Page 62 of The Academy
“Do you remember when I came to find you in the basement of the dorms?” he says. “Down in that brick tunnel?”
“Mmmmhmm.” Her mouth is pressed against the front of his shirt and the vibration of her lips travels directly down to his cock. He is instantly hard.Don’t say another word,he thinks.Just enjoy this.But what he thought he saw going on in the tunnel has been plaguing him. He has to ask.
“Were you down there with East?”
She snaps her head back. “East?”
“Andrew Eastman? I’m pretty sure I saw you in the tunnel with Andrew Eastman.” He swallows. “East.”
Simone grabs Rhode’s face and kisses him. Rhode opens his mouth too wide, he uses too much tongue, and their teeth click; his erection presses into her leg. Awful, all of it—however, Simone is pretty sure all thoughts of her with Andrew Eastman in the brick tunnel have flown from his mind.
Rhode slips one of the delicate straps of Simone’s dress off her shoulder to expose her breast. He takes her nipple in his mouth and bites—why,whydo men feel the need to do this? It hurts and Simone carefully pulls away.
“I think we should sit down,” she says.
Yes, yes,Rhode thinks. He leads her over to the sofa, a threadbarecreature that has seen its share of pond-wet bathing suits over the years. It smells like algae, but hopefully Simone won’t notice.
Simonedoesnotice: The smell is a medley of mold, mildew, fungi, decay, water murky with insect carapaces and fish eggs. She ate fish eggs tonight, a lot of them, black and glistening. This suddenly turns Simone’s stomach, it’s roiling, roiling, she can’t think about the—
“I need the—” But before she can ask for the powder room, she pukes in Rhode’s lap.
Rhode ends their romantic evening by rubbing Simone’s back as she vomits a magnum of champagne and four ounces of royal osetra caviar into the Wullys’ toilet. She’s crying and begging his forgiveness, then she’s accusing him of intentionally getting her drunk so he could seduce her. He doesn’t respond; his mind is, frankly, elsewhere. It’s on the three hundred dollars he owes for the rental car (more for cleaning if Simone barfs in it on the way home) and on the whopping seventeen hundred dollars he owes Haz. He has enough beef Wellington left over to feed the first floor of Classic North, though the boys won’t appreciate it. There are two gorgeous chocolate caramel tarts waiting in the fridge; those he’ll take home to feed his feelings of utter failure.
Simone sleeps until noon on Sunday and awakens feeling like dog shit—not only physically but emotionally. So many things went wrong: She got wickedly, mortifyingly wasted, she puked, she kissed Rhode and let him fondle her in a desperate attempt to eradicate Rhode’s notion that he saw Simone and East together.
Rhodeknows—not everything, but something.
When Simone finally emerges from her room, the girls on the first floor are all over her like ants on a picnic.How was it? Was it fun? Where’d you go, what’d you do? DID YOU GET WITH HIM?
Simone has, at least, come up with a spin. “I had a lovely time, Mr. Rivera is quite the romantic. The details are private.” When she sees Davi, she says, “I’ll return your dress after I’ve had it cleaned.” (It’s splattered with vomit and Simone worries it won’t come out.)
“Keep it,” Davi says. “It’ll always remind you of your first date with Mr. Rivera.”
That’s what Simone is afraid of. “Thank you,” she says. She will throw the dress away.
The next day, Simone checks Zip Zap—and the next, and the next, but nothing appears about Simone and Rhode. After all she went through, Zip Zap doesn’t give a flying fuck.
14. Limerence, Part II
Hakeem is leaving on a recruiting trip—first to Princeton, then Columbia, Harvard, and Dartmouth.
The night before he leaves, things get very hot between him and Taylor during Intervis and they go almost all the way.
“Come on, baby,” Hakeem says. “You can’t make me leave for these recruiting trips as a virgin.”
“I’m not ready,” Taylor says. “And I don’t want it to be like this, with the door cracked and Mr. Rivera down the hall.”
“We could go to God’s Basement,” Hakeem says.
“Hakeem,” Taylor says. “No.”
Later, Hakeem stops by Dub’s room. Dub thinks maybe Hakeem feels bad because while he has four Ivies interested in him, Dub hasn’t been contacted by any college scouts. Or, possibly, Hakeem wants to review the playbook because he’s missing practice all week and their final game—against longtime rival Old Bennington—is on Saturday.
But it turns out, Hakeem is there to talk about Taylor.
“She won’t give it up to me, man,” he says. “I just turned seventeen. It’s embarrassing that I’m still a virgin.”
Dub can’t believe Hakeem is confiding in him like this; he thought those days were over forever.
