Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn (30 page)

Pilar sits up in bed. Gideon looks at her breasts and thinks, with a surprising sense of removal, Those were
just in my hands. "I thought we called this off!" Pilar shouts.

Called this off? Pilar's stepping back into her pants, turning to the wall, suddenly modest, to slip back into bra
and shirt, a sexy film in reverse. That means that Pilar has talked about Gid when he's not around. That...God, that
was all he wanted. He has been imagining her thinking of him since she met him.

"Gideon," she pleads. "I really do like you. We planned this, like, a little while ago, and I thought I told her not to
come over. I really don't want you to be mad at me. I really like you."

Gid thinks. He wasn't mad when he saw the video camera. He wasn't mad when he saw Madison. You could
do worse than lose your virginity to a really hot girl while another hot girl taped it. Even if the girl taping it isn't as hot
as you used to think she was. Does that make it even hotter?

"I really like you," Pilar repeats. "I don't want you to think that I don't like you."

Yes, this is definitely the part of this whole experience that's annoying. Because she was just all over him, and
she didn't seem to be acting, so it's like she's apologizing because she thinks he could never believe she would
actually be hot for him. That he would be worthy of it. But in fact, he totally believes it.

It's not the bet
Molly wrote him.

He didn't understand, but now it is so incredibly obvious. Both what she meant and what he has to do.

He starts to dress himself, checking his wallet for his emergency credit card.

"What's going on?" Pilar asks, chasing him to the door wearing a white comforter like a toga. Gid tells himself
not to look back, but he can't help it. "Damn, you're hot," he says, shaking his head.

"Why are you leaving? Where are you going?" Pilar supports herself against the mirror with one hand.

"Buffalo," he says, putting on his coat. He takes a final look at Pilar. He can't tell if she's angry, desperate, or just wasted. He decides he'll never know and steps out the door into the foyer. It's one of those apartments where
the elevator comes right to your entrance. He can hear what's going on inside.

"Buffalo?" Madison says. "Who lives in Buffalo?"

"I don't know," Pilar says. "That girl Molly McGarry lives there, I think."

"I don't know if I know her," Madison says.

"You might not," Pilar says. "She's not really all that pretty."

This would have stung Gid before. He would have thought better of his judgment, but all he thinks now, and
what I think too, is Don't hate Pilar and Madison. They just live in their world, under its terms.

^{the queen city}

At five-thirty in the morning on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Gideon's one of eight people in line to buy an
Amtrak ticket at Penn Station. There's only one window open, and the man behind it has the longest face Gid's ever
seen. Even on the happiest day of his life, the man must look about ready to pack it in. The alcohol's slowly leaving
Gid's system, and his skin feels prickly, his brain jumpy. If he weren't so nervous, he would be happier than he's ever
been in his life.

Seven people come and go from the window pretty quickly. The last, an old lady, has a problem. She smacks the counter repeatedly with her wallet. The man with the long face doesn't look like he's having a good time, but he
doesn't appear to be getting riled up. Finally, Gid sees her credit card come out. She signs her ticket, still glaring.
"Have a safe trip," says the man. "Next."

Gid steps up. "I want to go to Buffalo," he says.

The man's face lights up. Gid's startled by the transformation. He looks like a different person. He says, Tm
from Buffalo."

"No shit," says Gideon. He hands the guy the credit card. He's hoping the fact that he hasn't used it at all yet
will make up for any debates about what constitutes an emergency.

The man is shaking his head, all smiles and reverie. "I like New York," he says, "but Buffalo's my town. Why
are you going there?"

Gid doesn't want to say "To lose my virginity," so, inexplicably, he says, "I'm going ice fishing."

The man's delight collapses and disappears. "Have a safe trip," he says.

As Gid walks away, he realizes that it's barely winter and that the lakes aren't frozen yet. The guy probably
thought he was making fun of him. He'd like to go back and tell him the real reason. Man to man. But his train leaves
at six A.M., in five minutes.

He settles himself in for the ride, taking from his bag a bottle of water and a newspaper, because he's always
thought it looked fun to read a newspaper on a train and he never has. His train won't get in until early afternoon. He
has a long time on the train to think about what he's going to say to Molly. He even starts to write it out, but almost
three hours later, he finds himself in Albany staring at fourteen Amtrak napkins covered in adolescent meanderings.
He realizes he can't think of how to explain his presence in Buffalo to Molly when he himself doesn't exactly
understand it.

Start at the beginning. Start with Cullen and Nicholas.

Okay. Gid draws their pictures on a napkin, representing Nicholas mostly by his keen eyes and pretty mouth
and Cullen with a big head and perfectly messy hair. He smiles fondly at his flawed but evocative representations.
Before he met them, he thought he was forever fated to that present level of confidence, that he was going to have
to go through life like Jim Rayburn. He no longer believes this.

Clearly, these guys know a lot about girls that's worth knowing. And Gid is grateful for having been taught most
of it. But it's not like he actually wants to be like them. Cullen, well, he's happy the way he is; girls are like prizes to him, and he likes that. And maybe, Gid thinks, if I were as handsome as he is, I would be like that too. But I'm not.
And when you don't have that handsomeness to protect you, don't you need a girl to be your friend?

As for Nicholas, well, half the reason he's even going to see Molly McGarry
—well, he thinks, a third of the
reason, maybe—is to tell her what he's figured out. Nicholas punishes Erica, delights in it, because he can't yell at
his own mother. And the sad thing is that if he did yell at his mother, she'd certainly recover.

Will Erica? Probably, and probably all of Cullen's girls along with her. And Pilar Benitez-Jones is probably the
damn finest piece of ass he'll ever see in his life. But at the end of the day, Gid knows that he's too much like Erica,
really, to let Pilar have sex with him. He would hate waiting for Pilar to call. He would hate himself for hating to wait.

They say girls are the only ones who care about virginity. That we're the only ones who care about anything.
It's not true.

He throws the napkins out in the Buffalo train station men's room, still unsure of what to say. It's six in the evening, grimy, wintry, and dark. The train station is just a hideous shack, like a beach snack bar, beneath an
underpass. Snow is coming.

He gives Molly's address to a cabbie outside. "I thought Buffalo had a nice train station," he says, trying to
strike up a conversation. He actually knows the truth, that they used to, and he's hoping the cabbie will discuss this
with him.

But the cabbie just runs his finger along the inside of his gums and, depositing something in his ashtray, says,
"Nope."

Molly's house is a modest two-story brick thing on Highland Avenue, built sixty or so years ago by someone careful but without passion. He knocks on the plain wooden door, set to the left side of a painted white porch. A little

boy answers, clearly Molly's brother. This is good. He's small and dark-haired, and looks annoyed.

"My parents aren't here," he says.

"I'm looking for your sister," Gid says.

"Molly or Jasmine?"

Jasmine? She has a sister named Jasmine? Gid smiles. No wonder she wrote about hurricanes and vaginas.

"Molly," he says.

The kid runs off without saying anything.

In a minute or so, Molly pads down the hall, dressed in jeans, mismatching socks, and a T-shirt with no bra.
"Gideon?" she says, with the surprise of someone waking up in a different room than the one where they fell asleep.
"What are you doing here?"

"What do you mean, what am I doing here?" he asks. "What reason would I possibly have for coming to
Buffalo, other than to see the famous antifreeze pond?"

He thinks maybe she's smiling? Or about to smile?

"If you are happy to see me, 111 tell you the real reason."

Now she's smiling.

"I came here to lose the other half of my virginity," he says.

No one would ever recommend that you say this to a girl, but somehow, it's exactly the right thing.

Molly doesn't smile, but she doesn't not smile. "How did you get here?" she asks.

He tells her about Amtrak, and the old lady, and the man with the long face. "I feel bad about the ice-fishing
comment," he says.

"Don't feel bad," she says. She pulls him into the hallway. The little kid lurks in the background, behind a metal
radiator. "Get out of here," she barks at him. He takes off. "I think he's gay," she whispers. "All he does is read
biographies of ballet dancers. He's either gay or an aesthete, I guess, both of which are not good matches for this
town." She takes Gideon's coat and hangs it on a tree, on top of a lot of other coats. It falls to the ground. "Do you
mind?" she asks, leaving it.

"Not at all," Gid says.

"My parents aren't home," she says. She indicates he should follow her upstairs. She takes his hand, as she
did walking across the quad a few weeks ago. He kisses it. Molly winces.

"That was kind of gay. Not gay like my brother gay. I didn't say anything last time, but I'm feeling a little more
confident this time."

"I get it," Gid says. They've paused on the landing. The stairs are lined with family photographs. Molly has looked the same since she was about four. He touches the silver frame on one of them, showing Molly at nine or
ten, standing on her ice skates on a pond, in the middle of a park. "Is this the pond?"

"The very same." There's some movement downstairs, footsteps, kitchen cabinets being opened and closed.
"My sister," she says, jerking her head, indicating he should move faster.

Her room isn't like Danielle's, but it reminds him of that. It's carpeted, and not with interesting carpet, just
carpet. There are dumb posters on the wall left over from childhood
—Christina Aguilera and a photo of the mayor, Anthony Masiello, shaking hands with Hillary Rodham Clinton. Downstairs, he hears the patter of feet and a toilet flush. This is a nice place to lose your virginity, he thinks. The TV hums up through the floorboards. Molly's bed is
warm, with flannel sheets printed with daisies.

Gid lies down looking up at Molly. "You can get into bed with your clothes on if you want," Gideon says. "I could
take them off for you."

She grins down at him. "Do you think you can handle that?" she says. She takes off her mismatched socks
and lays them on a pile of old
Seventeen
magazines on a plain wooden desk. She snuggles in next to Gideon, her
head rests on his shoulder. "You can take off my clothes if you tell me what you're doing here," Molly says. "And
remember, you're not trying to convince me of anything. I just need to believe you."

Gid closes his eyes. "About twelve hours ago," he says, "I was going to have sex with Pilar. And I realized 1
didn't want to lose my virginity to her. I mean, I want to maybe have sex with her, or a girl like her, someday. I mean,
who wouldn't? Not that you're not a girl like her. I mean, you're..."

Molly laughs and readjusts her head on his shoulder. Gid panics that his shoulders are small. But her head is
pretty small. He relaxes. "I know that I was supposed to have sex with you because of the bet, and I probably
wouldn't have thought of it on my own. I probably wouldn't have. But once I knew you, I liked you."

Molly looks down, the compliment making her shy.

"And I know why you were mad at me. You weren't mad because I had a bet about you. You were mad
because I thought you would have a nervous breakdown if I had sex with you for any reason other than that I was
madly in love with you."

Molly is shocked. She props herself up on one elbow. "How did you figure that out? I mean, that's pretty

involved."

Gid shrugs. "Partly a conversation I had with Nicholas Westerbeck's incredibly insane mother. Partly because
Madison Sprague nearly captured on videotape, from the vantage point of a forty-square-foot custom closet, me

losing my virginity."

There's a knock on Molly's door. "What?" she says.

"What are you doing?" it's the little brother.

"If you go away, we'll watch
Flashdance
in, like, an hour."

There's the sound of feet disappearing down the hall.

"Go on," she says.

He shrugs. "If Madison weren't so clumsy, and such a drunk, I probably wouldn't be here right now. I can't lie to
you. Pilar is incredibly hot. But that's all she is, or most of what she is. Which is probably why she's so hot. These
are issues I will have to work out. But seriously. Do you really think we're going to have sex for a whole hour?"

Molly considers this. "Only if we do it more than once," she says, kissing both his cheeks.

All of Gideon's nervousness melts away.

"Why didn't you just wait until we got back to school?" Molly whispers as he's taking off her clothes. "And don't
tell me it's because you couldn't wait another day."

Gideon laughs. "If I'd stayed in New York, I probably would have hooked up with Pilar eventually. She's very
persuasive. But seriously. I...just thought this might be...a lot more fun."

They kiss for a long, long time. Gideon obviously has been kissed before but never this extensively or, it
seems, this well. Molly McGarry's face and lips and hands are all a couple of degrees warmer than any skin he has
ever felt, and thinking this, he lays a finger along her cheek and opens his eyes. "To me," he says, "there is no one
more beautiful than you. I somehow know that you need to hear this. And, well, plus, it's really true."

The small but ever-present shadow of suspicion that resides just above Molly's left lip vanishes. When it is
gone, Gideon realizes he noticed it for the first time right before it disappeared. The planes of her cheeks and
forehead soften. I want to say that she looks luminous, but I think I might hate myself. Oh well, I will take that chance.
She looks luminous. Oh, wow. I don't hate myself at all.

Molly smiles back at Gideon. "There is no one more beautiful to me than you either," she says. They press
themselves tightly together.

So tightly, in fact, that I am not sure where to go.