Stoned

The next night he met me here to smoke, like always, with a bunch of the guys. I was determined to ignore their leers and assessing glances, checking me out now as though they could see through my clothes. I hadn’t told anyone what happened. At the time it felt like such a good idea, but now I just felt stupid.

Now that I had slept with one of them though, I belonged to all of them, or some stupid shit like that. I hoped so. I wanted to sleep over at the house like the other girlfriends did, light Shabbat candles there. I never made rush, when all my other friends joined sororities. This would be like belonging to something. Like fitting in.

I really liked Jake. He was hot. He studied poetry too, just like me. He was in the frat, he said, because it was his dad’s house, and it WAS a Jewish frat, not because he really wanted to be in one.

I got so high again that night that all the stone animals came to life. I danced and twirled my way around the sculpture garden, felt myself communing with the cold marble figurines.

“This one is a cat,” I announced and draped my body across its back, meowing in the moonlight. That’s when I felt Jake come up to me. Suddenly his jean clad legs had spread mine.

“Hey there pussycat,” he said. I meowed in response. “I would so like to fuck that pussy of yours again.”

I smiled and twisted my hips back and forth across the cold hard stone. He fucked me as I made cat-like sounds, my back splayed across the marble of the statue, my knees bent and held up against his chest as he thrust inside of me. I didn’t know where the other guys had gone. For all I cared it was just me and Jake, stoned as fuck, making love in the sculpture garden. I only found out later that all the guys had watched…and recorded…and then posted the video onto YouTube the next morning, complete with many many Facebook links. Way to ruin a girl’s reputation.

For two weeks Jake didn’t return my calls. He wouldn’t speak to me at the Shabbat dinners at the Hillel House, even though he sat across from me. I hid in my room. I cried. I raged at my best friend. Confided in my roommate. I went to the sculpture garden every night, hoping he would show. I was still hoping Jake would come back to me. That he would apologize.

He didn’t. I smoked my stash alone. Everyone on campus knew. I mean, whatever. So now I had a reputation as the campus slut. It didn’t really bother me so much. But I wanted to get back at him. Bad.

He finally called me and agreed to meet for Szechuan noodles. When I got there he was already sitting out on the red wooden steps of the pagoda-themed restaurant holding take-out. I almost cried.

“I got you noodles with black bean sauce, vegetarian, that’s what you like, yeah?” I nodded, too mortified to do anything else.

“Is there any particular reason you don’t want to have a sit-down meal with me?” He looked down at his jeans, scratched an invisible itch, then out at the traffic slowly rolling down the quiet college-town street, then at me.

“I got you a Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda too?” He said it like a question, like some sort of apology, as if the addition of the soda would somehow soften the blow of what I knew was coming. “Look, Rachel, it’s just, you know, I don’t think it’s going to work out between us.” I swallowed.

“Did you decide that before or after you fucked me in front of your friends?” I took the bag of takeout from him and walked away. When I got back to my dorm room, my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t even get the wrapper off the chopsticks, and I could barely break them apart.

“Damn it!” I yelled, and threw the chopsticks across my room. Then quickly got up to retrieve them and ate my black bean noodles, sitting on my bed, looking out the window at the quad down below. I wasn’t mad that I had lost my virginity, I was kind of glad to see it go. I was mad at Jake for breaking up with me, mad at the Youtube video, which had ruined my reputation on campus permanently, and mostly mad because I’d never be a part of their charmed circle. As I guzzled the last of my black cherry soda, I had an idea.

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