Girl dinner, p.30
Girl Dinner, page 30
“What’s she like? Your cousin,” said Sloane, suddenly feeling like she was entering a trance. A fugue state. Like the ground beneath her was starting to shift.
(What is a Good Woman? One that is worthy.)
(Not of academic validation. Not of power.)
(One that is worthy of honest, unfailing love.)
Love.
Love the food.
“Oh, well, don’t let her hear you call her that,” said Arya, with an air of fondness. “She’s … I don’t know, sensitive, really. She’d kill me for saying it, but she is. She wants everyone to be different—she wants everything to be different, and she has some really strong opinions about what falls within the constraints of right and wrong. She comes off tough as nails, totally confrontational. Bull-in-a-china-shop kind of recklessness. The kind of energy that makes you think wow, I need a nap just looking at you.” He smiled, or grimaced. It was a look that was admiring, but shadowed with doubt.
“But?” Sloane prompted.
“But,” Arya agreed. “Underneath it all, you kind of know she’s one of the people the world is going to hurt.”
“What?”
Sloane felt a sudden hammer of alarm. It wasn’t what she expected—though, what had she expected? What had she wanted to hear? She didn’t understand this reaction she was having, this abrupt sense of … pain. Yes, pain. Over the future belonging to some other idealistic girl, inevitable injury that was so completely irrelevant to hers. And yet not fully cleaved.
“I mean … maybe that’s not true. I hope it’s not true.” Arya ruffled a hand through his hair with a shrug. “But do you know what I mean? There are some people who are just … innocent. Who only want good things for others. It’s this, I don’t know, this earnestness, this energy that you just know people are going to misuse.” He fell into his desk chair, staring idly into nothing. “I don’t know, she seemed off. I think something happened to her recently. She seems a little depressed.”
“Yeah?” Sloane was holding her breath.
“She just doesn’t seem … light, I guess, anymore. There’s a heaviness to her now.” Arya stared into space again, then shook himself. “I’m probably overreacting, or, I don’t know. It’s not like I really know her, I just—”
“It’s her age,” Sloane said quietly. “I was idealistic at that age, too.”
“But you’re not burned out, though,” Arya said. “Are you?”
“Burned out?” Sloane had to consider it for a moment. “I mean, no, I don’t think so. But I’m also not sure I was ever trying that hard to change the world.”
“Why go into sociology if not to change the world?” Arya was doing it again, expressing an avid interest in her thoughts. Poor thing, Sloane thought. Don’t waste this goodness on me, not when there are so many young ones left untainted, still intact. Not some purity bullshit, but a light—exactly as Arya had said, a lightness.
“I was trying to understand the world, I think,” Sloane explained. “I guess in some sense to explain it, first to myself and then to others. And then try to get other people to see it the way I saw it.”
“In order to…?” prompted Arya expectantly.
“Change it, I guess. Sure, if you want to call it that.” But Sloane didn’t remember a lightness. “I just don’t think I was ever that person. The kind of person with that kind of fragility, I guess, or that the world would try to hurt.” As soon as she said it, she knew it rang false.
“Of course you were,” said Arya, with certainty he couldn’t possibly possess, but still Sloane wanted to believe it. “How could you not have been?”
“I just don’t think I inspired this kind of protectiveness,” she said, gesturing to Arya, who shook his head, rising to his feet.
“I would have wanted to protect you then,” he said. “I still do now.”
His eyes were dangerously soft, a reminder of Sloane’s moral hazards.
A Good Woman didn’t devour. A Good Woman left things intact.
No, not intact. A Good Woman was a nurturer. A Good Woman didn’t leave things as she found them, she made them better. She simmered the sauces until the flavors melded. She made the home gleam again with airiness and health. She was deserving of love not because she was beautiful—she was beautiful because she shone with worth. It came from inside. Love that love had begotten. You had to treat the self with tenderness. You had to love the food.
“How can I help you?” Sloane abruptly asked Arya, who frowned. “What’s something that will actually help you, Arya? Recommendations, of course. Anything else? Would you like any of my publishing contacts?”
Arya frowned at her, puzzled. “What?”
“Sex with me will get you nowhere, Arya,” Sloane said matter-of-factly. “You’re the garden. I’m not here to uproot what you’re growing. Let me tend.”
“That cult is really getting to you, huh?” Arya’s eyes were laughing, confused, hurt.
“I really enjoy fucking you, Arya,” Sloane said seriously. “If I didn’t have a daughter, I’d be fucking you right now.”
Arya blinked, his expression only barely faltering. “I’m not totally understanding what Isla has to do with it—”
“It’s her girlhood, Arya,” said Sloane. “I can’t rob it from her, okay? I can’t let her see the ways I fail her. I can’t fail her, don’t you understand?”
“Sloane.” Arya’s confusion blended into concern. “Are you okay?”
She was talking too fast again, too passionately. “Your cousin, it’s not that she doesn’t know,” Sloane tried to explain. “It’s not like she doesn’t understand that the world is going to hurt her. She knows the game is rigged. She knows she’s playing to lose. She already crossed that bridge, you know? There’s no going back now. That’s the heaviness you saw in her.” Sloane’s certainty came from a place of experience. It came from history. It came from knowledge that was developed over time, from catcalls at twelve to a life built on the razor-edge of predation and exploitation. Confusion about whether the desire of others was good or bad. A reward or a punishment. Wanting without understanding. Catching glimpses, the way you could brace yourself instinctively, the way you knew from the shared history of your kind to reach for protection, but—god, how dark things could get!
Sloane ached for her—a version of herself that was dead now, long gone. A version of her that didn’t exist.
No, Sloane realized abruptly, she did exist. She couldn’t stop existing, doomed but unformed. She existed in all the bodies of all the girls who didn’t yet see that they could no longer trust the intentions of their teachers. She was real in the heart of the girl who was only just beginning to understand that she wanted justice she could never achieve. She existed on the precipice, in the beauty that was desirable because it was unaltered by the knowledge to want better, to ask for more. She lived inside the value of youth, which wasn’t value, not really, because it was mythological, empty—just a vessel waiting to be filled. She was the vacancy of potential, which was a shape constrained by nothing, which was the very same thing as being shapeless.
She existed—smarter, prettier, boundless, and younger—still ultimately destined to find her way here, to this place of endless failure—in the form of Nina Kaur.
Sloane rose to her feet then, kissing Arya’s forehead. “I have to go,” she said.
“Sloane,” Arya called after her. “Are you okay? You look a little bit—”
She didn’t hear him. Time, time was slipping away from her. With every moment that passed, Isla became a person that was further and further from the safety of Sloane’s body. Closer to being injured, closer to being hurt. To being molded like clay into something that this disappointing world had made her. This world that wanted her to suffer, all because a woman in a story ate an apple in a garden—because a woman somewhere got hungry.
Because a girl could still starve and nobody would care, but a woman had to eat.
38
The day of the solstice dinner was a cold one. The sisters spent all morning huddled together instinctively under blankets, weighted down, waiting. Nobody touched their breakfast. There was an unresolved energy in the air, an active and prevailing wind, a distant hint of smoke. Tension knitted their shoulder blades as usual, this time shielding the collective heart rate of a conserving humpback whale.
It wasn’t time; not yet. Patiently, enduringly, they waited. Time at half speed, they rested. The branches outside their windows rattled. The residents of the Icebox descended to the lower floors, where there was heat.
Then the guests started to arrive.
It was interesting, Nina observed, to see what each sister had felt was appropriate for the occasion, best suited for a meal. The room was entirely occupied by men. Dalil had brought someone Nina didn’t recognize; someone she didn’t think was even a student. A boy, not much older than the rest of them. Someone who looked like he had access to the internet, to ruining a life with the push of a button. He swayed a little on the stairs, like maybe he’d needed some early convincing. Wordlessly, Nina came over to help Dalil prop him up.
Alina arrived with her boyfriend, the knockoff Kennedy named Tripp. Nina blinked with surprise, and Alina lifted a brow as if to say, We all make sacrifices. Nina nodded. She already understood that was the truth.
Tessa arrived with someone in military uniform, early thirties. Nina didn’t ask. Similarly, though she had considered seeking out answers to whatever passed between Tessa and Fawn in the past, she dismissed the impulse almost immediately—it wasn’t her pain or her story, and if Tessa didn’t want to exhume it, then Nina wouldn’t unearth it, out of respect.
There were two cops. A handful of what looked like service workers. Some athletes. Some frat bros. None too old. Perhaps among the oldest was Fawn’s guest.
“Oh, hi, Nina,” said Professor Villanueva. “Your term paper was excellent, I just finished grading it. Really strong analysis.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“Miss Carter told me this was a scholarship dinner?” Professor Villanueva was surveying the sea of guests, observing them with a brittle sense of suspicion, perhaps, that all was not quite right. Maybe he could feel it, the frequency, the thing Nina had first noticed; or maybe it was the girls who were licking their lips, baring their teeth, panting quietly. The occasional glint of canines flashing beneath the dining room’s chandelier.
“Yes, sort of. More of a congratulations on the end of the semester dinner. Happy solstice and all that.” Nina cleared her throat and held out a hand that was only slightly shaky with anticipation. She blinked away lightheadedness, a passing dizzy spell. “Can I take your coat?”
“Oh, I can’t let you do that,” said Professor Villanueva, and Nina wondered for a second if she’d imagined it, the certainty she’d felt that he wanted to fuck her. He seemed suddenly very paternal toward her, like his concern was that she hadn’t eaten enough vegetables in recent days. He seemed frailer than she’d imagined, still healthy and active but not incapable of being taken down by sixty starving girls.
“There you are, Max.”
Nina’s eyes strayed to Fawn, who came over without acknowledging Nina. Professor Villanueva’s cheeks grew flushed. “Sorry, I suppose I hadn’t mentioned to you that I had Miss Carter last semester,” he explained to Nina. “She was one of my most promising students.”
“Oh, Max, you really don’t need to pretend around Nina,” said Fawn with an air of dismissal. “I told you, she understands.”
“Fawn.” Professor Villanueva’s mouth grew thin, his voice dropping. “We talked about this.”
“Yes, you mentioned several times that it was a mistake. An accident!” Fawn laughed loudly, as if one of them had told a joke over cocktails. “You accidentally kissed me, of course, how could I forget. And the worst part,” Fawn added to Nina in a performative aside, “is that I didn’t even get the highest grade in the class. He gave it to some dude named Brody.”
“Maybe I should go.” Professor Villanueva looked uneasy. Next to him, one of the seniors—the one who’d first assured Nina about her uterus—touched the side of her dinner guest’s neck like she knew exactly where to slice it open. “I—I think I should leave. I’m so sorry, Miss Kaur—”
“You can call me Nina,” offered Nina. “I mean, we haven’t done anything, so. There’s no need to be so formal.”
Fawn gave another high, distinct laugh. Professor Villanueva glanced hastily around the room.
“Oh god,” said Fawn. “Nobody cares, Max. Literally nobody cares. That’s the fucked-up part of the whole thing. It’s not like fucking your students is new or creative. You’re an evergreen cliché.” She leaned over as if to kiss him, covertly removing something from her pocket, and Professor Villanueva shrank instantly away.
“Coward,” snarled Fawn, and pressed a pink stun gun into his neck.
Professor Villanueva shuddered and fell, seizing as he went. There was a slight commotion as the other guests turned to look.
“Oh, no,” Fawn cried out, bending as if to check Professor Villanueva’s pulse.
Nina bent, too.
Across the room, the latch on the dining room turned audibly. At least three girls let out a soft, pleading moan.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Nina murmured to Fawn. Her finger did fit perfectly into the dimple of Professor Villanueva’s unmoving cheek.
“I did. But apparently you weren’t listening.” Fawn’s eyes met Nina’s then, hard, angry. An unmistakable fuck you.
Nina understood, finally, that she had been wrong and she had been right. Fawn was honest, Fawn was fake, she was both the friend that Tessa loved and she wasn’t—Fawn was a coin that would fall wherever it needed to for Fawn to wind up on top.
Fawn had never contradicted Tessa or renounced Tessa’s approach to the ritual because it was closest to her own. But it wasn’t exact, because justice wasn’t necessarily altruistic. It wasn’t always systemic. The violence in Fawn’s justice was personal, singular. With a subtle hint of vengeful smoke—that feminine mesquite.
Then, a secondary epiphany, via the usual am-I-a-narcissist internal reckoning: it was never about Nina. Not the sex or whatever it was—that was probably just lust and convenience—and not the betrayal, either, because Nina never meant enough to Fawn to leave a mark. That was the truth, and the truth fucking hurt. Nina could admit that. Her heart shattered because she still fucking had one, thank you very much. It was the end of something. The end.
“I really did love you,” Nina said.
Fawn looked up at her, expression contorted with something that was guilt and envy and the loathing you could have for a person whose pleasure you once craved.
“Bummer,” said Fawn.
It was everything Nina needed to hear.
39
What do I use?
A stun gun works. Hang on, I’ll send you a link.
40
“Sister Kaur? Your candidate?”
Nina rose to her feet, exhaling. This was her moment. This was what she had known would have to happen the moment Slate said her name. The one choice she could make that would finally make sense of everything. She would stitch up the wound, mend the hypocrisy; she would make two contradictory things equally true.
The House was holy. The House was violent.
It was possible to win, but only if you were willing to lose.
“My candidate,” said Nina, rising to her feet, “is myself.”
There was a collective gasp around the dining room. Beside the unmoving bodies of their recently incapacitated guests, The House was filled with sudden motion as girls turned to each other to whisper, to throw uneasy glances across the room.
“I believe in this sisterhood,” Nina explained simply. “I believe in it so much and so fully that I mean to prove every word I said to you the night of my initiation. I love The House unconditionally. I want every sister in this House to eat well.”
She looked around the room, her hands spread wide in saintliness, in invitation.
“I love you,” she said to her sisters. “This much.”
For a moment, it was deathly silent.
“Nina,” whispered Dalil, in reverence. In awe.
Beside her, Tessa’s eyes had filled with tears. Summer’s lips parted with a quiet sigh.
Across the room, Fawn swallowed hard, her jaw visibly tensing. Nina understood the hand she’d played, the way an ax was falling. Because who could beat it?
What had any of them ever wanted but love?
41
There was a hardware store about three miles from campus that sold everything Sloane would need. She just had to drop off Isla first at Britt’s.
“We’re having a group playdate,” Britt’s husband Finn announced merrily, revealing that Theo was already there when he opened the door to let Sloane in. “Are you headed to The House for elections tonight? Tell Alex we’re all doing great. The girls are being unusually docile—I’d be concerned if I weren’t so impressed.”
“Oh no, no House business for me, I just have to pick something up at the store and run an errand before dinner,” said Sloane, and bent to kiss Isla’s head. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Thanks so much for doing this.”
“Oh, it’s really no trouble—”
“Hey, Finn?” asked Sloane on second thought. “Do you know about … you know.”
Finn, who had bent to remove Isla’s coat, looked quizzically up at her. “Hm?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” Of course he wouldn’t. It wasn’t for him. Sloane knelt beside Isla, taking her pudgy hands to her lips. “Be back soon, sweet girl.”
Isla smiled, and Sloane’s heart filled.
