“Uh, I don’t know. It just seemed like a good thing. No men.”
Marla shook her head in mock wonder, put her arm around Lizzie, and gave her a hug. “No men. Clearly, there’s a story behind that sentence. I can’t wait to hear it.”
Later that night, when Lizzie was wriggling around, trying to make herself comfortable and wondering if she’d ever get used to the thin mattress, Marla spoke into the darkness.
“Do you think we’ll be friends?”
Lizzie got a sick feeling in her stomach, although maybe it was a result of the pizza at dinner. “I’m not so good with friends,” she muttered.
“Really? That’s interesting. My stepmom, Taylor, says that the typical pattern with roommates is that first they adore each other, then they can’t stand one another, and then they come back to being friends. But maybe we can skip the middle part of not liking each other. I sort of have a feeling we can.”
Oh God, Lizzie thought. Was Marla one of those woo-woo people who believed she could predict the future? She would absolutely change rooms tomorrow if that was the case.
But Marla seemed to read her mind and went on to say, “No, no, it’s not like there’s an angel sitting on my shoulder telling me what’s going to happen. I just get these feelings about things. Big things. Not like passing tests or getting a date, but the deep, important future.”
Although Lizzie wasn’t sure that she saw the distinction that Marla was making, she was interested in what Marla would say next. “And I kind of need a friend right now, to talk to. To tell something to. A sort of secret. I mean a real secret. About me. That nobody except my parents and the other people involved in it know about.”
But Lizzie wasn’t ready for that quite yet. She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell her own secret. “So what about our future?”
“Okay, here goes. When we’re really really old, like in sixty years or so, I see us sitting on a porch, in rocking chairs, and one of my great-granddaughters will say, ‘Mama Marla’—because that’s what I’ve decided I want to be called—‘how did you and Auntie Lizzie meet?’ And we’ll tell them that we met the very first day of college, because we were assigned to the same room, and that first night we lay in our beds and told each other great secrets about our lives. And she’ll say, ‘What are those secrets?’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, baby, they’re secrets; they’re not for telling, not now or ever.’”
“Why are you all of a sudden talking in a southern accent?” Lizzie asked suspiciously. “You’re from Cleveland.”
Marla said, just a tad defensively, “I’m from Brecksville, actually, which is south of Cleveland. But that seems to me how that little story needed to be told.”
Lizzie, enchanted despite herself with the picture of Mama Marla and Auntie Lizzie, took a deep breath and sat up in bed.
“Okay, you go first with the secrets,” she said.
Marla nodded, which of course Lizzie couldn’t see, and began. “Well, my mother was so weird this afternoon because she’s worried about me.”
“Is that the secret? Because of course I got that.”
“Hey, don’t interrupt, it’s hard enough as it is.”
“Okay, sorry.”
“I had this boyfriend, James. Well, I still have him. I mean, he’s here, going to school here. And I got pregnant last fall.” She hurried on. “James and I talked about it, what we should do, should we get married, because we are going to get married sometime, of course, and then we talked to our parents. And then . . .”
Marla paused so long that Lizzie thought she might have stopped talking for good.
Finally she continued. “And then,” she repeated, “nobody thought we should get married, we were way too young, and that I should have an abortion and put it all behind me. But I realized that I wanted to have it, the baby, that I wanted to keep it, that I wanted to get married. I didn’t want to have an abortion. And then everyone started arguing with everybody else, and with me, except James, who felt the same way I did, and finally we came to this terrible compromise, which was that I would have the baby and then some lucky couple would get to adopt it.
“So that’s what happened. I spent my senior year being pregnant and having the baby in June, and then it was gone, poof, off to live with another family. So technically I didn’t graduate from high school but they let me in here anyway, and I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl, and everyone is just tiptoeing around me, even James, and though I guess that it was the sensible thing to do—I mean, how could we raise a baby and go to college, even if we did get married; I mean, I know people do it, but it didn’t seem that people like us did it—it’s turned out to be really hard, and I spent most of the summer crying and not wanting to see anybody, sometimes even James, who I love more than anything in the world. I mean, honestly, nobody wants me to see James anymore, especially his parents, who did like me once, so that’s why my mother is freaked out about me. She doesn’t know what I’m going to do next.
“And you’re the only one here who knows, besides James.” Marla took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
Lizzie couldn’t think of anything to say. Everything she tested out in her mind—“Oh, wow,” or “That’s terrible,” or “I think you’re really brave,” for example—sounded lame, insensitive, or just plain dumb. She got out of bed and went over and sat down next to Marla and took her hand. Of all the secrets that passed through Lizzie’s life, Marla’s was the one she never revealed, never retelling it as a good story or a terrible heartache, not divulging it to friends or George. Or even Jack, to whom she’d told everything else.
“Now you,” Marla said, when Lizzie was back in her own bed.
“Okay. My secret is that I had sex with my entire high school football team last winter and spring. Well,” Lizzie corrected herself, “not the entire team; just the starters.”
There was silence for a few moments, then Marla said, “Oh, Lizzie, I’m so sorry.”
Of all the responses Marla could have made, that was the most unexpected. Lizzie felt tears well up behind her eyes.
“It was supposed to be fun. We called it the Great Game.”
“Do people know?”
“Well, the whole school knew by the time it was over. Everybody stopped talking to me, and I kind of stopped functioning at all my last semester. And in a horribly weak moment I told my parents, which was probably a mistake. They’re totally different than your parents.”
Marla started laughing, which shocked Lizzie. “Oh my God, Lizzie, you screwed two dozen different guys and you didn’t get pregnant? Are you kidding me?”
“Twenty-three, actually,” Lizzie admitted, uncomfortably.
“You know, kiddo, it would have been so much less crazy, not to mention less destructive, if you’d picked the basketball team to fuck.”
*?Maverick and the Great Game?*