Читать книгу Indecent: A taut psychological thriller about class and lust - Corinne Sullivan - Страница 11

FIVE

DARBY LI HAD BEEN RANDOMLY ASSIGNED MY ROOMMATE THE summer before our freshman year at Buffalo State, and when I looked up her profile page, I was terrified. She was beautiful, the kind of beautiful you couldn’t fake with professional photographs and manufactured confidence. With her gray eyes and thick dark hair and caramel-colored skin (the product of a Chinese father and a Jamaican mother), she was the poster child for palatable exoticism—the kind of exoticism I secretly longed for. She was from Soho, I discovered, daughter of a curator and visual artist. She’d attended an elite all-girls private school where they wore plaid kilts and knee-high socks with loafers.

I didn’t think I belonged at Buffalo State, but I knew that Darby didn’t; it was a mistake, a mix-up, and I almost wished Buffalo had paired me with a plump homebody from Upstate, someone unobtrusive and safe. Darby and I would never be friends, I decided, not because I was plain and white—plenty of her friends were white, it appeared, though none could be described as plain—but because my life was without distinction. During freshman orientation, when we were asked to say a “Fun Fact” about ourselves, I volunteered that I played the flute until tenth grade, a fact that elicited blank stares and a sympathetic pat on the wrist from the girl on my right.

But strangely, miraculously, Darby Li and I became friends. Darby had just broken up with her boyfriend of three years—heir to an enormous mattress fortune and possessor of a tiny prick, as Darby informed me—and she was looking to go wild. I had never done anything wild in my life, and the feverish energy in Darby’s eyes excited me. Within the first month of college, Darby had taught me about everything from handles and pregames to hookups and blackouts. Darby was the one who orchestrated my first real kiss: with a junior named Paul at a party in her brother’s apartment. Darby was the one who urged me to dance with Jonah Davis from my Communicating Nonverbal Messages lecture at the freshman Halloween bash, which later led to my first real hookup. “What would you do without me?” Darby often asked me. “I’m not sure,” I would answer quite truthfully.

I even trusted Darby enough to let her see me without my makeup, to see the naked, spotted face that I disguised everyday. “You can’t even see it,” she’d assured me as I fussed over a raised blemish on my chin or my forehead, something that left a beige-colored protuberance under my makeup that became the only thing I saw when I looked in the mirror. Assurance was the kindest thing she could have offered me.

I knew why I liked Darby—her beauty, her frantic energy, her ability to repel culpability and embarrassment and shame and all the burdens of those who did not possess her unique beauty—but I could never be sure why she liked me. Perhaps she found me funny, or loyal, or kind. Perhaps she enjoyed my company on all those nights we hiked barefoot back to campus, our heels in our hands and our heads floating somewhere up above our bodies.