“Mom! Papa!” I screamed. “She’s rabing me! She’s rabing me!”
“What?” my mother asked, desperately trying to keep her lips from curling into a smile.
“Grace is rabing me.”
Mike was the first person to go down on me, after a party to benefit Palestine, on my dorm room rug. I felt like I was being chewed on by a child that wasn’t mine. The first time we had sex was the second time I’d ever done it. He put on some African music, kissed me like it was a boring job given to him by his parole officer, and I clung to him, figuring he’d let me know if this wasn’t what sex was supposed to be like. When he finally came, he made little, scared-sounding noises like a cat stuck in the rain. I kept moving until he told me to stop.
Noni and I are at the newsstand across from Grace’s preschool, waiting for pickup. I am nine years old and have the day off of school, which is my dream, but I haven’t used it well. Noni is my nanny. She is from Ireland and was in a bad car accident when she was sixteen that made it so her jaw will only open so far. Her hair is crispy from hairspray, and she wears leggings that show her tan calves. We are looking at magazines and drinking iced teas. The man who owns the newsstand looks at me a moment, and for some reason it sends a shiver down my spine.
“Noni,” I whisper, panicked. “Noni.”
She removes her head from her People magazine and leans down to me. I know the real word now.
“What’s doing?”
“I think he’s trying to rape me.”
I helped Mike and Goldblatt buy finches for an installation art project and, when they got loose in the bathroom of Renson Cottage, I used my experience as an Audubon volunteer to corral the birds into a darkened corner and gather them in my hands. The finch beat its wings, and I thought how holding a small bird is the closest a nonsurgeon will come to feeling a naked beating heart. The bird pecked at my hands, but I’m not squeamish, and I shoved it back into the cage. How many girls can do that?
In May, Mike graduated along with his whole gang of merry bandits: Goldblatt, Kyle (an expert on Costa Rican culture), and Quinn, a textiles student whose senior project involved creating bathing suits with holes where the crotches should have been. The only one who was left behind was Barry. Barry would now be considered a super senior, a dubious distinction given to those with one more semester to finish.
Barry, Audrey and I agreed, was creepy. He had a mustache that rode the line between ironic Williamsburg fashion and big-buck hunter, and he wore the kind of white Reeboks last seen in an ’80s exercise video. He worked part-time at the library, and I would often see him skulking along the aisles, shelving books in the wrong places. In social settings, he commanded attention with his aggressively masculine physicality and a voice that went Barry White low. There was a story about him punching a girl in the boobs at a party. He was a Republican. All reasons to avoid him and to wonder why they let him into the living room of Renson Cottage so much.
In his super-senior semester, Barry seemed lost. With his friends gone, his brow had softened. You could see him smoking cigarettes alone, kicking at the ground in front of the student union and sitting in Mike’s old place in the computer lab like a dog without an owner.
Who’s the big guy now?
There was a particularly raucous party in the loft above the video store. I wore Audrey’s fancy wrap dress, and we drank two beers each before we left and split a Xanax she still had from a flight to Boca with her grandma. It hit me hard and fast, and by the time we showed up I was possessed by a party spirit quite alien to me. Audrey, on the other hand, became dizzy and after much deliberation went home, making me promise to treat her wrap dress with the proper respect. I missed her keenly for a moment, then snorted a small amount of cocaine off a key, before kissing a freshman and dancing into the bathroom line, where I showed people how easily Audrey’s wrap dress opened and explained how “bogus” the creative writing department was.
All my friends were gone. I looked for Audrey, even though she’d told me she was leaving, and I’d also watched her go.
Finally, from behind, I saw my friend Joey. Sweet, oafish Joey—DJ and snugglebunny full of Michigan pride. There he was, in his Members Only jacket, tall and warm and ready to save me. I snuck up behind him and jumped on his back.
When he turned around, it wasn’t Joey. It was Barry. Uh-oh played in my head like a loser’s sound effect on a Japanese talk show. Uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said.
“Well, we don’t know each other,” I told him. “I have to pee.”