So Shelly (6 page)

“I’ll pay for my own,” she insisted with a stone-cold seriousness.

“It’s no big deal,” Gordon said, and laughed. “I got it.”

“I don’t want to owe you anything,” she said.

“You won’t owe me. It’s just breakfast.”

As she would later tell Shelly, and Shelly would share with me, Caroline gave in, surrendering absolute control of all things Caroline, which she had been struggling so hard to maintain ever since she and a longtime boyfriend, high school crush actually, had decided to “take a break” and “see other people.” She hadn’t “seen” anyone since and had no plans other than to reunite with him once he came to his senses. Yet here she sat with this stranger, a boy more beautiful than handsome, beautiful in what she thought was a safe, almost kidlike way.

“So, what’s your name?” Caroline asked.

Without hesitation, he said, “Will Parry,” and hoped she wasn’t a fan of Pullman. Gordon had a Huck Finn–like capacity to lie on the fly.

“You go to the university, Will Parry?”

“No. I mean, yes,” he stumbled purposefully. He’d discovered a long time ago that to make a lie believable, it’s helpful to allow the person being deceived to think you’re lying at first, then to lure him or her in with half-truths and
crumbs of information. And, usually, the more ridiculous the story, the more believable it becomes.

As he had hoped, Caroline bit. Thinking that she had uncovered his dissembling, she raised her right eyebrow in consternation.

“I mean,” Gordon recovered, “I don’t go to
the
Ohio State University, if that was what you meant. I go part-time back home.”

“Where is that?”

“Cleveland. I go to Cleveland State. I wanted to go to Ohio State. I was actually accepted, but I had to change plans when I was elected mayor.”

Caroline laughed into her cup, nearly blowing coffee out of her nose. “You expect me to believe you’re the mayor of Cleveland?”

“No! Not Cleveland. Pepper Pike. It’s a suburb.” Pepper Pike was Willie’s hometown.

“And you’re the mayor?” Her tone betrayed her disbelief.

“Yes. I was still a senior in high school when I was elected. At the time, I was the second-youngest elected official in the state. Some kid from the Toledo area had me beat by twenty-three days.”

That was the kind of shit that hooked them. Although he was freestyling his story, the Toledo kid was real. Gordon had read about it on the Internet.

Caroline hesitated. Holding her coffee cup in two hands, she brought it to her lips and stared through the rising steam into Gordon’s eyes, searching for any sign that would unravel his unlikely story. It was almost too silly to be true—yet was almost too silly to be a lie.

“So, how’s the mayor business going?” She continued her cross-examination.

“It sucks.” Gordon had also learned that people are more willing, more likely, and happier to believe the negative rather than the positive.

“Why’s that?”

“Well,” he said, continuing his ad lib, “Cleveland State sucks. And being mayor of a small town is a lot more difficult and a lot more boring than you’d think. I only ran on a dare from my government teacher anyway, but when I won, I was stuck.”

“What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“The teacher?”

“Kohler. Mr. Kohler.” It was his fallback name. He’d gotten it off a urinal.

Again, she paused and studied his face.

“Why are you in Columbus?”

“A city planning convention.” There actually was such a convention taking place at Gordon’s Holiday Inn. He’d read “Welcome, City Planners!” in white letters on a black placard on top of a gold stand inside the lobby of the hotel. He had a way of unconsciously recording almost everything he saw, even things only in the periphery. It was likely that that little sign had prompted the entire “I was a teenage mayor” story, even if at the time of its inception he hadn’t made the connection himself.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Seriously. Come back to my hotel and I’ll prove it.”

“How?”

“When I checked in, they gave me an identification badge on one of those dorky lanyards that you wear around your neck, and a bunch of crappy swag.”

Caroline performed a prolonged lie-detection scan of his retinas.

He didn’t blink.

A pregnant silence settled between them over the table.

The tipping point.

She took a drink of water. Wiped the glass’s condensation from her hand with her napkin. Looked into his eyes once more. Weighed the implications of hooking up with this guy. Weighed the implications of not. Decided that at least this one time in what had become her lonely life, she would take a chance, live a little. She must have thought, “Fuck it.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Caroline watched as he slid out from beneath the table, stood up, and walked to the cashier. She liked what she saw.

She drove toward campus with her left hand death-gripping the steering wheel and her right index finger poised over and periodically punching her presets. (Traffic fatalities caused by distracted driving have doubled in recent years.) Gordon gave up on holding a conversation over the alternating Top Forty and rap music blaring, and the wind rushing past his ears. Instead he concentrated on keeping his pancakes down while surreptitiously texting his assigned roommate for the weekend, Pauly Dadeno, a senior second-string defenseman.

He attempted to text “Get out. Got a girl,” but typing
blindly with his cell wedged between his seat and the door, he spelled “Gnt nvt. Gnt d girl.”

Apparently, Dadeno had decoded the message, for after an “I told you so” moment when Gordon and Caroline passed the welcoming placard in the lobby, Gordon found his seventh-floor room unoccupied. However, in the shaft of hallway light that rushed like a playful puppy ahead of him into the room, he spied his large equipment bag, labeled “Knights Lacrosse,” lying at the base of Dadeno’s double bed near the windows. He spun toward Caroline, clutched her wrist, and pulled her into the room and him as he closed the door behind them.

Before their eyes had even adjusted to the semidarkness or she’d had a chance to consider playing coy, Gordon’s lips found hers, which he gently parted with his tongue. Caroline sighed appreciatively as a dam of pent-up desire broke deep within her. Without disengaging, Gordon slid downward, cupped his hands beneath her bottom, and lifted her to his eye level. Caroline placed a hand over each of his cheeks and opened her mouth wider. Later, she would remember the too-youthful smoothness of his face and curse herself for her stupidity, but in that moment, she instinctively wrapped her legs around his hips and thrust her body upward, as if she were shinnying up a pole. Her face above his, she fooled herself into thinking that she had assumed control of the situation.

With Caroline grafted onto him, Gordon spun toward the room’s interior and walked to the foot of the near bed, where he seated Caroline in front of him.

With her ex-boyfriend—the only boy with whom Caroline had ever been naked—Caroline, like most high school
lovers, would undress hurriedly in the dark or beneath blankets. One can only imagine her titillation when Gordon confidently and arrogantly teased her by slowly sliding out of his jacket and unbuttoning the sleeves and front of his dress shirt. In the moonlight that squeezed through the narrow gap in the otherwise drawn curtains, his shaded torso appeared sculpted. She compulsively reached between her legs when, at a painstakingly slow pace, he slipped his belt from its loops, unbuttoned, and unzipped his pants without averting his gaze. Gordon turned his back to her and inch by agonizing inch tugged his khakis past his bare hips and ass (he never wore underwear) and let them drop and puddle at his ankles and cover his deformed foot, pausing to allow her to drink him in. When he turned full frontal toward Caroline, she gasped, fell flat on her back, and watched him approach through her widespread knees.

Later, she wouldn’t remember the sequence of movements that left her lying naked. The only experience she could compare it with was the time when she volunteered to be hypnotized during an assembly at her high school. Her friends had accused her of acting when she’d claimed that she couldn’t remember what she’d done under the hypnotist’s sway, but she knew she’d succumbed to a force beyond her control, and it happened again with Gordon. She would, however, never forget and forevermore seek to repeat the sexual awakening that she experienced in that Holiday Inn, and she would forever love, hate, and haunt the man who unleashed and then left her.

Caroline was not a virgin, but sex had been rough, brief, and disappointing on those previous occasions. She had
never experienced an orgasm. With Gordon, she had one before he entered her. Then another before he carelessly finished inside her.

In the half-light of the next morning, Gordon woke with Caroline already straddling him. With her in the final throes of a transcendent screw, applause and calls of “Bravo!” and “Encore!” burst from somewhere in the room. The shock of which launched Caroline off of Gordon and sent her sprawling in terror across the room, where she tripped backward over the lacrosse bag and landed flat on her pretty little ass. Legs akimbo, she lay staring into the leering faces of Dadeno, Justin Terlander, and David Thurston, who were recording the entire performance on Dadeno’s phone.

As she rose to her feet and stripped Dadeno’s bed of its duvet in order to cover her nakedness, Caroline read “Knights Lacrosse” on the equipment bag that lay at her feet, from which the taped handle of a stick extended. Shamelessly, Caroline dropped the duvet, extricated the stick, and started swinging at the boys, who, despite repeated slashes against their shielding forearms, laughed hysterically and gladly suffered blows in exchange for the view of the hot naked chick.

Only the arrival of Brother Lombardy in full collar and Coach Abbott, in boxer shorts and more body hair than an evolved man should be expected to bear, brought the burlesque to a close. One by one, Coach Abbott grabbed each boy by the nape of the neck and peeled him from the room. Brother Lombardy advanced until he spotted Gordon, naked
and propped up on his elbows, bemusedly watching the bad vaudevillian skit that he’d initiated.

Caroline dropped the stick (there have been only three substantiated lacrosse-related deaths in the United States in nearly twenty years) and wrapped the duvet around her.

“Young lady, do you need help?” Brother Lombardy asked in a despair-filled voice, his eyes averted.

“No. I just want to go home.”

“That’s fine. Gordon, we’ll need to talk as soon as you’re dressed,” Brother Lombardy said, before turning and exiting, leaving behind all his dreams of adding Gordon to the brotherhood, dreams mingled and lost in the intoxicating smell of sex that still permeated the room.

“Gordon? You told me your name was Will!” Caroline said.

Gordon lay unmoved and silent.

“You’re no mayor either, are you?”

No response.

“Are you even in college?”

The evidence was beginning to pile up: the bag, the boys, the chaperones.

“What are you? In high school?” Her voice rose several octaves.
“Don’t tell me you’re in high school! How old are you?”

“Fifteen,” Gordon finally spoke.

“Fifteen! I just fucked a fifteen-year-old!”

“Well,” Gordon corrected himself, “actually, I won’t be fifteen until January.” He grinned.

“That’s statutory rape! I could go to jail!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll cover for you,” Gordon promised without sarcasm.

“I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this.” She must have said it a hundred times as she gathered her scattered clothes with one arm while the other insufficiently covered her swaying breasts.

Bedraggled, one shoe on and one shoe in her opposite hand, she slunk toward the door.

“Caroline,” Gordon called.

“What?”

“Thanks.”

“Fuck you,” she said, flipped him off, and then exited, slamming the door behind her.

The boys were all suspended for the semifinal match. Without them, the Knights got smoked by a team of waspish blue bloods from suburban Cincinnati. By Monday night, Caroline’s naked tantrum was posted on several juvenile and sleazy, yet tremendously popular, file-sharing sites under the title “Crazy Naked Lacrosse Chick.” It had already received more than a thousand hits.

Among the student body at the Rood, Gordon was instantly deified.

Within six months, Gordon was expelled from the Rood. When rumors began to fly around campus regarding Gordon’s relationship with Willie, Wildman seized his opportunity to
exact revenge for his room eviction. He alerted one of the Brothers to Willie’s website, where it was discovered that all of Willie’s most recent homoerotic drawings of heroes bore a striking resemblance to Gordon. They were both called into the office of the dean of students, Brother Randolph, where Gordon freely admitted to posing for and being flattered by Willie’s representations. Willie was forced to move to a single room on another floor, and further punishment and scandal were avoided.

Three months later, however, when Gordon was discovered in the athletic director’s office, midcoitus with the athletics secretary, Mrs. Guiccioli, there was no saving him. The incident was covered up to save Mrs. Guiccioli her job, her husband and children, and the Rood’s reputation. Gordon was allowed to finish the term but was told that he would not be welcomed back in the fall.

On his last day at the Rood, as he marched toward the limousine that Catherine had sent to chariot him home to the Strand, Willie, Mrs. Guiccioli, and Brother Lombardy wept. But the vast majority of the jealous crabs in the bucket were glad to see him go. Gordon was too much of a reminder of their own boring choices and limited potentials.

When the janitors cleaned Harrow Hall that summer, they found, “The meek shall inherit the sloppy seconds of the BOLD!” spray-painted in red on the walls of Gordon’s room.

After the initial anger and shame wore off, Caroline found that she couldn’t get Gordon out of her mind. The following summer, she quit her job and dropped out of Ohio State. With the image of Gordon’s equipment bag seared
into her memory, Caroline Googled all things related to Ohio high school lacrosse until she found and visited the Brothers of the Holy Rood’s Cleveland campus. A surprisingly empathetic Brother Lombardy informed her of Gordon’s real identity and of his return to Ogontz. She followed him, enrolled in community college, waited tables at a Denny’s (I guess she felt closest to Gordon there), and stalked him like it was her job.