Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn (26 page)

Molly nods and unhooks Gid's collar. "Now, don't jump overboard," she warns.

Gid bows.

Once they get outside, Devon ducks behind a bush. He guzzles whiskey from a silver flask, then passes it to
Gid. As Gid drinks, Devon says, almost dully, "So I guess you'll be having sex with her tonight."

"What do you mean?" Gideon asks innocently.

Devon guzzles a little more, then cocks his head to indicate they should go back inside. His wig shifts. "Dude,"
he says, bounding up the stairs two at a time. "She wants your nut sack."

Now Devon's wig is also falling off toward the back of his head. A few red curls have sprung out. Gid reaches

out tentatively, and Devon leans forward, letting Gid tuck everything back inside. "Thanks, man," Devon continues. "Okay, dude...she'sgotyou on a chain. Man, I wish some hot girl would lead me around on a chain."

"Monster Mash" ends as they come back inside. One of the rappers pulls Mrs. Geller out of the DJ booth,
doing a sort of modified twist, and one of his friends ducks in. Interpol comes on, and a riot of sophomore hookers
fill up the dance floor.

"You think Molly's hot?" As much as he doesn't want to admit it matters, he wants to know.

Devon thinks about this. "If she led me around on a chain, she would be."

Gid finds this only slightly helpful. More alcohol would be very helpful.

Gid takes Molly out with the flask. Stands guard while she, careful with her skirts, ducks into the bushes. When
she comes out her eyes are all glittery. "I'm drunk," she whispers as she resecures the collar around Gideon's neck.
She gets in so close to him that the top of her lip actually bends the top of his ear.

"I'm surprised," Gid says. "I thought you were better behaved than that."

"This is itchy," Molly says, rubbing where the dress meets her neckline. "The booze makes me feel less sweaty
and gross." Gid thinks of her sweating inside her dress and is aroused. He likes this night, the sneaking off, the itchy
dress.

As if on cue, Cullen and Nicholas walk by, dressed as his virginity. "What are they?" Molly asks.

"You don't want to know," Gid says. But he smiles. He is drunk. Not too drunk. Not throw-up drunk.

Back inside, Cullen and Nicholas are the stars of the show, Cullen taking his few steps and Nicholas posing
with his question mark nearby. They repeat this action several times. The dancing hookers cluster around them,
giggling and pointing at the thong. Gid must be drunk, because as he surveys this spectacle, he's overcome with
pride and flattery.

Molly tugs on his collar, uncomfortably flattening his Adam's apple. "Sorry," she says, "but I do want to know
about Cullen's and Nicholas's costumes."

Nicholas stands perfectly still as Cullen pirouettes around him. Then they switch. Cullen's pirouettes are
clownish and sloppy; Nicholas, even sandwiched between plywood, moves nimbly.

Suddenly, Gid's view is blocked by a giant black cape. Mrs. Geller frowns at him. Now that she's up close, Gid
can see that she has a fake wart on her face so the frown's a little scarier. "What do you have around his neck?"
she asks Molly. Gid tries to breathe out his nose so she won't smell the booze on him, and sends Molly desperate,
silent signals to do the same.

"I don't know that I think it's appropriate for the two of you to be making fun of the slave trade," Mrs. Geller
says. God, that wart's really grossing him out, even though it's fake. It seems to have been sculpted out of some kind
of putty, and then painted.

"He's an indentured servant," Molly explains, using the same tone of voice she used earlier with Gid.
"Indentured servants weren't slaves. They came over to America with
—"

Mrs. Geller clears her throat. "I'm clear on indentured servants, Miss McGarry. Now, I have spoken to the
other chaperones, and we feel your costume depicts a power dynamic we're really not comfortable endorsing. We'd
like you to return to your dorms and change your costumes."

Molly stands up and faces Mrs. Geller. "There are, like, twenty white kids here dressed as rappers! And you're
kicking us out? I am not endorsing indentured servitude, I'm depicting it. There's a difference. God, this school is
retarded!"

Gid has a sense that this is going to be the thing that really gets them in trouble.

Sure enough, Mrs. Geller turns white.

"My son is retarded," she says.

A few minutes later, Molly and Gid stumble across the quad together. "We're wasted," Gid whispers, and slips
a hand under Molly's elbow, hoping to steady them both.

"This school," Molly fumes, her face red, her eyes unfocused. "It's this weird combination of hippie stupid and totally uptight. I mean, can you believe Edie is writing Betsy Ross's diary for one of her classes? It's all in the same
vein of this costume. It's not any different."

They are both stupid ideas in exactly the same way.

Molly continues, pausing at the John Midvale memorial. She starts to peel off her wool dress. She tries to pull it over her head and can't. She sits down on the marble edge of the memorial and starts pulling savagely at it with her
arms.

"Uh, hey," Gid says, amazed and excited. But then, she's wearing another dress, a lighter cotton dress
underneath it. "Wow," he says, "you're wearing two dresses."

Molly looks at him quizzically. "This isn't a dress, it's a slip."

This doesn't register at all.

"A slip? Your slip is showing?"

"Oh yeah, I've heard that before," Gid says. "I never knew what it meant."

Molly puts her hands on her seventeenth-century hips and shakes her head. "You really are incredibly
clueless," she says. "I mean, like, it's logic-defying." There's something nice about the way she says this. It's as
though she's saying she likes him because of this, not in spite of it. He opens his mouth and quickly shuts it.

Molly waves a hand in front of his face. "Hello?" she says. "What are you thinking about?"

Molly narrows her eyes, taking in his weirdness. Or so that's what he thinks. As a girl, I know that she's just

really uncomfortable and that narrowing her eyes is the only thing she can think of to do.

"Okay," she finally says, "I guess me and my scratchy dress are going back to my dorm. This marble is cold
under my butt anyway." She throws the dress around her shoulders, like an athlete would a towel. She starts to back
away.

Gid has to think of a way to extend the evening. But without nightcaps, apartments, or walks along the
promenade, he's got nothing.

Gideon decides to use the only idea he has. The only weapon in his arsenal.

"Molly," he says. "Do you want to know what Cullen and Nicholas's costume was about?"

"Of course I want to know," she says. "I didn't pull on your chain just for the hell of it."

Gideon hesitates. Confiding in girls, he knows, has helped him so far. That's how he got Pilar to like him, when
he first met her and later, at Fiona's. It's how he got me to like him, though he doesn't know that. But Cullen and
Nicholas, that's not how they get girls to like them. They're all cool and distant. Cool and distant is not going to work
for Gid, because Gid's not gorgeous.

And he doesn't just want to confide because he feels good. There is also the guilt. Molly is the subject of
speculation in a way that's probably not so nice. He owes it to her to tell her something damaging about himself.

It's funny that's how he thinks of it. Girls call this "sharing."

He stuffs his hands deep into his suede jodhpurs. "Okay," he says finally. "They're my virginity. Their costume
is my virginity."

The Danielle story
—the sounds of the brother making noise in the next room, his hand, working its way under the expanse of stretchy fabric, et cetera, all the way to the yellow thong and the question of is he or isn't he—comes
out.

He's very detailed, open, and honest. Without, of course, breathing a word about the bet.

When he's done confiding
—or more or less done, once the underwear is dirty, it's hard to think of what else
you would say—they stand there in the middle of the quad under the bright hard stars. Molly's not quite smiling, but
there's a peaceful sort of look on her face. "Shit, I'm drunk," she says quietly, then she lies down along the base of
the memorial. It's circular, so naturally, she has to curve her body into a C shape. It's a process about which she is more matter-of-fact than sexy, and Gid smiles fondly, appreciating this. He lies down too, his feet near hers, so that
their bodies take up almost half the diameter of the circle. The marble is freezing through his thin shirt, but he knows
that lying down like this with a girl—even in a not very sensual position, even outside—is an opportunity he can't
miss.

"Something similar happened to me," she says, "but I was on the other side of the thong thing. I mean, it
happened to me with a boy. And I wasn't wearing a thong. They hurt my butt. But I always wonder if I am or if I am

not. I mean, I probably don't wonder as much as you
do..."

Gid is so stunned it takes him a second to feel insulted. "What do you mean, not 'as much as you do'?"

"Oh, you know," she says. "It's just not as big a deal for a girl."

"What are you talking about?" he says. "Virginity is, like, everything to girls! I think it's way less important to
guys. I mean, you guys have, like, a cherry to pop."

"Okay," Molly says, "if I am so obsessed with my cherry, why did you stand there half in tears wondering
whether to tell me your little story and I just up and told you about mine without even thinking about it?"

Gid doesn't know what to say. "Thongs hurt your butt?"

Molly makes a face. "Mostly. I mean, it depends on what kind of day your butt is having."

This is funny. They laugh. They laugh hard. They laugh so hard that they sit up, first just leaning against each
other, but then they start clutching at each other.

They clutch at each other for long enough and are drunk enough that they start to make out. Being in Gid's
mind was a lot easier before all this making out started. Gid making out drunk is different from Gid making out in
rehearsal. I can feel his brain go totally slack, and where I usually hear him wondering what to do with his hands, now
he's just kind of on sexual autopilot.

Molly pulls away from him. "You know what's good about this Halloween party thing?"

Gid shakes his head.

"No one's around. We can sneak back to my room."

Gid grabs her and kisses her again. A long, hard kiss, but with no tongue. It's a grateful kiss.

But he's not even thinking about the bet! He's just glad.

As they walk toward the door, Gid unconsciously reaches for Molly's hand. He takes it and kisses it. "I never
kissed a girl's hand before," Gid says. See, now, he's just remembered the bet. He thought this was a good move.
Suave.

The campus is totally, amazingly empty, a sea of quiet and cold green grass. They walk right in the front door
of her dorm and upstairs without seeing a soul.

Over Molly's bed is a framed Picasso print from someplace called the Albright-Knox Museum. Gid looks
closer. "Wow, Buffalo has a museum," he says. Edie's side of the room is papered with drawings of the American
flag. He wonders, Is Edie, like, really patriotic or something? God, that would make her even weirder. But then he
remembers her Betsy Ross diary. Okay.

Molly takes off her slip and hangs it over the desk. She's wearing a white T-shirt and white underwear. No
thong, but they are cute underwear. Gid likes the way the curve of her butt and her breasts look in the dim light from

outside. She's soft and girlish, she looks younger somehow. She gets into her bed. Gid takes off his jodhpurs and
starts to unlace his shirt when Molly beckons to him and has him sit on the edge of her bed. She puts Gid's hands at
his side, and then she starts to unlace his shirt. His heart starts to beat fast
—and beats faster when he realizes
she's looking right into his eyes as she's removing his clothes. He's actually in Molly McGarry's bed, on Halloween, and he's actually about to...win the bet. But better than that, a girl is undressing him. He has imagined losing his
virginity, but this, this seems like a lot to ask for.

I don't think there's a person alive who doesn't like watching people have sex. Watching and hearing the
narration, though, is a little weird. I almost feel like I'm directing them.