"I Want Her She Wants Me" by Matthew Jeffrey Vegari

She wore wigs at parties. That was the first sign I missed. But I liked the wigs, the blonde one with the strand of pink she paired with pink lipstick and a star near her eye; the long, black one she wore only when she smoked; the green one she donned on Halloween and again for St. Patrick’s Day, when she dressed as a leprechaun, a scholarly leprechaun who carried Joyce in her pocket, because what leprechaun, master of gold and clouds and rainbows, would not have read Joyce in her spare time? With all that agility in those little legs, the inscrutable ability to travel time-space, as it were, as fast as a leprechaun, would she not have had time also to read James Joyce?

I met her in a small English seminar I took for credit, having enrolled on the recommendation of a friend who knew the right professors and teaching assistants. I took the class to learn more about literature and put the finishing touches on my college education. Within half an hour I knew that I didn’t fit in. I couldn’t catch the references to ancient mythology, or comment on the style and voice of the literature (this, I learned, is called diction. Who knew the sounds of words mattered so much?). What I could do was provide historical context, far better than those who read the Wikipedia articles end to end, because I could cite scholars, or invent scholars to cite, and either the other students believed me or were too checked-out to care. Most of us were seniors after all.

Week One: I left early.

The professor went over the syllabus, which I had already printed and read. The assignment was A Farewell to Arms. I looked up the plot summary.

Week Two: I brought up the impact of shell shock after World War I.

“Well, that shouldn’t matter,” she said, without raising her hand. She was doodling at the other end of the table, and didn’t look up as she spoke. It was an impressive table, long and oval-shaped, dark and vast as if the floor of a dark wood or desert had been sealed in smooth wax. It made her seem very far away. Her natural hair was brown, as dark or darker than the copper bust above the room’s fireplace, brushed hastily to the side of her face. The longest strands hung well below her shoulders. This impressed me immediately, and even more a few weeks later, when I saw how much of herself she could tuck under a wig.

“What shouldn’t matter?” I replied. She didn’t return my eye contact.

“When the book was written. We’ve barely discussed the language. If you’re on an island with just the pages of the book, what good does context do you?” She looked up and searched the room, her fingers twitching, grasping at the air for props. “On an island all you know is sand, palm trees, and A Farewell to Arms.” She gestured in the direction of the copper bust as she alluded to palm trees, as though she saw something there the rest of us did not. She resumed her doodle.

“If that’s the case, why even write the author’s name?” I asked. “Why make a cover? Why not print the pages out on plain white paper and remove the copyright date?”

Her hand stopped moving; she looked across the polished surface. Her eyes were long-lashed and widened as she prepared a response, her mouth open just enough that I could make out her perfect row of bottom teeth. Her lips were full and expressive, red. I could almost hear the little vessels pumping blood to them. She looked at me as though she had never been challenged before, as though I were an intruder, a newcomer who didn’t know the rules, so see, silly historian, here they are.

I waited patiently, but Professor Dalton—old, gullible, bleary-eyed—seized the opportunity as a teaching lesson:

“Does anyone know the type of literary criticism that employs the analysis Natalie is describing?” He lifted his head and eyed each of us individually, his gray brows rising impossibly, like those of a puppet. After a loop around the table, he relented. “Natalie?”

“Formalism,” she replied. She smiled as she spoke—not from the arrogance of having known the answer when the rest of us didn’t, I thought, but because the existence of this term seemed to justify her own scholarship.

Formalism, Dalton expounded, is a school of thought that eschews cultural context, history, precursory texts, authorial intent, and outside influence in the analysis of literature, treating each text as though it were written in a vacuum. Whether a novel was written in the midst of a war, in a jail cell, by a woman who later committed suicide, after the time of Shakespeare, before the time of Tolstoy, is of no consequence. The text matters most of all.

I still wanted to reply to Natalie, if only to demonstrate that I wouldn’t be silenced by a smirk, but Dalton seemed to sense this, and changed the subject. He did not like conflict except in those novels he taught, where family wealth and health could decide the fate of an engagement or marriage. When a dispute arose in conversation, he straightened his back and coughed, indicating that he would propose a new topic, or, if desperate, flip through the book in search of a passage to close-read. He ignored my hand that still hovered in the air, turned to a page, and read aloud.

Close-reading, as I have come to understand, is a cumbersome task that English majors undertake when they want to analyze a passage of prose. They focus on sounds, the rhythm of a sentence, stops and starts, rhymes, breaks, pauses. It lies, Natalie later explained, at the foundation of Formalism. The kernel and crux of the text become less what is being said and more how it is being said, i.e. how does the type and quality of paint affect the painting at large? When we close-read in class, I did my best to follow along and take parenthetical notes on syntax in the margins of my books (like this). (That’s called metafiction.)

As Dalton picked apart a sentence, Natalie opened her laptop. I followed suit and searched for her online, nodding my head over my own computer, convincingly simulating the act of note-taking.

She was an editor at the campus book review. She worked the library circulation desk. She spoke French well, or well enough to quote Victor Hugo. She looked identical to her older sister. She wore wigs at parties.

 I friended her without a second thought. She accepted after ten seconds, looking above her computer screen and winking. Game on.

Her cover photo was an image of a place called the Gemini Diner. She stood outside wearing tall patent-leather boots, her arms outstretched as she cradled the sign overhead. In spite of her command over the room, I discovered that she was two years younger than most people in the class. That she was a sophomore made her all the more alluring. She wasn’t supposed to be in the room, and neither was I.

Week Three: I sat next to her.

I’m not certain what I expected. Would I put my hand on her leg? Would she put hers on mine? I just wanted to be closer to her, close enough to smell her, close enough to see what she was doodling in black ink on that book of yellow paper.

She smelled of perfume, a nonspecific type, but one I would classify as girly as opposed to soapy or sophisticated. She doodled her name in an old-fashioned font. Sometimes she drew tiny vines or flowers growing on a serif—a word she’d teach me on our third date.

In the intervening week, I had done more research online. Natalie had written a few columns for the campus newspaper, some concerning relationships and sex, others her love of French literature. Her writing style was at once self-aggrandizing and self-effacing as she delved into the fine-tunings of a good first and second date, what to order and drink, when to let a boy kiss you, or when to move first and kiss him. She poked fun at modern blogs and bad feminism. “It’s 2019, Ladies,” she wrote. “Be a man about it!”

As with her articles, there was a sense of irony and contradiction to her person. Her nails were well manicured, painted red. They looked older than the rest of her hands: than her fingers, narrow and dainty; than her knuckles, dried and chafed; than her thin wrists, around which she wore a plastic watch and a woven wristband fraying at its edges. Her pen strokes were skillful and smooth, but her left thumb wrapped around her pen like a hungry child gripping a fork. She had the make of someone who wanted to defy her age, but would not relinquish those items and fashions that betrayed her. She wanted to be considered mature, but never old. I knew this because each time we jumped ahead in a book without finishing our discussion of an early chapter, she would try to circle back. She respected the natural progression of things. I studied history. We made total sense.

Today we were discussing Sentimental Education. Natalie had brought two copies: one in French, the other in English. Halfway through class I messaged her and asked if she read the original French to show off. To the right of me she smiled, but didn’t type out a reply. Instead she wrote in her notepad, “Are you sufficiently impressed?”

That was how we communicated the rest of class: I typed out witty comments; she inked out wittier ones. I could tell that she was waiting for me to message her. If I allowed too big a lag in conversation, her pen would rattle between her fingers, vibrate like a plucked string. Eventually her jitters gave me jitters. I made fun of Dalton’s voice and his pronunciation of the word “penalize.” She called him a she-devil and drew an accompanying image. I laughed loudly enough that I had to excuse myself from the room.

In the bathroom, I went to a stall and shut the door. I needed to relax. I had a good thing going, and I really liked her. I unzipped my pants and jerked off. Sometimes you just need a little release to maintain a level head. I read an article recently in GQ about a famous baseball star who used to have sex with fans between innings.

Week Four: Our first date was on a Thursday.

She kept me on the edge of my seat. I mean that quite literally. My back began to sweat after my first beer, and I felt an involuntary coolness between my shoulder blades. Her hair, natural still, was pulled back in a loose ponytail, with two strands hanging on either side of her face. It was another perfect contradiction: semi-professional, sexy-enough. She wore just the right amount of makeup. She looked good without looking unnatural or different.

We talked about first-date things, or what people assume they should talk about on first dates. She said my answer to why I studied history was “adequate.” When I told her that it didn’t matter what I studied, that the plan was to become a lawyer, she laughed. It was a loud laugh, almost derisive, like a playful kick to the shin that hurts a little more than it should. “My parents are lawyers,” she said.

At one point a group of people she knew approached our high-top table. I made busy with my phone as she discussed her latest column and an article that had just been published in The Atlantic. “I want to write a response,” she said, twice.  

“So what, you’re a senior?” Natalie asked when her friends had left. “On a date with a sophomore? Does that make you cool?”

“And you’re, what, a sophomore? On a date with a senior? Does that make you cool or something?” I added the “or something” because it sounded less aggressive, and I didn’t want to be off-putting.

“Will you write the article?” I asked after some time had passed. “The response, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to get better at pinning down the ideas in my head.” She looked away and examined the corner of the bar, as if one of these ideas may have fallen into reach, onto the shoes of an unwitting stranger. “Sometimes I try so hard to find the right words, it gets hard to say what I really mean.”

We didn’t kiss. It didn’t feel right, and I was too nervous anyway. I didn’t know what she made of me. Maybe I was good practice for her columns. I hoped she wouldn’t write about me. Then I hoped she would. I said I would see her on Monday afternoon, in class. She invited me to a party on Saturday. “Come if you’re free,” she said.

“I’ll try my best.”

“I hope your best is good enough.”

Two nights later I had difficulty deciding what to wear. I opted for jeans and a Zombies t-shirt. The band is a good conversation starter, and I thought that I could impress her with my taste in music.

It took me a full five minutes to find her at the party, in a space no larger than a 7-Eleven. I poured myself a drink and stood by the wall, looking around the room to see if I could recognize anyone. Some familiar faces, but nothing I could capitalize on. I was the stranger, the not-so-tall guy in glasses waiting for someone to turn up.

“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” Natalie approached me on the right, a drink in-hand. It was the eyes that gave her away. Heavy mascara and purple shadow with the tiniest bit of glitter. But the eyes were still there, like deep pools of churning chocolate (this is called consonantal alliteration). She wore the long black wig, which fell longer than her natural hair. She looked a little roguish, a little emo—if emo is still a word people use—but as self-assured as if she had just received an award. And she was pleased to see me, though not surprised. She’d known I would show up. We both had.

“I didn’t realize that Cher was coming to this party,” I said. I didn’t know how the joke would land. Maybe it wasn’t the right reference to make.

“Cher. I like Cher. Yeah, just call me Cher.” She deepened her voice as she spoke, and I laughed.

“Do you always wear a wig?”

“Only when I want to be someone else. I’m a Gemini, you know.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“October 12th. You gonna buy me a present?” I stepped closer to her and stroked her arm.

“A Libra. Of course you’re a Libra.” She moved her hips towards mine and played with my fingers. Hers were soft and warm, like a child’s. They were manicured black.

“You like Libras?”

“They’re OK,” she said. She turned and greeted a friend at the foot of the stairs.

Week Six: We had sex.

We had gone on a date to see a movie—her pick—and then out for drinks. I had the sense that it would happen the entire night. We kept brushing against each other, then apologizing, then telling the other to stop apologizing. We tried to outdo each other with jokes and callbacks. She turned her head while laughing, covered her mouth and shifted her entire body away, as though she didn’t want to admit when I had said something clever.

It was clumsy in the best way possible. Smooth clumsy, easy clumsy. Familiar. It was the first time, Natalie was the first time, that I’d felt something beyond a rush of blood and an inward lurch. She didn’t leave afterward and I didn’t want her to.  

From then on we texted throughout the day, met for lunch, studied in each other’s company. I worked beside her at the library checkout desk; she came with me to my carrel and looked at the books I was studying for my thesis. She explained Formalism to me; I explained Progressivism to her. In the evenings I followed her everywhere, drinking to counteract my natural awkwardness. Over time I started recognizing people and even looked forward to going out. Even if I only said hello and goodnight, I developed a sense of belonging, or at least lost a sense of not-belonging.

I learned that she had six wigs, a few made of real hair, half of them stolen from a theater production during her freshman fall. My favorite was the blonde one with the strand of pink. It made her look galactic, otherworldly, like someone recognizably famous even though you might not be able to put her face to a name. My friends told me I was lucky; her friends told me the same.

I got to know every inch of her body. There was a birthmark at the back of her neck that made her self-conscious, an L-shaped scar on her left wrist where she once burned herself, a cluster of dark freckles above her collarbone that looked like cracked pepper. Her pinky toes were disproportionately short, which excited me though I never understood why. Her hair always smelled of cucumber, her skin of sweet vanilla. When she slept beside me, she shrank down in size, her legs folding into her torso like a diver. I wanted to wrap us in two and not let go. Sometimes she woke me up with her arms around me, biting on my shoulder because, she said, I tasted good.

Once I asked her to wear a wig during sex. She said she didn’t like the idea of having to change in order to be with me. I said wasn’t the person who wore the wig the same person who climbed on top of me and scratched at my chest? When she wasn’t paying attention, I took the blonde wig with the strand of pink and tried to put in on her. She fought back, laughing. I tried harder, taking a clump of her hair and stuffing it into the wig’s lining. She started to kick. Finally, she jumped from the bed and slammed the door behind her.

Week Eight: Halloween.

She dressed as a leprechaun. I didn’t wear a costume. She made me carry around a pot of gold, an old backpack spray-painted yellow and covered with glitter. Inside she placed a bag of brownies baked by a friend. She told me not to have any. “You can’t handle them,” she said. I believed her.

The parties we went to, hosted by the literary and thespian crowds, were loud and smoky, foreboding and intimate, like long biographies whose spines you need to break in before you can turn the pages. Someone wore a homemade Sideshow Bob costume, with a headpiece made of dark, twisted cotton. Two others dressed as Ronald and Nancy Reagan, except it was the president who wore a red skirt suit, his wife the suit and tie. A lot of the costumes were clever like this, though a few were less successful, either too understated to be understood or too understood to be understated (this is called alliterative chiasmus). The partygoers treated me well because I was Natalie’s boyfriend.

The smell of cigarettes and weed became a kind of aphrodisiac, the music a lesson in give-and-take. The songs typically involved heavy use of synthesizers and dissonant chords that sounded as if they were played in reverse. After I’d worn my Zombies t-shirt to a party and a friend of Natalie’s asked me to play a song or two, it had become a habit of mine to hook up my phone for a change of pace whenever the speaker systems were unmanned. Tonight I chose “I Want Her She Wants Me.” When Natalie heard the chorus she gave me a hickey, her copy of Dubliners flush with my thigh.

Halfway through the party, Natalie told me that we had to go. She looked very serious and asked me to grab her coat from the back. As she left the building she pulled off her wig. Outside, I found her seated on a bench, her arm wrapped around another girl’s waist. I could hear heavy breathing, wheezing, like an old woman at the top of a stairwell. It sounded like an asthma attack.

The girl was Natalie’s friend Dana, a junior on the newspaper who covered sports. I tried to figure out if she was wearing a costume, but her coat covered most of her body and nothing about her hair suggested any drastic changes. I kept my distance and found a better view of her face: Dana had huge makeup smears on her cheeks and chin, miner-like blotches of charcoal that extended to her ears. Tears fell from her eyes, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand. Her face looked like a half-erased whiteboard. The tip of her nose was black, where the makeup remained intact: She had dressed up as a cat or mouse; the smears across her cheeks were what remained of her whiskers. On the bench to the right of her was a set of pointy velvet ears. Between her sobs, Dana explained how her date, a rugby player, had tried to take her home. When she resisted, he had grabbed her arm and tried a little harder. She insisted that she wasn’t going anywhere, and he told her to fuck off. He had then started dancing with another girl.

I felt bad for Dana, who clearly liked this boy and had been left with a bad taste in her mouth. They had gone on one date, or what Dana described as a date and Natalie later clarified as delayed gratification. I had taken two shots at the party, and Halloween was stirring a childlike excitement in me. I asked Dana for the guy’s name and how he was dressed. I would go back inside and give him a piece of my mind. The act was to show Natalie what I would do for her, and to give Dana, her friend, a sense of support. Natalie told me not to be ridiculous. He was twice my size, and besides, what good would that do?

“They’re all the same,” Dana said.

Natalie glanced at me and I winked at her.

Week Nine: our second midterm. Natalie got an A. I got an A minus.

We went out to a nice dinner. At the restaurant, we watched two people on a date.

“Ugh, poor woman,” Natalie said, bringing her palm to her lips. “She really wants to get out of here.”

“How can you tell?”

“Look at the way she’s angling away from him.”

“You think she’s angling away?”

“Her feet and knees. They’re pivoting unnaturally, like her lower body wants to stand up and leave but her upper body won’t let her.”

I looked the woman up and down. “Her lower half is her better half.” I laughed.

“No, see? She just asked for the bill. She’s not even done with her drink. I’ll bet she takes a big swig to finish it off and says goodbye.”

In two minutes the woman had done just that. It felt planned, staged. It must have been a woman thing, a female connection. “I’m sufficiently impressed,” I said. “Do you know them?”

“No! That would be cheating. It’s called body language for a reason. I am an English major, after all.”

“Which way are your legs angled?”

We both looked down. She rounded the table and kissed me on the cheek. 

Week Eleven: We fought because I didn’t call her back over the Thanksgiving holiday.

I’d hit a turning point in my thesis, and I needed to find a lot of information very quickly. I was writing about judicial activism in the Supreme Court in the early twentieth century, and my advisor told me I was relying too much on the majority and dissenting opinions of the justices. I needed more primary sources from contemporary periodicals. Natalie argued that a text message or two during the day wouldn’t have been too much to ask. I told her that my phone had been off to free myself from distractions.

“I’m a distraction?” she asked.

“You know what I mean.”

I tried to give her a kiss, but she swatted me away with a jerk of her hand.

“I guess I shouldn’t be too mad, because you’ve basically taken a Formalist approach to your thesis. It means I’m rubbing off on you.” She slapped me playfully on the arm.

Winter Break: I visited her for a week, and she visited me.

I spent almost all my free time on my thesis. There was an award in my department that I wanted to win to improve my law school application. Natalie said that I was growing distant, a word she didn’t like using because it sounded like what an older woman would say to her unfaithful husband. I told her that she would understand, that in two years when she wrote a thesis she would be even more obsessed with its outcome. She said this was a very uncharitable view of her character. I reminded her that she sometimes rescheduled our dates just because an old movie she liked was on. “That’s different,” she said. “I’m a Gemini.”

Things got worse when we returned to campus. I seldom left my carrel, and when I did, Natalie was often working at the circulation desk. She would ignore me as I tried to speak with her, bringing her finger to her lips. If I left angry, she would follow me outside, cry, throw her arms around my waist, tell me she didn’t mean it like that but I was getting difficult to be with (this is called asyndeton).

I never liked it when she cried. I felt something pull tighter in my chest, like an instrument being over-strung, especially if I was the cause of her tears. It was not guilt so much as a desire to cheer her up, to be the one she could rely on when something bruised and battered her. Natalie cried easily, hysterically, at pictures of babies and dark jokes, but not at what mattered. When she cried in our fights, I could tell that I’d really hurt her, dug my nails in and wedged a gap between flesh and bone.   

Week Two of second semester: We broke up.

It was supposed to be a conversation about where things were heading. We were too analytical to prevaricate. We both spelled out the data points, the damning examples of the other’s indifference. Natalie cried. I cried. I gave her a big hug and left. She came to my carrel two days later and we talked it out. We got back together but a week later I didn’t reply to her messages for two days. We broke up again. I couldn’t give up my thesis, not in the way that she wanted. It had taken on a life of its own, and I was guilty of more than faulty communication. Natalie said that I didn’t care enough. I wasn’t sure that I could disagree.

Week Four: We were officially broken up.

People knew, and I stopped going to her parties altogether. I found a lot more time, and my thesis got better and better.

Week Six: She invited me to a St. Patrick’s Day party. I had just turned in my thesis and was already a little drunk.

I caught up with all of her friends. Natalie and I barely spoke, but we never strayed too far, like two animals sizing up each other’s threat. She was wearing her green wig. It felt good to see her outside the context of the library. I knew exactly when her shifts began and ended, so I’d given myself 30-minute windows before passing the circulation desk. Twice I’d bumped into her accidentally, but only managed a shy smile. A friend had told me she was arriving early and leaving late, so I knew she was trying to see me.

I played “I Want Her She Wants Me.” We kissed, and she led me to a back room.

It was different than before, a little angrier, a little less careful, as though we had been told what to do but not how to do it. The room was pitch black, and as the door shut I followed instinct more than memory. Natalie sat back against a chair and opened her legs, wrapping her ankles around my calves. Her fingers dug into my neck and back, almost as if she were trying to hurt me. I’d find red scars the next day. I thrust harder and faster, which was what we both wanted. Her breathing quickened, her legs wrapped tighter. Because of the way were positioned, I had no exposure to her hair, something I noticed almost immediately because it usually found its way over my nose, between my lips, under my tongue.

I didn’t last very long, but Natalie didn’t seem to mind. She pulled her pants back up and didn’t let me kiss her again. I would say that I felt used, but what I really felt was that we had both wanted it that way, and Natalie did the right thing by forgoing any sense of intimacy. As she opened the door to leave, I saw her adjust her wig in the flood of light.

Week Seven: I started to check out books just to see her.

I missed her. I called a few times, but hung up at the sound of her voicemail. I missed her little fingers, her wigs, even the purple one that looked flammable. It wasn’t thesis withdrawal. My thesis had filled a gap and I was only now seeing the wound. I wanted to watch her mouth twitch as she typed up a column, the words collecting at her lips before meeting the page. I wanted to see her drop something on the ground and grunt as her hair crashed over her face. I wanted (anaphora) to know what she thought of the new president of student government and her hair, and the way she had a little lisp, and whether that meant she compensated in other ways (polysyndeton).

The Atlantic published her response to the article from the fall. I had no idea she was writing at this level, that she had evolved beyond punny articles in the school newspaper. The sentences were succinct and polished, rhythmic even, as though a bassline were strumming through the entire piece. She had succeeded in impressing with her argument, not distracting with her prose. Her voice was so confident that it took me a third read to remember she was only a sophomore. Had she drafted the response during or after our relationship?

Whenever I approached the circulation desk she was conveniently busy, often handing me off to one of her colleagues. She wasn’t rude, but she didn’t return my smile, at least not with equivalent enthusiasm. A friend told me that I was becoming sappy, letting a girl ruin what should have been the best months of college. The truth was that the best months were behind me, and I regarded them with a nostalgia intended for thirty, forty, and fifty-somethings: I once dated a girl in college who…. I could hear the cadence in my head.

Natalie never replied to my messages, even after I told her I’d bumped into “our old friend” at a bar. It was the woman we had seen on a bad date, who had gulped down her cocktail and asked for the bill. She was with another man, and things appeared to be going well: Her feet were angled towards him, and she leaned back as she laughed. She had found someone! We shared a history, she and I, that others in the establishment didn’t know about. I wanted to congratulate her. But as I was on my way out, I saw a second man join them. The first man greeted him with a kiss on the lips, and offered him a sip of his drink. The two men sat down side-by-side, nestling into each other’s company.

Week Nine: I went on a date.

I was spending more time with friends, particularly those I had lost touch with since I started dating Natalie. I had become the kind of friend no one likes, there only occasionally, and I wanted to make amends before graduation. In going to bars and attending games and shows, I became reacquainted with people from my freshman and sophomore years, some whom I didn’t realize I had missed.

The forwardness that came with being a senior was present in almost every interaction. If people didn’t like you, they didn’t pretend to want to spend time with you. But if they were interested, they made their interest known. So it was with Alice Mitchell, a girl who had lived across the hall from me freshman year. The first detail worth mentioning about Alice is that she is tall, very tall. When I spoke with her, I had to look up—just slightly, but enough to unnerve me, enough to make me squint. She was clear with her interest, however, openly flirtatious, and I thought it made sense to at least have drinks with her.

We went out, and it felt like work. Not work that delivers in the end, but work you are assigned. Task-labor, tedium. Alice had a pretty face, sharp cheekbones that along with her height rendered her statuesque. While we waited for high chairs, she pushed me after I made a joke. I tried to push her back, but my arms were shorter than hers, and I ended up swatting the air in false pantomime. She laughed at me, loudly, and tied a knot with the cherry stem from her drink. We reminisced about our time in college and agreed that we had made the most of it. But when she touched my leg over the course of the night, not once or twice but three times, and still I didn’t feel the desire to reciprocate, I knew that something was out of place, that if I didn’t want to sleep with someone tall, at least for the sake of saying I had slept with someone tall, I was not in my right state of mind. I paid for the drinks and said goodnight.

Week Eleven: I won my department’s thesis award.

I went out to celebrate with friends and got fairly drunk. On the way out of the bar, I saw Natalie walk into a building across the street. I was wearing my Zombies t-shirt, she her blonde wig with the strand of pink (leitmotif). I followed her inside, despite my friends’ insistence that I leave her alone. I knew my way around. It was the same building as the St. Patrick’s Day party.

She was easy to spot, though she kept her distance. Her wig glowed in the blacklight. When I tried to dance with her, she turned her back to me, shook her hips, and drifted away. The room was loud, louder than the usual parties, and I felt it float a little, tilt unbalanced like an antique. I found her again and brought my lips to hers, but she pushed me away, forcefully enough that I stumbled against the wall. I went over to the bar and poured myself another drink. My eyes followed her around the room: She spoke with her friend Dana and a boy I didn’t recognize. She hugged him and let him pinch her on the cheek.

I grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to a back room.

The room was pitch black, and as the door shut I followed memory more than instinct. Natalie sat back against a chair and I opened her legs, wrapping her ankles around my calves. Her fingers dug into my neck and back, almost as if she were trying to hurt me. I’d find purple scars the next day. I thrust harder and faster, which was what I thought we both wanted. Her breathing quickened, her legs fell limply at my sides. Once when I lost rhythm, she got out of the chair, but I sat her back down. She was a Gemini, after all.

When I finished, I pulled my pants up and waited for her to do the same. She said something, though I couldn’t hear her. I tried to kiss her, but she slapped me. The party room was too loud for me to stay when I left. I walked home, my heart racing in my chest, my steps breezy and light, my lips curling to my ears, smiling uncontrollably.

Late May: I graduated.

My parents hosted a celebratory night of drinks for me, and I invited Natalie to come. I figured that it might be the right time to chat, to have the conversation we should have had months before. I wanted to apologize for the way I had treated her during my thesis and to let her know that I would be around campus a few weeks this summer. I wanted to make it up to her.

When she didn’t text me back, I texted again a few days later. I didn’t hear from her until I had returned home. She emailed me a long message, explaining how I would go through the world thinking I was a good person when really I was an awful person. I had hurt her in a way she didn’t think was possible, which made her feel young and naïve, not just because of what I had done, but because she would now begin to question her judgment of others. She told me that I had hurt her emotionally and physically, used her like an object, learned nothing about caring for someone else after all our time together. And, worst of all, I had never bothered to apologize, and instead had the audacity to invite her to a party, a party with my parents, as though we could, pardon the outrageous analogy, she wrote, kiss and make up. She said she never wanted to see me again and that she had informed her friends of what happened. She warned me about returning to campus.

I read the email multiple times, looking for subtle cues that pointed to satire, the kind of dry humor only she could come up with. In the end, I decided her words were meant to be taken seriously. This frightened me. I wondered if it all came down to timing, whether I had allowed too many months to pass before attempting reconciliation, and in this interval she had allowed her dissatisfaction to fester into something dark and altogether contrary to her character. I’m not sure what she expected to accomplish, how I was to interpret something like this. I drafted a carefully worded reply, but decided againt it. Who knew what she would do with it.

I forwarded the email to a friend. He told me I needed to be more careful. She wore wigs at parties, after all, and was probably still shell-shocked from the breakup. With a girl like that, he said, you had to be careful.

—

Matthew Jeffrey Vegari has published fiction in Zyzzyva, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Boston Review. He is a recipient of the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. He holds an undergraduate degree in English from Harvard College and a master’s degree in economics and management from the London School of Economics.