I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly Page A

skin, and green eyes. She’d been born in South Africa and had never quite lost her accent, never quite fit in. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a red sweater and short white shorts, picking her way through the grass between the girls’ dormitory and the path to the dining hall like a prey animal warily crossing an unsheltered space. She had a low tolerance for bullshit, so we had clashed early and gone our separate ways.
    We wound up in an environmental studies class together my final semester. She was outspoken and insightful in class, and, well, she had always been beautiful. I noticed her thin, freckled arm resting on the table one day and wondered if she had freckles everywhere. We began studying together, and then we were “studying together,” and then I was trying to get her to be my girlfriend. We made out ferociously a couple of times, but then she refused.
    â€œIt’s just that . . . I feel like you treat me as a woman first and as a person second. I want to be a person.”
    I couldn’t get my head around what she was saying. I liked her, she liked me, what was the problem? Finally, I gave up. I wanted her in my life, and I wanted her in my room, hanging out with me while we did our homework. If she wouldn’t deign to be my girlfriend, I would force myself to endure that humiliation.
    The next night I told her, okay, no funny business; we would just be friends. She seemed surprised, but then she settled in. We worked late into the night. I had taken ephedrine to study, as I often did, but something went wrong that night, and it just made me feel feverish and tired. I felt like I was going to pass out. I told her to go ahead and keep studying, that I was just going to lie down for a minute.
    Riley woke me up later. All the lights were off. She was crawling into my bed naked. Afterward, we fell asleep in each other’s arms. The next morning, I had her sit on the couch while I played “What a Wonderful World” for her, the Nick Cave/Shane McGowan version. It began to snow, and we sat on the couch together and watched the snow come down in impossibly huge flakes.
    After that, we spent every free minute together in my room. Riley was intelligent and caring, but cruelty was only ever one word away. When she was on top, I imagined her spine as a finely detailed poisonous millipede under my fingers, delicate as it was dangerous. I talked down about her to my friends, but I was crazy about her. She kept me on my toes.
    â€œYou make me feel like I’m in a movie,” she said one day.
    â€œLike I’m Indiana Jones and you’re Willie, that dancer girl?”
    â€œWhy do you always get to be Indy?” she said.
    We fought. My high school experience was a wound that hadn’t healed; hers had been a rosy crescendo. Riley had been one of the popular girls, a member of the court at the senior prom when she was just a sophomore. She had lost her virginity to her boyfriend Randy, three years older than she, on Valentine’s Day, after the Valentine’s Day Dance. “It was just perfectly romantic,” she told me with faraway eyes.
    Randy was older, stronger, cooler, just all-round better , the boyfriend I could never be. His primacy in her heart was unquestionable as, shortly after he had joined the Marine Corps, he had been found dead. They declared it suicide, but Riley was convinced it was foul play. She spoke of him constantly, lovingly, and chastened me for sulking: I had nothing to worry about from him, he was dead , couldn’t I just appreciate what a great guy he had been?
    One night, she related to me how she had been sexually abused as a child and then date-raped by one of Randy’s friends after a drunken campfire party after Randy had enlisted. If that weren’t hard enough for her sheltered, seventeen-year-old boyfriend to process, she then detailed how she had gone back home on her first break after entering Simon’s