Nina got drunk every Thursday. This was when she and her friends from the sorority house would go to Brassring, a box of a nightclub off the highway that had a wall of flashing lights, a sticky dance floor, and a DJ who would signal the start and the end of the night with the same song, usually something by Nelly or 112. At Brassring, the drinks were served in plastic cups and by the end of the semester Nina had switched from vodka cranberrys to vodka tonics because her friend Ellie said tonic didn't have any calories. Years later, when she graduated and moved back to New York, Nina scanned the back of a bottle of tonic water at a party and was confused to see a 12-ounce serving had almost as many calories as a can of Coke.
***
One April Thursday during her junior year, Nina was at Brassring trying to order a drink unsuccessfully. She'd already taken shots of Black Haus during a pre-game in Ellie’s room, igniting a small but eager buzz. The sheaf of singles in her hand was visible, her sternum pressing against the bar's laminate edge, but the bartender was pointing to everyone around her. Nina felt overlooked and, as minutes went by, invisible. This bothered her because when she got dressed to go out that night she felt hot. She typically didn't think she had the upper body to pull off the silver halter top that tied across the back with three skinny strings, but she wore it anyway after slathering herself with rinse-off bronzing lotion, as if the northeast April sun had the power to turn her pale splotchy skin a deep and even russet. She wore her favorite pair of flared black pants that made her short legs look longer when paired with black platform boots. Her coarse curly hair was bone straight thanks to a sapphire-plated flatiron, its surprisingly sharp plastic teeth snagging with every stroke.
After an undignified amount of time spent waving money around, Black Haus buzz fading, Nina gave up and went to find who she came with. Most of her real friends had been invited as dates to the Delta Theta Beta fraternity spring formal happening that night at a hotel in town, so Nina agreed to go out with Kelly, an anxious blonde who sat next to her whenever they had classes together. They'd gotten fairly friendly by virtue of proximity although Kelly spent most of her time with her boyfriend Jimmy, a smiley ROTC type who was on the wrestling team and was widely considered one of the nicest guys in their class just because he wasn't an outright asshole.
Kelly and Jimmy were holding hands near the bar with a crew of wrestlers Nina recognized but had never spoken to. At a Division III liberal arts school like theirs, Nina considered athletes to be non-entities; jacked jesters whose campus existence was largely defined by the ten minute trek from the fitness center to the dining hall where they'd pile their dinner trays with whatever was congealing under the hot bar, swipe cards hanging limply around their necks.
"Can someone get me a drink?" Nina shouted over the music, "This bartender is ignoring me."
"What do you want?" a tall, pale, very blonde guy asked. Nina knew his name because their junior class was small, not because she ever saw him at the fraternity houses or frat-approved bars she went to almost every night.
"Double vodka tonic," she said, handing over the crumpled dollar bills.
In under a minute, he passed her a plastic cup filled with the clear fizzy liquid and a leftover single. Most people would have tipped with that, she thought.
"Thanks," Nina said. "You're Drew, right?"
He nodded, taking a sip of his Coors Light. Drew had deep dimples and the whitest eyelashes she'd ever seen. At home in New York, Nina didn't know any blonde guys her age except one kid who transferred to her school in tenth grade from one of the Carolinas and lived in a gated seminary on the west side. His father was a pastor or a minister or something having to do with church.
"What's your major?" Nina asked between long pulls from the straw and was completely unsurprised when Drew answered “Business.” She'd planned on being a dual major, Theater and English Lit, she told him, but ended up declaring Communications.
"Very cool," he said.
After a few minutes of bobbing their heads to the music, It wasn't me, and looking around, Jimmy called over to them. He'd ordered a round of kamikaze shots and they toasted to the fact that there was no wrestling match the next day, a declaration of little worth to Nina, but she raised her mini cup and sucked the cloudy liquid down. She didn’t have any classes on Fridays, so whatever. When she turned to the bartender this time, he looked right at her. "What do you need, sweetheart?"
Nina loved to dance when she got tipsy but sometimes found it impossible, no matter how many drinks she'd had, to truly get out of her head and into the music. Every hip sway or arm wave reinforced her belief that social dancing is, at its core, absurd, and wouldn't it be great if everyone had to learn a routine in order to be allowed on the dance floor instead of being left to their own bodily interpretations of rhythms they didn't choose. But tonight, the crowd was cleansed of anybody whose gaze mattered to Nina, so when Kelly grabbed her arm, she turned it up for the Division III sadsacks watching passively as if two friends grinding against each other, drinks aloft, was a spectator sport. And then there was the wall of flashing lights, shimmering like a thing of beauty, and her pulled-straight hair, somehow, wasn't frizzing yet.
***
"Am I crushing you?" Nina asked Drew a short time later when she sat with half her ass on his lap in the backseat of some wrestler's crammed Honda Accord. "Nah," he said, and lightly balanced both hands on her waist to keep her steady, a gesture that, for a single second, called her body to attention in a way she wasn't used to. They drove to Pulo's, a rickety dive bar at the top of a hill. Campus lore had it that townies used to stash coke in the toilet tanks and there was asbestos in the popcorn ceiling. No matter where you stood, your soles became sticky with the dregs of infinite 50-cent beer nights.
Pulo's was full, as it usually was on a Thursday just shy of midnight, although the crowd wasn't typical. The back room was filled with people Nina routinely felt sorry for; people she’d see waiting in line for movie night at the Green Door, an arcade-style grill room in the basement of the student union that offered all-you-can-eat popcorn and free refills on soda and punch.
A tequila shot materialized and instead of asking how they were still celebrating the fact that there was no stupid wrestling match tomorrow, Nina joined the group in a cheers. Then, double vodka tonic in hand, she slid into a wooden booth next to Drew.
"Why aren't you at the Drug That Bitch formal?" he asked, using the acrostic nickname for Delta Theta Beta that everyone thought was hilarious and acceptable. Nina debated lying but reasoned that Drew wouldn’t judge—or care—either way that nobody had asked her. “I actually wasn’t invited to that,” she said, taking a long sip from her glass.
Of the four fraternities on campus DTB was king. As the oldest established house, they had a shabby but hulking four-story tudor revival that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a V.C. Andrews novel. Inside, a sprawling foyer with exposed rafters, an abundance of brown leather sofas, a steep winding staircase with no banister that proved treacherous after one too many rounds of flip cup, quarters, or Beirut. Although hazing was, in theory, prohibited, DTB’s Hell Week was legendary on campus, with students regularly trading unconfirmed stories about how they heard pledges were instructed to take the virginity of at least one freshman girl, how they were locked naked in cages after funneling grain alcohol and were forced to bark like dogs and eat their own vomit, or how the night before initiation, they got pelted with full beer cans and lit cigarettes in a bid to see who could emerge with the least amount of bruising and burns.
Most girls at school fell into two camps: those who lived to party on DTB's sprawling main floor or in its fluorescent-lit concrete basement and those who didn't. Nina was squarely in the former camp, showing up to the frat’s parties on Tuesday and Saturday nights, dancing to Eiffel 65, Juvenile, Trick Daddy, or—if one notoriously emo brother was DJing—“Mr. Jones” by the Counting Crows. It was fun, it was the central-casting version of college she craved, it was nothing like her private high school in New York, which fell all over itself praising its political correctness and values-based learning. Not being turned away from DTB parties, even as a fairly anonymous face in an overly perfumed pack, felt to her like she’d reached the correct college social-order apex, a perch she had no interest in descending. To do what? Eat free popcorn at Green Door on Saturday night?
Occasionally, the deep recesses of Nina’s cerebellum would alight with the observation that there wasn’t a single Black, Latino, Asian, or—if stereotypes and last names were any indication—Jewish brother in the fraternity house. She told herself it was because their school was located on the outskirts of a blue-collar industrial hub that mostly attracted kids who lived in the predominantly-white surrounding suburbs. Nina imagined the minorities on campus preferred to do their own thing.
“You weren’t invited?” Drew said. “I thought those were your boys.”
This bothered Nina. It was true she spent a good deal of time partying at the DTB house, but none of the brothers had ever singled her out. Once, during her freshman year, a stocky senior agreed to take her to the fraternity date party, sight unseen, because her five-foot-ten blonde roommate was dating his best friend, the fraternity president. Her roommate thought it would be fun to double even though Nina hadn’t ever spoken to either guy. Her date was visibly disappointed when he picked her up, but he kept bringing her fresh beers and lighting her cigarettes during the party. Nina jerked him off on his scratchy futon where he weakly came in dribs then ambled out to smoke a bong next door, leaving her to gather her things with one hand sticky and glowing under the black light.
Later, when the four-year fog started to lift and she found herself back in New York working as an editorial assistant, she seemed to easily attract the type of guy she worked so hard to be noticed by at school; overgrown campus idols who now lived for golf outings and team happy hours and fucking her from behind. Guys who excelled at spending their postcollege ad-sales paychecks to impress her. There were weekends in Miami, extravagant Manhattan dinners with enough cocktails and wine to make Nina almost comically porn-like in bed, and—in one case—a pair of tall snakeskin Fendi boots for her birthday which she wore while giving the benefactor head on the gleaming wood floor of his Weehawken apartment.
Like nights spent at the DTB house, Nina also thought this was fun. She was young and single and devoid of the freshman fifteen she carried all though college. It only became repulsive with time, when the built-in hedonism of the city wore thin for these types of men. Men who retreated to the sterile corners of the sterile suburbs in which they were raised. Men who married pretty-enough girls who quit their teaching jobs the day after the wedding. Men who became bloated dads to three kids by the time they were 35. Men who posted frightening things to Facebook about the first Black president. Men who jerked off to stepsister porn in the den while their pretty-enough wives were on a Target run or at margarita night. Married men who thought it was okay to message Nina on Instagram after a few too many beers asking if she remembered them from school, what she was up to now, and commenting that she looked good.
At Pulo’s, Drew wasn’t chatty but he didn’t look over his shoulder to see who was coming and going. Nina got up periodically to get another vodka tonic, to pee or look in the mirror, take a shot with Kelly, or to feed the jukebox quarters but wound her way back to the wooden booth where she learned Drew was from a town in New Jersey she’d never heard of, he had one sister who was almost ten years older, and the last movie he saw was The Mexican.
Around midnight, Kelly and Jimmy asked if they wanted to leave. Nina was pleasantly tipsy and still had a full drink on the table. She was running out of things to ask—she read somewhere that the secret to being a dazzling conversationalist was to just keep asking questions—but she knew the sorority house would be virtually empty, as the DTB spring formal afterparty was the stuff of legend and closed to anyone not invited to the main event. The thought of changing into her flannel pajama bottoms, clicking in her retainers, and getting into bed alone while her best friends would be starting the second half of their night at the fraternity house was deeply unsettling.
“Wanna stay?” she asked Drew, figuring they’d catch a ride back to campus with someone they knew.
“Sure,” he said, and went to get another round. She downed her drink in two sips and reapplied her lip gloss and racked her brain for topics to discuss.
***
An incomplete list of topics discussed:
Books: “Yes! Her name is Banana! She’s Japanese. You really should read her stuff, it’s all really short,” Nina said, to which he mumbled something about not having read a book by choice since junior high.
More books: “But my favorite takes place on a college campus like ours, but these weird kids are obsessed with Latin and Greek and they accidentally kill someone in the woods.” Nina said. “It’s not, like, a hard read, it’s literally amazing, that one you’d probably love.”
Sports: “I've literally never watched a sporting event on TV in my life. The number on the back of their blouses—is that their age?” Nina’s go- to sports joke made him smile, dimples so deep, who has two symmetrical dimples like that?
Dimples: “Your dimples are, like, designed by Xavier Roberts!” she said. “Like, Cabbage Patch Kids? They had dimples? … I did too collect Garbage Pail Kids! The one with the kid going down the drain? Wait, so you have to wear those one-piece unitard things like AC Slater? He had dimples too! I love that show so much, the inconsistencies make it so campy....you know, like silly but maybe intentional?”
“Yes, I’d love another one, thanks! No, I’m okay, I hate Big Buck Hunter, but you play. I’ll get the next round.”
The DTB formal: “Yeah, Ellie was invited. So was Megan. And Amanda, but Chris doesn’t seem into her. I heard they bet on a ping pong game in the basement one night and the winner had to give the loser head. Ha, yeah, she lost. No, we are good friends, why are you even asking that? I’m just saying, I feel like maybe that’s why she got invited. I’m glad, honestly. I went to one date party there and it was like every other fucking party, like beer pong in the basement and the Beta Pi girls whispering about us in the corner. They probably wanted to eat us. I’m just kidding, God, can you not take a joke? They’re not fat they’re just, like, tough. We are not mean girls! I don’t know why people think that.”
His teeth were so white and his eyes were so dark, she thought as she watched him sip his beer, his full lips lingering on the bottle which he held by the base. Nina never thought about that before, how people drink, the way people hold things. “Let’s take a shot,” she heard herself say.
“No, I’m not playing pool. Are we, like, in Mystic Pizza? What? You’ve never seen Mystic Pizza? Oh my God, it’s so good. We’re watching it. There’s this scene where a super young Julia Roberts in, like, her first role hustles a rich guy at pool and, like, fucks him in his mansion after … Fine, I’ll play Buck Hunter, give me the shotgun. Last time I played this stupid game I didn’t shoot a single doe, but most of the bucks just got away so I still got the points.”
****
In the morning, Nina felt different. She was alone in her bed and her head was throbbing, which wasn't a new sensation, but there was something else, a corporal ambiguity that felt more urgent than the usual gut feelings of guilt or unease usually reserved for the hazy memory of a drunken eye roll someone took the wrong way, a dumb lie she might have told in the basement of a house party, or disappearing to make out with a guy one of her friends had a crush on. She’d had guys touch her uncomfortably in the past, using a wayward finger as a proxy for, what Nina assumed, an erect penis, but this sensation was entirely new. She looked down to see her naked body, her arms streaked amber from the remains of last night’s bronzing lotion.
Her mind started its habitual backtracking but mostly stopped at Pulo’s wooden booth. Sitting up, she clocked her black pants and halter top crumpled on the floor, and her black shoulder bag next to it. She checked inside. Wallet, cigarettes, gum, and house key were all there. This served as a familiar salve. If she was responsible enough not to lose anything essential, it was probably fine. Two green glass bottles of Yuengling sat empty on her desk. She vaguely remembered making fun of Drew at Pulo’s for his Coors Light consumption, telling him she had a six-pack of actually good beer in her mini fridge. She pulled a hoodie and a pair of sweats out of a drawer before swapping them for her robe and headed into the sorority house’s communal bathroom to shower away the bronzer, the black eyeliner, her slightly matted but miraculously still-straight hair, and whatever else was left of a drunker-than-usual Thursday night.
She got dressed and walked across campus to get a bagel. A vague sense of unease tapped at her gut. But she pushed it aside when she saw her housemates waiting for coffee at the union. They’d been at the fraternity formal the previous night and looked as hungover as she did. All was fine, she had her things.
By dinner time though, it was obvious to Nina that all was not fine. The hangover had diminished but the uneasy flutters had multiplied into pulsating pangs of dread that probably wouldn’t ever go away unless she had the right information. She needed to call Drew, that much she knew.
“You said you were on the pill.”
To Nina, the words coming through her dorm phone sounded like a rare dialect of a language she only half knew. She understood people sometimes say crazy shit when they’re drunk but she also knew she wouldn’t have said that. The pill was never a thing in her life. She had a neurotic Jewish mother who was openly against it, regularly citing obscure reports about the detrimental effects synthetic estrogen can have on a woman’s body.
“Oh,” she said.
****
Drew called her a few days later and asked if she wanted to hang out. He lived a few blocks from school with three other wrestlers in a residential house on a narrow leafy street. Nina said sure, she’d be by after her 4:30 class. On the walk over, she wondered whether Drew liked her—she’d been drunk at Pulo’s, yes, but also probably smarter and funnier than any other girls he’d get with on campus. Or maybe he just found her attractive and wanted to have sex again. Either scenario, at least in that moment, seemed preferable to her usual pattern of orbiting the packs of fraternity brothers who seemed to look right through her as if she were fat or old or deformed in some way. The phantom of the frat house, she thought, which almost made her laugh but not quite. When she got to Drew’s, the door was half opened and the house was quiet.
“Hey” she said, sitting down next to him on the cracked leather sofa. “Where is everybody?” Drew said they were at wrestling practice but his shoulder was acting up so the coach said to sit this one out. The room was still, which was odd to Nina. At the sorority house, sound was perpetual, whether from CDs, TV, a hair dryer, or gossip.
“What have you been doing?” Nina asked. “Just waiting for me?”
“Ha, yeah.”
He moved in to kiss her, his cold hands under her sweatshirt then her tank top. He took off his own T-shirt and Nina helped him with his mesh shorts and boxers. She felt clear-headed and was committed to being present. She’d chosen a pair of black underwear that sat nicely on her hips and a lacy black Victoria’s Secret bra with aggressive underwire. Her tits were pretty good, a solid B cup with pale saucer-like nipples which never bothered her until years later when she discovered online porn and the abundance of dime-sized, almost violently pigmented circles made her feel inferior. She sucked in her stomach as her wide-leg sweatpants and underwear came off and Drew climbed on top.
“Do you have a condom?” she asked. There was no discourse about her being on the pill—Nina ended their phone conversation the other day abruptly and was too disoriented to clarify that she was not, in fact, on birth control. Plan B, she realized years later, would have been an option had she known such a thing existed.
Drew tore open a Trojan from a drawer next to the sofa, rolled it on, and started to push his way in. Sober, she was surprised at his vigor.
One of the last things she remembered from when they were talking in the wooden booth at Pulo's was Drew saying he hadn't read an entire book by choice since middle school. It annoyed her at the time, but really, what did it matter? She remembered how hard she had to work to have even a baseline conversation with him, but did she really expect him to care who Banana Yoshimoto was or be interested in hearing more about her favorite book of all time, the one about the weird college kids reenacting an ancient bacchanalia? He didn’t say much, but not everyone has to put on a show all the time. Maybe he was just shy and not as skilled as she was at keeping conversation going and what they’re doing now is how he communicates. That’s okay! And a knowledge of fiction is an unfair metric by which to measure a person’s inherent value. Physicality can be valuable too. He was an athlete.
She knew he was all the way in because it hurt, the sharp pain giving way to unpleasant friction. Nina did her presumed part and writhed around a little, grabbing his ass mostly in an effort to keep him deep where the pain felt more contained, an action Drew took as excitement and started moving faster. Nina studied the water-stained ceiling and thought about the DTB spring toga party she, Ellie, and Amanda were going to that night. What do you wear under a toga made out of a sheet? A bathing suit? Shorts and a tank top? Underwear? Drew was pumping hard, his eyes half closed and his hands gripping her thighs. Maybe jeans and a tube top in case the sheet unties. He made no sound before he collapsed on top of Nina. When he pulled himself up, she saw a glossy sheen on his limp and naked cock. She felt something inside her leg, slimy but substantial, more tangible than some wayward fluid. The condom was there, deflated and glistening, wedged in the space where her pelvic bone and inner thigh converge. It was Nina’s second time having sex—the first that she remembered—but she sensed something wasn't right. She held it out to him.
“It must have fallen off," he said. "That happens with me sometimes.”
“Oh” she said.
Nina drank a glass of water from the tap after putting her clothes on. His housemates would be home from practice soon and she needed to blow dry her hair for the toga party. She zipped up her hoodie, shoved her bra in her pocket, and walked back to the sorority house in the orange glare of the April sun sitting unusually low in the sky.
***
During the days that followed, Nina went to class, ate her meals, smoked the occasional cigarette on the porch, and listened to music in her room. At night, she drank with her friends at the DTB house, Pulo's, and Zeta Phi Zeta, the unofficial Jewish fraternity that occasionally threw decent parties but was mostly filled with pre-med guys who never had enough beer and kicked everyone out by midnight. These guys would later go on to become quality husbands with decent voting track records who would never think to drunkenly message a random girl from college when their wives went up to bed.
She’d just come back from her last class of the week when Drew called her room and asked if she wanted to grab dinner off campus that Friday. Nina pictured them somewhere like the Prince Hal Inn, a dimly-lit converted carriage house one town over that she'd been to during Parents Weekend. "But it'll have to be early, he said. "I have a match Saturday morning."
On Friday, Drew picked her up in his car at five on the dot and drove to an Italian chain at the end of a shopping center that also had a Blockbuster, a VoiceStream Wireless store, and a Dress Barn. The restaurant had a small waterfall out front, Dean Martin’s greatest hits piping up through the water. When the stars make you drool just like a pasta e fasule, that's amore! A hostess led them through the mostly empty restaurant to a comically large round table against a wall of exposed windows. "I forgot my sunglasses," Nina said as they slid into the curved booth, the late afternoon glare stinging her eyes.
A waiter in a bowtie came by, proffering menus. "Hi, I'm Kenny," he said. "I'll be your server today. Have you all dined with us before?"
Nina ordered a glass of red wine and Drew stuck with water.
"You're not drinking?" she asked.
"I have a match tomorrow," he reminded her.
Nina rolled her eyes, even though he was driving her back to campus.
“What are you gonna get?” she asked, studying the menu, which was roughly the size of a Sunday newspaper.
“Not sure, what about you?”
“Maybe linguine with clam sauce?”
“Clams. Gross.”
“Do you not eat clams?”
“No.”
“Have you ever tried one?”
“Yeah.”
“What don't you like about them?”
“The taste.”
“You should try one from my pasta – I bet you’ll like it.”
“Nah.”
“It’s cooked in, like, garlic and oil so it won’t taste fishy.”
“I’ll eat fried calamari if you want to get it but that’s it with the fish.”
Nine excused herself to go to the bathroom. She was having a good hair day, and admired her relatively silky blowout in the mirror before applying more lip gloss. She had borrowed a tight black tank top from Ellie that made her waist look smaller, even under her blue denim jacket, and so she admired this as well.
When she got back to the table, the food was waiting—the linguine for Nina, chicken parm for Drew.
“You sure you don’t want to try a clam?” Nina asked playfully, dangling one on her fork.
Drew shook his head and took a bite of chicken.
“How is it?” she asked.
“Pretty good.”
They ate in silence until Kenny came by to clear the plates. “Any coffee? Dessert?” He asked.
“I’m fine,” Nina said.
Drew reached for the bill and Nina asked if she could leave the tip. “Nah, it’s all good,” he said. The parking lot hadn’t filled up and the late-afternoon sun was mostly gone. The still-bare trees along the highway were a continuous blur as Drew drove back to campus. She asked to be dropped off at home, since she wanted to pregame with her housemates for that night’s DTB Around the World party. When Drew pulled up to her front door, Nina pecked him on the cheek, thanked him for dinner, and jumped out of the car. “See ya,” she said through the open window as he drove away.
The sorority house was quiet when Nina got inside and she climbed the three carpeted flights to the attic, which had been converted years earlier to a spacious common room.
“I thought her home would be, like, bigger,” she heard someone say as she opened the door to her friends draped across the floor, an armchair, the old floral sofa. They all held red Solo cups and were watching Pamela Anderson, on mute, lead a silent tour through her Malibu beach house. Music was playing from the ten-disc changer. You’re my butterfly, sugar baby. They shrieked when she walked in, Ellie immediately started making her a vodka tonic, and Nina turned up the boombox as loud as it could go.
