preserve your innocence in this filthy world.”
Nicole laughed again, and said, “Well, I’d say he’s the one playing the game, in that case.”
Perry waited for her to go on. She didn’t, and eventually he asked, “What do you mean?”
“Well, why does he want to believe those things? And if that’s what he wants to believe, why shouldn’t he?”
“Because it’s not true.”
“But he doesn’t want the truth. The kind of girl he thinks I am, he’s never going to find anyway.”
“So, you just figured out what kind of girl Craig wanted, and decided you’d pretend to be that?”
“Isn’t that what everyone does?”
“What? No!”
“No? What was all that class-ring crap with you and Mary about? Seems to me like you had her game all figured out, and played it pretty well for a nice long time.”
Perry sat up. He put his hand to his Adam’s apple, where she’d bit him. It was damp, and when he looked at his fingers, he was surprised to see a drop of blood on them. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. “Mary’s the one who had me figured out.”
“No,” Nicole said, shaking her head, still smiling. “You knew she wanted that whole Eagle Scout thing. Small-town boy. Good daddy someday. Gonna work at the Edwards and Son Lawn Mower Shop in Bad Axe and tinker with the minivan on weekends. She thought all that ambition—the scholarships and the grades and the SAT scores—was all about making sure you could buy her a nice little house on the outskirts of town and an engagement ring a year or two after you got your high school diploma, and started with the babies. And that game worked out really well for you, didn’t it? You had the sweetest girl at Bad Axe High for three years, and then you ditched her. Did you ever once tell her the real story—that your actual plan was to go to a fancy university, maybe study something like philosophy? Go to school for about ten more years, and then maybe travel around Europe with a backpack for a few more? Jesus Christ. Poor Mary must still be lying awake at night wondering what the hell happened, who the hell she was actually dating all that time she was dating you.”
Perry’s heart was pounding—not just in his chest, but in his throat, throbbing against his Adam’s apple. It was pounding in his wrists, his legs, his temples. He was out of the bed without knowing he’d stood up, looking down at Nicole, who was looking up at him, still with that fucking little smile—and he wanted to say something horrible to her, something that would change her life, something that would scare her, something—but he couldn’t. He never would. Looking down on her smiling up at him, he couldn’t even maintain the desire to say it.
Jesus.
No wonder Craig was such a dupe and he himself was such a chump, a backstabber, a lying asshole.
She was so beautiful. Plato’s ideal, as he now knew from Philosophy 101. She always had been, but now he could see it for what it was, even knowing that it wasn’t what it appeared to be:
Her face was tilted sweetly, like that of a sparrow or a kitten, and she wore that ludicrously girlish smile, and Perry was suddenly reminded of what must have been her second-grade school photograph. Pigtails. No front teeth. Frozen in black and white wearing a little bit of lace around her collar and a silver cross, and then he remembered with perfect clarity sitting behind her in fourth grade, Mr. Garrison’s class. They were talking about sanitation, and Nicole had raised her hand and asked Mr. Garrison, “What happens to the poop after it’s flushed down the toilet?” and all the other kids, especially the boys, were doubled over with laughter at the sound of the word poop coming out of the pretty little mouth of Nicole Werner, who turned around to Perry then, horrified, blushing two bright spots on her cheeks, looking straight at him, as if for help, and Perry was incredibly relieved that he’d reacted, himself, too slowly to laugh, and was able now to look her in the eyes, shrug his shoulders, as if to say, Who knows what these idiots are laughing about? Who cares?
Now he was looking at her, lying half-naked on his bed, the strap of her silky top slipping over her beautiful, womanly shoulder, and Perry couldn’t open his mouth, but he knew by her expression that he was asking her with his eyes to tell him, Is that who I was? Is that who Mary thought I was? Is that what I did? How did you know when even I didn’t?
Instead of answering, she stood, gathered her jeans off the floor, slid them up, and he watched, remembering only a few months before, when he’d found her standing on the front steps of Godwin Hall wearing that bulky sweatshirt—homesick and sad—and how she’d put her head on his shoulder and cried, and the helpless way his mouth had opened, and nothing had come out. Had she really been homesick and sad? Or had that, too, been some kind of test?
Now Nicole put her arms on either side of his face and kissed him (a quick, sweet, nonsexual parting kiss) and said, “Hey. It’s okay. We come from the same place, Perry. I know who you are, and you know who I am. I’ll see you around, okay?”