“Where is it exactly? Show me.” His voice, after this moment of bravado, faded out.
“It’s over here,” she said, gesturing vaguely and miserably. In fact, she didn’t know. She was seventeen years old and she had been too embarrassed until now to comprehend her own anatomy. She’d had hundreds of orgasms alone in bed, but she could not draw a map to the place where they had originated.
That night, after Cory had gone home to his house across the street, and Greer was left in the quiet wonder of what had happened between them, she went online and Googled the words clit and diagram, so that now she would know, and then next time he would know too. If you ever wanted to get an accurate picture of who you are, Greer thought years later, all you had to do was look at everything you’d Googled over the past twenty-four hours. Most people would be appalled to see themselves with this kind of clarity.
Now she and Cory were constantly together. He told her about his parents, how he’d felt ashamed when he was younger that they had accents and menial jobs. She told him about being an only child, and having parents who were often indifferent to her. “I will never be indifferent to you,” he said, and she realized that he was on her side, and that she wasn’t alone. They were becoming seriously attached, and their sexual activity was a mix of gasping thrill and excruciating misfire. Sometimes he accidentally hurt her, and sometimes her own hands and mouth became misguided hummingbirds. They tried and tried. They had petty arguments about whether they were compatible.
“Maybe you’re not the right person for me,” he said once, testing out the words.
“Fine. Maybe you should go out with Kristin Vells,” she said. “You can help her with reading. I bet she’ll appreciate that.”
“Believe me, we won’t be doing any reading.”
Greer turned away, upset and hugging herself, and she realized that she had seen this kind of behavior in TV shows and movies: the emotionally fragile girl with her arms crossed protectively around herself, maybe even stretching out the arms of her sweater. She didn’t understand why she was so easily willing to take on this predetermined female role. But then she realized she actually sort of liked it, because it made her part of a long chain of women who had done exactly this.
Sometimes all it took was a distraction to make them both return to themselves. They would play one of his three-and-a-half-year-old brother Alby’s video games for an hour or two, or send IMs filled with private jokes—it was amazing how quickly private jokes could develop—and then they would both remember they were compatible. “I don’t know that I love you yet,” Greer warned Cory one afternoon when they lay brazenly in her bed with her parents moving around downstairs. But she had said it only because she did know.
“That’s all right,” was all Cory said. But they knew that this was love, and that this was also desire, the two forces forming a substantial and circular current.
Then, a week later, Greer said, “Remember what I said about love? Is it too late to change it?”
“It’s not an answer on a test.”
“Well, okay. Then I love you,” she said quietly, trying it out. “I do.”
“I love you too,” he said. “We’re even.”
At her house the next afternoon, now certifiably in love and even, they had what was considered actual sex. It was a little embarrassing and certainly imperfect—Cory gnawed at the condom wrapper for a long, tense moment—though occasionally, over time, it would become perfect. Her house was used for exploration; in the Pinto house they weren’t even allowed into his bedroom, so instead they sat in the living room on the sofa with the plastic covers zipped onto it, and there was always fragrant food cooking, and sometimes an aunt wandered in or out.
What she particularly liked about being at Cory’s house was that Alby was often with them, lolling all over them on the couch. Alby was a late addition to the Pinto family, having been born when Cory was fourteen. Alby’s dented, empty juice boxes dotted the back of the Pinto family car, along with his action figures lying facedown or faceup, bent-armed or straight-armed, frozen in mid-kick or mid–karate chop, waiting for him to return to the car and reanimate them. Alby resembled a small Cory, funny and antsy and precocious, very likely brilliant; and he loved his older brother and also seemed to love Greer.
Alby often carried his box turtle with him, holding it as tenderly as if it were a newborn lamb. The turtle had wandered unobserved into the Pinto yard one day a few months earlier and had sat for a long time in the scrub grass in the sun, giving the appearance of a rock, or an antiquarian law book, dusty, brown, gold, green. But Alby had recognized it for what it was and said, “That’s my turtle,” claiming it immediately and naming it Slowy. “Because they are slow,” he explained to his family.
Alby had easily determined that the turtle was male. “The boy turtles have red eyes,” he said, because he had read it in a children’s science book, having learned to read at age two and a half. Alby would lay the two-pound box turtle down on the couch and then he would lay his own thirty-eight pounds on top of his older brother, who fastened him in place. Alby asked Greer to play video games with him; he was an expert, with advanced hand-eye coordination. He often wanted her to look at books with him—they were both obsessed with books—and Greer found that soon they were making their way through entire series together, taking turns reading aloud. He liked the Encyclopedia Brown series best, books that she had once loved.
“Why did the Meany parents name their son Bugs?” Alby asked, concerned.
“That is an excellent question.”
“Or, maybe it was the author, Donald J. Sobol. Bugs Meany already has a bad last name. Now he has a bad first name too. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“You even feel sympathy for the bully,” she said. Alby burrowed in hard against her.
How resourceful people are, Greer thought now as she lay in bed with Cory in his dorm, recalling this moment. Cory’s little brother had burrowed into her, ensuring that even when they were apart, she would remember him and love him. And still she kept burrowing into Cory, and also, distantly and metaphorically, into the spectral figure of Faith Frank, who had swept down upon Greer’s newly adult life and made her want something. We burrow and burrow, attempting a hidden path. We are canny in our burrowing, Greer thought, though we never want to admit it. Across the dorm room, Steers kept the light on all night.
* * *
? ? ?
There was a moment in the middle of college, imperceptible at the time as an actual moment, when talk started to shift from classes, majors, parties, and symbolism in literature to jobs. Once it happened, jobs won out, and classes and majors and novels and academic debates took on a sweet, quaint whiff of the past. Jobs made you sit up straighter and scheme, trying to think of any connections you had ever made and could now use. Everyone was thinking and worrying a little about the long run, that abstract road that supposedly might lead to happiness, before it led to death.