“But wouldn’t you hate it more if Jon had sex with someone he was in love with? I think that’s the whole point. What we’re doing isn’t supposed to be meaningful. It’ll be a diversion. A way to get us through the months until we graduate.” And a way to get back at my parents, she added silently.
“Yeah, in a way it would be worse if he fell in love with another girl. It would be horrible, but at least it would mean that he wasn’t having sex just to have sex. Trust me, Lizzie. You’re crazy if you go ahead with it. Why’s it so important to you, anyway? You could get Maverick back anytime you wanted to, you know that. Maybe I can find someone I could stand to go out with so we can double date like last year. Wouldn’t that be more fun than having sex with a bunch of football players? I just don’t understand why this stupid Big Game or whatever you called it is so important to you.”
“Because when my parents find out about it, and I think everyone’s going to find out about it, they’ll finally have to realize that I’m not who they think I am. Parents are supposed to love their children even though the kids aren’t perfect, but they don’t love me like that. You know Mendel and Lydia: they think they can get rid of any behavior they don’t approve of by treating me like I’m some rat they can retrain to do better. I honestly think they never loved me at all.”
Andrea reached out to touch Lizzie’s hand in sympathy, but Lizzie twisted away from her. “Lizzie, listen to yourself. You’re going to do something totally asinine just to show your parents you can do something asinine? That’s ridiculous.”
“If you think it’s so ridiculous, then, okay, don’t do it. I couldn’t care less. But I’m going to.”
Andrea had almost the last word as they walked out of the lunchroom. “You know, Lizzie, I think my mother was right when she said you needed therapy.”
“Wait, your mother said I needed therapy? When did she have that great insight? When you told her about the Great Game?”
“I didn’t tell her, I already told you that.”
“When, then?”
“I don’t know, back in the sixth grade, maybe. She was talking to my dad.”
“How come you never told me?”
“Because I knew how angry you’d be.”
“But now you’re telling me?”
“Yes, because you’re making a huge mistake and you won’t admit it, even to yourself, so I don’t care how angry you are. I’m your best friend and I feel like I’m trying to save you from yourself.”
That was the end of Lizzie and Andrea’s friendship. After the yearbook staff meeting that afternoon, Lizzie walked home alone, making a list in her mind of all that she needed to do before the next day and the first F of the Great Game. She had to choose what to wear and decide what she was going to say to Thad Cornish. Finding out the location of Thad’s locker was third on the list. Homework was easily neglected in favor of the more important stuff.
From the middle of September to the middle of April Lizzie was consumed by sex. It wasn’t great sex. It wasn’t even good sex. It was pretty awful. It was nothing like sex with Maverick had been. When she and Maverick slept together, it was exciting and a lot of fun. They learned the basics from one another, and then a little bit more. It felt as though they were fellow explorers, gingerly (and often not so gingerly) filling in all those blank spaces on the map of the body. It didn’t have to do with passion or need, but rather good fellowship and camaraderie. Friendship. It was totally satisfying and Lizzie never regretted a moment she spent with Maverick.
But after the first four or five guys, the sex involved in the Great Game wasn’t even fun. Still, she charged on, grimly and doggedly. At first the flirting was diverting, but once she got to the eighth or ninth player on the list even that palled and became more and more like a boringly repetitive homework assignment, something she had to do to get a good grade. In the midst of intercourse she often found herself reciting poems in her head. She wished she could talk to Andrea about what was happening. She’d come home after the deed was done, take a shower, brush her teeth, get the Great Game notebook from one of the drawers in her desk, cross off a name, and then crawl into bed, falling instantly and thoroughly into sleep. She came to count on those dreamless Friday nights that somehow seemed so much more restful than the other nights of the week.
*?The Center?*
Thad “Cornball” Cornish was the team’s center for his sophomore, junior, and senior years. As a born-again Christian, he was the player who led the team in their pre-and postgame prayers. He was very selective about the sins he’d commit, and it turned out, luckily for the Great Game, that fornication, or maybe just fornication with Lizzie, wasn’t on his proscribed list.
*?Lizzie Meets Marla?*
Lizzie was lying on her bed, reading I Capture the Castle, waiting for her roommate to arrive. It was a little nervous-making. She’d never shared a room with anyone before, although she and Andrea, in their younger and friendlier days, had often spent the night at each other’s house. Earlier that morning, the first day the dorms opened to incoming freshmen, Mendel had driven her to Martha Cook, where she’d be living for the next year. Together they’d carried up the heaviest of the cartons, filled with whatever she couldn’t bear to leave at home. When Lizzie opened the door of her third-floor room, what she noticed first were the many boxes piled in one corner. They were from someone named Marla Cantor, from Ohio. Marla Cantor, whoever she turned out to be, was going to be her roommate.