Brin hadn't intentionally avoided having sex. She'd always had a vague curiosity about it, in fact, and she would probably have been happy enough to experiment, if it had come up in a natural way. It had simply never come up in a natural way. She had known by the time she was twelve or thirteen that she was gay, though she hadn't consciously known that her disconnection from the flirty games of her peers and her terrifying attraction to other girls was the same thing that the kids tossed around in casual insult: Homo. Lezzie. She knew it was weird and dangerous, and that was enough.
She liked boys. They were much easier to be around than girls were. They aroused nothing in her other than friendly camaraderie; there was no mystery or power in the way they made her feel. They didn't draw her eyes or lodge in her brain, as some of the girls did. She didn't feel compelled to watch their hands, or stare at the downy line of hair on the backs of their necks, or, oh God, notice the fall of shirt over breasts, the cling of jeans to ass.
She would never have dared to touch any of those obliviously tormenting girls, and she attracted—thankfully—no physical interest from her male friends beyond punches on the shoulder. So sex, as an activity she might engage in, simply never entered her universe.
Besides, she was working. She knew that her path to college, and from college into the life she could only hazily imagine but wanted desperately, was a path with white lines around it and a net at the end. She had practice, of course, and games, but also drills and reps and long leg-burning runs. She had weight work, aerobic work, skills work. She never finished, but she exhausted herself, and then she had schoolwork.
During the distasteful grind of college recruitment she discovered, to her chagrin, that free rides were vanishingly rare and never actually free. Most scholarships were partial, and even the ones that claimed to be full would not cover huge chunks of her costs: travel, clothes, books, sometimes nothing beyond tuition. Almost by accident she realized that her best deal would be an elite private university, the kind that didn't give athletic scholarships but boasted an enormous endowment. Athletics could get her in, and financial aid would make it possible for her to stay.
She would have assumed that sex would come for her in college (if she'd thought about it explicitly, which she hadn't allowed herself to do). Then college came: a leafy, dignified campus full of buildings that looked like castles. Here she was aware that there was a lesbian community—communities, really, because there were artsy queer girls and studious feminist lesbians and dykey jocks and even, God help them, sorority-sister gay women—and for the first time she felt the conscious desire of other women directed at her.
She wanted to enjoy that, but she didn't. After so many years of keeping her own longings still and silent and utterly private, the casual, open coupling of the women around her felt shrill and obnoxious. Was this really what she'd waited for? What she'd kept herself driving toward? She had kept desire to herself so long that part of what made it precious was its secrecy. Acting on it seemed to make it cheap.
She had some opportunities. A tall theater major with short dark hair kissed her at a party near the end of her freshman year, and she thrilled to it. It was much more awkward than she'd expected—there were a lot more teeth involved than she'd imagined, and there was a taste to another person's mouth, which had never occurred to her—but it was also dazzlingly real. The woman, whose name she was not quite sure of, had smiled while they swayed in the noisy darkness of someone's living room exploring each other's lips and tongues; Brin had been able to feel the curve of her lips and she had smiled herself, and then they were both laughing and the moment broke. She'd lost track of that woman at the party. Later, she'd realized that she probably should have pursued her. It was her turn. But she'd gotten embarrassed and left.
It turned out that she still didn't speak the language. Years later she'd hear, at reunions, Didn't you know that so-and-so had a crush on you? That whatshername totally thought you were hot? No, she hadn't. She had trained herself too assiduously to keep her eyes and her thoughts to herself.
She worked. When she wasn't reading, writing, doing a lab, finishing a problem set, she ran, lifted, shuttled, sprinted, drilled. With no parents or teachers telling her what her priorities had to be, she could set her own schedule. She liked being good at what she did and she labored at it, and during those months of intense, immersive effort some new door opened in her body. Her sense of the field expanded. She was able to move without thinking through her movements. She looked forward to every practice and she burst into games. The second half of her first season, she played on the varsity squad; not unheard of, but unusual enough.
She had expected sports to get her to college. Through college. Then she would take a professional job and maybe play on a company team, or in a rec league on the weekends. Feeling this new power, she regretted this for the first time, and the four years she had began to seem short. But unexpectedly, after the Ivy League tournament that ended the season (in which she set a league record for assists in a game and tied the tournament scoring record), her coach received a call. Would Brin be interested in participating in an invitational camp with members of the under-20 national team? It wasn't an offer of a place on the team, of course, but a tryout. A step. A date.
Yes, she would be interested. As soon as classes ended, she was on a plane.
She'd fallen in love with dismaying frequency in junior high and high school—if love was what you called it when you thought obsessively about another person, watched her furtively, memorized the curve of her earlobes, and imagined a thousand scenarios in which you heroically saved her life. It hadn't happened to her so far in college. There had been mild crushes: a girl with thick blonde hair who made her look forward to an 8 a.m. French class; a buzz-headed, broad-shouldered swimmer she saw in the weight room. She almost missed the frenzied obsessions that had haunted her in her early teens—almost—but thought with complacency that she must have outgrown them. Then came the first invitational camp, and Kelly.
As the invited athletes gathered in a room that looked like a study hall crammed with desks and chairs, Brin felt a still-nameless stranger take the all-too-familiar place at the center of her attention. The girl—woman, that is, or almost-woman, as they all were—was medium height, medium coloring, with purposeful energy and a relaxed self-command. She was animated with a few of the others, exchanging hugs and greetings; she had been here before.
Many of the players knew each other. Some had been playing together, or against each other, on traveling teams and at selective camps since they were twelve or thirteen years old. Brin was probably not the only person in the room who was new to this level of the system, but she felt as awkward as if she were, listening to the hum of conversation that excluded her. And already, there was that one person who burned at her awareness. Brin was both elated to feel the fierce hunger return with its life and heat, and dismayed to lose control, once again, over her own brain.
She could never explain or understand what drew her to the people she was drawn to, and sometimes after the chemical reaction had died out she was puzzled or even embarrassed that she had felt so fierce an attraction. Now, again, she was pulled to a person whose fascinations were rich and deep but not obvious. No one would have tagged her as the most beautiful woman in this room, or the most charismatic, or the most outgoing.
This woman who had immediately monopolized her attention was a superb athlete, of course—she was here, after all—gorgeously muscled, physically confident, graceful. She was not, however, a classic beauty; her face was pleasant but ordinary, her mouth a little big, dark eyes large and brows heavy, which gave her intensity rather than prettiness. Her brown hair, shot with gold from the sun, grew to her shoulder blades, almost but not quite curly; she let it tumble loose, which meant she was constantly pushing it away from her face.
Brin tried to pretend that she was not focusing furiously on everything that she could glean about this woman, but she listened intently for her "Here" at the roll call and matched her with the scanty information on the roster that had been included in their orientation packet. Her name was Kelly Dwyer. She was from New Jersey. She was a rising sophomore at Rutgers. She was a defender now, though she'd been a forward all through high school. None of that mattered. Her voice, a little rough and low, mattered. Her hands. Her smile, the quick flash of her teeth.
