“Football team’s practicing,” Lizzie murmured, mostly to herself.
“You think?”
“Do irony much?” Lizzie asked her best friend. “I was wondering if it’ll be a good team this year.”
“Do I really care?”
“Don’t criticize what you don’t know. It’s so un-American of you not to like football. And you’ve never even been to a game. You didn’t come with me at all last year, when they were playing great.”
“I wasn’t criticizing. I was just expressing my feelings.” Andrea paused. “Sorry. I’m just feeling awful today. I miss Jon so much. I know it’s a good idea for us to date other people now that he’s at Duke. I mean, he’s like eight hundred miles away, so obviously there’s not much chance of us getting together regularly. But I really wish he’d stayed here, or at least gone someplace closer. Why’d he have to choose Duke, anyway?”
Another pause. “Do you think he’ll sleep with a lot of girls there? That’s what bothers me the most, honestly, especially because this year is going to be so useless. What are we going to do with ourselves except take the SATs again and fill out college applications? It’s basically no fair that he’s off at Duke having a great time and we’re stuck here. Plus, there’s no one in school I’d want to date anyway.”
“Yeah, you’re right. There isn’t anyone. I was just wondering if I should get back together with Maverick,” Lizzie admitted.
“At least you have a choice,” Andrea said bitterly, “at least Maverick’s still around. I keep imagining Jon making passionate, sweaty love with all those smart southern belles.”
“Well,” Lizzie said, trying to be comforting, “first of all, I’ve heard that those southern girls don’t actually sweat because their bodies have adjusted to the heat.”
“You made that up,” Andrea complained.
Lizzie pretended Andrea hadn’t said anything. “Secondly, I don’t know what the national average is for freshman sex in college, but I don’t imagine that Jon’ll go much above that. He’s much too conservative.”
“Yeah, but the way I’m feeling is that even one or two is too many. Really, Lizzie, we need to do something drastic that’ll stop my imagination from working overtime.”
They walked on, not talking. The football sounds grew louder when they turned the corner. Now they could see the team practicing. Lizzie could pick out Maverick, his blond hair reflected in the setting sun. She was just beginning to imagine a detailed scenario in which she and Maverick started dating again and ended up at the same college next year, when Andrea turned to her and gripped her arm, hard.
“Ow,” Lizzie said. “That hurts. Let go.”
Andrea ignored her. “Lizzie, listen, I have a totally crazy idea. Wouldn’t it be something,” she went on, “if we both slept our way through the football team this fall? Then I wouldn’t care what Jon did, because I’d be doing it too.”
“Whoa,” Lizzie said, not quite believing that Andrea was serious. Still, her mind began to race through the possibilities that the idea presented. “I’d have thought that only a true football fan would come up with a plan like that. But I kind of like it. It would be a great game that only the two of us knew the rules to. If we seduced every player on the team, then we’d be winners of the Great Game and Champions of the West, just like the fight song they sing all the time at Michigan football games.”
Andrea tried to look modest but failed. “Whether I’m a fan or not, if we do this it’ll be like being the first men on the moon: they never had to achieve anything else in their life because they always had that giant leap for mankind to fall back on. And we’ll have all those boys to show that once we really did something adventurous with our lives. It’s like a sign that we really lived.”
“We’d be legends in our own time,” Lizzie said, willing to play along.
“Not legends,” Andrea said, slightly alarmed. “We’d only be legends if people knew, right? And we can’t tell anyone about it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t have to tell anyone, but do you honestly think the guys we have sex with will keep quiet about it? They’ll broadcast it far and wide.”
“My parents would kill me if they found out.”
“Your parents would ground you until you were thirty,” Lizzie said. “Then they’d kill you. But you know what my parents would do?” Without waiting for Andrea to respond, she said, “They’d want to watch. Maybe they’d bring along a grad student or two to take notes.”
“Oh, ick, Lizzie, don’t even think that. That’s disgusting. Nobody’s parents would do that. Not even yours.”
Lizzie shook her head in disagreement. “They definitely would. Then they’d write articles about Girl X, a high school senior acting out sexually. More stuff to add to their overflowing CVs. So of course I don’t want them to know about it. I don’t want it to show up next year in some adolescent psychology journal. This is ours, ours and the team’s.”
Lizzie thought about what she’d just said to Andrea. Was it true? She wondered what it would mean to her parents to discover that their daughter—their little developmental psychology project, as she often thought of herself when she felt especially unloved by them—had had meaningless sex with multiple members of the football team. Lizzie knew that Mendel and Lydia believed that they were uniquely qualified to raise a psychologically healthy child just because they happened to have devoted their lives, professionally and personally, to psychology. And Lizzie had done nothing to dissuade them from that belief. She had been, in their eyes, a more or less perfect daughter. She had been well behaved, seemingly untroubled, a good student (that had been easy for her), and surely headed for a successful life; a daughter who validated all their theories about children and child-rearing. When she was young, she had just wanted to please them. As she got older, especially once she reached adolescence, she saw how her collaboration with them on that view of her (and of themselves as parents) kept them off her back. But she’d also begun to understand the price that she’d paid for that collaboration: they had no idea who she really was. Some of her teachers probably knew her better than her parents did. Heck, Andrea’s mother almost certainly did—that was why she didn’t want Andrea to spend so much time with her. She wanted Mendel and Lydia to see her, Elizabeth Frieda Bultmann, as she really was (or at least as she saw herself, from the inside). She wanted them to be curious about her, to want to know what went on below her polished surface. She wanted them to know her sadness, and her fears that she wasn’t attractive, that she’d never be happy, that she felt lost and frightened most of the time, that she was, deep down, in her bones, a terrible person, a liar and a cheat. Maybe if they did find out about the Great Game, it would wake them up enough to finally see her.
“All right, I’m in,” she said abruptly.