“No, you’re really smart. I think you’re fantastic. I think only maybe your life revolves too much about men, a little bit, right now.”
Pip stared in amazement at this fresh insult.
“Maybe you want a female friend who’s something older but used to be so much like you.”
“You were never like me,” Pip said.
“No, I was. Sit down, please, ja? Talk with me.”
Annagret’s voice was so silky and commanding, and her insult had cast such humiliating light on Jason’s presence in Pip’s bedroom, that Pip almost obeyed her and sat down. But when she was gripped by her distrust of people it became physically unbearable to stay with them. She fled down the hallway, hearing the scrape of a chair behind her, the sound of her name being called.
On the second-floor landing, she paused to seethe. Stephen was weak? She thought about men too much? That is so nice. That really makes me feel good about myself.
Behind Stephen’s door, the marital fighting had stopped. Pip very quietly moved closer to it, away from the sound of basketball downstairs, and listened. Before long, there came a creak of a bedspring, and then an unmistakable whimpering sigh, and she understood that Annagret was right, that Stephen was weak, he was weak; and yet there was nothing wrong with a husband and a wife having sex. Hearing it and picturing it and being excluded from it filled Pip with a desolation that she had only one means of assuaging.
She took the rest of the stairs two at a time, as if shaving five seconds off her ascent could make up for half an hour’s absence. Outside her door, she composed her face into an expression of sheepish apology. It was a face she’d used a thousand times on her mother, to reliably good effect. She opened the door and peeked in, wearing the look.
The lights were on and Jason was in his clothes again, sitting on the edge of the bed, texting intently.
“Psst,” Pip said. “Are you horribly mad at me?”
He shook his head. “It’s just I told my sister I’d be home by eleven.”
The word sister dispelled much of the apology from Pip’s face, but Jason wasn’t looking at her anyway. She went in and sat down by him and touched him. “It’s not eleven yet, is it?”
“It’s eleven twenty.”
She put her head on his shoulder and her hands around his arm. She could feel his muscles working as he texted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t explain what happened. I mean, I can, but I don’t want to.”
“You don’t have to explain. I kind of knew it anyway.”
“Knew what?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“No, what, though? What did you know?”
He stopped texting and stared at the floor. “It’s not like I’m so normal myself. But relatively speaking—”
“I want to make normal love with you. Can’t we still do that? Even just for half an hour? You can tell your sister you’ll be home a little late.”
“Listen. Pip.” He frowned. “Is that your real name, by the way?”
“It’s what I call myself.”
“Somehow it doesn’t seem like I’m talking to you when I use it. I don’t know … ‘Pip.’ ‘Pip.’ It doesn’t sound … I don’t know …”
The last traces of apology drained from her face, and she took her hands away from him. She knew she had to resist an outburst, but she couldn’t resist it. The best she could do was keep her voice low.
“OK,” she said. “So you don’t like my name. What else don’t you like about me?”
“Oh, come on. You’re the one who left me up here for an hour. More than an hour.”
“Right. While your sister was waiting for you.”
Speaking the word sister again was like tossing a match into an oven full of unlit gas, the ready-to-combust anger that she walked around with every day; there was a kind of whoosh inside her head.
“Seriously,” she said, heart pounding, “you might as well tell me everything you don’t like about me, since we’re obviously never going to fuck, since I’m not normal enough, although what’s so abnormal about me I could use a little help in understanding.”
“Hey, come on,” Jason said. “I could have just left.”
The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain college professors and certain gross-out movies and now also from Annagret, a sense of the unfairness of what one professor had called the anisotropy of gendered relationships, wherein boys could camouflage their objectifying desires with the language of feelings while girls played the boys’ game of sex at their own risk, dupes if they objectified and victims if they didn’t.
“You didn’t seem to mind me when your dick was in my mouth,” she said.
“I didn’t put it there,” he said. “And it wasn’t there long.”
“No, because I had to go downstairs and get a condom so you could stick it inside me.”
“Wow. So this is all me now?”
Through a haze of flame, or hot blood, Pip’s eyes fell on Jason’s handheld device.
“Hey!” he cried.
She jumped up and ran to the far side of the room with his device.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” he shouted, pursuing her.
“Yes I can!”
“No, you can’t, it’s not fair. Hey—hey—you can’t do that!”
She wedged herself underneath the child’s writing desk that was her only piece of furniture and faced the wall, bracing her leg on a desk leg. Jason tried to pull her out by the belt of her robe, but he couldn’t dislodge her and was apparently unwilling to get more violent than this. “What kind of freak are you?” he said. “What are you doing?”
Pip touched the device’s screen with shaking fingers.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jason said, pacing behind her. “What are you doing?”
She pawed the screen and found the next thread.
She slumped to one side, put the device on the floor, and gave it a push in Jason’s direction. Her anger had burned off as quickly as it had ignited, leaving ashen grief behind.