Considering Rona’s face was still kind of bleeding, it seemed like the polite thing to walk her home. Except he felt nervous to offer, like it would be presumptuous, like maybe she was too important to hang out with him now that she was a celebrity.
He decided to just start walking alongside her towards her dorm without saying anything about it. She didn’t tell him to cut it out and go home.
“So like, how…?”
There was so much to ask, he didn’t even know where to start. Knock that crazy girl on her butt? Scare her into giving up? Get so completely bad-ass, when you seemed so nerdy and regular?
“How did you…”
He leaned down to remove somebody's pink wool glove that was sticking to the front of his pants leg. University Drive was the main corridor between east and north campus, so everything was blowing down it—angry gusts of wind, dead leaves, fast food wrappers, lost articles of clothing. Also a lot of drunk undergraduates and homeless guys. They all seemed okay to Gavin, fellow-travelers on this symbolic path of life and all the funny places it could lead you.
“Learn to box?” she asked.
Oh! Learn to box. Watching all those angry people trying to beat the crap out of each other, he had forgotten that it might be the kind of thing you learned. It looked like everyone was just winging it.
“My dad taught me when I was little. But just hitting pads or a punching bag. I never actually boxed another person before.”
“You must be a natural.”
“Not really. That girl just sucked.”
It was weird: she seemed so blasé about the whole thing, while he felt like he had just jumped out of the way of a train. His hands were shaking, he was dizzy, sweaty. Everything around him, even the crappy wind and the fast-food wrappers, seemed sort of beautiful, that exaggerated kind of beauty that happens immediately after you escape death.
And Rona—Rona who had actually done the thing, who had taken on death and punched it in the face like it was a schoolyard bully—she seemed like a god.
An icy gust of wind shot right at them, opening Gavin’s unzipped coat and getting all into the fabric of his sweater. Rona moved a little closer to him. He couldn’t tell if it was on purpose, like to use him as a wind block, or if she just got blown that way. Either way, it sent kind of a jolt through him.
“She threw a lot of punches but they were crappy punches,” Rona was saying. “It’s better to throw a few really good punches than a million crappy ones.”
Someday he would need to ask her what the difference between a good punch and a crappy one was. It actually sounded pretty interesting. But not right now. They were approaching the broad steps in front of Roebuck Hall, and he needed to figure out what to do. He and Rona were just friends, and friends didn’t kiss each other goodbye. But when your friend’s cheekbone was swelling up because she had gotten punched in the face in front of a hundred people and it didn’t even faze her, and when you had never met anyone close to that brave and would never be that brave yourself, even if you worked at it for the rest of your life—under those circumstances, just a regular handshake didn’t seem like it would adequately convey the depth of your respect and admiration.
“Do you want to come in and have a drink?” she asked. They were twenty feet from the stairs now.
Rona wants to have a drink. With you. A warm feeling exploded in his stomach, like when Frick said he belonged in the Ivy Leagues, like something really good had just happened.
Pull it together! It was just Rona Gomez. He’d had four drinks with her already, just a couple hours ago.
“Sure,” he said, like he didn’t care too much either way. “A drink is cool.”
“Let’s go to the store.”
They walked right past her dorm and into a really lit-up corner store filled with liquor, cigarettes, condoms and ramen. And a whole wall of cell phone accessories. Gavin splurged on a sixty-dollar bottle of Glenfiddich, even though he knew they had it at Beverage Depot for like forty. Rona got about six protein bars.
She had already eaten half of her first one before they were back out on the sidewalk, and she ripped open a second one on the stairs to her room. She handed him one, too, and he took a few bites. Coconut, kind of sweet for his taste, but it probably wasn’t a bad idea to get some food in his stomach after all that stress and alcohol.
She opened the door to her room with a keychain that only had one key on it.
Rona’s room.
It was just a regular dorm room, which weirded him out. But what else would it be? It had two halves, each with a desk, dresser, and twin bed. It was pretty obvious which side belonged to Rona. The right had a neat flowered comforter on the bed, a perfect grid of cheerful posters on the wall. Animals, sunsets, ocean views. There was a dresser with about seven framed photos of the same guy on it, and above that, a reproduction of that Klimt painting every girl had in her room back when Gavin was in college.
“She’s in Bloomington,” Rona said. “She goes there every weekend to see her boyfriend.”
The other side of the room, the dark, messy side, had nothing on the wall except an actual painting. A swirl of gray and black and midnight blue. In the middle, two bright figures, their bodies twisted around each other in a way that could be sex or a fight or a dance.
“My friend made that. In New York.” She gathered up back clothing items from the bed and desk and floor and tossed them into the bottom of her closet. “Have a seat and I’ll grab some cups.”
He wasn’t sure where to sit, so he just stood and watched her rummaging through a bunch of plastic dishes in her top dresser drawer. It was cool to see her here, in her natural habitat. He tried to imagine her doing her regular activities here: reading Stump’s plays ahead of time (Where? On the chair? The bed?), drawing pictures of trees, looking up stuff about forests. Brushing her hair, maybe, or folding her laundry if she ever did that. Maybe doing some cleaning, in her pajamas. He wondered what she slept in. Faded black sweats? An antique slip?
“I don’t have any real glasses,” she said, placing two plastic juice cups on the seat of the desk chair . “These are from the dining hall.”
She straightened out the tangle of sheets and blankets and sat down on the bed, her legs crossed in front of her. Miniskirt, black leggings, gray socked feet. She pulled the chair next to the bed so it was like a coffee table.
“Sit down.” She patted the spot next to her, but that was too close. The flimsy mattress would buckle and then he’d basically be on top of her. So he sat far away, as far as he could get while being on the same bed.
Rona Gomez sleeps here. My butt is touching where Rona sleeps.
That was trouble. You weren’t ever supposed to think things like that when you were in a girl’s room, especially if she was just your friend. You had to think about something like politics or literary criticism.
He ran his hand over the comforter, stone gray, woven out of some kind of textured fabric like soft burlap. This comforter goes over Rona’s body when she sleeps. He could almost see it falling over her hips, clinging to her waist, curving across one bare shoulder.
He looked down at his right hand and saw the paper bag. That’s right. They were supposed to be having a drink. He pulled the Scotch out—it came in a canister that he had to pry open with his shaky hands, and then unscrew the bottle—and poured two cups. Rona sniffed at hers and poked her finger into the surface.
“Um,” she said. “I need to ask you about something.”
Stomach lurch.
“Sure, yeah. Go ahead.”
She looked at him and bit the side of her lip, like he was a particularly cryptic abstract painting or something. He looked back at her. The black eye didn’t seem too bad, no massive swelling like last time, just a little puffiness and a purple mark. Her hair was still tied back, a little messed up on top from the fight.
“I was thinking.” The liquid lurched to one side of her glass, and he was sure she was about to spill it all over the nice gray bedspread. But no, she lifted it to her face and swallowed the whole thing like it was cheap tequila. Her eyes scrunched up for the tiniest second, but other than that she kept a blank face.
“Do you think it would be a good idea for us to have sex?”
Major giant stomach lurch. Klimt poster spinning upside down, flowers and sunsets twirling and blurring. He pulled the half-eaten protein bar from his pocket and chomped a big bite out of it. Chew, slowly, slowly. Swallow.
That helped. At least the posters were back in their regular order now. He took a sip from his own glass and held it against his tongue. It burned at first and then melted into something warm like maple candy.
“I thought it wasn’t a good idea,” he said.
“Yeah, but the tension is getting kind of distracting. I’m having trouble focusing in class.”
Rona Gomez can’t concentrate in class because she wants to… He couldn’t even say it in his head. He really wanted to, because it was one of the best things he’d ever heard in his entire life. Rona’s having trouble focusing because…
“Are you okay? Eat the rest of your bar.” She reached down to the floor, where she had thrown her coat, and pulled another one out of the pocket. “Here, eat this one, too.”
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