“Aren’t you going to sign my form?”
“There’s plenty of time for that,” she said. “Today is only the first day of the New Baptist Plan. There are plenty more days to come.”
? ? ?
WHEN VERENA LEFT, my head throbbed. It was as if she’d been inside my brain, picking through it as if it were a chicken carcass. I lay down on my bed, wrapping the scarlet dress around my neck like a scarf.
I hadn’t expected Verena to suggest that I give up Y——. I didn’t know what I had expected the New Baptist Plan to be. It had seemed like a joke, but now I knew she was serious. She wasn’t going to give me $20,000 for doing nothing. Until our conversation, I hadn’t thought of Y—— as a thread that connected me to Tristan and that difficult time in my past, but that’s what it was. Verena wanted me to sever it.
Tristan and I had never been anything more than friends, but we were close; at the age of twenty-one I had never experienced closeness with a boy. When our senior year of college started, we began to spend so much time together that to others we quickly became “the two of you.” Wherever one of us went, the other was soon to follow.
I thought we were building up to something during those autumn months. For the first time I thought I understood what love was. I had always thought of myself as outside of things; when others spoke of dates and relationships and sex, I knew it didn’t apply to me. I hadn’t realized the extent of my exclusion until Tristan came along and made me feel included. I was one of them, finally. In the campus bookstore with a friend, I’d point to a funny card with hearts on it and joke that I could buy that for Tristan. As the autumn festival approached, I thought I’d have someone to go with. Tristan was possibility more than anything else; he opened up a world to me that had always been closed. When I saw couples holding hands or kissing, I didn’t feel resentful anymore. Tristan hadn’t kissed me, but we were moving in that direction. The anticipation of him wanting me brought joy that I’d never known. Every day when I awoke, I thought I didn’t deserve to be so happy, that no one did.
I couldn’t have sex with Tristan—I was firm in my mind about that. He could never see me naked, and so there was a line between us, and what was beyond that line was out of my reach. What I wanted was for him to want me, for him to touch me. He held my hand sometimes. Once I fell asleep next to him on the sofa, my cheek resting against his white T-shirt, and he put his arm around me. I wanted more than that—I wanted for him to kiss me. I wanted his want.
In the end, he didn’t give it to me. Tristan said we shouldn’t be friends anymore, that it was “impossible.” We’d been on the verge of what I’d wanted, that place of wanting and touching, but he pulled back at the last moment. “You’re not right for me,” he’d said, and then he refused to talk to me.
When our friendship ended he began to date a girl from my history class. After months of being friends with me, of building up to something that never happened, he began to date her and instantly they were holding hands and kissing as they walked together on campus, and doing other things behind closed doors that I could only imagine. That was the start of the unraveling that would culminate several weeks later with my mother’s arrival on campus and Dr. Willoughby prescribing Y——, but I didn’t know that at the time.
At the beginning of the new semester in January, I walked to the campus health center in a snowstorm. I felt that something bad was going to happen to me. “I need help,” I said to the disinterested receptionist behind the desk. She asked what was wrong but I didn’t have words for it. “Well?” she asked; there was a line forming behind me. “I’m bleeding,” I said. It wasn’t true, but it seemed to sum up my defectiveness as a female more than anything else I could say.
As I sat in the waiting area, I thought about leaving, but I didn’t know where else to go. My friends had tried to be helpful, but I didn’t share with them the depths of my pain; they might have laughed. There had never been anything between me and Tristan besides friendship, so they would have thought me foolish. That there had only been friendship between us made it worse. There had been a line between us. It was the line I grieved over, more than I grieved for Tristan. The line would always be there, even after Tristan was gone.