one of these nights, the Sunday after the Clarence Howell fiasco, I felt a pang in my stomach, a punch to the gut, which I recognized as agonizing loneliness. All that first week, ReeAnn, Babs, and the Woods twins tried to include me: “Imogene, I baked some brownies, do you want one?” “Hey, Imogene, we’re doing facemasks and having a movie marathon tonight, you in?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to join; it was that, from the very beginning—even though they were strangers to one another as much as I was to them—I felt left out. It was as though a secret meeting had taken place without me, one during which the other girls had compared interests and traded stories and created inside jokes, all the things that happen naturally over time but seem to happen without my notice in the course of a week. Even on the third night—when we skipped the dining hall and made pasta together and Meggy took one of the almost-cooked strands of linguine and dangled it between her legs and the other girls laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen—even then I didn’t belong. Of course, it was impossible to say whether the pasta bit was a previously established joke, or if I just didn’t find it funny like they did.
I wasn’t comfortable, like they were, hanging out in the living room braless under a T-shirt and scrubbed free of makeup. It didn’t matter that they were all doing it—that the Woods twins had perpetually hard nipples under their sheer tank tops and that Babs would even wear her retainer to watch TV at night. I wasn’t ready to expose my spotted face and pointy breasts to them—to anyone—and knew that to join them at night still made up and fully dressed would only invite more scrutiny.
With Chapin they had never bothered; girls like Chapin didn’t need an invitation and wouldn’t join in even if she had one.
Downstairs, ReeAnn and Babs and the Woods twins were watching that show they liked, the one about the mismatched couples and the puppies.
“Oh my god, did you see that?” I heard ReeAnn shriek. “The dog just peed everywhere!”
I tried to open a book and distract myself—Old School by Tobias Wolff, one of my favorites. “You felt a depth of ease in certain boys,” I read, “their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.” The pang grew worse, radiating down my legs and shooting out through my fingertips until I felt I would burst out of my skin.
The door opened and closed downstairs. A voice greeted the others—a male voice. It was Raj. I heard the clink of a bottle on a table, a cheer from the girls. A cabinet creaked open in the kitchen and glasses were passed around—wine glasses, I could tell. “Let’s play a game!” one of the Woods yelped. (I couldn’t yet tell their voices apart.)
“Where’s Imogene?” Raj asked. He knew better than to inquire about Chapin’s whereabouts.
Babs gave a response I couldn’t hear. I opened up my bedroom door. Perhaps it was the novelty of Raj being around—he rarely hung out at the Hovel—or the lure of intoxication to placate the anxiety I felt in these sorts of situations, but I found myself creeping down the steps and suddenly standing before the others in the kitchen.
“Imogene!” ReeAnn cried, as though I were back from the dead. I was relieved to see that she wasn’t yet in her pajamas. She retrieved an extra glass for me, and I joined them at the table. The others smiled at me, and the smooth dry smell of Merlot wafted to my nostrils. “Did you know that ‘Merlot’ translates to ‘young blackbird’ in French?” Raj volunteered as he handed me my full glass, and I thought, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I did belong here.
Raj pulled out a deck of cards and said we would play a game he invented called “Give a Question, Take a Question.” If the player selected a black card, he or she would pose a question to the group. If the player selected a red card, anyone in the group could ask that player a question—“The dirtier the better,” said Raj. The girls giggled, and I considered Raj, trying to decide if he was cute. The idea of him having sexual experience made him unexpectedly alluring.
Twenty minutes and nine rounds later, we were all on our second glass of wine except for Babs, who drank water (“I don’t drink,” she announced piously; none of us were surprised). We’d learned that ReeAnn once gave a hand job in the back row of a movie theater, that Babs kissed two girls one summer at Bible camp (“But I’m not gay!”), and that the craziest place Raj had ever had sex was in a Starbucks bathroom. My head felt light and fizzy, a balloon barely tethered by its string. Though I’d drunk in college, I’d never been able to hold my liquor; after a strong drink or two I often found myself smiling for no reason and paying compliments to strangers, one time even dancing with my eyes closed in the corner of the party with my cup held triumphantly above my head, entranced by the music.
Sometimes it scared me how much I enjoyed drinking, how much I enjoyed feeling more myself and less myself at once. Sometimes, when I started drinking, I feared I’d never want to stop.
I looked around the table at my fellow apprentices and felt sure, in that moment, that I loved them all. Several times Raj turned and smiled right at me, and I smiled back. He was cute, I decided. I wondered what the girl he’d had sex with at Starbucks looked like.
Maggie Woods selected a black card and smiled devilishly. “Have you ever had anal sex and, if not, would you?” she asked the group.
Babs squealed in disgust. ReeAnn shrugged and said, “I haven’t, but I’d be open to it.” Meggy Woods said, “One time, but he promised it was an accident.” By the time Raj said, “I don’t know, are we talking about me giving or receiving here?,” my teeth chattered I was laughing so hard. Why had I never realized how funny they all were?
“What about you, Imogene?” Maggie asked, and everyone turned towards me. I hesitated. “I haven’t,” I said finally, “but if the guy really wanted to, I’d probably let him.”
I’d meant to make them laugh, but no one did. Maggie refilled her glass and nudged me. “Your turn, Imogene.”
I picked the card on top of the deck, hoping it was a black card so I could ask something funny and redeem myself from whatever I had said before that was wrong. It was red.
“Ooh, Imogene!” everyone howled. I knew I wasn’t the only one who was drunk.
“I have a question for you,” Raj said. The sureness of his voice made us turn to him in curiosity. “Have you ever hooked up with a guy of color?”
My face felt hot. The others eyed me expectantly. I felt certain this time that there was only one way to answer this question.
“Yes, in high school. I dated a guy named Jared Hoffman who was black. He’s at Johns Hopkins for med school now.” I brought my glass to my lips to keep from grinning. My pulse raced. I was never a good liar.
Raj’s foot grazed against mine under the table. It was bare, I could tell, but I didn’t feel disgust; I felt a bit giddy.
Raj picked a card. “Red again,” he said, slapping the card upright on the table.
If I had been someone else, or perhaps if I had drunk a few more glasses of wine, I could have asked what I wanted to: “Would you ever hook up with me?” And maybe he would smile, and take my hand, and the girls would clap and howl like a TV audience as Raj and I made our way upstairs to my bedroom, where we would lie down in my bed and he’d slip his tongue between my lips and his hand between my legs—
“Do you think you and your girlfriend are going to get married?” Babs asked this.
Raj shrugged. “Honestly, I think I just might be with the girl I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”
The girls sighed happily, and I clutched the edge of the table. The room was spinning. He had a girlfriend. A girlfriend he was probably going to marry.
“You okay, Imogene?” ReeAnn asked.
I realized then that I was standing. “Yeah. I just realized—um, I need to call my mom, I think.”
Everyone stared at me. I wondered if I was wrong, and no one else was drunk,