Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn (5 page)

Marcy Proctor! That's the girl from this afternoon! She's pretty. And she was the only one who was vaguely
nice to him during his father's asinine little episode. "Well, did he pull it off?" Gideon asks, hoping for a no. Poor
sweet little Marcy Proctor.

"It took him three weeks," Nicholas says, smiling at the memory. "But he did them both...on the same day."

Gideon sits down on his bed. Liam Wu. "What does Liam Wu look like?"

Nicholas, as Gideon suspected he would, describes the Asian guy who honked at him this afternoon.

"He did that? You guys bet him that he couldn't do it, and he did, just for fun?"

Cullen looks at Nicholas, who shrugs. "Well," Cullen says, "we did give him Nicholas's mom's car. But look,
what he was doing was really, really something to pull off. I mean, it was truly magical. Stunning entertainment. What
you're going to do is what you're going to be doing anyway. Or trying to do."

"You gave him Nicholas's car?" Gideon and I are on the same page. Shocked about the car, also shocked that
Liam Wu was so handsomely rewarded for pussy hounding.

"Yep," Cullen says. "He wouldn't do it otherwise."

"Well," Gideon says, "I won't do this. Not even for a car."

Though we are both wondering what kind of car it is.

Nicholas sidles up to Cullen and whispers to him. Cullen scowls, shakes his head, and whispers back. "Excuse
us, won't you, for just a minute?" Cullen hides the bourbon under his bed. As he's doing so, his cell phone rings.
"Answer that," he says to Gideon, then adds, "please." He and Nicholas leave.

Cullen has a silver flip phone. The caller ID says
Madison.
Before Gid can even say hello, a young female
voice asks, "How's the new kid?"

God, this girl sounds pretty. Her voice is teasing, with a little layer of gravel in it. Gid bets she smokes, and
even though he's watched a lot of filmstrips and ads that tell him to think otherwise, he finds this sexy. "I am the new
kid," he says.

"Well, I
guess he must not hate you, 'cause he let you answer his phone," the girl says.

"Yes," Gid says, "I guess."

"Are you guys going to come over tonight?" the girl asks. "Oh shit, I gotta go."

Cullen comes back into the room first. Nicholas follows. "That was someone called Madison," he tells Cullen.
"She wants us to come over."

Cullen nods and starts to pack himself another bowl.

"We've decided that if you get laid by October, we're going to give you the car," Nicholas says. Cullen does a
little dance, a sidestep, snapping his fingers, swinging his arms in little loops.

"What car?" Gid says. "Is there another car?"

"The car is the car is the car," Cullen says, twirling around. "A 1991 seven-series BMW. Sunroof. Five-speed,
of course."

Holy shit. The
car that honked at him today.

"You can drive a standard?"

"Of course," Gideon says.

Thank God. That whole both-hands-on-the-steering-wheel thing is so Rust Belt.

"But you guys gave Liam the car, right?" Gid says.
"You
can't just take it away from him."

"Sure we can," Cullen says breezily. "By the way, this is a cool car, but it's also white. So it's not like, wow,
totally bad ass. But you definitely should win it."

Gideon imagines a world where he has proved to his roommates he can get laid, actually gotten laid, and won the prior instrument of his humiliation. This is a world he wants to live in. It seems too good to be true. And of course,
well, none of it has happened, but it could, right?

"You guys are going to give me the car? That's great," he says.

"Well, I wouldn't go out and buy your BMW racing jacket yet," Nicholas says darkly.

"Ha! Yeah!" Cullen says. "Better get some condoms first, and see if you use one of them."

Gid thinks about the girls on the quad. There were so many pretty ones. One of them is going to have to like
him, right?

"I think this calls for a celebration," Cullen declares, pulling out the camera from this afternoon. Nicholas looks
unenthusiastic but dutifully lines up for a pose, with Gideon in the middle.

Cullen holds out the camera with his impossibly long arm. Gid feels good here, flanked by his roommates. Then
the flash goes off, and it occurs to him he's in the middle not as a gesture of support or affection, but because of
symmetry. He's the shortest.

"Wait a minute," he says. "What do you guys get? Your bet is about me, but you're betting each other, right?"

Uneasy glances pass between Cullen and Nicholas.

"Uh," Nicholas stammers, "if I win, then I get the car back."

"Wait a minute," Gid says. "Doesn't your mother know the car's missing?"

I had the same question.

"She never leaves New York," Nicholas says. "She never leaves our neighborhood."

Gid looks at Cullen, who nods.

"Anyway," Nicholas says, "Liam knows that he might have to give it back. He just won't ever know why.
It's
our
secret. He knows we're going to do something like this, but he just doesn't know what."

Gid likes the "our secret" part, but he's still not settled on this.

"Okay," he says. "So what does Cullen get if he wins?"

Cullen claps his hands together, his face brightens with eagerness. But Nicholas shoots him a stern look. He
says one word: "No."

And that's the end of that conversation. Strangely, the refusal to divulge this last detail has made Gideon more,
not less, interested in the bet.

more girls, more guys

Gid's so up and down; sometimes he likes himself, sometimes he doesn't. He's complicated. Most guys are so
uncomplicated. They're either total nerds who look about ready to dive under the rug, or they're jock assholes who
strut around like they own the world. Gid struggles with his ego. It makes me think that I could tell him anything.

I think I might have a little crush on him. But I get a lot of crushes.

On the short walk to dinner with Cullen and Nicholas, their fellow students spot them, admire, and clear to the
side as they pass. Gid feels like he's riding the crest of a wave. Gideon sees beautiful girls
—a swaying mane of
chestnut hair here, a perfect jawline there, a set of luminous green eyes—and these girls are looking at
him.
It
occurs to him that the attention is because of Cullen and Nicholas, but he pushes that out of his mind.

The bet scares him. But the bet is also fun, because Nicholas and Cullen made it up, and being around them, even on their terms, well, it's fairly enjoyable. Gid didn't ask to room with the coolest guys on campus, but since that's what happened, well, he'd be a fool to turn his back on the opportunity. Plus, he doesn't totally believe the bet's real.

"Start looking around. I know you can do October, buddy, but you're going to have to be proactive," Cullen
says. He claps him on the back and strolls ahead. He sneaks up behind a girl with black hair, dressed in pink satin pants and a tight white tank top, and puts his hands over her eyes. The girl stops and runs her hands up his arms,
then squeals, turns around, and hugs him. Cullen slips his hands inside the back of her pants, and she doesn't flinch.

That, Gideon, is a lot to live up to.

Gid turns to see if Nicholas is paying any attention to Cullen's antics, but he's clasped his hands behind his
back, with a faraway look in his eyes. A blonde girl, medium height, athletic, and tan, falls into step beside him. "Hey,"
she says. She's wearing running shoes and blue-and-white-striped pants with a soccer ball stitched over the upper
thigh.

"Hi," Nicholas says, not even looking at her.

So Cullen is the flirt. Nicholas is the strong silent type. I just need to find my thing, Gid thinks. How hard can that
be?

It can be pretty hard, Gid. I mean, I'm falling for you, but I'm not sure I'm normal.

"I'm Erica,'
⁷
the blonde girl says, leaning across Nicholas. She's extremely healthy and Nordic-looking.

"Hi," Gid says. "I'm..."

"I know who you are," she says. "You're new. Madison talked to you on the phone. Madison's my best friend."

Gideon and I both think it's weird how girls are always identifying themselves as each other's best friends. Of
course, I do it too. Hey! Maybe I just did.

Erica touches one of her blonde braids self-consciously and her blue eyes dart nervously in Nicholas's
direction, but Nicholas appears to be daydreaming. She gives Gid a quick smile and takes off. Even just running to
catch up with her friends, she has a studied, symmetrical athleticism to her gait.

Erica. "She's one of the girls from Liam's bet?" Gid whispers to Nicholas.

"Yep," Nicholas says. "She sure is."

Just as they're about to go inside, Cullen doubles back and joins them. "Whew, Lucy is hot. I'm hooking up with
her later. Oh, and by the way, that dorm
—" Gid follows Cullen's finger to a building at the far end of the quad, not
unlike their dorm, but older. "That's Emerson...that's the weirdo chick dorm. The Virgin Dorm. See how it's all pretty
and pristine? Unlike where our friends live." He turns around, showing Gid the dorm he pointed out before.

"White," says Gid, to show that he has been listening.

"We call it White Wedding," Cullen says, punching Nicholas on the arm. Nicholas doesn't react and walks a
few paces ahead.

"Don't worry about him," Cullen says. "He needs more alone time than a community like this affords."

The dining hall is one vast space with maybe eighty round tables and two doorways
—one where students line
up and the other where they emerge with their trays. Gideon was really hoping for something more grand, maybe
with higher ceilings, or more dark wood. It's not much nicer than his high school cafeteria, and the smell and
sound—cheap wheat bread and bananas, clinking silverware and ice thundering into squat glasses—is the same.

"So this girl that you're hooking up with that you were talking about, Lucy," Gid says to Cullen. "Have you
hooked up with her before?"

"No," Cullen says. "She's new."

"So you never talked to her before?"

I can see where Gid's going with this, and he's not going to like where it leads.

"No, not before tonight. Wait...I'll catch up with you in a second." Cullen takes off.

So wait a minute. Gid would never dispute that Cullen's better with girls than he is, but according to the terms of
the bet, Cullen believes he can get laid sixty times faster than Gideon, and Nicholas, even worse, thinks Cullen can
get laid two hundred times faster!

Gideon finds Nicholas waiting in the food line with his tray and silverware. He tells Gideon exactly what I would
tell him if I could.

"I wouldn't think of it that way," he says, and, after accepting a scoop of rice, moves along.

Poor Gid looks miserably at a middle-aged cafeteria worker, with vapor covering her bifocals, poised to drop a greasy chicken breast onto his plate. He thinks she has some kind of weird skin disease. Gid, that's a hairnet. "How
else should I think of it?" Gid says, out loud to no one in particular, nodding yes for the chicken, nodding again for
rice.

Gideon finds Nicholas at the salad bar, where he is loading his plate with chickpeas and sunflower seeds. "Did
you know," he asks, gesturing at the chicken on Gideon's plate, "that when an animal is slaughtered, it feels fear,
and we're essentially eating that fear?"

I've heard this before and think that is total crap. But Gid thinks about the bet and how he never even asked out a girl in his whole life. Not even Danielle, who just wrote "I like u" to him on a Post-it note, then went to second base with him that very day. He throws the chicken away and decides not to eat chicken until the day he gets laid.

Gideon fills a beige plastic bowl with lettuce. "Put some beans in," Nicholas says. "You need some protein."

Now Nicholas is examining a bunch of bananas in a stainless-steel bowl, with oranges and some Red
Delicious apples. "Don't eat those," he warns. "Nonorganic bananas are the worst." He takes an apple and smells it.
"Pesticides," he says, putting it down. He takes an orange. "Look," he says. "It's all going to be okay."

Nicholas cocks his head and Gid follows him, wondering, exactly, as I am, What is so okay about this? Nothing
could be further from okay.

They pass a table of plain brown-haired girls who look like they're actually in prep school to study, a table of
foreign students arguing and holding straws in their hands like cigarettes, a table of pretty, thin girls who eat slowly
and deliberately to make their tiny amounts of food last. Again, Gideon can feel people looking at him. He has never,

ever felt so visible.

To his right, about five tables over, he sees the girls from earlier in the day. Molly and Edie. The blonde, Marcy,
isn't with them. He guesses that Molly and Edie are those sort of pretty but not spectacular girls who prefer each
other's company to all others.

Twenty paces ahead, under a round window looking out on White, is Cullen. In front of him is an ugly heap of
casserole and he holds a large spoon in his hand like a child. And next to him is Liam Wu. Across from them is a
chubby redheaded guy with a gap between his two front teeth.

Gid and Nicholas settle across from Cullen and Liam, next to the redhead, who, making room, gives Gid a
heavy-lidded nod and a wave. Liam Wu's perfect head moves, almost imperceptibly, in greeting. If he remembers
Gid, he's not saying so. Tm Devon," says the redheaded kid. He's wearing a Brian Jonestown Massacre T-shirt
and smells like Fab detergent and pot.

Cullen picks up one of the four glasses of chocolate milk that he's got lined up on his tray. He presses a finger
to his lips. Gid understands he's reminding him they're not telling Liam or Devon about the bet. This is a relief.
Gideon tries to eat
—the other boys aren't talking at all, just grimly bolting their food—but he can't keep his eyes off
all these pretty girls. One with miraculously soft brown eyes, her pale hair piled on top of her head, stands ten feet
away, looking for a table. Another, red-haired, in a purple halter top showing off freckled cleavage, stands up from
her seat and waves to someone at the salad bar.

As gut-wrenching as it was for him to look at these girls this afternoon from the car, now it is much, much
worse. What with the time constraints and "not doable" comments and all. He steals a glance at Liam. God, he's so handsome. It's not fair. Gid closes his eyes and envisions Liam handing him the keys to Nicholas's mother's car.

I wonder if this is another trick from
Journal of the Zen Hut

"Olivia Hill is looking good this year," Cullen says.

How, Gideon wonders, is he able to pick one out for compliments? "A lot of these girls are really pretty," he
says.

"They're not girls," Cullen corrects him. "They're opportunities."

Nicholas shoots him a look like,
Don't give anything away.

Liam Wu picks up a glass of cranberry juice and drinks the entire thing. "I totally disagree on the Olivia Hill
thing."

"What do you know, you have slanted eyes," says Cullen. "I bet you can't even see out of them."

Devon chokes on his food, laughing. Even Nicholas laughs. Gideon wants to laugh but isn't sure how to laugh
at a joke like this. He can't believe it's allowed. He liked it, but it scared him.

"Don't eat too much," Liam says. "You don't want to get filled up."

"Why not?" Cullen says.

"You'll want to save some room," Liam says, "for my cock." He smirks and looks up from his tray. His
handsomeness, the way his cheekbones pulse as he talks, hits Gideon like a pool cue to the gut.

After the laughter dies down, Gideon gets up the nerve to ask who Olivia Hill is. Liam Wu angles his head and
says, "Orange shirt, two o'clock."

Gid finds the orange shirt in a sea of shirts, blooming with breasts and offsetting soft skin. Its wearer is a tall
girl with dark hair and eyes; she's getting a cup of tea. She looks English.

Gid wonders if this is perhaps just because she's getting tea. But she has rosy cheeks and light skin, and she
appears reserved, in a sexy way.

"Jesus," he says, "I think she's gorgeous."

This hurts a little. I wish Gid would only look at me and think that.

"Start with something smaller," Nicholas says.

"You mean a smaller girl?" Gid asks.

"Smaller like a big cookie," Devon says.

"But not a chocolate cookie," says Liam, drinking another glass of cranberry juice.

Everyone except Gid laughs. There's clearly some chocolate cookie joke that Gid will never know about.

Liam guzzles another glass of cranberry juice. Cullen says in a girlish voice, "At first I thought...but then I
thought," and everyone laughs again.

Except Gid.

Gid is hungry. What am I going to do without meat, he wonders.

"No,"
Nicholas says. "Seriously. What I meant was, a girl in your league."

What's really sad is that he kind of said this to be nice. He felt bad at all the inside joking, and he was trying to
be briefly earnest about what he'd meant by starting with something smaller. Yes, that's what passes for nice around
here.

On the walk back to the room, Cullen starts talking to some girl with her hair tied up in a red bandana. They fall
behind. Gid looks back forlornly. He knows that neither Cullen nor Nicholas has really decided to be his friend yet,
but at least Cullen is easy to talk to. Nicholas is cryptic. Nicholas is intimidating. But Gid has to think of something to
say to him. Shit, even his father would be able to think of something to say right now. It would be stupid, but it would
be something. He thinks about Nicholas telling him what to eat. Could he start a conversation with that? He looks out
onto the quad for inspiration. He sees a lot of bare legs. That works.