college boys by brittany ackerman

I. Your dog watched us have sex from the corner of the room.

You had the nicest apartment I’d ever seen off campus. When we stopped hooking up, all my friends were mad at me. They no longer had an open invite to your frat. It was their favorite place to party. I had thought you might be my date to formal, but something held me back from wanting more.

II. After college, you grew out your hair. It was longer than mine when I met you again for sushi on Hollywood Boulevard. We walked back to your place to smoke and passed a brick building painted yellow. I touched the wall as we ambled by. You lived in the attic of an old house you shared with five other people. When I looked out the window, I saw the street below us unfold like a rolled out tongue.

III. You ate hot wings while I told you I wanted a relationship. The sauce was all over your mouth and you didn’t bother to wipe it off. We sat on stools in a sports bar and I sipped on a Diet Coke. You walked me home and told me it wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t cry, but I sat on the porch for a long time after you left and tried to figure out how I might play it cool to win you back.

IV. We met in a nonfiction class, memoir specifically. We read books about people’s lives and one day I asked to bum a cigarette. It was January and we wore our warmest winter coats. I remember your blue beanie, how tufts of your blonde hair stuck out and I wanted to feel them. For a while, things were easy between us. When they got too complicated, you had to let me go.

V. Freshman year. I forget how I met you, but I went to your dorm room every night and let you feel me up. We never kissed, but I was lonely and my boyfriend was such a fuck up. He never knew about you. No one did. We once drove to the woods at night and I thought it might be the end, the end of my life. You drove so recklessly. I stopped going to see you. I broke up with my boyfriend, but then we got back together.

VI. You had a heroin problem but told me you had recovered. When we went for dinner, you drank ten beers and fell asleep in the booth. I drove your car back to my sorority and you slept in the parking lot for I don’t know how long. In the morning, your car was gone. I had to see you in poetry workshop for the rest of the semester. The following semester I saw you again. I was with my friends and I pointed to you from across the bar. Right then you vomited into your lap and we all looked away.

VII. At the stoplight party, you wore green. I wore yellow because I wasn’t sure. No one talked to me that night. Red meant someone was taken, but only green filled the room. I stuck out like a sore thumb. I wanted to go to your room and talk. You kept telling me Okay, later. You made out with a girl from another house on the dance floor. The next day, you apologized, but it didn’t change anything. Not really, anyway.

VIII. You had already graduated a year before. I was still a senior. Everyone went to Puerto Vallarta for spring break, but I visited you in Los Angeles. We drove around the city, looked at apartments together. There was one that had a huge sliding glass door that let out to a private patio. We never lived there, but when I opened the door, I imagined the rest of our lives together. I imagined a pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade that we would share. I imagined the sun on my face. I imagined sitting with you in silence.

IX. You showed me your penis at the biggest party of the year. You said you wanted to talk, that you were sad the year was over and we wouldn’t see each other all the time anymore. You were like a big brother to me. We’d been friends all four years of college. We never did anything beyond joking around and talking shit. You pulled down your basketball shorts and I saw a spongy pale thing hanging there, flaccid and useless. Your face paint was dripping. You were sweating so hard.

X. I knew it wouldn’t work out when I got into a car accident and you called my mom and told her I was overreacting. You moved to New York and I moved to the opposite coast. I visited you once. We walked through Central Park and I texted someone else. You called me a slut at dinner and I looked down into my bowl of spaghetti. Your mouth was purple from too much wine. I wonder if you ever found your way. I’m still finding mine.

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University.  She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension, The Porch, Catapult, HerStry, Write or Die, and Lighthouse Writers.  She currently teaches writing at Vanderbilt University in the English Department.  She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, MUTHA, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel, The Brittanys, is out now with Vintage. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.