List of Characters
Jack: Our point of view. Smart, corny, neurotic, Jack has few friends at school outside of his study group. White. Lifeguards in the summer and has a big dick.
Pri: Jack's ex(?). Brilliant and reserved, she plays varsity soccer with her best friend Liv. Indian-American. Short and athletic with ass for days, darkly tanned with thick black hair.
Liv: Pri's best friend and Jack's study buddy. Funny and dynamic, she plays varsity soccer and does what she feels. Jewish. Tall with a heart-shaped face. She has a deep tan, small breasts, and sprinter's legs.
Marco: Liv's boyfriend and long-time friend. Charming and almost offensively handsome, he teaches tennis and studies literature. Colombian-American. He's fashionable, with a lean, muscular body.
Sylvie: Liv's long-time frenemy and Marco's ex. Grim and sarcastic, she's pre-law at NYU. Pale, Jewish, and tiny, with a cute face and a bull ring septum piercing.
Kay: Sylvie's friend from NYU. Laconic and up for anything, they study film and play volleyball. White and non-binary, they're over six foot and covered with tattoos. Bleached pixie cut and dark eyelids.
Grace: Liv's friend from college. Perky and energetic, she's All-State softball and loves to party. Chinese-American. She's muscular but feminine, with thick legs, big breasts, and fun tattoos.
~
We sat in the crowded plaza at the center of San Cristobal, squished shoulder to shoulder at one of the buzzing cafes. The tourists and locals had come out in droves for their mid-morning
almuerzos
, filling every plastic chair and painted bench, a few even standing nearby to wait for tables. The sun was pure and crisp like a hole punched out of the sky. A pretty young busker played her acoustic guitar by the fountain.
After last night's debauchery no one had felt up to making breakfast at home. Our table was covered in small plates: half-eaten croissants, acai bowls, and empty mugs laced with foam.
Grace ripped a corner off a piece of toast and stared at the butter dish as if contemplating a major life decision. I slid the fig jam towards her with the edge of my hand. She smiled awkwardly, dredged her toast in it, and popped it in her mouth.
We'd hooked up last night, Grace and I, which had sent my little crush careening off into heart-thumping, palm-wiping, "concentrate on not staring at her" territory. All morning we'd gravitated together while pretending not to. First sitting side-by-side in the car, casually, hands almost touching. Then in the short-lived scrum at the cafe we'd pulled up chairs for each other without making eye contact.
Something fluttered madly in my stomach, what I hoped was butterflies and not some fast-moving cancer. The sensation was just shy of nauseating. Grace seemed off too. She laughed with the others, sure, and grumbled about headaches with the others and talked shit with the others, but she wasn't her bubbly, talkative self. Her smiles and quips were on a quarter-second delay, like her mind was elsewhere.
Whatever was distracting her, she looked lovely, with her snug linen blouse embroidered with flowers, with her strapping, thick thighs stretching the leg holes of her high-waisted jean shorts. Sunburn still glowing, her glossy hair tossed over one shoulder, she gave out a crooked smile in response to some joke of Marco's. Her toes fidgeted in her Birkenstocks.
"Sorry," she said. "I wasn't listening. Is Syl just hungover?"
Sylvie was the only one of us missing from breakfast. All I knew was that she'd begged out while still in bed. Hungover was a good theory. We'd spent all evening slamming vodka shots and chasing with vermouth, and Sylvie was a hundred pounds, five-foot-nothing.
Our game of Truth or Dare, unsurprisingly, had gotten out of hand. Raw feelings were exposed. People
did things
. It ended somewhere around the time that Pri pounced on Marco. I wasn't exactly sure what the others had done while Liv's boyfriend fucked my ex ragged on a wicker loveseat, but I'd hooked up with a thick softball star on a couch worth more than my dad's car.
"She said she had something to work on," said Liv. "Probably just sitting on an icepack."
"An icepack?" asked Grace.
"Jack was pretty rough with her. I heard the moaning from the fucking kitchen..."
Oh, and that. After I'd put a drunk and orgasm-fried Grace to bed, I'd stumbled my way into Syl's room. From Liv's warped perspective it was harmless gossip, some sneaky tea. I felt like I'd betrayed Grace before I even knew there was something to betray. I stared at the filigreed handle of my fork. My jaw clenched. A herd of related feelings stomped all over me, shame leading the way.
Squeezing between tables, Pri was just returning from paying the bill. She scoffed over our shoulders. "Again?" she asked, as if she'd bit into something bitter. "Is that a regular thing now?" On the way to her seat, she stretched to drop a little bakery bag down in front of Liv.
I said nothing while Liv sat up with childlike interest. She opened the bag and her eyes lit up. "Pri! You didn't need to do that!"
Pri sat, shrugging like it was no big deal, but she couldn't stop herself from blushing.
It occurred to me that, in the exact same moment, Pri had tried and failed to trigger some jealousy response towards me but immediately glowed at Liv's faintest praise.
Grace nodded along distantly, like she was sitting through the waiter reciting the specials in a language she didn't understand. In the span of twenty seconds she'd turned greyer somehow. She glanced at me but before I could say something (And what would I have said besides 'Sorry, I'm a horny piece of shit?'), she snapped her eyes back to the others and took a sip of coffee.
"You two didn't have sex, right?" asked Liv.
"What?" Grace blanched. "Oh, no. We didn't. We just did... oral." She seemed to be on the verge of saying something more but it drifted away.
"We need to be more careful," said Pri abruptly. "With the furniture, I mean. I truly can't afford stain removal on Italian leather."
"None of that stuff is leather..." started Liv. "But yeah, yeah, it's a good point."
"Stick to a bedroom for the dirty-dirty," said Marco scratchily. He'd been conserving his voice but apparently that little gem was too important to withhold. "Or a bathroom."
"Fucking in the bathroom is so dangerous--"
"In the shower, yeah, but it's easy to clean up on tile."
"What a stupid comment. Why not just fuck on a garbage bag? Why do anything right?"
"Castle today?" asked Kay, changing our course once again. They held their phone up to show a photo of some ruin, all gray-brown towers and arches and crenellations. If the groaning that followed was any indication, there would be no castle today.
A notification appeared over the photo, and I felt my own pocket buzz at the same time. Grace was staring off at some swaying palm trees while the rest of us checked our phones. It took a moment to understand what we were seeing, and another long moment to even form a reaction.
"This can't be what I think it is," said Liv. "No one is that insane."
Pri looked up, phone limp in her hand. "It's exactly what you think it is."
Sylvie, who was pre-law at NYU, had finished what she had apparently been working on: a legal document, a kind of contract, sent to us through email and rendered in Docusign.
"'I,
Blank
,'" I read out, "'hereinafter referred to as the Participant, hereby acknowledge...' Wait, what?"
"'The Participant,'" continued Pri, "'Agrees to mutually undertake a sexual encounter with other Documented Participants, see Appendix A: Documented Participants...'"
Grace seemed to snap out of whatever trance she was in, her brow knitting, and pulled out her phone.
"Blah, blah, blah..." said Liv, scanning the document. "Here it is: 'including but not limited to activities such as sexual intercourse, oral sex, sexual outercourse, and sexual touching.'" Her mouth hung open and she waved the phone in the air as if punctuating some point that she wasn't making. Eventually, she said, "This is beyond fucked."
"'Confidential Information... Indemnification...'" Pri seemed in awe. "It's a release but it's also a non-disclosure agreement. This is pretty cool actually."
Liv audibly gagged. "You can't tell me that you like this?"
"Okay sure, it's completely cuckoo if you want to, like, analyze it, but you do have to admire the ingenuity. This is
chutzpah
, right?"
"This isn't chutzpah. This is pathetic."
