Greer became a vegetarian like Zee. This was easy to do in college, where tofu and tempeh grew on trees. She and Zee sat in the dining hall with their plates of beige protein. Late at night they sat together in one of their dorm rooms, having long, searching conversations, which in the moments they took place seemed notable for their candor and feeling, though much later on would seem notable for how young and untried and guileless they had been.
“Tell me what it is that interests you about men sexually,” Zee had said once after midnight in her room. Her roommate was off elsewhere with her hockey player boyfriend, and they had the place to themselves. The roommate’s side of the room was covered with posters of the men of hockey, fierce and strong, mouths stuffed with rubber. Zee’s side was an ode to equality and justice and in particular anything having to do with animals or women.
The words men and women, deposited into conversation casually, were recent additions to their vocabulary. After a few usages, they became less strange, though throughout their lives girl would always be in play, a useful, durable word, signaling a confident state that you would never entirely want to leave.
“Because I don’t understand why people are so different from one another,” Zee went on. “Why they want entirely different things.”
“Well, that’s genetics, right?”
“I don’t mean why am I gay. I mean on a feeling level. Is it just visual, what we like or don’t like about other people?”
“No, not just visual. There’s the emotional part too. There’s that line that Faulkner said, about how you don’t love because. You love despite.”
“Yeah, I love that line. Just kidding! I never heard that line, obviously. I’ve never read Faulkner and probably never will. But the feeling, what makes it sexual?” asked Zee. “I mean, do you actually like the penis, objectively? ‘The penis.’ That sounds so official. And like it’s the one penis in the world. Am I allowed to ask you that, or is it too private and I’m freaking you out right now?”
“I like Cory,” Greer replied, and the answer seemed a little too easy and prissy and terse. How could you possibly explain to someone else why you liked what you liked? It was all so strange. Sexual taste. Even regular taste—loving caramel, hating mint. To be a heterosexual woman did not mean that you would be attracted to, let alone in love with, Cory Pinto, but Greer was. So maybe it was a good enough answer. Everyone on campus kept hooking up every weekend; it was a relentless activity, like IMing, but she didn’t know what it would feel like to sleep with someone she barely knew, someone she hadn’t grown up with.
Here she was with him now, in his college bed, which looked exactly like hers. Both beds had extra-long sheets, a weird detail of college life. After college, sheets would immediately shorten to their normal length.
They came in close for a long kiss, and as he began to lift her shirt and touch her they could hear a key crunching in the lock, and they sprang apart. Steers, his roommate, came in, the earbuds in his ears emitting a thin and distant stream of rhythmic rage. He nodded to Greer without removing them, then sat down at his desk under a spill of light from his perpetually lit gooseneck lamp (“He never shuts it off,” Cory had said. “I think he’s KGB and he’s trying to break me”) and proceeded to master a chapter of his engineering textbook. In response, Greer and Cory took out their own books from their backpacks, and soon the room was like a study hall. Cory was reading a bulky book for his econometrics class; Greer was reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and underlining so often that some pages were entirely marked up.
“What are you marking up?” he asked, curious.
“Things that stir me,” she said without self-consciousness.
Later, when Steers left the room again, she knew they would return to the bookmarked kiss, and to another kind of being stirred, or maybe a related kind. Love ran through everything Greer read—love of language, love of character, love of the act of reading—just as it ran through everything that had to do with Cory. Books had saved Greer as a child, and then Cory had saved her again later on. Of course books and Cory had something to do with each other.
With Steers gone, Greer’s Abercrombie jeans would be unsnapped and unpopped and her shirt and bra removed, all by Cory, who never got tired of stripping her. He would work everything off and would then sigh and lean back on his elbows on the narrow bed and have a good look at her, and she would love this moment so much that she couldn’t speak.
She hadn’t been able to explain any of it to Zee. All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies. Cory’s penis sometimes angled to the left. “If this was an object you’d bought in a store,” he’d said to her once, “you’d probably return it. You’d tell them, ‘It’s crooked. It looks like . . . a shepherd’s crook. I want a better one.’” “I would not,” Greer had said. She would not have returned it, because it was his. Because it was him. She was touched that they were discussing something that no doubt he would rather die than discuss with another person. Which meant that she wasn’t another person, really; that they were tangled together and indivisible.
Before they had become that way during their last year of high school, Greer had prowled the days in what had felt like isolation. Throughout her childhood she’d carried a soft aqua vinyl pencil case with a picture of a Smurf on it, as if to prove that she was like everyone else at school, though if anyone had asked her to name a single fact about the Smurfs, she would have had to admit she knew nothing. Smurfs weren’t interesting to her in any way, except as social currency, which was something she understood she partly lacked.
Her parents had never cared much about fitting into the community in their small western Massachusetts town. They sold ComSell Nutricle protein bars, setting up a display of their thin collection of wares in people’s living rooms. Greer’s father, Rob, also painted houses around the Pioneer Valley, but he was sloppy, sometimes leaving cans of paint on people’s porches; months later, a crusted roller might be found in the azaleas. Greer’s mother, Laurel, worked as a so-called library clown, performing in the children’s rooms of public libraries all around the valley, though she had never invited Greer to come watch her show, and Greer had never pushed. It was just as well that she didn’t see the act, she’d thought as she got older, for it would have been painful to witness her mother trying too hard, in clown makeup and a red wig.
Her parents had met back in the early 1980s when they’d both joined a community of people living on a refitted school bus in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone on that bus wanted to live differently from how they had always thought they would have to live. None of them could bear to go off separately and lead conventional, regimented lives. Rob Kadetsky had “climbed aboard,” as they all called it, after graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology with an engineering degree, and then having no luck with a few solar-related inventions that had initially seemed so promising. Laurel Blanken had climbed aboard after dropping out of Barnard and being afraid to tell her parents, to whom she dutifully sent bogus postcards each week, hoping they wouldn’t notice the postmarks:
Dear Mother and Father,
My classes are amazing. My roommate got a gecko!
Luv,
Laurel