“I’m sorry, but you’re still on probation guywise,” Eliza said. “You thought the person who raped you was a nice guy.”
“I’m not sure I actually formed that particular thought. I was just excited he was interested in me.”
“Well, and now here’s somebody else who’s interested in you.”
“Yes, but I’m sober.”
They’d compromised by agreeing that Patty would go to Eliza’s off-campus room (her reward from her parents for having worked a summer job) directly after dinner, and that if she wasn’t there by ten o’clock then Eliza would come looking for her. When she got to the off-campus house, around nine-thirty, after a none too scintillating dinner, she found Eliza in her top-floor room with the boy named Carter. They were at opposite ends of her sofa, with their stockinged feet sole to sole on the center cushion, and were pushing each other’s pedals in what might or might not have been a sister-and-brotherly way. The new DEVO album was playing on Eliza’s stereo.
Patty faltered in the doorway. “Maybe I should leave the two of you alone?”
“Oh God, no no no no no, we want you here,” Eliza cried. “Carter and I are ancient history, aren’t we?”
“Very ancient,” Carter said with dignity and, Patty thought later, mild irritation. He swung his feet down onto the floor.
“An extinct volcano,” Eliza said as she leaped up to make introductions. Patty had never seen her friend with a boy before, and she was struck by how altered her personality was—her face was flushed, she stumbled over words and steadily emitted somewhat artificial giggles. It seemed to have slipped her mind that Patty had come over to be debriefed about her dinner. Everything was about Carter, a friend from one of her high schools who was taking time off from college and working at a bookstore and going to shows. Carter had extremely straight and interestingly tinted dark hair (henna, it turned out), beautiful long-lashed eyes (mascara, it turned out), and no notable physical flaws except for his teeth, which were jumbled and strangely small and pointed (basic middle-class child maintenance such as orthodontia had fallen through the cracks of his parents’ bitter divorce, it turned out). Patty immediately liked that he didn’t seem self-conscious about his teeth. She was setting about making a good impression on him, trying to prove herself worthy of being Eliza’s friend, when Eliza stuck a huge goblet of wine in her face.
“No, thank you,” Patty said.
“But it’s Saturday night,” Eliza said.
Patty wanted to point out that the rules did not oblige her to drink on Saturday, but in Carter’s presence she got an objective glimpse of how odd these rules of Eliza’s were, and how odd it was, for that matter, that she had to report to Eliza on her dinner with the wrestler. And so she changed her mind and drank the wine and then another enormous gobletful and felt warm and excellent. The autobiographer is mindful of how dull it is to read about someone else’s drinking, but sometimes it’s pertinent to the story. When Carter got up to leave, around midnight, he offered Patty a ride back to her dorm, and at the door of her building he asked if he could kiss her good night (“It’s OK,” she specifically thought, “he’s a friend of Eliza’s”), and after they’d made out for a while, standing in the cold October air, he asked if he could see her the next day, and she thought, “Wow, this guy moves fast.”
To give credit where credit is due: that winter was the best athletic season of her life. She had no health issues, and Coach Treadwell, after giving her a tough lecture about being less unselfish and more of a leader, started her at guard in every single game. Patty herself was amazed at how slow-motion the bigger opposing players suddenly were, how easy it was to just reach out and steal the ball from them, and how many of her jump shots went in, game after game. Even when she was being double-teamed, which happened more and more often, she felt a special private connection with the basket, always knowing exactly where it was and always trusting that she was its favorite player on the floor, the best at feeding its circular mouth. Even off the court she existed in the zone, which felt like a kind of preoccupied pressure behind her eyebrows, an alert drowsiness or focused dumbness that persisted no matter what