All the Alphas had to suppress their shock when Hazel took up with Nat, an impossibly attractive tall man who moved with the alien grace of a praying mantis. He played forward on the Tigers’ basketball team, a trail of comparisons to Willis Reed spilling out behind him. His rank as a slightly older guy with experience added to his mystique—he’d come to school on the GI Bill a couple of years after serving a tour of duty in Vietnam and had just entered his junior year.
It took Nat three tries to convince Darlene to walk off campus with him after their economics class to a greasy-spoon diner that other students rarely visited. She made excuses until his third request. A number of possibilities stampeded through her head: Maybe he wanted her econ notes, so he had decided to sweet-talk them out of her. Perhaps he had no idea that it would look bad, and the choice of restaurant wasn’t deliberate. Or possibly he intended to woo her behind Hazel’s back. At the center of these possibilities stood the man himself: the supple-spined number 55, with feminine lashes ringing his amber eyes; a fine-looking, bashful guy whose many sensitive questions and attentive gaze had probably invited fantasies of marriage in even the most sensible of her Sigma sisters. He palmed basketballs easily, and Darlene enjoyed thinking of those big hands wrapping her hips or cupping her breasts, her nipples pinched between his long fingers. His solar charisma shocked her thinking so dramatically that anything capable of keeping them apart—even Hazel—became irrelevant.
The second time Darlene went with him to the diner, he made his intentions clear by brushing her bare arm with his knuckles, and though she sensed the wrongness of the caress and felt stirrings of the potential havoc it would cause in her sorority, she couldn’t avoid relating to Nat the way all the sisters did, as a grand prize only an idiot would refuse. Under the table, her leg relaxed, slid against Nat’s, and rested there as a testament to her surrender. The next time they saw each other, they walked farther off campus, and in the lot behind a different restaurant, when they recognized their luscious privacy at the same moment, their faces drew together instinctively and their mouths and tongues connected with slippery, illicit delight.
The secret dalliance inflated her—it practically pulled her skin taut with joy. Her roommates noticed and told her she had the flushed look of someone obsessed; they poked her waist and demanded information so personal that she blushed and hid from them in the library. She would have had a very difficult time keeping such juicy information from the girls with whom she shared lipstick, pomade, blouses, stockings, and class notes, and with whom she usually initiated long conferences after a mere glance from a fly athlete.
At other times, she wanted them to know. Her roommate, Kenyatta, wouldn’t give her any peace, and Darlene finally confessed, careful to emphasize that they had only kissed.
Kenyatta’s face went flat at first, then developed into terror.
Aren’t you happy for me? Darlene asked.
No, Kenyatta told her, this is not good. This is very not good.
Vertigo overtook Darlene, and she swiftly understood how they’d view everything. Nat, the man, the basketball star, wouldn’t bear the responsibility, only Darlene, the slut, the man-thieving heifer, regardless of whatever credit she might have with her sisters. When it came to romantic betrayal, they’d give her no breaks.
Then just don’t tell, she begged Kenyatta. Forget I told you.
I’m sorry, these girls gon find out one way or another. Lord knows I can’t keep a secret, neither. Better if it happens sooner than later for all involved. Why you had to tell me, anyway?
No, Kenyatta, don’t. You can’t. Please.
Tau Taus can’t be beating other Tau Taus’ time. You know that.
Kenyatta would never have considered keeping the secret as an act of mercy. In choosing her as a confidante, Darlene had forgotten Kenyatta’s loyalty to the inflexible pecking order of the group, which required that the girls regularly submit their most fashionable clothes to April for approval before dances; though April’s motivation for this ritual remained unspoken, everybody said the reason was that she wanted to keep anyone from upstaging her. Often April would cherry-pick her entire outfit from the best of the lot.
Darlene, petrified, could only wait until someone passed the bad news to Hazel herself. Until then she tried to keep her distance—but not from Nat, with whom she frequently met in the evening on shady residential streets or in parks, where nobody would take note of two dark figures pressed against a tree trunk, their lips conjoined, their hands traveling ardently over each other’s bodies.
During that time, she remained on edge, constantly ready for the inevitable confrontation. She envisioned hair-pulling, so she got her hair cut a little shorter, tied it tightly behind her head in a tiny bun. But nothing happened. Kenyatta claimed not to have told, despite her declarations of allegiance to Sigma Tau Tau, and when Darlene crossed paths with Hazel, she couldn’t detect any signs of vengefulness—no eyes narrowed, no mouth corner raised, not a single oddly placed or ambiguous word in her conversation. Paradoxically, when they returned to campus after the winter break, Hazel’s conversations with Darlene seemed to take on a more familiar tone than usual, a crisp lightness like the very infrequent morning frost.
Hazel played on the women’s varsity basketball team. On the one hand it made her seem a good match for Nat; on the other it inflamed the rumors about her sexuality. One weekend when she had an away game, Darlene and Nat met at an expensive bed-and-breakfast an hour away, in Shreveport, intent on going all the way.
The place had a lush atmosphere, with antique, wallpapered rooms named for Renaissance painters and a deep, putty-colored Jacuzzi recessed into a wood-paneled alcove in the deluxe suites. Nat had requested the Botticelli Room, he told her, but only the Raphael was available.