They remember the apartment of their boyfriend’s parents, its rooms edged in dark furniture and floor lamps, a dust-free entertainment center with an undersized television tucked into the proper square.  Their boyfriend had talked about Caligula all week.  “It’s got anal fisting,” he said.  While the movie played, they sat next to him on the couch, a velvety purple.  They drank wine.  Beer.  Wine.  Beer.  Sinuous empty glasses and bottles of backwash stood tall on the coffee table.  They told him to stop, to slow down—but damn they were drunk.  They remember gusts of togas and jingles of Caligula finger bells, the apartment swirling sinister.  Their boyfriend was heavy, lying on them with his thick gut, his hair furry over his bare shoulder blades.  He moved them into his bedroom, a square of space unlit except for the streetlight that through his window misted the air to a dismal, lawny green.  He fucked them dry.  They did not stand up and push him off and say no.  They were drunk, scared, stereotypical.  They were insecure.  All they did was say, “It hurts.”  Their boyfriend said, “I’m almost done.” They blinked at the ceiling and stared at the striped shadows in the vent of the metal heater mounted on his wall. 
       

        Afterward, they wiped themselves up in the bathroom and got dressed.  “Where you going?” their boyfriend asked.  “Leaving,” they said, not looking at his face now that the light was on.  As he asked what was wrong, they left.  At least there was that—dignity had rooted its way through.  They walked home in the dark through the lawns of campus and a block of city square.
       

        The next day he came to their house, a crumbly place they shared with two other students.  “I am so sorry,” he said, sitting beside them on their futon, the floor that no one ever washed specked in filth.  “I was so drunk.  I can’t believe I did that.  I’m really, really, sorry.”  The daylight through the one window made a warm spot on the futon cover, a nice place for a cat to curl or a child to put her cold feet.  They saw themselves discarding him, dumping him, finishing with him.  But they wanted him too much.  When he smiled at them, spoke to them, looked them up and down, spaces inside them soared like balloons into a clear sky.  He made their stomach flutter like breezy fingers, like kites in the wind.  So they closed their bedroom door and fucked him right there in the open of day. 

***

        After they graduated, they settled in Austin, where they waited tables and drank beer and vodka-cranberries in blues and metal and punk and college bars while feeling just fine.  The restaurant they worked for closed temporarily to renovate, so they decided to visit friends in Chicago.  One of these friends was a man they had known a long time, since they had been seventeen.  They called him.  “I’m so excited,” he said.  “Stay at my place.”  Every night, they went out for food and wine and talked, and afterward they always went back to his apartment and had sex with him.  Good sex.  Mutual-orgasm sex.  So they started wondering, over Peking duck at a place in Wicker Park, as they sat across from him at a table in the front window, whether a relationship was a possibility.  An authentic relationship.  He could visit them.  They could visit him.  They could talk on the phone every day but know the bills were worth it.  A relationship seemed like an answer to various questions about self that had been concerning them lately.  They were becoming aware of self’s acute needs—for an anchor, for some sort of grounding material.  Their life often felt uncontrollable, wild like a mass of threads and namelessness and intangibility.  So they swallowed a bite of their meal and asked him about this idea.
       

        “We’d kill each other,” he said.  He was losing his hair early and had a dark blond goatee to compensate.  “It would never work.  Plus, I just got out of that other thing.”  They pretended to agree but flicked through their duck with one chopstick, blotted their now sweating upper lip with a napkin.  They hoped the light was dim enough to mute their face, which felt fraught, exposed, weak.  After dinner they fucked him anyway, in the dark of his bedroom with his cat lying on the broken heater beneath the window that overlooked a block of roof.
       

        In the morning, they sat on his futon drinking coffee, and he told them that he was interested in this woman he knew, this friend of a friend.  As he described her, they finally understood: with them he wanted one of those stringless relationships, unbound and untied, the kinds of relationships truly confident people had.  He wanted their milk but wanted to discuss other cows with them.  They were pathetic, they realized, but it was a special pathetic, an intricate pathetic, a pathetic of complication and ambiguity and intelligence.  They decided to be honest.  They did earn a college degree.  They could be articulate, convincing, real.
       

        “I would feel disrespected if you fucked other people while I’m here,” they said.  Their head hurt and their face felt bloated with wine from the night before.  They put the coffee cup on the wood floor, speckled with cat dander and clumps of dust.  “It just isn’t cool.”  They tried to seem adult, rational.  “Seriously,” they said.  They put their hand on his shoulder.  His shirt was off, his skin smooth.  Very smooth.  “It would be so messy.  Would you wait until I’m gone?  Then you can do whatever you want.  I will too, you know?”
       

        They stayed with other friends for a few days, and then on their last night in Chicago they returned to his apartment.  He welcomed them.  “I’ll miss you,” he said.  They went out with him for Greek food and carafes of wine.  On the L back to his apartment, they noticed that he did not put his hand on their knee.  He seemed like he wanted them to leave.  They wondered why they had come back.  They remembered when they were nineteen: he had pulled their high school senior picture from under his bed and confessed that he thought they were beautiful, that he was a little obsessed, that he looked at their picture all the time.  They remembered that moment—he had been sitting on the floor as they sat on his single bed, his comforter a shade of dark maroon, thin and worn.  They had heard the sound of his mother opening an oven door, running water.  He held their picture out to them.  Their face was feathered in hair, their head tilted to show off their bare shoulders, the soft mole on their collarbone. 
       

        The L moved through Chicago, a worm through the dark.  He was their friend.  They had known him such a long time.  They thought they must be special to him.  They could not be pathetic enough to so quickly repel a friend like this.  After so many years?  Come on!  Let’s exhume our pride. 
       

        When they got back to his apartment, they said they wanted to have sex. 
       

        He shrugged.  “I’m tired.”  He stood at the fridge in his narrow kitchen, opening beers for them.  “If we do, I’m not going to want to worry about you getting anything out of it.  I’m just going to want to do it for me.”
       

        “Oh,” they said, swallowing beer. 
       

        “If that’s okay with you.  Just so you know.”
       

        They felt themselves smile.  They feel it still—an involuntary lifting of the mouth, as if their jaw had done it without them. 
       

        “Sure,” they said.  “That’s fine.” 
       

        He lifted them onto the counter and fucked them, and as they were in his bathroom afterward, wiping themselves, they heard him play his messages.  They heard a woman’s voice.  It was the other cow.  “I left my jewelry on your dresser,” she said.  They heard him move across the room and turn the volume down.  They stood over his toilet, motionless as they heard her voice, as they heard his feet quick on the floor, the low rock of the L in the distance.  The one bulb in the bathroom was over the mirror, in which they were not in a position to see themselves, but they could see the sink, a swirl of rust curving around the drain like a question mark.   
       

        They said nothing to him about the message.  They lay beside him in his futon while his cat slept on his chest.  They wondered why they were so unloved.  They wondered what they had done wrong.  They had thought they were so cool, so sexy.  So low-maintenance. 
       

        In the morning, they saw everything from that dreamy tower that contained them before the hangover started, and they reached for him.  They squeezed his ass, felt the muscles in his back.  They embraced nostalgia for the women they had never been, caressed that fantasy power.  They let it be fingered.  And they fucked him again.  They might remember him someday and say that they had the last laugh.  And hadn’t they?  A bit of a ha-ha into the face of somebody? 

        Were things with them really this bad?

***

        They remember adolescent vomit, beer-bile in their throat when they were a high school sophomore, lying in a hallway, the carpet a dry slab of sponge on their cheek.  Juniors and seniors made a small circle around them, lightly kicked their legs.  Their eyes were open, they were aware of everything, but they didn’t move.  Maybe they couldn’t.  Were they faking something? They don’t remember well enough to say.  They hear the laughter and feel the kicks and the rush of shame.  All they wanted was sympathy.  They were only sixteen.  They had only wanted some attention, someone to take care of them.  And then an older girl named Darcy who had dropped out, who the juniors and seniors called a loser, a whore, pushed her way through the circle.  She was wearing leather pants and a leather jacket.  “Stop it, you guys!  How would you like it if it was you?”  She bent down toward them, hair pulled back into a ponytail, stripe of blush up her cheekbone.  “Come on, sweetheart,” she said.  She stood them up and helped them into a bedroom.  “Stay in here for awhile and then we’ll take you home, okay?”  From their place on the floor, they saw a shirtless man sleeping on a single bed, thin tapestries on the walls, piles of clothes by a closet.  The light was dim—they couldn’t tell where it was coming from.  Dust misted the air.  They still couldn’t move.  They heard the music through the walls; the man on the bed rolled over and snored.  Darcy came back and knew what to do, knew how to pull them up without making them feel like puking again and how to hold them steady and walk them down the hallway without looking away from anybody.  So what, assholes, Darcy seemed to say.  Drunk girl.  Big fucking deal.  They thought Darcy was extraordinarily kind.  She took them to her boyfriend’s car.  They started feeling better.  They said they needed to go to their friend Joy’s house, where they were spending the night.  Joy’s mother was never, ever home.  Kids were there all the time, watching television and making toast. 
       

        Darcy led them into Joy’s duplex and told Joy they'd had too much to drink.  “She’s better now, though,” Darcy said and left without saying good-bye.  Then they hugged Joy and told her how they threw up at the party, how they were at the bottom of this hallway circle, how they were worried about their reputation.  Joy scoffed.  “Who cares?” she said.  She opened a package of Oreos and gave them some.  They thanked Joy and went into her room and took off their bra because it had been bothering them, so tight around their ribcage, so ill-fitting.  Then they danced in the living room, a rectangle of pale walls and big brown plaid chairs with a few boys sitting in them, watching.  They walked downstairs to Joy’s basement, a vacant carpeted place with a couch, a set of closed doors across a hallway from a washing machine, a giant television housed in a wooden cabinet.  A senior boy followed them down and started kissing them in front of the television, his kisses gentle, rhythmed, mild.  They couldn’t feel his braces.  He lay on top of them, the carpet thick and soft on their back.  He moved his hand up their sweater and when he closed his warm fingers around their breast he whispered their name, stunned by bare flesh.  He whispered their name again and again and again and they felt silly.  They were only sixteen, embarrassed by gestures so romantic and exalted and adult, but it was so nice to hear their name, to know that he knew them, to feel his breath warm in their ear.     

Anna Blackmon Moore lives in Northern California,

loves her infant and toddler, and often wonders how she will

tell them about her life.  She loves to write.  Please check out her blog: http://dearadele.wordpress.com/.

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