Chapter Text
Entering her second year at Brown, Shauna believed everything was fine. Well, the classes were great for the most part. The rest was fine. Her friends were fine. Better than the ones from high school, at least. The apartment she’d just moved into was genuinely terrible, with a leaking roof and a cracked toilet liable to clog on a whim. Plus, she had no idea a shower could be so small. Moving out of the dorm was a perk, though. Her freshman-year roommate obsessed over showtunes and wrestling — likely being the only person in the world with this quite annoying co-obsession. She also slept through every alarm and liked leaving her trash on Shauna’s bed. Living with Sean, a junior she’d taken some lit classes with, seemed like a better prospect, even if he smoked weed and clove cigarettes nonstop. So her living situation was, in all honesty, fine, if not wildly overpriced.
Jeff Sadecki was perhaps the most fine element of them all, not in the way an R&B song would use the word, but just alright. He was there. She could count on him to want to hang out a few times a week, as long as they had sex at least once. He was handsome enough that she didn’t mind looking at him. He made dumb jokes, giving her a reason to laugh at him, though he thought she was laughing with him. He wasn’t smart, or even remotely pretentious, which she valued in a man specifically.
They’d met in a geology lab last spring that the student body called “Rocks for Jocks,” a nod to how easy it was as a lab science despite Brown being notoriously rigorous school. Jeff forgot a scantron on the first exam. And the next three. She always brought a few, and since his unassigned assigned seat was right next to hers, she’d handed him one each time. After the final, he tallied the four scantrons and claimed it equaled a coffee in price, “so I owe you one,” he said. Jeff was quite pleased with himself with that pickup line, but Shauna’s acquiescence was more grounded in wanting a reason to leave her room.
Shauna initially assumed he wanted to date her but soon discovered he saw her as an easy source of sex and casual companionship. Their partnership, meant as loosely as possible here, barely involved romance. Maybe they kissed hello or goodbye, and they semi-consistently cuddled after sex. Nothing else date-like ever happened than that initial coffee. They sometimes drank bottom-shelf Russian vodka mixed with thawed orange juice concentrate in the back of Jeff’s car. Most of their time was spent on a bed or couch, watching whatever awful action movie he’d picked up from Blockbuster. Occasionally, he’d sling an arm around her shoulders, a familiarity never present in their other interactions. Once, he accidentally grabbed her hand while walking her to a campus bus stop, then dropped it like he’d been burned.
Jeff made it clear, repeatedly, he didn’t want a girlfriend. He mentioned a high school girlfriend vaguely, only to emphasize how suffocated he’d felt in that relationship. And, well, Shauna didn’t really want Jeff as a boyfriend either. Hypothetically, sure, having a confidant besides her journal sounded nice, especially when she felt crushed by loneliness or confused about her emerging desires and the messy, unpredictable stirrings they elicited. Some nicer restaurants in town were simply too much to try alone or with friends, but she missed a meal that was even half as good as her mother’s cooking. Studying in the library with another person would feel great too. She was there enough alone during her work study hours, sorting through interlibrary loan books and drowning in the minutia of the Dewey Decimal system. The idea of being in the orbit of someone else, each doing their own thing together, made Shauna wistful to think about.
As un-Shauna as it sounded, she even would’ve liked to have someone to accompany her at a football game. She didn’t actually like football, but the Ivy League rivalries seemed like mindless fun that she’d never really had the opportunity to engage in. She struggled to find ways to participate in ‘traditional’ college in general. Her writing group friends were always happy to have a kickback at someone’s apartment, but nobody had ever invited Shauna to a frat party. Jeff was even in a frat and had never wanted to be seen with her around her brothers. And yes, Shauna Shipman deeply believed that frats were stupid and elitist and exclusionary. But some part of Shauna remained desperate to fit in with the cool kids, as much as she tried to repress that in herself.
Shauna resented the cool kids, truly. She hated the popular girls with their beautiful, honey-blond curls, perky breasts, legs that seemed endless under cheerleading skirts. In high school, they hadn’t sneered at her; they hadn’t looked at her at all. If they did, they looked right through her. She was invisible, non-existent. They giggled and walked past her without a second glance. Boys lined up to tote them on their arms, introduce them to friends, bring them to parties. Shauna’s exclusion stung, and the sting confused her: she hated them, yet craved acknowledgement. Hell, she craved the idea of being one of those girls and then felt a deep burning shame for wanting that.
Shauna Shipman wasn’t a trophy to be shown off, nor did she even want to be. She was Salutatorian and at an Ivy League school on a full scholarship. She’d made columnist on the school newspaper, a rare sophomore accomplishment. And she had no B grades across her entire freshman year, at that. Logically, she prided herself in these things and she glowed when her mom praised her for them. Emotionally, she felt hollow. Why did she care about approval from people she thought beneath her? Why did it hurt that Jeff never introduced her to his frat bros or invited her to a party she would have hated? Who cared if the hot cheerleader with the jock boyfriend knew that Shauna existed? Why would she want a beautiful girl in a pretty sun dress to stop and say she loved Shauna’s flannel and Doc Martens? Coming to Brown, she’d hoped to stop feeling like a failure in a social structure she didn’t understand or want to participate in. If anything, the feeling had spread even deeper into her bones.
So here she was languishing on her lumpy bed, feeling like the most pathetic person in Rhode Island. Jeff had stopped by that afternoon, clearly more excited for an empty apartment to fuck in than to see her after two months. The sex was decent enough. Her mind wandered, as it always did, to writing assignments, ceiling cracks, his weird-smelling car, old classmates with pretty hair and low cut shirts. She assumed that was just part of sex, despite how it was portrayed in the romance novels she’d steal from her mom’s bedside table when she pulled overnight shifts. Jeff was the only person Shauna had slept with, so she didn’t have much to actually base this on. But she hadn’t gotten through a single session with Jeff without her mind floating away to something.
Her dalliances with Jeff were at least partially motivated by her confused desires. She was fairly certain she liked boys, even if not Jeff specifically. She’d had her mouth water looking at a smuggled Playgirl or two at a sleepover. Deep down, she knew she liked girls too. But she could autopilot through hook-ups with him, repressing thoughts of women whenever she wasn’t on the verge of orgasm. Logically, Shauna truly did not think there was anything wrong with being gay or bi or any of those other terms that led to her stomach twisting in knots when they came up in conversation. She was at a progressive school, majoring in English, for fucks sake. She’d listened to more clumsy beat poetry about giving your first blowjob as a confused teenaged boy than she could stomach. Plenty of her acquaintances and classmates were gay, though it seemed like the guys were four times as likely to be the ones out. Maybe there were other girls around Shauna shoving themselves quite deeply in the closet. She had no reason to be curious about that so long as she had Jeff. Or, whatever this weird situation with him was. Saying he ‘had’ him seemed like an overstatement when he’d awkwardly said ‘this is my, uh, Shauna’ the one time they ran into a friend of his at the dining hall. He’d gone to sit at his friend’s table after that, not even really acknowledging her as he walked away.
Jeff was safe. Boring. An asshole sometimes, sure, but easy. Conversation with him was dull, mindnumbingly so, but it was almost a comfort that it left her with no desire to want more of it. Shauna wasn’t even fully sure how Jeff had ended up here, if she were being honest. He wasn’t particularly smart, nor was he on an athletics scholarship. He was undeclared as far as his major went and planned to stay as such until the last possible moment when the school forced him to pick one. Goals? He had none beyond fast orgasms and beers with the boys. As long as he was around, sex and “romance” weren’t complicated. Maybe that was all Shauna needed right now.
Still, she felt a flicker of excitement for the new year. Soon she’d start the courses for a Women’s Studies minor. She’d signed up for Queer Lit, though she might drop it out of shame before the first day. Her column with the student paper would start up as well. Shauna had desperately missed creative writing group nights at the coffee shop and the ensuing after parties with cheap beers and joints that let her pretend to be a “real” college student.
She’d decided to go out for club soccer as well. She’d been so excited to escape soccer leaving high school, ready to never kick a damn ball again. She’d stuck with it more out of obligation to the team and because her mom had told her she’d regret it if she quit and she hated disappointing anyone. With a year off from the sport, she realized she’d actually missed having a team and getting to let out the cutthroat competitor that always bubbled just under the surface. She didn’t want to be that person in her classes, but she had to channel that aggression somewhere. A return to soccer seemed like the logical conclusion, Distraction was good. Being busy made the confusing, life-altering longing more manageable. It helped push down the ever lurking self-loathing of being on the outside of a social circle she simultaneously detested and put on a pedestal.
If she were brave, maybe she’d be able to recognize it was time to stop taking shortcuts, stop letting Jeff fill the spaces she hadn’t learned to occupy herself.
Maybe this was the year she’d get braver, if only to stop making herself small for Jeff fucking Sadecki.