Who Do You Love(59)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

Even if he’d never asked her specifically about race, he had asked lots of questions about the girls she hung around with at Beaumont. They all dressed the same way, the same brands of jeans and shirts and shoes. “It’s like they got a memo,” he’d once said to Rachel. He’d meant it as a joke, but then Rachel explained that a version of such a memo actually existed.

“It’s just suggestions, really,” she’d said, looking embarrassed, which meant she at least knew how ridiculous it was, and Andy didn’t want to fight, but he wondered sometimes about whether he could actually have a future with a woman who handed other girls instructions about Girbaud versus Guess jeans, and how many buttons’ worth of cleavage they could show.

“You look nice,” he told her as she sat in front of her light-up makeup mirror and assaulted her eyebrows with her tweezers. The year before, she’d cut her hair in that face-framing, short-in-front, long-in-back style that the Friends actress had somehow convinced every woman in America to get, but now it was long and curly again, the way it had been when they met in Atlanta, the way he liked it best. She pulled on a short white skirt, a blue silk blouse, a scarf at her throat in the sorority colors, and a pair of beigey high heels that matched the color of her skin and made her legs look impossibly long.

Her kiss was brisk, almost impersonal. “See you at midnight,” she said, and then, in a swirl of hair spray and perfume, she was gone.

Andy sneaked into the bathroom, marveling at the array of stuff, enough scrubs and lotions and masks to stock a drugstore. He spent a long time in the shower, enjoying the water pressure—the showers at Oregon usually felt more like a trickle. He used exfoliating cream for his legs and deep conditioner for his hair, and considered a leave-in olive oil treatment before deciding that it might be missed. Back in his jeans and sweatshirt, he slipped down the back staircase, which Rachel told him had once been for servants to use, and roamed around the campus, buying a few slices of pizza for dinner, then sitting on one of the benches to eat them and watch the people go by. Ten black girls in blue suits and black shoes, all in a line, were balancing potted plants on their gloved hands as they marched by him. They were followed by half a dozen guys, each pledge carrying his own books and a second backpack, no doubt laden with a senior brother’s texts. Andy decided, again, that fraternities and sororities were the stupidest thing in the world.

Finally it was midnight. Andy lay in bed while Rachel paced around the room, shoes off, hair loose, telling him the story about some potential getting drunk and puking in the ladies’ room—“She told us she was on antibiotics, which, I’m sorry, but shouldn’t she have remembered that before she, like, drank three glasses of punch?”—and how she’d heard that some other sorority was ripping off the theme for their formal, which was One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “They’re doing Midnight at the Oasis, which is basically the same thing. And I heard they rented an elephant,” she fretted.

“That’s—” Awful, he’d been going to say, but Rachel jumped in with “I know! God, I could kill myself for not thinking of it!”

“Maybe you could just get a fat person.”

Rachel paused, halfway through unhooking her bra. “Huh?” Even though she’d gotten thinner, her breasts, in profile, were round and heavy as some kind of fruit. Melons were the cliché, of course, but hers reminded him of peaches, from the tawny pink-gold color of her skin to the sweetness when he kissed her.

“A fat person,” he said, mostly kidding. “You know, so a fat person could come to your parties.”

He could see her making up her mind, deciding whether to be amused or combative. “We have fat people,” she finally said.

“Who?”

“Missy Sanders.”

“Missy Sanders isn’t fat,” he said, hoping they were talking about the same person, a bosomy, rosy-cheeked blond whose thick legs were more muscle than flab and who was an all-conference field hockey player.

“She isn’t thin,” said Rachel.

“And isn’t her father a senator?” Andy asked.

Rachel slipped on her pajama top, a stretchy cotton button-down imprinted with red hearts. Freshman year, she’d bought out Victoria’s Secret, and had worn some kind of weird new outfit every time he visited, lacy bras and panties, sheer, short nightgowns, garments made with hooks and wires to pull her waist in and push her breasts up. Finally he’d told her that his favorite outfit was a plain white tank top and pajama bottoms loose enough that he could slip his hands inside of them.