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He lifts his own glass and clinks it into mine. “To your first game of rugby. Cheers. ”
“Cheers. ”
“Wait, whose first game?” one of the Carson players asks.
Scott points at me. “Carrie’s. She never played before today. ”
“Ladies, we’ve got a virgin in the house!”
Before I know what’s even going on, I’m standing on top of a table, and forty women are singing to me.
Oh, rugby women are the biggest and the best
And we never give it up
And we never give it a rest
And we build a better ruck
And we give a better fuck
And no matter who we play, we can never get enough
Out in the field! Down in the scrum! Rugby women will make you come!
My throat is so hot, but I’m smiling.
It is impossible not to smile. I feel strong and fast, bruised and shaken, surrounded by affectionate solidarity.
I feel normal again, like I used to, before everything went off the rails.
In Massachusetts, there’s an office building where it’s someone’s job to erase Caroline Piasecki’s vulva from the Internet. If it works, in a year, that girl won’t exist anymore. She’ll be dead, and part of me will be dead along with her.
Maybe in the meantime what I’m supposed to do is grow into someone new. Find something green in me, feed it, watch it shoot up toward the sun. Turn into a girl who plays rugby and dances at parties and flirts with boys who are sunny and open and who don’t deal drugs or avoid discussing even the smallest details of their personal lives.
Rugby is awesome.
I’m so flipping hard-core, I can’t even stand it.
The first time I see the inside of West’s apartment, he’s not home.
I feel weird about it, but it’s not as though I snuck in. Me and Bridget ran into Krishna at the student center, and he invited us over with him and Quinn to watch bad TV and drink “even worse” alcohol. None of us could resist the allure of the mysterious “even worse. ”
So here we are, sprawled out on a big leather sectional couch, sharing a bottle of butterscotch schnapps that Krishna produced from the depths of the coat closet, and watching reruns of What Not To Wear, which Krish has stored up on his DVR in numbers that kind of frighten me.
West is working at the library, but he should be done soon. I text him, Are you off yet?
Yeah, he replies. I’m walking home. You?
I’m in ur apartment, poking all ur things.
This isn’t true, but it gets his attention. DID YOU BREAK IN?
Yes. I keep a set of lock picks in my cheek.
Houdini used to do that. I find the idea repulsive, but I also sort of love it.
Very tricky. Are you really there?
