Lizzie’d thought back then that they’d dine out on it for decades. She’d imagined that years later she’d be sitting around with her friends, having coffee, and she’d tell them about those twenty-three football players, and one of the women would say, “What a great idea,” and everyone would express chagrin that they hadn’t done the same thing themselves. Or at a dinner party far in the future, a fellow guest would ask her what she had done in high school and she’d reply casually, “Oh, I fucked the starters on the football team,” and then everyone would laugh and laugh about her glorious past. What she hadn’t realized was that once you got through with high school, nobody but you gave a damn—or even remembered—what happened to you there.
There was a moment, before Andrea turned traitor and withdrew from the Game before it even began, that Lizzie believed that all her other accomplishments would pale in comparison, become essentially unimportant if she fucked half the football team. Who cared if you had starred in the school play, been elected class president, gotten into a great college, or won a National Merit scholarship (none of which Lizzie actually had done)? Instead, you’d had all that sex; nobody else could say that. It turned out not to be like that at all; in the first place Lizzie had ended up fucking the whole football team (which was too much sex for any high school senior to deal with). And afterward, for months and months, she was so profoundly tired that she could barely get up in the morning; there were very many mornings she didn’t get up at all. She had trouble doing her homework; she couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. The voices never went away. There was no one she wanted to talk to, no one who would understand what she’d done and why and what happened as a result. This silence on her part seemed irreversible, possibly making it impossible to change.
For a long time she couldn’t read anything but poetry. This was when she memorized all those poems by Millay, whose life was a great comfort to her. Vincent—as she was known to her friends—had been with so many men, and yet out of those experiences came all these poems that Lizzie loved so much.
And because for years and years the voices in her head never let Lizzie forget that the Great Game had been a stupid idea right from the beginning and that she’d been an idiot for participating in it, her past was always there, a living thing. It shaped her present and her future. There was no way that she could forgive herself because those two announcers in her head continually condemned her behavior in the Great Game. They condemned her. They hammered away at her, a constant reminder of what a terrible person she’d been and always would be. Someone so clearly undeserving of both friendship and love.
*?Jack and Lizzie Have Sex?*
Jack saw Lizzie’s rather distinctive underpants on Lizzie quite soon after they met. The professed reason that they’d gone to his apartment after the second day of class was that Jack said he wanted to lend Lizzie a paper on Housman he’d written a few years ago, but both of them knew giving her the paper was just an excuse to spend time together, which they both knew was just a euphemism for making love.
Lizzie waited nervously while Jack rummaged through the mess on his desk, which was covered with papers, magazines, and books. His search was unsuccessful. “Crap,” he said. “I know it’s here somewhere. All, right, forget it, I’ll look for it tonight.” He sat down next to her on the couch and abruptly changed the subject. “You’ll skip your anthro class today, right?” he asked, and Lizzie assured him that that was the plan.
When Jack put his arm around her and pulled her toward him, there was a long moment when Lizzie resisted. Oh God, she thought, this isn’t right. I’m not right. Why am I afraid about what’s going to happen next, when it’s exactly what I want to happen, what I’ve thought about happening ever since we sat in that filthy booth at Gilmore’s talking about poetry, or even before that, when he started to defend me in Terrell’s class?
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Lizzie said quickly. “I was just surprised.”
“Really? I thought this was what we both expected would happen.”
“It’s . . . it’s just that it seems so sudden. No, that’s not what I mean, it’s not sudden; I mean, it is sudden in a way, but that’s not what I meant.” She floundered on. “I don’t know what I mean. Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
“It’s more what you did than what you said, actually,” Jack said.
“Okay,” Lizzie said desperately. “Let’s start again. You put your arm around me and start kissing me and I’ll kiss you back, okay?”
Jack didn’t move. “Look, are you a virgin?” he asked.
This was one question Lizzie could answer honestly. “No, of course not. Really, I just had a sort of minor freak-out for a second. Can we please forget it?”
They did, and after that it seemed a pretty natural progression that they’d wind up in bed.
They were just beginning to undress when Jack said, “Are you on the pill?”
Lizzie hesitated. “Why?”
“Because if you aren’t, then I’ll get a condom.”
“Um, I’m not, actually.”
“Okay, give me a minute to find one.”
While Jack looked through the drawers in the bedside table, Lizzie tried to get her underpants off as unobtrusively as possible, but Jack too quickly found what he was looking for and turned back to her while she was still in mid–panty removal.
He stared at them, stunned into silence. Finally he said, “Jesus, Lizzie, those are the most anticlimactic things I’ve ever seen. What sort of subliminal message are they supposed to project to people who encounter them? Where do you even buy them?”
Lizzie blushed. Why hadn’t she thought to borrow a pair of Marla’s?
“Actually, nobody else has ever seen them. Except my roommate.”
“Really. Can I ask why you wear them?”
Lizzie fumbled for an answer. “They’re comfortable, for one thing.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that comfort’s important, but it’s like you’re hiding yourself in granny underwear.” No one could ever say that Jack McConaghey hadn’t understood Lizzie from the get-go.
In between the kisses and caresses that followed, Jack promised her that he’d try to block her hideous underpants out of his mind, but the fact that they were so large and so white might distract him at critical moments during the next, say, hour or so. He hoped she’d understand.
Afterward, they lay next to one another in Jack’s single bed, holding hands, until their breathing returned to normal.
“Well . . .” Lizzie spoke first. “I’m glad that in the end they weren’t too terribly anticlimactic.”
“It was touch and go for a while, but lust prevailed over aesthetics.”
Lizzie didn’t much like the word “lust,” especially when applied to what had just happened between them.
“So, Ms. Bultmann,” Jack began, but Lizzie interrupted him.
“Don’t call me that. I hate it.”
“Really? Why?”
It was obvious to Lizzie that Jack loved the question “Why?” but she wasn’t going to explain her parents and her past to him. “I guess it’s the double n at the end,” she said. “It just seems so pretentious.”
“Okay. I apologize,” Jack said. “It’ll be ‘Lizzie’ from here on out, but what I was going to ask you was—”
Before he could finish, Lizzie cut in again. “Are you thinking that you want to have the sexual-history talk now? Because I don’t.”