Something Right Behind Her by Claire Hollander Read Free Book Online

If losing my virginity to Douglas
O’Meara had been such a terrible act, wouldn’t I have felt it at the time?
Wouldn’t some voice inside me have taken over and said no?

 
    CHAPTER FOUR

 
    The next morning
I slept until about eleven. I had dreams the way you sometimes do when you wake
up a lot and then go back to sleep, but none of them were like the one where
Eve is walking again. None of them made me cry out. In one, I was kissing Doug.
We were outside my English class and he was beginning to take off my shirt, and
Sharon Ghery, my sometimes friend, sometimes superbitch, was there, and she
started pointing at us. It was so realistic, when I woke up, I was surprised to
find myself in my own bed and not standing on the worn gray carpet of the
English building.
    Once I started
to climb out of bed, I felt a soreness in my thighs, and the whole Doug episode
came back to me with tsunami-like force. I had slept with Douglas O’Meara, the
preppy asshole! I felt like laughing and crying all at once. Worse, I could
still feel him on my skin. I felt like all of me had been Douglasized, taken
over from the inside out. I didn’t feel like seeing him, or any of the
O’Meara’s for that matter; I didn’t want to face him, to talk to him, but a
part of me craved his touch, still, wanted some essence of him, a dream of him
to wash back over me.
    I’d thought
about Doug that way before, maybe even cooked up a fantasy or two in my spare
time - fuzzy, fantasies revolving mostly around what he and I were wearing
before we tore our clothes off and did it. I’d been ashamed of the fact that I
had this fixation with Douglas O’Meara mostly because it was a wide-spread
affliction. Even back in eighth grade, Eve had pointed out to me that I was the
one girl who didn’t go over there just to ogle him. So much for Andy Berg, the
exception to American girlhood. Figures I would give into my worst impulses
now. I thought of Eve and the way her head fell crookedly off her pillow, how a
tightness had formed in my throat that somehow dissolved with Doug’s kiss.
    I knew I had to
get myself together and act like everything was normal, or I’d never have the
courage to leave my room. Step One to Getting Over Having Slept with
Your Dying Best Friend’s Brother, I told myself, was a long, steaming hot
shower with plenty of pomegranate body scrub. I squeezed practically half the
bottle out into my palm. I wanted to scrub Doug from every pore of my body. Step Two , I decided, was
to act like nothing ever happened.
    I got dressed in
hang-out clothes, a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt, braced myself, and headed
downstairs. The kitchen was empty and Mom had left a note saying they’d all
gone to meet some friend of Milly’s to go apple-picking and they wouldn’t be
home until late in the afternoon. She didn’t say anything about my coming home
instead of staying at Eve’s. Maybe she didn’t even know.
    Eve, of course,
would be wondering why I’d left when I was supposed to sleep in the guest room.
She was no fool, and might even figure it all out, especially if Doug acted
sheepish around her, which he might, since he must’ve felt at least a twinge of
guilt. If Eve knew about me and Doug, I was sunk. What excuse could I possibly
give? I was upset about her? How lame was that?
    I started pacing
around the kitchen. I was really hungry and tired. I wanted a cup of tea, but I
couldn’t get myself focused enough to even put the kettle on. My stomach felt
hollow, but full at the same time, as if the guilt I felt were occupying a
physical space in my body. The worst part was the way my arms and chest ached,
how my body had stretched in some unaccustomed way to accommodate Doug’s bulk.
This was something I had never anticipated, how overtaken I felt, how bruised.
    I finally choked
down a peanut butter sandwich at about one, and then I calmed my nerves enough
to dash off an e-mail to Eve, saying I couldn’t get to sleep I was so
sunburned,