The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley Page B

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    Over the next few weeks, the Boxer and I saw each other in class every couple of days, and he acted as though he’d done nothing wrong. Of course, I refused to discuss the things I thought he’d done wrong. I had no intention of giving him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d messed me up.
    I banished my heart to Baden-Baden, where I directed her to wear a bright bathing costume, take the waters, and read peacefully plodding, romantic novels by E. M. Forster. Instead, she lurked sarcastically in a cabana, savagely pinching the pool boys when they were too slow in bringing the refreshments she incessantly rang for. She clutched dog-eared copies of The Stranger, Death in Venice, and The Last Temptation of Christ (look where love got him ), and spent the entire day meticulously decrying everything on earth. She refused to shed her dark glasses, slugged down pitchers of stiff drinks, and occasionally laughed in sardonic barks. In the evenings, she’d get herself up in bugle-beaded, bias-cut satin. She’d languish delicately on a fainting couch, until some man was fool enough to ask her to dance, at whichpoint she’d eviscerate him with her smile, fling his entrails to the spaniels, and request that the band play a tango. She was Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, and Dorothy Parker rolled into one. If, however, I accidentally allowed her to take the dark glasses off, she turned without warning into the post-lobotomy Frances Farmer, and I had to dash from the room. She wasn’t healed. Not by a long shot. I had hurt feelings, but I pretended I cared nothing about anything.
    To bolster that notion, I went with the Princelings to Japanese restaurants, ate raw fish, and engaged in a sort of bizarre verbal ménage à trois. I flirted openly with them during class, while the Boxer watched with slitted eyes. It seemed he was jealous. He’d been attracted to me, after all. One of the boys? Ha! I was so not a boy. Never mind that Princeling Two was gayt. Never mind that Princeling One was stray, and too good looking for his height of roughly five foot four.
    PRINCELING ONE WAS NINETEEN, which meant that he called me an “older woman.” I was still young enough that I thought that was funny. He had black hair, blue eyes, and a constant tan. He was from Florida.
    Princeling Two was from a Kansas family furniture empire, and so deep in the closet that he was basically a cashmere sweater. He looked like a slimmer hybrid of the Campbell’s Soup Kid and Bob’s Big Boy, his hair combed into a hipster pompadour. His parents had bought him an apartment in the West Village, where he lived blissfully (and bafflingly) on deliveries of French food and cocaine.
    I was a prude when it came to drugs. I’d never even taken a drag of a cigarette. I had an idea that persons who snorted things off of hand mirrors would automatically be punished by looking like Jeremy Irons. My time with the Princelings was spent with them high and me sober. I hadn’t been around people with expensive habits before. Idaho had topped out at marijuana, and so I was both familiar with, and annoyed by, the lugubrious hilarity of the pothead. The coked-up dialogue of the Princelings wasn’t irritating to me, because I talked that fast naturally. I’d just assumed that I’d found two other people like me, at least until I learned that their hyperactivity was chemical, not innate.
    Princeling One’s parents had been drug smugglers, until his father had fallen off a sailboat and disappeared into the Atlantic. Now he had a millionaire stepfather, and owned a significant portion of Miami. I studied him as one would study a strange and somewhat rare bird, the kind of bird whose females are dusky brown and whose own plumage is sparkling and gaudy. Princeling One had slept with everyone, including Zak’s current girlfriend. He wore sexy button-down shirts and expensive pants that looked like old jeans, but were really replicas. He was beautiful,