Strots shrugs and looks down at her cigarette. “It is what it is.”
“Did she know?”
“Yeah.” The laugh is bitter. “She knew.”
“Did anything happen between you guys?” We’re getting way personal now, but I jumped into that pool first, and though Strots is not required to join me, I feel comfortable enough in calling out to her from my submersion. “I won’t tell anybody.”
She swishes her Coke ashtray around, the butts that float on the flat dark soda like dead bodies in a pond.
“Yeah,” she says in a small voice. “Things… did happen between us.”
A broken heart changes the appearance of a person’s face, altering their features: Strots’s chin disappears and her eyes get sucked back into her skull and that healthy athletic complexion is replaced by skin the color of stationery.
“Here’s the thing,” she says as she drops what’s left of her cigarette into the soda bottle’s graveyard. “Like I told you, Greta uses people for a power trip. She gets off on the games. I thought I was the exception, but it turned out I was just the rule.”
“You thought she was in love with you?”
“Yup. ’Cuz that’s how she acted when we were alone.” Strots shakes her head. “The things she said… the things she did to me when we—”
When Strots stops short, it’s like she’s pulling the curtains closed on a window, no more landscape for me to see—or for her to, either. Abruptly, her eyes lose the faraway cast, returning to their laser-sharp normal.
“We kept it wicked quiet, of course,” she says. “And besides, who’d have believed it? She’s like the poster child for a quarterback’s girlfriend.”
I think of our school handbook. Strots is right about the Christian thing. It’s in the part that covers student conduct and core values. I remember reading the relevant passage and not thinking it applied to me one way or another. I’m not having sex with anybody. Probably ever.
But under the rules, you can get kicked out for being gay.
I should have thought the rule was wrong before. Funny, how knowing someone changes how seriously you take things. Fairness is not just relative, it’s relational.
“She can’t mess with you,” I say. “She’d have to turn herself in for the conduct violation.”
“Exactly. And it’s fine. It’s good. It’s fine.” Strots lights another cigarette. “At the end of last year, we went our separate ways. She got back with her boyfriend, who she never stopped dating anyway. I went home. I try not to show anything around her. I don’t want her to know she broke me and I’m still broken.”
At that moment, I know I hate Margaret Stanhope more than anyone I’ve ever met. I also get a feel for why Strots was willing to “handle” things for me. Two birds with one stone, and I don’t blame her.
Strots exhales a plume of smoke out the window. Then she points at me with her cigarette. “It’s just what I told you back in the beginning. Don’t give her what she wants. I’m not going to let her see the lesbian crumble—and that was the whole point of last year for her. I just didn’t know it until it was too late. I didn’t know until her fucking boyfriend came to pick her up.” Strots shakes her head slowly. “I’ll never forget it. We had a room that faced out the front. I still remember watching her from the window as she ran across the lawn and jumped into his… you know, his arms, or whatever. He was older. Eighteen. Going to college. Had his own car. It was a Range Rover. His parents gave it to him, I’m guessing. He was hot. Really good-looking.”
“Oh, Strots,” I say.
“You know what the kicker was?” She looks to our door like it’s open and she can see across the hall to Greta sitting on her bed. “And it’s a good one, a real twist the knife, break the hilt off kind of thing.”
When Strots doesn’t go on, I say, “She brought him in and introduced you, didn’t she.”
There’s a pause. “Yeah, she did. It was allowed because, you know, everyone was there with their families packing up and leaving. She walked right into our room with him, her arm around his waist, her face glowing as she stared up at her Superman. ‘This is my roommate.’ Jesus Christ, I wanted to hurl. I hadn’t had the courage to ask her what was going to happen with us over the summer, but in my mind, I was going to go visit her in Greenwich. Stay at her house as a friend. Float under the radar.” Strots curses. “And you know, my family’s got a place or two. She would have really liked my grandmother’s in Newport. But seeing me during the break had never been her plan. None of what I thought we had was real. All along, what she’d been after was that moment right there, when she brought her boyfriend into the place that was ours. It was all to set me up.”
Strots rubs her thumb over her eyebrow. “As I shook her boyfriend’s hand? I saw the satisfaction in her eyes, and I realized, it had all been engineered for that instant. Everything we had said to each other, everything we had… done… was so she could feed off of my shock, off of all that pain and shame I had to try to hide. It was a long game, played by a master. I almost respected her for it, if I hadn’t been so busy feeling like shit.”
“She’s evil,” I whisper. “She is really evil—”
“What did I expect, though, you know?” Strots looks down as she talks over me. “I mean, really, where did I think it was headed? The whole time, we kept apart outside of our room because we had to. Because it was safest that way and it was easy. She had those two suck-asses of hers, and I got my sports. With the code of conduct, it felt like a smart move to stay under wraps, but again, that was only on my side. For her? She was living her real life with those girls, that boyfriend, the perfume and the short skirt shit. I was the lie. So what did I honestly think was going to happen?”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“I absolutely can. She might be a bitch, but I let her in, knowing what she was. A girl like her? You can see her coming a mile ahead.”
We both fall silent. I don’t know where Strots is in her mind, exactly, but for me, I’m envisioning another round of scenarios where Greta gets her comeuppance. She is married, but her husband is cheating on her. She is rich, but someone is stealing her fortune from her. She is pretty and gets caught in a house fire. Snippets of these hypotheticals flip-card through my mind, animated sequences that move in blocks.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Strots says. “About your shit.”
I refocus on my roommate. She’s staring at the drawer of my desk.
“I won’t tell anyone about yours,” I say back.
Strots nods. “Good. And Keisha doesn’t know about Greta, by the way.”
I think of how protective Keisha is of my roommate, and enjoy a momentary image of the girl picking Greta up and throwing her through that third-story window. Or a second-story one.
Any window is good, actually.
“Someday, Greta’ll get hers,” Strots says. “I have to believe this, or God doesn’t exist.”