Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn (4 page)

Nicholas's eyes turn bright. "Oh-ho," he says. "I need to hear the story behind these."

"Oh my God," Gid says, feeling panic and a sense of falling, of unreality, almost, more than anger. "You went
through my bags. You guys are totally...you...you have no..."

It will take him months to put his finger on it. So let me complete what Gid can't.

Cullen and Nicholas don't care about much except their own amusement. They have no real sense of morality.

"These are my girlfriend's," Gid says, still bewildered to find his most private possession out in the open like this. "My girlfriend from home," he qualifies, not wanting word to get out that he's taken. Although he feels some
blushing pride in being so. Sort of.

Nicholas mashes his lips together and makes a low, skeptical sound. "You brought these here as a memento?"

"That's right." Gid lifts his second, smaller suitcase onto the bed and starts to unpack. He makes a sudden
decision, gathering his wits, swallowing his shock. He's going to act normal, because then they might just forget
about this. "They're my girlfriend's, and I just have them to remember her by."

"I don't buy it," Nicholas replies.

Gid continues to unpack, monitoring his expression, keeping it still, without tells. Inside, he remembers. He
remembers the way those underwear felt in his fingers, how the nylon threads stuck to his calluses.

As violated as he feels, he also wants to tell.

Then Cullen takes the underwear from Nicholas. He smells them. "Freshly laundered," he says.

Wow. That
was...
Cullen is some breed. There's a pause while Gid lets what his new roommate has done sink
in.

Gideon doesn't like it that Cullen just smelled his girlfriend's underwear, but he admires it. These two boys are so comfortable in their own skins. Gid wants
—hard to admit this to himself because he doesn't yet know what they
want—to be around them, to be like them. Mostly it's because he thinks it would be a good way to get girls. But partly
it's because these guys seem to have more fun being themselves than he does being himself.

"Uh, sorry I smelled your girlfriend's underwear," Cullen says. He doesn't sound all that sorry. He's just
reacting to the length of the pause.

"Well," Gid says carefully, "I did spend the whole ride up here trying to forget her. Maybe letting some guy smell
her underwear is a step in the right direction."

Wait. He wasn't trying to forget her. He was trying to forget feeling guilty about not remembering her.

Nicholas, still unpacking, is mostly faced the other way, but Gid can see the side of his mouth. He smiled. He

smiled at one of Gid's jokes.

Gid, this is no small feat. You're my hero.

'Til tell you," he says. Cullen's eyes light up with delight, and there is a hungry glint in Nicholas's "I'll tell you, but
you have to promise
—"

"Don't tell us not to laugh. You can't tell people not to laugh," Nicholas says. "I mean, you're our roommate, and
we're going to try to like you, but if you end up embarrassing yourself, or being a complete asshole, we won't. We
can't control how we're going to feel."

"I get it," Gid says, surprising himself. "You guys are auditioning me to be your friend."

And goddamn if those two masters of confidence aren't speechless and awkward, just for a second. Gid hasn't
beaten them at their own game, not by a long shot. But at least he's told them he knows what they're playing. The kid
from Virginia is surprisingly smart. And the smarter they get, the cuter they get.

Because we're not like guys. The whole thong thing. Please. It's a pair of friggin' underwear. The most mundane thing in the world. But who am I to stop the magic? Who am I at all?

_{the bet}

They are nice enough to ease Gid's pain with some bourbon. "From the bar on my grandfathers boat," Cullen says.

"My grandfather has a boat," Gid says, enjoying the warm burn in his chest.

"Really?" Cullen says, pouring another small belt into Gid's mug. "My grandfather's is a forty-two-foot
Chris-Craft. What's yours?"

Gid's grandfather keeps a twelve-foot Starcraft with a twenty-horsepower Mercury outboard in his garage in
Manassas. He sometimes fishes for bass in the Potomac. "Let's just say it doesn't have a bar," Gid says. Cullen
nods. Nicholas, Gid is pleased to see, smiles again. He's smoking pot, but not drinking. He only drinks when there's
Guinness available, he says. A predictable eccentricity.

Gid's eagerness to be their friend is so understandable to me. Say what you want about these guys, they are charming mother-fuckers. Even though I've been making fun of them, I may already be friends with them, and if I'm not, if they wanted to be friends with me, I don't think I could say no. Gid loves the way the smoky liquor softens his
pot buzz. The room is so warm and foggy now that it feels almost tropical.

Cullen removes the thong from his pocket and tosses it to Gid.

Gideon sits down on his own bed and draws his legs up, Indian style. He holds the underwear. "My girlfriend
back in Fairfax was named Danielle Rogal," he says. "She lived down the street from me."

"God, this is great!" Cullen shouts.

Gideon shifts uncomfortably.

"I'm serious," Cullen says. "Don't leave anything out. What kind of body did she have?"

Gideon squeezes the underwear, thinking of Danielle's bare olive skin and sincere hazel eyes, which became
more sincere, often disturbingly, the more naked she became. "Thin, maybe three inches shorter than me, normal,
uh...chest," he says. "Dark hair. Anyway...uh..." Telling this story can't possibly enhance his reputation. But he's
already started.

"I actually had no idea how long we'd been going out," Gid continues. "But when we were saying good-bye, she
told me we had been going out for seven months, two weeks, and three days." This gets a snicker from the crowd,
and from me too. Girls are supposed to be bad at math, but we're excellent at counting. "So, the night before I
left...Well. I guess I should go back."

Cullen rubs his hands together with coarse greed. "Only if it involves anything remotely dirty!" Nicholas is flat
on his back again. With every outburst from Cullen, his eyes dart to the side in annoyance.

"So once we'd been together for about two months, we basically started doing everything," says Gid. "But she
always had her clothes on. Her pants had some weird thing about them...where I would have my hand in them, and
they would kind of...expand?"

Nicholas and Cullen don't know, either.

Is he talking about
Lycra?
Oh my God. Guys are such retards!

"But she never took her clothes off, and then..."

Cullen leaps off the bed, screeching as if in pain. "For how long did she never take her clothes off?" he asks.
He holds his head, bracing himself for the answer.

What, Gid wonders, has Cullen so confused and upset? "The whole time. The whole time we were...until the
night before." Gid looks helplessly at Nicholas.

"No!!!"
Cullen wails. "That's so horrible!"

"Cullen, just let him fucking finish," Nicholas says. "I think that what Gid's saying is that they did a lot of shit for a few months, but she always had her clothes on. I think it's sort of a boarding-school thing to just get totally naked
and go for it."

Gid wants to know more about boarding school and nudity but doesn't know how to ask without sounding too
eager.

"So the night before. We're in her basement."

"Don't leave out all the details," Nicholas advises. "I like a little atmosphere."

"Ass-mosphere!" says Cullen. "You like that?"

"The carpeting was green, shag. Her couch was like, tweed or something. And upstairs, I could hear her
brother, Kevin, getting himself a bowl of ice cream. I knew something was different because her parents were out at a Kiwanis dance and her brother, he won't come downstairs because of his mold allergy..."

"Okay," Nicholas says. "Details can overwhelm."

Strangely, Gid is enjoying himself. Being the center of attention. "So sure enough, instead of just, like,
unzipping her pants and, like, letting her bra just kind of hang off of her, she just jumps off and takes off all her
clothes."

"Fucking finally!" Cullen shouts.

"Quiet!" Nicholas commands. His eyes take on that lightness, that sea-under-the-sun quality that indicates his
rare excitement. "This is when it all happens."

This is indeed when it all happens. Gid takes what he hopes is a courage-stealing sip from his mug of bourbon.
Stalling, he reads it.
Midvale: Class of
78
Twenty-fifth Reunion.
Cullen's dad went to school here too? Gid
continues through a pang of outsiderness. "She's naked. Except for these." He holds up the underwear. "And she
says, looking right at me, It's time.'"

Cullen jumps up and sits down, jumps up and sits down, delighted. Nicholas nods and smirks with real pleasure.
Gid had been willing himself to say that Danielle said, "I want you to do it to me." But he chickened out. He's glad
they're enjoying the story, but he can't help kicking himself, wishing he had the balls to embellish, make it even better.

"So was this the first you'd heard of it?" Cullen asks. "Were you like, 'What's it time for, cookies and ice
cream?'"

"Oh no," Gid says. "I knew what she meant. She had said, 1 want my first time to be with you.' But I thought that
was, you know, for some future date."

Nicholas and Cullen nod to each other. Gid senses vague, if not entirely genuine, approval. He also hopes this
is over.

"How many girls have said that to you?" Nicholas asks Cullen.

"I don't know, eight? But each time I hear it, it's like the first time all over again."

"That's not true," Gid says, before he can control himself.

"Which part?" Cullen asks. He smiles. Gid watches him. His smile is innocent. This is a guy, Gid realizes, who
could persuade a girl to part with just about anything.

Everything about Cullen suggests that Gid is one hundred percent right about this.

"They all say the same thing?" Gid asks.

"No," Cullen whispers. "Each one says the same thing very differently."

I would bet my place in Gideon's head that Cullen is lying.

"Did you two do it or not?" Nicholas asks. So it's not over.

Gid can't run away from the truly interesting, incriminating part of the story any longer. This is bad for him but good for the story. "We...started to, I mean, that was definitely the idea. I mean, I tried to get it off her, and then, you
know, I couldn't, so we just kept doing it, but I kept fussing with the underwear,
and..."
He trails off. "I don't know how
to say this."

"Let me help you," Nicholas says. "The underwear, and not what the underwear promised, ended up being the
thing that ultimately drove you...urn...over the edge. The underwear, and not the thing that the underwear promised,
was the place where this particular spasm"
—he lets the pure phonetics of the word sink in for a second, the soft S
coming up against the harder
M—
"of passion found its final resting place."

"What ever!" Cullen says. "I come on girls' underwear all the time."

Gid winces.

"Dumbass," Nicholas says. "It's because he's a virgin."

"No way," says Cullen. "That sucks."

"I don't think I am technically a virgin," Gid protests.

Gid knows he told a good story. But good story or not, this virgin label, if at all possible, has to go.

He reaches for the bourbon, hoping to loosen the tightness growing in his rib cage.

"Not so fast," Nicholas says. "It's not Mountain Dew."

Cullen takes a few shirts to his bureau and drops them in a drawer. Everything he owns is old, cotton, and
ripped in such a way so as to casually display his incredible physique. Gid decides that he likes Cullen, but that his
particular brand of cockiness is going to become extremely annoying. "1 don't think I am technically a virgin," he
repeats.

"None of this matters," Nicholas says shortly. "What matters is what you, or rather we, do with these
underwear. And I say, these underwear are a challenge."

Cullen agrees, "Yes! A challenge. Absolutely!"

Nicholas continues, "These underwear don't ask a question about the past. They ask a question about the
future. Who cares whether you sort of got laid? When are you definitely going to get laid?" Nicholas paces the room,
warming to his subject. He stops, facing Gideon with almost military precision. "I say the end of the year. June. It
seems like a long time, but really, when you think about the fact that you have the rest of your life to have sex, it's not
so bad."

"December!" Cullen shouts. "No, fuck that. He's going to get laid by Halloween." Cullen leaps onto the bed on
his stomach again and humps it. "Workin' overtime!" he shouts.

Gideon wonders what this carnal outburst is regarding. I know it's really just that. A carnal outburst.

"I have to say I am impressed that the girl offered to have sex with you without your asking for it," Nicholas
says. "Lack of desperation bodes well for your long-term success."

"Thanks," says Gideon, thinking, that's not the right thing to say to someone who thinks that even in an
environment teeming with luscious girls, it's going to take you a whole ten months to get laid.

Now Nicholas does something really cold. He turns to Gideon and sizes him up. "The white Chuck Taylor
low-tops are trying too hard to be old-school; the jeans are too neat. The shirt is the same
color
as the jeans, so you
kind of look like a blueberry."

Cullen nods slowly, impressed. "Great call. But I still believe in October."

Okay, I feel bad that they said Gid looks like a blueberry. But I'm not going to say it's not true.

"You're just not doable yet," says Nicholas. "And that's not, like, me, that's just the truth of the universe filtering
through me."

Oh God. Now, that is too mean. Girls have nothing on boys when it comes to outright cruelty. Behind-the-back
stuff, we're better with that, sure. But saying it right to your face? Boys rule on that one.

"You've made your point; I've made mine. I say Gideon gets laid by the end of October," says Cullen.

"I say no way," Nicholas says. "But he definitely gets laid by June."

"I think you're making a mistake there," Cullen says. He backs up, and they regard Gid once again. "If he
doesn't get laid by the end of October, I say there's no way he gets laid by June. I think you either have it or you
don't."

"And
I think that you definitely don't have it yet, but you could have it," Nicholas says. "So, to reiterate, you say
by October or never. I say not by October, but definitely by June."

"I believe we have clearly defined our terms," Cullen says.

They shake hands.

"Wait a minute," Gid says. "You guys are making a bet about me?" He's still holding the underwear in his hand.
God, that trip to the bathroom. That was his first mistake. The underwear would have been safe in his drawer, and
they'd be talking about...Forget it, Gideon, the truth is, something equally awful probably would have happened. "I
don't know. I mean, obviously, I'm going to try to have sex with girls, right. But I'd prefer to not have anything riding on
it. I think it might...mess me up."

Cullen and Nicholas eye each other nervously. I can see that partly they don't want to hurt Gid's feelings. But
also that they really want this bet. Bets are fun. Nicholas said he hoped they could find some way to entertain
themselves this year, and this is it. "If you're going to be doing it anyway," Nicholas says, "what does it matter if we
have an interest in it?" That was a pretty smart way of presenting it to Gid. Making him the star of the show.

"Last year, we bet our friend Liam Wu that he couldn't have sex with both Marcy Proctor and Erica Dewey,
who were roommates, in the same week, in their room. We gave him a month to do it," Cullen said.