In One Person

where’s my bra?” Elaine asked; she couldn’t find it in the bedcovers, but she wouldn’t have had time to put it on, anyway. (She had to answer the door.)
    “It’s
him
,” I warned her.
    “Of course it is,” she said. She went into the living room of the apartment; she looked at herself in the long mirror, in the foyer, before opening the door.
    I found her bra on the bed; it had been lost in the crazy patterns of the rumpled quilt, but I quickly stuffed it into my Jockey briefs. My erection had completely subsided; there was more room for Elaine’s little bra in my briefs than there had been for my hard-on.
    “I wanted to be sure you were all right,” I heard Kittredge saying to Elaine. “I was afraid there was a fire, or something.”
    “There was a fire, all right, but I’m fine,” Elaine told him.
    I came out of Elaine’s bedroom. She’d not invited Kittredge into the apartment; he stood in the doorway to the dorm. Some of the Bancroft boys scurried by in the hall, peering into the foyer.
    “So you’re here, too, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me.
    I saw that he had a fresh mat burn on one cheek, but the mat burn made him no less cocksure than before.
    “I suppose you won your match,” I said to him.
    “That’s right, Nymph,” he said, but he kept looking at Elaine. Because her shirt was white, you could see her nipples through the fabric, and the darker rings around her nipples—those unpronounceable areolae—looked like wine stains on her fair skin.
    “This doesn’t look good, Naples. Where’s your bra?” Kittredge asked her.
    Elaine smiled at me. “Did you find it?” she asked me.
    “I didn’t really look all that hard for it,” I lied.
    “You should think about your reputation, Naples,” Kittredge told her. This was a new tack for him; it caught both Elaine and me off-guard.
    “There’s nothing wrong with my reputation,” Elaine said defensively.
    “You should think about her reputation, too, Nymph,” Kittredge told me. “A girl can’t get her reputation back—if you know what I mean.”
    “I didn’t know you were such a
prude
,” Elaine said to him, but I could tell that the
reputation
word—or everything Kittredge had insinuated about it—truly upset her.
    “I’m not a prude, Naples,” he said, smiling at her. It was a smile you give a girl when you’re alone with her; I could see that she’d allowed him to get to her.
    “I was just
faking
it, Kittredge!” she yelled at him. “I was just
acting
—we both were!” she shouted.
    “It didn’t sound like acting—not entirely,” he said to her. “You have to be careful who you pretend to be, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me, but he kept looking at Elaine as if he were alone with her.
    “Well, if you’ll excuse me, Kittredge, I should find my bra and put it on before my parents come home—you should go, too, Billy,” Elaine said to me, but she never took her eyes off Kittredge. Neither of them looked at me.
    It was not yet eleven o’clock when Kittredge and I stepped into the fifth-floor hall of the dorm; the Bancroft boys who were loitering in the hall, or gawking at Kittredge from the open doorways of their rooms, were clearly shocked to see him. “Did you win again?” some kid asked him. Kittredge just nodded.
    “I heard the wrestling team lost,” another boy said.
    “I’m not the team,” Kittredge told him. “I can only win my weight-class.”
    We went down the stairwell to the third floor, where I said good night to him. Dorm check-in—even for seniors, on a Saturday night—was at eleven.
    “I suppose Richard and your mom are out with the Hadleys,” Kittredge said, matter-of-factly.
    “Yes, there’s a foreign film in Ezra Falls,” I told him.
    “Humping in French, Italian, or Swedish,” Kittredge said. I laughed, but he wasn’t trying to be funny. “You know, Nymph—you’re not in France, Italy, or Sweden. You’ve got to be more careful with that girl you’re humping, or not humping.”
    At the moment, I wondered if Kittredge might be genuinely concerned for Elaine’s “reputation,” as he’d referred to it, but you could never tell with Kittredge; you often didn’t see where he was going with what he said.
    “I would never do anything to hurt Elaine,” I told him.
    “Listen, Nymph,” he said. “You can hurt people by having sex with them and by
not
having sex with them.”
    “I guess that’s true,” I said cautiously.
    “Does your mom sleep naked, or does