Turns out I don’t like champagne.

    It was Valentine’s Day, and all of my friends were sitting on the floor of my dorm room. We were freshmen and we thought champagne was the mature thing to drink, throwing frozen raspberries into little flutes with glitter in the plastic. We had these ideas of what our futures looked like: money, power - polished success. While we spent those days wearing strappy crop tops and jewelry that stained our skin green, blacked out but pretending to be sober while handing our cheap fakes to bouncers, we acted like there was no darkness in the world; nothing bad was allowed to happen, because if we took a moment to absorb reality, we wouldn’t land in a chic office downtown one day, our shoes clacking on linoleum.

    We passed the international student in our hall twenty dollars for that cheap jug of champagne, thinking it was the first sip of what would be the rest of our lives.

I scowled as soon as it touched my lips. I clambered over legs to my desk and poured vodka into a large glass jar that at one point had applesauce in it.

 

You answered the door with your vape in one hand and an almost empty bottle of wine in the other.

    I remember you were loud, which, looking back now and really knowing you, meant that you were already drunk. You never liked my roommate, you told me later, one night alone in your room when we practiced blowing O’s while trying to remember the lyrics to songs that we’d listened to in middle school.

You had to be at least tipsy to greet her so warmly.

    You welcomed us inside, leading her to the cabinet where you hoarded booze. It was a sort of business that you and your roommate had started. You had a really good fake and would order alcohol off of a delivery app - there were less questions that way. Then you would sell it to the rest of us.

    I didn’t hear what you and my roommate were saying, laughing about, as she stuffed the bottles into her backpack. My eyes were surely crossed, body swaying like the overgrown fields in my hometown that I’d traded in for pavement and skyscrapers.

    “You can sit down, if you want,” your roommate said. I hadn’t noticed him.

    He was on your cheap couch, watching a show that had just started streaming, a purple blanket on his lap. Saying no wasn’t an option since I was tripping over my feet while standing in one place.

    I remember feeling uncomfortable sitting down. I was very aware of the amount of skin I was showing and the push-up bra I was wearing. I felt large and uncoordinated, trying to sit delicately but crashing instead.

    You and my roommate talked for what felt like hours before she asked if I wanted to go back to our room. At that point the television screen no longer had actors or lines, but waves of colors and garbled sounds. I’d rested my head on your roommate’s shoulder, and the world spun. While I was too gone to really register the moment, I felt a rush, that first prickly idea.

Maybe he thought I was pretty.

I told my roommate that she could head out. I’d go down to the party with you and yours.

 

I was sober by the time we got back to your dorm from the party.

    You led me up there when my roommate texted me that she’d met a guy there and that she needed our room. I was frustrated by inconvenience and jealousy, but you’d laughed, saying that I could stay on your couch until she kicked him out.

    We spent a couple of hours sharing our life stories and eating terrible pizza before you fell asleep. My roommate still hadn’t texted me back, so I cuddled up with that purple blanket and looked out the window at the parking lot seven floors below.

“Can’t sleep?” your roommate whispered, looking down at me on the couch from his lofted bed. 

I hadn’t realized that he’d taken off his shirt, and I forced myself to maintain eye contact, to not look at his shoulders and chest.

I whispered back, something funny, and we laughed softly. I glanced over, listening, monitoring to see if you’d wake up. You remained still, breathing deep.

It didn’t happen all at once, but I remember realizing that your roommate’s whispered joking was serious; not only was he flirting, but he was challenging me. I would take it further, and he would do the same.

“Get up here,” he said.

And I did.

 

We got dinner on Thursday.

He’d looked around the restaurant anxiously. It was a popular brunch spot in the city, but we went at eight in the evening. No one was there but us.

Casual means secret. At least, that’s what it means when it comes to me.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he’d said after, side by side, looking at the ceiling; if I stretched I could touch it with my fingertips.

I don’t remember what he looked like, not really, and I don’t remember what his interests were or what he was good at. Those things didn’t matter. What mattered was the rejection, the chance for redemption. I wanted his approval. I was using him just as much as he was using me. Only he was getting what he wanted. 

If something secret was where I could start, then I’d take it.

However, in the back of my mind, the thought of why it had to be a secret began to fester. I wondered if he was ashamed of me, and that led to me wondering why. Every negative thought that I had ever had about myself, bubbling in the depths of my psyche, huddled away in the darkness, burst with truth and accuracy.

Every move I made, every word I spoke, had to be flawless, because my version of perfect was mediocre: enough to hide away, to keep secret, to make him look over his shoulder anytime he heard something similar to the door opening.

It became a game of trying to change his mind, to redeem myself.

“You know,” he said after taking a sip of his soda, as if the thought had just crossed his mind, “if I were a girl, I wouldn’t dress like you.”

    I looked down at my jeans, realizing that it was hard to breathe. It wasn’t just a comment about my oversized T-shirt, I assumed, but a remark implying that every time that he’d seen me he’d been disappointed. 

    I laughed, not knowing how else to react. It was empty. The thought of my existence filled me with shame.

    I wanted it to be a secret too, because if anyone knew they would see that I was nothing.

All I ordered was fries. I didn’t want him to see me eat, to think That’s why she’s so overweight, why her thighs are too big, why her stomach isn’t flat and why her teeth look so small on her fat face. Maybe, if I ordered little enough, went on a run at four in the morning, he wouldn’t have one more reason to keep what had happened a secret, to be ashamed of me.

    He paid for our meal, and he requested me two dollars for my fries through an app after I got off the elevator.

 

A dorm on the floor above him opened up, and he took it. He really wanted to make a “big bed.”

 

It was the twelfth time, and like the tenth, seventh, fourth, and each of the others, as soon as it was over and he’d caught his breath, he swore that it would never happen again.

    “I have class at nine,” he said, resting his head on his pillow and shutting his eyes, shifting his body not enough to push me out of the bed, but enough for me to catch his implication.

    I swung my bare legs off of the edge, suddenly feeling shy. He’d seen too much of me, enough to judge, enough to think about. I never felt comfortable with him, except in the moments that weren’t supposed to happen. Those were the only times when I could let myself think, for a moment, that he didn’t hate me, and that I didn’t disgust him. The way I saw it, if he was with me, I had at least a few more minutes before the bad thoughts would come again. It was intoxicating, that comfort, reassurance, that maybe I was worthy, that maybe I’d redeemed myself.

    That feeling dissipated the moment he closed his eyes as if I was no longer there, hunched over, putting my pants back on.

    “You know I’m not interested, right?” he said two times later, Monday of the following week.

    I nodded, thinking about how when we were with you and our group he would talk about my friends. He wanted a small girl, one that he could throw around and get to do anything without asking, not one he had to guide, not one who batted her eyes when he asked her to do something new or out of her comfort zone.

    I would do it for him, anything, for that moment of acceptance, to be seen as someone on the same playing field as that imaginary tiny blonde girl, an equal with my friend that he would always stare at, flirt with, touch.

    We were supposed to be friends. That’s what we told everyone. But his texts were empty, emotionless, providing nothing but a response. I kept trying to pretend, to force it out of him, to really have something together that wasn’t just under his duvet. So one day I told him about my cousin. He’d been in a car accident a couple of weeks before, and I woke up each morning terrified of what the update would be.

    “I’m sorry :(“ he replied an hour later.

    I couldn’t ask for more. We weren’t anything real, and it wasn’t as if he owed me a heartfelt message of support. Everyone else could do casual, secret, late nights with no strings.

    However, the game is why I stuck around despite everything. There’s one way to get rid of me: genuine interest. I knew he didn’t think much of me, and all I needed was something to prove that I’d changed his mind. But if he would have given that to me I would have stopped responding, stopped waiting for an invite to come over, stopped going out of my way to see him between classes. There would be nothing left for me to work toward.

    I kept prying, kept oversharing, kept hoping that something would pique his interest and that he’d say something real. It was an empty hope that became routine, and I put more and more of myself on the line to see if he would bite. I knew that he didn’t really care, but I liked to come off as having an exciting life. I wanted him to know that he wasn’t all that I had, didn’t want him to realize that the two minutes it took for me to respond to his texts were forced, resisted.

    “Oh, your friend from home is visiting next weekend?” he asked, sitting up.

    I smiled to myself, realizing that he’d been listening.

    “Would she be interested in a threesome?”

    My face fell, fastening my bra with my back facing him. 

I shook my head, telling him that she wouldn’t.

    I didn’t know if that was true.

 

He was mad when you commented about the hickey on my neck. I’d piled on makeup and wore a turtleneck. It was my fault for not hiding it better, for existing, for being walking proof of what had happened.

You said that you knew all along. 

He was furious.

    “I’m not really that mad. It isn’t that big of a deal,” he said on the phone that night. Someone saw me crying in the lounge and texted him.

    I told him about my cousin being taken off of life support, that I didn’t know when it was going to happen, that he could have died already and I didn’t know.

    He told me to come upstairs.

    At first, he just let me cry. He was in his bed, and I was in the chair he’d pulled up beside it, looking out over the parking lot, eight stories up, talking about my cousin for two hours.

    He got up and hugged me as I started to head out, and I thought, for a moment, that he cared; I’d redeemed myself. Then he breathed on my neck. He grabbed my hand and pushed it down, and then my shoulders.

I told him that it shouldn’t be happening, that it was wrong.

I was afraid to say no.

I was still crying. I don’t know which part it was about.

 

My roommate said that it couldn’t have been what I thought. We’d been doing that for most of the semester. This time was no different. I was obviously in love with him. I’d just gotten what I’d wanted. I’d gotten what I’d been asking for.

 

We sat in a hotel bed, your almost empty bottle of wine between us and my vodka on the nightstand, your vape in your hand.

    We didn’t talk about him after I left. When I would visit, when we would text, we would avoid him altogether, like telling a parent a story about a night with friends and cutting out the illegal parts. 

    We practiced blowing O’s and tried to remember the lyrics to songs that we’d listened to in middle school, while sharing our life stories and eating terrible pizza.

    You asked me who I was texting, two minutes between the notification and me replying. I smiled, telling you the little details: the good ones.

    I didn’t want you to know that it was another redemption boy.