The football player has held me down. Getting up off the grass, shaking the earth-damp blades off my clothes and out of my hair, I understand that. He has not raped me; I understand that, too. I am still wearing my clothes. I was in peril but I don’t quite know how much. Though I am sober, my body has gone over to fright. I remember nothing.
“Everyone knows his reputation,” the boy says. “But no one was sure how to tell you. You seemed so excited. So I thought I’d come along, just to make sure you were all right.”
From that point on I am instead with the boy who came along, Ben. Ben is six feet six inches and at least in my memory does not slouch like so many of the overly tall, but wears his gallantry straight-backed. He has a rare condition known as Marfan syndrome. It has left him gangly, almost painfully thin. His thumb joints grow out from his palms at right angles, like those of Abraham Lincoln, who also had the syndrome. Lincoln, Ben tells me on one of the early nights when we are lying on his dorm bed or mine fully clothed, would have died within months even if he hadn’t been shot on that fateful day at Ford’s Theatre. The syndrome had attacked the musculature of his heart. I am struck immediately by this idea, that the future was seeded secretly into the present, the present seeded secretly into the past.
Ben’s heart is safe—if I know anything about Ben I will always know this, that his heart is safe and big and beating—but the syndrome has made his sternum protrude into a point and he is self-conscious about it. Long before the Chicago weather turns so famously cold, he wears thick sweaters. It reminds me of how, even in summer, I have to lie under a blanket to be able to sleep. His skin is so elastic he can pinch his neck between two fingers and pull the skin there several inches away. It feels slightly waxy to the touch, like what I imagine the figures on display at Madame Tussauds to be. His height, his skin, the unusual prominence of his bones—all these put Ben always on display. It is not a costume or a disguise, the way my dyed hair and torn clothing was, the way my new streamlined clothing is, but for him it is an identity thrust upon him. Whereas I once kept trying to find a way to make the pain I feel inside show up on my skin so someone would notice, and now I pretend I don’t feel it at all, Ben has no choice but to wear openly that he doesn’t belong.
That, I realize, has made him kind. He is quick to laugh, quicker even to make others laugh, and dating him I am suddenly at the center of dorm life. When our dorm organizes a fund-raiser, Ben comes up with the idea of selling milk shakes in the lobby at midnight to the students, who are so famous for studying long hours that rumor has it that’s why the cafeteria closes one night a week, to make the students go out. I, so in love with coffee that I briefly brew mine with caffeinated water, add the idea of using coffee ice cream and mixing in instant coffee granules. What we dream up is a tan sludge so gritty that drinking it is like drinking wet, sweetened sand, but when sales day comes around, the line of students in the lobby is long. At a school where students compete to say how little time studying leaves them for sleeping, and a good decade before Red Bull will become popular, drinkable highly caffeinated sludge is an undeniable hit. We use the first round of proceeds to buy more instant coffee, and advertise the next round of milk shakes as even stronger. That they’re gross only adds to the hard-core appeal.
And I understand that. I will prove myself by drinking the gross thing, doing the hard thing. It will be years before I understand the value of softness. My body still hurts from the Lyme disease, and I am completely unprepared for the Chicago winter. Ben picks me up and carries me when my knees don’t work. When I am well enough to stand and turn, he takes me dancing. He turns out to be an excellent dancer, able to spin and dip and lift me. I live in a dream, a dream of being loved.
But we are kids, me eighteen and him nineteen, and we are slow to realize what a threat looks like. Though I feel happy, I swear I do, since the night on the Esplanade I have somehow stopped eating. Before, in high school, I ate to hurt from the inside and then vomited for the relief of getting rid of what filled me. But now to have anything in my stomach is suddenly, inexplicably, scary. Only apples, nonfat yogurt, veggie burgers without the bun, and lettuce are safe. I haven’t told anyone in Chicago about what happened with my grandfather, and I am determined not to. That belongs to the New Jersey house. That belongs to the past. My grandfather is dead and I am in college and free. At night, Ben and I lie on his bed, and with a single fingertip he traces the emerging bone-curve of my hip over my jeans and up the knobs of my back to my neck, which seems longer now that my body is more sparing. Pleased with my new thinness, I am wearing a lot of black, I am trying to be the New Yorker I long to be. I seem sophisticated to this boy from Kansas. We have sex only once or twice across the months, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Neither of us knows yet that we are both gay. Neither of us knows yet how much we are a refuge for each other. He likes my turtlenecks and my fine-boned face and even my silence. “You’re like a ballerina,” he says.