Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn (8 page)

Nicholas stands up, smoothing his pants. "No, we don't. We could call it off."

Gideon doesn't know if they're calling his bluff. (I don't think they are, for what it's worth.) Here he was thinking
he didn't like the bet, that if he was going to enjoy his life here it was going to be in spite of the bet. But could it in fact
be true that the bet is the heart of his life here? After all, for better or worse, these guys are his life on this campus.
And what other than the bet ties them to him? What else, since they made the bet, has been discussed?

"Don't forget about the car," Cullen says.

Oh, right, the car. What if Gid wins the bet, and a year from now he is driving me around in that car? Will he tell
me where he got it? What if he borrows the car from Liam and wins the bet in it? Will he clean it? Will I be grossed
out anyway?

Gid squares his shoulders and feels the pleasantly achy buzz left in his body from this morning's workout. He
didn't think he was going to like running, and he actually did, quite a lot. Maybe these guys are on to something.

"I can get Molly McGarry to like me," he says. The boys cheer. He likes the sound of them cheering. But over

it, he remembers trying to make a move on Mija, how his apathy turned his limbs and mouth to stone. He has a
premonition. One that, having observed him, I share. The success of this bet will not only hinge on how much she
likes him but also on how much he likes her. He just can't lie to girls the way some guys can. He considers this a
fault. I, of course, do not.

"No other girl?" Gid says. "But what if...?"

"Just get Molly McGarry to sleep with you," Cullen says with affectionate weariness. "Then you're free to do
what you want. That's the story. You get it. I know you get it. It's not hard."

Cullen has loaded up the Vaportech for a smoky, pre-class send-off. Gideon steps up, hopeful. Nicholas
waves him away.

"You can't smoke pot during the day," he says. "You're around too many people, and it will make you too
paranoid."

Cullen nods and smokes more. "What about him?" Gid asks.

"I don't get paranoid," Cullen says. "Paranoia's just nature's way of saying, 'Hey, you really are a dork.'"

of the buffalo mcgarrys

So. Molly McGarry. Gid recalls the knowing way her smile slid to the left side of her mouth, the smug sparkle in her
brown eyes. Gid didn't tell Cullen or Nicholas this, but she intimidates him.

Gid,
hello.
They know a girl like that would. It's why they picked her.

He strolls across the quad, head down. Nicholas gives him a bottle of ,green tea to take off to class every
day
—antioxidants, possibly fat-burning—and he's clutching it in his hand. Yelterday, he was glad classes were
starting, because he wanted to have something to think about other than girls. Now, he thinks, she better be in one of
my classes, because I can't spend all my time trying to subtly run into her. One, because I haven't got much time,
and two, because I don't know if I know how to be subtle.

Gid's first class is English. It is in the basement of Hull Hall, an ancient building that smells of old books and
disinfectant. The hallways are lined with sepia-toned photographs of old men frowning in three-button suits and
young men with toothy, carefree smiles, rowing crew. All this makes Gid forget about Molly for a few minutes and feel
serious and important and smart.

English is taught in a cramped basement-level room with wood paneling and a rim of windows looking out at the
grass. Gid sits at the far end of the long oval table. His classmates are achingly pretty girls and infuriatingly
handsome guys. The teacher is an austere black man named Jake Barnes. "I am aware," Mr. Barnes says, pacing
slowly, deliberately, "that my name is the same as the main character in
The Sun Also Rises.
A character who has a
certain...sexual dysfunction. So let's all laugh about that right now."

Gid, as I suspected, has no idea what the guy's talking about. He taps his pencil against his notebook. He likes
this whole sitting-in-a-circle thing but not for pedagogical reasons. Usually in class you can look only at the girls next to you and the rather sexually uninspiring back of the head of the one in front of you. This way, you can look at all of
them: Across from him, Edie, Molly McGarry's friend, sits with her ankles crossed and two fingers pressed to her
mouth. Gid considers her. She might be pretty when she's older. The other girls in the class are more obviously
arresting. One has a mass of dark hair piled on top of her head, held there with a red lacquer chopstick. Another has
wide-spaced brown eyes and curly lighter hair tumbling down her shoulders. She's wearing pink boots, with thick
platform soles. There's a dress code that says all girls need to wear skirts, but apparently it doesn't say anything
about them dressing like total sluts.

Copies
of A Tale of Two Cities
are passed around. Gid weighs its heaviness in his hand. The girl in the pink
boots shifts in her seat. Gid watches the shadow between her knees optimistically. Then he catches Edie looking at
him and quickly averts his eyes and starts to thumb through the novel with great interest.

Mr. Barnes wants them to read seventy-five pages, which seems to Gid like an awful lot. He considers asking
Lacquer Chopstick about Cliffs Notes, but something about the tilt of her chin and determined gaze makes him think
she's not a Cliff's Notes kind of gal.

Art History is held in a small theater underneath the dining hall. The teacher, Mrs. Yates, is ash blonde and
lanky and humorless, with large-lidded eyes behind giant glasses. The lights go out. The first slide is a winged woman
with large breasts, no head, and no arms. Back in Virginia this would have been cause for some vulgar commentary,
but here, everyone just nods and types into their smugly tiny little laptops. Gid just has a notebook. "In the year
forty-seven B.C., Thrace came under Roman control," Mrs. Yates says. Gid tries to writes this down, but he can't
see in the dark, and he knows he won't be able to read it later.

Lunch is like dinner was yesterday except Gid is less surprised by it all. No sign of Molly in the cafeteria. Pink Boots is there. I love her, Gid thinks. Relax, Gid, you're just hungry because you're living on beans. Once again, it is
the five of them
—Cullen, Nicholas, Liam, Devon, and Gideon. Gid sees that it will always be the five of them. Devon
gives them pieces of a Toblerone candy bar. Liam doesn't talk to him, but he doesn't insult him. "Any sign of Miss
McGarry?" Cullen whispers when the other three are embroiled in an argument about which, if either, of the
tennis-playing Williams sisters they'd like to have sex with.

"No,"
Gideon says. "I'm a little concerned."

"What have you got next?" Cullen asks.

"Spanish," he says glumly.

"Hmmm." Cullen presses his mouth together. "Molly seems like a French kind of girl to me."

Yes. Gid was thinking the same.

But they are both wrong. Arriving in Spanish class, Gid takes a moment to be sorry that the chairs aren't in a
circle, largely because in the second row sit several entirely straight-haired slim brunettes, all of the same pleasing species. He sits in the fourth
—close enough to look but not too close. In the midst of this row of brown heads, Gid
sees a flash of red. Molly McGarry's hair. Molly McGarry. The prize. The goal. Or whatever she is, other than, of
course, herself. She turns around and looks right at him. She recognizes him.

Gid's having trouble interpreting the look on her face. At first, he thinks she's sneering at him. Then he decides
she's actually trying to look sexy. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between. Meanwhile, Molly McGarry and
her sneer/whatever have turned back around.

Liam Wu appears in the doorway and stands there for a moment, pretending to survey the room when he's
really letting people survey him. And in fact, every girl present is looking at him. Every girl except Molly McGarry, Gid notes with satisfaction. Surely not every girl in the world would prefer Liam Wu to him, and maybe Molly is one such
girl. But then, of course, Molly looks too.

Liam spots Gid and moves confidently in his direction. "Hey," he says, sliding into the seat next to him. "In
about five seconds, the reason I take Spanish and the reason you're going to be glad you did too is going to walk in."

Gid looks up to see a preternaturally beautiful dark-eyed blonde woman with very large breasts, walking on
crutches.

"Check that shit out," Liam says under his breath. Gid knows exactly what he means: The crutches are
fantastic cleavage creators. She leans the crutches against the wall and hops to the teacher's desk. No way! She's
the teacher? She's wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and an orange corduroy blazer, cut
—and to Gid's credit, he knows even
teachers are capable of such calculation—to show off her slamming body.

She hops up to her desk and smiles briskly.
"No te preocupes,"
she says.
"Estoy bien. 1N0 creo quejuege otra
vez futbol con hombres Americanos, si?"
(Don't worry, I'm fine. I don't think I will play football again with American
men.)

Everyone laughs. Gid has no idea what she just said. He took Spanish for two years back in Virginia, but while
he studied the textbook, all the rest of the class did was make pinatas and watch videos of people tangoing or
tending goats. He passed the tests, but he's never actually conversed with another person in this language.

Her name is Laura San Video, and with her left eye one quarter shut in perpetual amusement, she takes
attendance.

"Pauline Mellon?"

One of the players on the Hot Brunette team.

"Molly McGarrrrry?"

Gid tries to get a good look at her, but the angle is all wrong.

"Geedeon a-Rrrraaay-burn," she calls his name with one eyebrow raised.

"Yvonne a-wel-stead?"

This is the pixieish blonde.

As a book with a blue cover is passed around, Ms. San Video stands in front of the room, smoothing and resmoothing her blazer over her hips. "This class," she announces, "is not just about learning to speak Spanish but
coming to comprehend the mind of the Spanish speaker, how this language has shaped the philosophies and culture
of people from Spain to the Caribbean to South America."

Gid frowns. This sounds like a lot.

"I," Ms. San Video says with a flourish, "am from Venezuela."

I've heard that among South Americans, Venezuelan women have a reputation for wearing slutty clothes. I've
seen sluttier clothes for sure, but truly never on a teacher.

She has them turn to a Julio Cortazar story. Each student reads a paragraph out loud. Gid is blown away. Five
minutes into class, and they are already working? At his school in Virginia, there were at least two or three days,
sometimes even a week, of throat clearing and orientations and covering your book with paper bags before you saw
an actual assignment. For a little blonde girl, Yvonne Welstead has a fantastic Spanish accent. At the story's end,
Gid knows this: The guy in the story was at some point riding a motorcycle. That's it.

He understands that paying attention will be a constant battle for him. The girls, they command the front of his
brain. And there's not that much left beyond that.

"Okay, what did we learn from this story?" Ms. San Video asks in Spanish. She stops in front of Gideon.

"Are you talking to me?" he asks.

"Hablemos espanol,"
instructs Ms. San Video.

"Okay," Gid says with a Spanish accent.

The class laughs. Ms. San Video's face barely moves, but Gideon (and, of course, I) feel her amusement
expand.

"Tell us what you learned in the story," she says, in
espanol.

"That cars are better than motorcycles?" Gideon says in Spanish, hopefully.

The class laughs again. Ms. San Video frowns. "You can't roll your Rs?" she says, exaggeratedly doing exactly
that.

"No," Gid replies.

"Why not?" she says. "You are afraid, Geedeon Rrrayburn?"

"It's because
—" Gid knows what he wants to say, but he feels so much pressure, feels his face heating up,
and all he can come up with is, "I think probably your tongue can do more stuff than mine." He says this in English.

Everyone laughs. Even Ms. San Video. Gid, at first stunned and confused, then ashamed, finally laughs too,
partly because Liam, who terrifies him, is laughing the hardest.

Gid would never admit to himself how much it pleases him to make Liam laugh. Will I ever, he wonders, still
laughing, stop wanting to impress people I don't even like?

When Molly McGarry turns around and proffers him the tiniest of smiles, Gid stops laughing and nods to her.

For a boy, a nod is, like, intimate. Molly colors slightly, and Gideon does the same. They both start to smile and
then try not to. He settles back in his chair as the class calms down, deeply pleased at having made progress,
however small, this quickly.

There is chemistry between them, i can see it. Now, chemistry is good, of course, but for a boy like Gid, who
examines his instincts a lot but has trouble trusting them, chemistry can be confusing. It can feel a lot like anxiety,
and this, of course, is something Gid's always trying to avoid.