Greer accepted the full ride at Ryland, and Cory chose Princeton; if he’d gone to Yale it would’ve been a constant, sharp reminder to Greer. Their paths were now diverging precipitously—the swerve affected not just her and her parents but also him—so they would have to work to keep themselves as close as possible.
On their last night together at the end of the summer, up in her bedroom with a strong rain battering the windows, Greer lay in Cory’s arms and cried. She hadn’t cried about college before now, because her parents had cried that day in the kitchen and she had wanted to distinguish her own response from theirs; also, she had wanted to be better than they were, stronger. But she cried there in bed with Cory.
“I don’t want to be this damaged person,” Greer said, her voice choked, her face turned sharply away from him.
“You aren’t. You’re totally fine.”
“You think so? I’m so quiet! I’m always the quiet one.”
“I fell in love with your quiet,” he said into the little blue section of her hair. “But that’s not all you are.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Of course I am. And other people will start to see it too; they really will.”
The rain came down and they barely moved, and then finally when it got late they rose with little groans and separated so they could finish packing up their childhood rooms, going through the task of selecting what they still cared about—what made the cut because it was still a part of them—and what was necessary to leave behind for good. Greer scooped up her collection of snow globes and her Jane Austen novels, even Mansfield Park, which she had never particularly liked. It was as if the books were a lineup of stuffed animals that had graced her room all these years; that was how much they comforted her. Cory, who would be leaving for Princeton in the morning, left behind his row of NBA bobblehead figurines on a shelf so Alby could have them. But after hesitating he took the boxed set of The Lord of the Rings. He wasn’t particularly literary, but he loved those books and would never stop loving them. Pretty soon Alby would want to read them too, he knew, and when that happened he would lend them to him.
The next day, after goodbyes so ardent and extensive that they had a World War II quality to them, Cory went off in his packed family car for the trip down to New Jersey; Greer would go to Ryland two days later. At Princeton Cory was given a job in the Firestone Library, checking out books in an enormous, grand room; he ate his meals in another enormous, grand room.
He and Greer Skyped at night and made the effort to travel frequently to see each other. He spoke to her about being intimidated by Princeton but loving it there too, and about playing Ultimate Frisbee on the greenest fields on earth. He didn’t tell her that he worried about staying faithful to her, and worried more broadly that what they had agreed to was going to be difficult to sustain. Girls at Princeton flirted with him all the time—WASPy blond girls who had grown up in houses with names, and a cool black flute player from LA, and a boho genius who lived in the Netherlands though she was American, and was named Chia.
Then one day in the dining hall, he heard one girl say to another, “Here’s something about me that you didn’t know. I made it into The Guinness Book of World Records.”
And the other girl said, “Really? What for?”
“Oh, I collected more bottles for recycling than any other kid ever had. It was my thing. I was famous in Toledo. I was such a little dweeb.”
Cory whipped around, practically spitting cobbler. “You’re Taryn the Recycling Girl?” he asked, shocked. “I read about you in my fourth-grade reader!”
And the girl, who happened to be gorgeous, with wavy dark hair and dark eyes, nodded and laughed. That night on Skype, Cory made Greer guess who he had met that day. “Just guess,” he said, but she was unable to guess, and so he told her. He left out the detail that Taryn the Recycling Girl from Toledo was really hot now, and that she had asked him if he wanted to meet for a drink sometime. “Glass, not plastic,” Taryn had said, giving the words a suggestive, James Bond quality.
And then there was Cory’s Secret Santa, Clove Wilberson, who had grown up in Tuxedo Park, New York, in a house called Marbridge. “Dang, Cory Pinto, you are the cutest and the wootest,” Clove said to him one day, in response to nothing.
“Both?” he said mildly.
He also didn’t tell Greer that one night Clove Wilberson came up to him after a party and said, “Cory Pinto, you are miles taller than I am, so I can barely do what I want to do.”
“Which is what?”
She’d pulled his face down toward hers and kissed him. Their mouths touched in a meeting of soft surfaces. “So did you like that, Cory Pinto?” she asked when they pulled away; for some reason it amused her to always call him by his full name. Then she quickly said, “Don’t answer that. I know you have a girlfriend. I’ve seen you with her. But it’s okay; you don’t have to look so scared.”
“I’m not scared,” he said, but almost immediately he felt compelled to run his hand across his mouth.
Sometimes he would see Clove’s room from below, and when the light was on he would imagine going up there and not saying anything, but just pulling her onto her bed the same way he pulled Greer onto the bed when she came to Princeton or he drove up to Ryland. Everything Clove Wilberson said to him was through a scrim of teasing.
And whenever he saw Taryn the Recycling Girl, she would say, “So when are we drinking out of glass, not plastic, together?”
How would he get through four years of college not having sex with anyone but Greer? He was excited by different girls all the time, now that he wasn’t with Greer every day. He wished he could say to her, Let’s have one day a week when we get to hook up with someone on our own campus. Someone who means nothing to us, but who fulfills a shallow hormonal need. You can hook up with that drummer friend of yours; he is totally into you, I can tell. But Greer would’ve been shocked, and he couldn’t hurt her.
Back home in Macopee over spring break freshman year, when they were sitting together at Pie Land studying, Greer had reached across the table and absently touched Cory’s face. Her hand stroked his cheek, for a moment staying on the small, pale scar there, which was now over a year old. He had imagined that when they were older and in the next phase of their lives, living in their apartment together in Greenpoint or Red Hook—or was it Redpoint and Green Hook?—that would be the right time to confess to her his modest but valiant tale of having once saved her from the indignity of having a group of high school boys declare her a 6, and then taking an injury to the face for it.
“I always knew you were really a nine,” he’d been planning to say. But he was slightly older now, and changing; and lately Greer had begun to speak to him with a certain halting eloquence about the way women were treated in the world. He finally understood how arrogant his confession would have been. His little scar, which had grown thin and white and nearly invisible, had been a badge of honor connected to a story he’d looked forward to telling her. Now he knew he never would.
* * *
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