Open by Lisa Moore

thing might qualify as big. Maybe she was in love with him. Love might be enough to explain the portentous anxiety he felt.
    Lyle had been sleeping with girls since he was thirteen. He’d been an altar boy early Sunday mornings, carrying smoking incense in an ornate silver and blood-dark glass container that hung from chains and banged against his red and white polyester robes as he walked, listening to guitar and folk hymns, and though he’d intuited the cloying menace, the oily funk of lust from a few older, eccentric men who somehow hung around the same places he did — behind the new Kmart on Topsail Road, the rectory, the pool at St. Augustine’s — he had managed to avoid overt unpleasantness. He’d developed a guiltless and generous sexuality.
    For instance: he’d had sex in a mouldy rec room that had a black, vinyl-padded bachelor bar ordered from the Sears catalogue and a plaid couch with dangerous springs, while pressing a glass painted with hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs, grey with dope smoke, to his mouth, sucking it so the rim left awhite circle on his face when he pried the glass away. The girl had drawn a heart with his name in ballpoint pen beneath her white school blouse. Sex in a friend’s bedroom with a black light and black velvet KISS posters. The girl had green, greasy eyeliner and a bottle of Blue Nun, Donovan sang about the season of the witch, and his friends played Dungeons and Dragons in the next room. Sex in a pickup near a field full of fog and horses. He and the girl were washed in a bath of red light, and before he knew what was happening a cop rapped on the steamed-over window. When Lyle lowered it, the cop stuck a flashlight in and swivelled it around, catching the girl’s breast, her naked foot. In the field beside them, a white horse had tossed its head, snorted, and trotted away into the fog. Once he’d taken some acid with a friend and two sixteen-year-old twin girls in a prefab cabin just beyond the overpass. He and his friend were sitting on one bed and the girls were sitting opposite them, a case of beer at their feet, when the twins’ father crashed through the door with a rifle. The door hit the wall and the cabin shuddered, a watercolour of a moose in Bowring Park swung back and forth from the jolt. The moose’s jaw fell, and moss and water poured into the lake at his knees, gently rippling the surface. The pink wallpaper expanded like bubblegum, stretching until it was a concave membrane, semi-transparent. Lyle hallucinated the trees behind the wall and the path to the mini-golf castle and duck pond, and he was confident he could simply step through to the other side if the screaming father took aim.
    So, up to this point, he’d had lots of sex but he knewnothing about girls. Everything about them — the elaborate knowledge they had of each other’s emotional states, how whole oceans of thought could be traversed in a gesture, the sophisticated designs of cruelty they visited upon each other without prompting — he didn’t understand any of it. This ignorance gave him courage now, walking in the storm toward the university.
    By the time he got to the campus it was deserted. Lyle thought Rachel probably wouldn’t show up. He promised himself that if he escaped this time he’d never take another chance, feeling in one moment that he meant it, promising God, his mother. Knowing in the next moment, watching his body wobble like the flame of a candle reflected in the chemistry building windows, that if he did escape, it was a promise he’d forget instantly.
    Rachel was the only person in the cafeteria, except a janitor at the far end of the room putting the orange chairs upside down on the tables. The fluorescent lights thrummed. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a marijuana leaf on the front. There was a bran muffin in front of her on a Styrofoam plate. A plastic glass of juice with the foil lid folded back. She was wearing dark sunglasses, and when he saw