Rachel made eye contact with Fiona. Fiona usually loved when they shared glances across rooms. This one was disapproving. It said, “You’re drawing more attention to yourself by not playing, you know.” Or at least, that’s what Fiona imagined it said. Fiona shook her head again. Rachel shrugged in response.
No one had ever taught Fiona how to play poker, and she didn’t try to follow the game. Everyone was wearing T-shirts and shorts, no shoes, so the clothing would come off quickly. And what did Rachel or Steph have to hide? To think, Fiona used to be that skinny! Fiona’s high school self wouldn’t have played strip poker either, but what a waste. She’d disliked her body then too: those large breasts, which sexualized her without her permission; those thick thighs that rubbed together in the heat. Now her breasts spilled out of the bras that used to fit. Now she pulled at the crotch of her shorts when she walked. What she would have given to get back the body she’d once hated.
Rachel was cheering; she pointed to Chad. “Off.”
He rolled his eyes and took off his shirt. They’d all seen him shirtless anyway, freckled and hairless as he walked along the lakeshore getting kids in and out of canoes.
Fiona poured herself a second cranberry and vodka. Yonatan won a round and told Steph to strip. She pulled her shirt over her head in one smooth motion, the way someone would in a movie. The more Fiona drank, the hungrier she got, and she dug out a bag of SunChips she’d had her eye on from the bottom of a shopping bag. Soon Rachel and Steph were in their bras and underwear, the boys in just their boxers. The game dissolved, but clothes stayed off; Fiona alternated: vodka, chip. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, and her feet did not touch the ground. Yonatan lay next to her and stuck his hand into the bag of chips.
Fiona had noticed Yonatan immediately during staff training. She had been sitting on the bench of a picnic table near the soccer fields; Rachel had been sitting on top of the table, braiding Fiona’s hair. They were chatting with some of the new girls while the guys played a pickup soccer game. Yonatan was the fastest one on the field, darting continually from one goal to the other, seemingly tireless. He had tan skin and muscular calves and curly brown hair, which he wore longer than the boys in America did. His curls kept falling into his face as he ran, and he kept pushing them back. She wondered if it bothered him.
“So you two know each other from a while back?” asked Nell, the pretty redheaded girl at the picnic table. She’d been quiet until then.
“Since last century!” Rachel said, fluffing Fiona’s hair affectionately.
Nell looked at both girls blankly. Rachel looked back.
“You know, ’cause last century was, like, seven years ago,” Fiona explained. She always did this, felt the need to make moments like this one less uncomfortable by filling in the blank spaces.
Nell nodded. “I got it.”
Rachel gave one of Fiona’s braids a tiny pull, the clandestine equivalent of an eye roll. Once Rachel decided she didn’t like someone, that was that.
The boys took a break and came over to the table for their water bottles. Yonatan poured his on top of his head and shook his hair dry the way a wet dog would. A couple of droplets landed on Fiona’s thighs, and she wiped them off, hoping he wouldn’t notice.
“Sorry,” he said, flashing a smile and then jogging back to the game.
Rachel drummed the fingers of one of her hands on Fiona’s shoulder. “Cu-ute,” she sang quietly.
Now Yonatan was lying on the bed next to Fiona, shirtless, but she didn’t know what to do in situations like these. Some girls, such as Rachel or Steph or even Fiona’s sister, Helen, seemed to be blessed with the flirting gene, but somehow she was missing it. She’d assumed that her college would be filled with girls like her, girls who had been prudish and awkward in high school but were on the path to coming into their own. She soon learned this was not the case. The girls were experienced and confident and self-proclaimed feminists who had sex for sex’s sake. They came from Manhattan; from L.A.; from international high schools in Tokyo, in Brussels. They called themselves “bi-curious.”
Fiona felt like she’d spent most of the year trying to get out of her own skin in the only ways that seemed available to her: smoking weed and ordering Domino’s with the stoner girls on her hall or downing sugary red drinks in a sticky dark basement where Top 40 hip hop blasted and she practiced her nonflirting on some pimply theater major. The drinks, the unlimited d-hall, the late-night munchies—they were all just ways to make it through the discomfort of being herself, which of course resulted in the inverse: Now there was just more of herself to hate.
She knew it was so typical, the Freshman 15 (or, in her case, the Freshman 20). But the commonness of it didn’t make her feel any less uncomfortable about the way she looked. Inside she was uneasy all the time, squirming within herself. She wanted to yell out to every person that met her at her heaviest “This isn’t me! I’m not this person!” But of course, she was that person, inhabiting and maintaining that awful body.
She ended up losing her virginity to a boy named George, who, by second semester, was the only remaining single, straight guy on her freshman hall. He was tall and lanky and nice, and they were drunk, and it was awkward and painful, but she just wanted to get it over with so she didn’t have to carry around the shame of being a virgin anymore. Now that it was done, she could have sex for real, and one might say that the logical person to have it with would be the shirtless guy lying on the bed next to her. But how did one make something like that happen? How did you let the boy know you were interested? And how, most of all, did you do it without making a fool of yourself?
He’d had his hand in the chip bag for longer than the normal amount of time, Fiona thought, and he briefly grazed her fingers with his own. He looked at her and smirked. For a moment, she felt like this was when you did it: When they gave you a bit of something, you took the bait.
Then he took his hand out and crunched a handful of the chips into his mouth. “Arghhhh,” he said with his mouth full, sounding like a pirate or a wild animal. He was just drunk was all. She reminded herself what she looked like, the implausibility of his interest in a person like her. Crumbs fell onto his bare chest. Fiona brushed them off, like a caregiver.