A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [77]
You leave Bix and Lizzie’s with Sasha and Drew and head west, toward Washington Square. The cold spasms in the scars on your wrists. Sasha and Drew are a braid of elbows and shoulders and pockets, which presumably keeps them warmer than you. When you were back in Tampa, recovering, they took a Greyhound to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and stayed up all night and watched the sun rise over the Mall, at which point (they both say) they felt the world start to change right under their feet. You snickered when Sasha told you this, but ever since, you find yourself watching strangers’ faces on the street and wondering if they feel it, too: a change having to do with Bill Clinton or something even bigger that’s everywhere—in the air, underground—obvious to everyone but you.
At Washington Square you and Sasha say good-bye to Drew, who peels off to take a swim and wash the hash from his head. Sasha’s wearing her backpack, heading for the library.
“Thank God,” you say. “He’s gone.” You can’t seem to stop talking in two-word sentences now, even though you’d like to.
“Nice,” Sasha remarks.
“I’m kidding. He’s great.”
“I know.”
Your high is wearing off, leaving a box of lint where your head should be. Getting high is new for you—your not getting high was the whole reason Sasha picked you out the first day of Freshman Orientation last year, in Washington Square. Blocking your sun with her henna-red hair, her quick eyes looking at you from the side rather than head-on. “I’m in need of a fake boyfriend,” she said. “Are you up for it?”
“How about your real one?” you said.
She sat down beside you and laid things out: in high school, back in LA, she’d run away with the drummer for a band you’d never heard of, left the country, and traveled alone in Europe and Asia—never even graduated. Now, a freshman, she was almost twenty-one. Her stepfather had pulled every string to get her in here. Last week, he’d told her he was hiring a detective to make sure she “toed the line” on her own in New York. “Someone could be watching me right now,” she said, looking across the square crowded with kids who all seemed to know one another. “I feel like someone is.”
“Should I put my arm around you?”
“Please.”
You’ve heard somewhere that the act of smiling makes people feel happier; putting your arm around Sasha made you want to protect her. “Why me?” you asked. “Out of curiosity.”
“You’re cute,” she said. “Plus, you don’t look druggy.”
“I’m a football player,” you said. “Was.”
You and Sasha had books to buy; you bought them together. You visited her dorm, where you caught Lizzie, her roommate, miming approval when your back was turned. At five-thirty, you were both loading up your cafeteria trays, you going heavy on the spinach because everyone says football muscle turns to Jell-O when you stop playing. You both got your library cards, went back to your dorms, then met at the Apple for drinks at eight. It was packed with students. Sasha kept glancing around, and you figured she was thinking about the detective, so you put your arm around her and kissed the side of her face and her hair, which had a burned smell, the not-realness of it all relaxing you in a way you’d never managed to be with girls at home. At which point Sasha explained step 2: each of you had to tell the other something that would make it impossible for you ever to really go out.
“Have you done this before?” you asked, incredulous.
She’d drunk two white wines (which you’d matched two-to-one with beers) and was starting on her third. “Of course not.”
“So…I tell you I used to torture kitty cats, and that stops you from wanting to jump my bones?”
“Did you?”
“Fuck, no.”
“I’ll go first,” Sasha said.
She’d started shoplifting at thirteen with her girlfriends, hiding beaded combs and sparkly earrings inside their sleeves, seeing who could get away with more, but it was different for Sasha—it made her whole body glow. Later, at school, she’d replay each step of an escapade, counting