Chapter 3: A Faster Game

Westy Bridges turned out to be an asshole.

He disguised it pretty well, but inside that great-looking swimmer's body, beyond the sharp eyes and the long, wavy hair and the puckish charm, lurked an arrogant, supercilious, and disdainful male slut.

He readily admitted to me he had a girlfriend back home in Atlanta, a very nice girl his parents adored. A rich girl whose father liked him. A girl who, according to Westy, was a sweet Georgia peach to everybody, a pleasant and demure girl who dressed right, led instead of followed, belonged to all the right groups, volunteered at the local hospital, and carried herself with dignity and confidence. Everybody thought of her as the epitome of the modern Southern belle.

"Everybody except me," he confided. "With me, she's the dirtiest little trailer trash tramp you could ever hope for. Ain't nothin' she won't do for me when we're alone in the bedroom, Sean," he leered. "And there ain't nothin' I haven't done to her. In the bedroom, in the back seat of her father's car, in the park in the fuckin' grass. She ain't a virgin anywhere, man." Westy oozed of confidence as he talked big.

In fact, his parents were barely out onto Interstate 75, on their way home, when Westy began trolling. He paced around the women's dorms, he cruised the lake and the Student Union, and he checked out the areas around the sorority houses.

By Sunday night he had bagged his first conquest, a hapless freshman girl who was probably away from home for the first time, and was unfortunate enough to have bumped into my roommate. Westy came stumbling into our room with his arm around her, and tried to introduce her to me. He had an opened beer in his other hand, which he waved around as he talked.

"Hey, Sean ol' buddy, meet..." He turned to the girl, a mousy little thing with thick glasses and a downturned, thin mouth. "What'd you say your name was, sweetie?"

"Eleanor," she said, gazing at Westy's imposingly broad shoulders, and dropping her eyes to take in his swimmer's chest, down to his impossibly narrow waist.

"Yeah. Meet Eleanor. Elly, this is my roomie, Sean. Say goodbye to Sean, Elly, he was just leaving." He gave me a significant look.

"Sure," I said. "I was just leaving." I stared back at Westy, trying to let him know I was not happy about this situation. "But I'm planning on coming back in about an hour," I said.

"An hour's plenty of time for us," said Westy, holding on to poor Eleanor. She probably thought he was being protective. I thought he was being possessive. I picked up the letter I was trying to write and left them alone, heading up to Spencer's room.

When I got to the sixth floor, the music pumping out of rooms up and down the hall was nearly painful. Country was competing with blue- eyed soul, Southern rock was prominent, and there was a smattering of a new sound, a primarily spoken type of music called rap. I got to Spencer's door and heard good old Led Zeppelin pounding out the speakers. I poked my head in and saw Spencer at his desk, and his roommate, a soft-spoken baseball player named Arlen Jones, on his back on his lofted bed, his hands propping up his head and his feet moving in time with the music.

"Hey," I shouted, trying to be heard over the music, "mind if I camp out here for awhile?"

Spencer glanced up. "Come on in," he said. "What's up?"

"Westy's got a chippie," I said.

"So?" asked Spencer.

"So, he wanted a little alone time with her, so I got kicked out for an hour."

"Ahhh," he said knowingly. He gestured toward Arlen's desk chair and reached for a deck of cards. "How about some gin?" he asked, a glint in his eye. "Penny a point?"

Just looking at him, I knew I was in trouble. What the hell, I thought, how much can I lose in just an hour? I nodded.

About ninety minutes later, I stumbled from Goldman's room in a little bit of a shock. I was already down over six bucks. Spencer was magnanimous about it.

"We'll just keep track here in this," he said, pulling a notebook from his bookshelf. He smirked just a little as he carefully wrote down the date and the amount I owed him.

I trotted down the three flights of stairs to the third floor, and back to my own room.

Westy was there, alone. He was sitting on the couch, desultorily rubbing at a stain on the coverlet.

"Fuckin' bitch was a cherry," he muttered when he saw me. "She fuckin' bled all over my couch. My mom's gonna have a kitten when she sees this."

I looked at him, thoroughly disgusted. "Don't worry about it," I said facetiously. "That stain will probably be buried by plenty of others before the year ends."

He brightened. "Hey, you're right, roomie," he said. He actually took me seriously, which bothered me even more. "Hell, between you and me, we'll probably bust the springs right out of this bastard, won't we?"

I didn't even bother to grace his comment with a reply. I took the letter to Kayla I was working on and climbed up into my bed to try to write.

On Monday, Coach Pick finally put us into teams and had us scrimmage. Jesse and Spencer were on Team Alpha, and Martin, Bryan, and I were on Team Omega. Martin was a leftie, so he was a natural to play the left defensive side. I was defending on the right, and Bryan was the forward on my side. Our keeper was Rick Rogers, who was a senior and the team's starting keeper. We had Brad Rickman as our stopper, another senior and a starter for the team.