Robin York - Deeper

“Where are you going?”

“Just out. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

I feel guilty for waking her up, but I can’t really help it. It’s hard to be an insomniac when you have a roommate.

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

She rolls over, and even though she’s awake, I ease the door shut slowly until it latches and locks with a quiet snick.

I’m always careful.

I walk to my car with my keys gripped in my fist, looking left to right across the parking lot, listening for anything, anyone. I had parked under the security light. From ten feet away I unlock my doors with the remote, and my heart beats so fast, so fast. The gasping sound of relief when I shut the door behind me is too loud in the clean, safe interior of my Taurus.

I turn on the stereo and crank up the volume and drive.

I have a series of loops that I do. First I go in a circle around the college, which is four blocks long and three blocks wide. Then I do widening circles around the surrounding college-owned buildings, the downtown, the fast-food strip and box stores, the Little League diamond and Frost-E-Freeze shack. I pass fields of cornstalks starting to break ranks and turn brown. My high beams spotlight the blank landscape of my home state.

One of these loops used to be my evening run, but I had to stop. After my naked body and my location became public information, being alone outdoors lost its charm.

I make only right turns, because I hate turning left, and my dad isn’t here to tell me I need to get over that.

I don’t know how to talk to my dad anymore. When I call him, I can’t figure out what words I would have said before, when I never had to think about it. I knew just how to make him laugh and love me. Now when we talk, it’s like I’m acting, only I don’t know my lines, and I suck at improv.

I can’t remember how to be the Caroline Piasecki who graduated from Ankeny High with her smile white and perfect, wearing her graduation cap and gown, walking onstage to give the valedictorian speech with her two sisters and her father in the front row of the bleachers, beaming with pride.

I haven’t told him about the pictures. I can’t.

I’m a mouth with a boy’s dick in it, a body to look at, legs to spread.

I spin the wheel, turning my car to the right. To the right. Always to the right.

I haven’t seen West for thirteen days, but I think about him. I walk myself through that afternoon at the library, trying to follow all the twists and turns of our conversation. Why did he push me back against the shelves? What was he thinking when he told that guy to leave? What was he trying to accomplish?

I think about him asking me if everything I do is about accomplishing something.

I pick over my relationship with Nate, trying to answer all the unanswerable questions.

Was he always bad and I just didn’t notice? Did he turn bad?

How could I have trusted him?

I think about West saying, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I remember the way his thigh felt, pressing between mine.

One time last year, I was writing a paper at my desk, and I heard shouting and laughter in the hallway, periodic smacking thumps that made me flinch. Nate was lying on my bed, reading his Intro to Econ textbook. Bridget went out to see what was going on and didn’t come back. Then I heard her laughing and West’s raised voice.

“What are they doing out there?”

I tried to sound like I didn’t care. Like I was slightly annoyed and I didn’t feel this tug in my chest. This pressure to find out, join in, become part of it.

Nate shrugged. “Go see.”

I can still remember exactly how I felt when I stood up and headed out there. Balanced on a knife’s edge between good and bad, unsure which way I might tip—but aware, deep in my bones, in my tight lungs and tense shoulders, that something was about to happen .

In the hall that night, I found Bridget and Krishna, bowling with rubber chickens.

Yeah. It took me a minute to get it sorted out, too.

I don’t know where Krishna came by the chickens—probably he stole them from somewhere—but whoever had owned them before couldn’t possibly have enjoyed them as much. Krishna and the chickens were famous last year. The chickens showed up all over—occupying toilets, hanging from the rafters in the dining hall, perched on top of the big phallic metal sculpture in the middle of the campus, or dangling from the party keg.

But this time Krishna was standing at one end of the hall, twenty feet from a neat arrangement of pins, and winding his chicken through several tight arm revolutions. As I watched, he let go, an underhand throw that whipped the chicken through the air with surprising speed. It hit the pins, and they exploded, scattering all over the hall. Bridget shrieked, then bent over, laughing.

It was totally juvenile—the game, Bridget’s girlish reaction, Krishna’s red eyes and his stoned grin. I had a paper due in the morning and a lot of polishing still to do. I had Latin homework to get through, and if I had to go to the library because of these guys, I’d—

Suddenly the door right across from mine opened. West came out with a chicken in each hand and a two-liter bottle of soda under one arm. “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking about chicken rockets,” he said, before he caught sight of me and stopped.

We looked at each other. Probably not for ten entire minutes, but that’s how it felt. Like an indecently long time spent staring at his face, when I almost never allowed myself more than a glance. A day of watching his mouth twitch. His nostrils flare. His too-pale blue-green eyes lit up with mischief.

I got all tangled up in those eyes of his, mentally tripped and fell, and then couldn’t untangle myself.

West arched an eyebrow. “Want to play?”

He didn’t mean anything by it. I’m almost sure.

Or, I mean, he did, but all he meant was, if I said yes, I’d get a chicken of my own and a free pass to indulge in this silliness, blow off my homework, act like a different girl.

He didn’t mean did I want him. Did I want to learn how to cut loose. Did I wish I could be different.

But, even so, my heart beat like a bass drum in a halftime show, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath to answer, No, thanks.

This isn’t for me.

You’re not for me.

The denial was too thick in my throat. If I tried to say it out loud, I would choke on no, because I wanted to say yes.

In the end, I didn’t say anything. Nate came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist, resting his chin on my shoulder. “What’s with all the noise?”

A door shut behind West’s eyes. His face closed off, and the tipping point where I was standing flattened out beneath my feet into the familiar, unexceptional terrain of my hallway, my state, my whole boring life.

“Just blowing off some steam,” West said.

“Could you keep it down, maybe?” Nate asked. “We’re trying to study.”

“Sure thing.”

Nate pulled me inside, closed the door, kissed my neck. His hands roamed under my shirt, over my bra, and then I stopped him because Bridget was in the hallway and I had a paper to write.

And also because I felt deflated, as though some rich possibility had been taken from me. Something more than a juvenile game of hallway bowling.

The alchemy of a boy who could turn two-liter soda bottles into chicken rockets.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the pull I felt toward West is the reason why I broke up with Nate. Whether it gathered power until it got so strong, it cast a shadow over all my other feelings, and I didn’t even realize it.

When I think about Nate, about West, it’s hard for me to tell what’s my fault and what isn’t.