In Her Eyes Read online

  I got accepted to FSU because I could pass tests. I said I was a slacker, but I was a smart slacker. I could get by with very little studying. If that sounds like bragging, I am. Ironically, I had a good brain for a college education that I really didn’t want.

  I hauled everything that mattered to me out of the house. My bedroom at home was left with nothing that I cared about. A stripped bed. A couple of plugs that hung down, skimming the floor. Pieces of swaying tape where posters had been. It was now a room that belonged to nobody. As far as I was concerned, Dad could’ve burnt the house down and I wouldn’t have cared.

  * * *

  A year later, I went to see my old high school friend Jerry, who was working at a classic rock station in St. Pete. Even now, he had a pair of chunky headphones glued to his head, a full beard, and he still smelled like potato chips. It was comforting to see that some things hadn’t changed since I’d come back from college.

  He swiveled around fast when he saw me through the glass. Holding up his finger to indicate he needed one more minute, he slipped in a commercial spot and pressed a button to let me into the studio.

  “What the fuck!” His goofy grin came first. Then he jumped up to hug me. I guess there were no hard feelings.

  “Lookin’ good, dude.” Something about him always made me smile.

  Since I’d come unannounced and in the middle of the school year, I knew he was wondering what the hell I was doing there.

  “I’m taking you up on your offer,” I said.

  His blond eyebrows crinkled together. “Huh?”

  I smiled.

  The moment he spotted my suitcase on the floor near my feet, he started shouting like a madman. I don’t remember if he finished out his shift. But I do remember going to a bar around the corner from the station and talking for hours.

  It was a dimly lit dive bar with a bowl of peanuts on every table. We ordered a couple of beers and took in the sight of each other, trying to see what had changed. I could tell he’d packed on a couple more pounds.

  “You like the station?” I asked.

  “It pays the bills,” he replied. “I got an apartment downtown. It’s really old, so the rent’s cheap. I couldn’t stand living with my mom anymore.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” I laughed. “She was hardly ever home!”

  “It’s better to be alone than knowing you’re supposed to be living with someone you never see. Don’t know if that makes sense. I’m happier on my own.”

  “It makes sense.” I took a gulp of beer, my eyes not leaving him. I wondered if he could see my desperation, my desire to turn him into my savior. I usually got what I wanted. But the past year, my luck seemed to have changed, so I wasn’t as sure of myself.

  “What happened with school?” he asked.

  I lowered my eyes and skimmed some peanuts off the top of the bowl. “It wasn’t for me.”

  He laughed his hearty laugh. “There’s so much you’re not sayin’! You’re bullshittin’ me!”

  “I had this roommate,” I said, feeling my face get hot. “She screwed me up so much…” I couldn’t hold back my smile, my laugh. And Jerry was like a mirror; I couldn’t help but reveal myself to him.

  “You were crushing on her, weren’t you?”

  Maybe all the years in school he’d sensed something about me. “How did you guess?”

  He laughed. “My manly charm works on every girl but you.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” I grinned, so incredibly happy to be in his company again. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him. He was the brother I never got. “I fell hard, Jerry. I never fell before, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.” He signaled the waiter to bring more nuts.

  Chapter Seven

  Cory

  In all that had been written about Adrienne over the years, I’d never seen anything about the inspiration for the band’s name. I assumed, just as I think everyone did, that it was a reference to hurricanes, since the members were all from Florida. I decided to ask about that.

  “Where did your band’s name come from?”

  She said, “That night after we left the bar, Jerry and I sat on the roof of his apartment building, watching a storm roll in. The building was only two levels.

  “‘Why do they call it the storm’s eye when it’s a hurricane?’ he asked me.

  “I told him I didn’t know, but it deceives you into thinking everything’s gonna be okay before you get slammed with more shit.”

  “So that’s where the name came from?” I asked.

  She looked at me like I was an idiot.

  “It seemed fitting,” she said.

  I thought about her lovers, especially the most famous one. It was easy to see the metaphor for Robin Sanders, but I hoped to know more. I wished she’d tell me about the year she spent in college, but it was obvious, with her skipping right over it, that perhaps she didn’t want to go there.

  “What about the year you spent in college?” I asked timidly.

  She didn’t look at me. “What about it?”

  “I thought you might want to respond, given what was said in the infamous biography.” I was referring to an unauthorized biography about the former governor’s college days that had been published after she left public life. It was called Georgia Peach: The Bittersweet Story of Robin Sanders. Everything surrounding Robin Sanders seemed to be a mystery, so I was hopeful that Adrienne could clear it up.

  Of course, no one’s life is ever neat and tidy. Nothing controversial can be cut-and-dried. And we journalists always want to put the facts inside a box and wrap it up with a neat bow. From just talking to Adrienne for a few minutes, I knew that nothing was going to be able to fit in such a box. I had to be patient. I had to be comfortable in the gray areas.

  “I’m not going to give an opinion about whatever was said about that year,” Adrienne told me. “That was her, our, personal business and whoever published it to make a few quick bucks should rot in hell.”

  When I told her that the author was Raymond Collins, a well-respected journalist, she promptly told me she didn’t know him and that he knew less than nothing about her or Robin Sanders.

  I mentally reviewed what I thought I knew about her and Sanders, knowing I’d need to add some backstory in my article for those who didn’t remember. Robin Sanders, Adrienne’s college roommate, who later became the famously conservative governor of Georgia, left public life after a lesbian scandal brought her bid for the Republican nomination for president to an end. It seemed so ridiculous now, twenty years later, that a lesbian affair could torpedo a career, but back then it did. And the woman she was reported to have had an affair with was sitting in front of me. Headlines at the time went along the lines of “Rock Queen Brings Down Conservative Icon.”

  After a much-publicized debate during which Ms. Sanders seemed to change her position on gay rights and shook her entire neo-conservative constituency, she and Adrienne were rumored to have run away together. They were spotted once in Hawaii, shooting a video for Adrienne’s band. Not long afterward, however, Robin Sanders disappeared from public view and was never heard from again.

  In an age in which almost everything is transparent, out there on the Internet for public consumption and scrutiny, there aren’t many mysteries left. Debating what had happened to Sanders had captured the public’s interest back then—still did, actually, kind of like those enduring arguments about the guilt or innocence of O.J. Simpson, or what really happened to Amelia Earhart, or the identities of Jack the Ripper or the WikiLeaks-like crusader who was making it his mission to expose corrupt politicians.

  People still talked about Sanders’s disappearance around dinner tables in America. The most prominent hypotheses were 1) that in a fit of rage, or maybe even rough sex gone wrong, wild-child hard-rocker Adrienne Austen had killed the woman she used to love—on purpose or accidentally—and found a way to cover it up, or 2) that Robin’s husband, Tom Rutherford, humiliated by the scandal, either killed her himsel
f or had her killed. Either way, it made for a salacious story that wouldn’t go away. If I could crack it, it would be a huge boost to my career. But I had to tread carefully. I decided to wait and let things unfold, hoping she would talk about the year she and Sanders roomed together. While she didn’t add much to what I knew about the details of that time, I quickly learned that it had impacted almost everything Adrienne did thereafter. As one of her cigarettes turned to a whole pack, something told me I wouldn’t have to wait too long to find out what was really behind the rumors.

  Chapter Eight

  Adrienne

  I could see Cory hanging on my every word, but I didn’t care. It felt so good to remember, I forgot he was there. Before I knew it, I was recounting all those conflicting feelings I thought I’d put aside years ago…

  Sometimes you can tell within a few seconds of meeting someone what kind of impact she’s going to have on your life. I never had that experience, though, until I met Robin Sanders. I had those butterflies that everyone gets when they’re starting a new chapter of their life, of course. Going to college had been a mystery to me, because my dad hadn’t gone and my mom wasn’t around to tell me what it would be like. I had to fend for myself. So I’ll admit I was a little scared that first day.

  When I came into the dorm room, Robin was already there, surveying the place as though she had an entourage waiting outside. Her long dark hair and clear blue eyes were a deadly combination. If those eyes were fixed on you, it made you second-guess whether or not your clothes were on backward. Yeah, I was very self-conscious from the moment I met her. So I spent a great amount of effort in the following months trying to act like I wasn’t. The harder I tried, the more obnoxious I became.

  I remember the way she told me her name.

  “Robin Sanders,” she said, while struggling to get out of a denim jacket. Who the hell wears a denim jacket in Florida?

  I scanned my brain for a witty comeback. “Like the Colonel?” Seeing her blank stare, “The fried chicken guy?”

  She turned up her nose as though I’d insulted her and said her name like it was being announced at graduation: “Robin Camille Sanders.”

  Looking back, I’m sure she was just insecure. But at the time, seeing that this girl couldn’t take a joke, I shifted quickly to insults. “Didn’t your parents like you?”

  Instantly there was a weird tension in the room. I couldn’t wait to get out to my car and grab my stereo. The humid air still felt better than the suffocating room. I decided we didn’t have to be friends just because we shared a room. There was some relief in that.

  I also knew right away that Robin was the kind of girl who wouldn’t be caught dead talking to someone like me if it weren’t for us sharing a room.

  “Don’t you have any stuff?” I asked. Sometimes my mouth ran ahead of my brain. But her side of the room looked like a maximum security cell.

  “I have plenty.” She squared her already tight shoulders and flipped her hair to dismiss me.

  What a fucking snob.

  Something about Robin brought out the asshole in me. She was easy to tease, easy to piss off, and she took herself so seriously it was a natural instinct to want to take her down a few pegs. I could also tell on that first day that she had the power to hurt me. I knew it, I didn’t want to know it and it was unsettling.

  So I pretended I couldn’t remember that she’d come from Georgia. It clearly was a source of great pride to her, so all the more reason to joke about it. I couldn’t help myself. I found myself talking before that censor switch in my head could tell me to shut up. No one had had this effect on me before.

  “The plum state?” I said matter-of-factly, pulling on a different pair of boots.

  “Peaches,” she said in exasperation. “Everybody knows Georgia has peaches!”

  “Oh, everybody? I guess I’m not somebody.”

  There was silence as I grabbed my keys and convinced her to go out to dinner with me. I’m guessing she only did it because she didn’t know anyone else down there. The second she met someone who was more like her, I knew I’d be left in the dust.

  When we went out to eat that first night, we ended up in a doughnut shop. I said something that made her laugh. And wow, just like that, all I wanted was to be the one who could make her laugh. It gave me a special thrill to crack that veneer and make her come undone.

  “Fuck you!” she shouted at me in the middle of the restaurant. She seemed surprised at herself, for allowing me to drag her down to my level, no doubt. “You made me say ‘fuck’ in public!”

  “Nah, you did that yourself.” I enjoyed sitting back and watching her unravel. I couldn’t be sure, though, if I was the reason for her weird behavior. For all of my swagger, I didn’t imagine I could give anyone the same butterflies that I was experiencing. By the end of that first night, everything inside me was fluttering.

  She rattled on about her film career aspirations, having a husband named Brian, a dog…

  I wanted to sweep Robin off her feet, but I didn’t know how girls did that.

  “I’ll get a small dog,” she continued in a cute Southern accent. “’Cause I don’t really like dogs. If it’s small, then it won’t count as a dog.” She was having a dialogue with herself until she caught me staring.

  Robin’s face…she had the kind of looks that snuck up on you, and once they hit you, you were toast. It was damn scary, a mortal danger kind of scary.

  When she realized I was staring at her, her shoulders stiffened and she wouldn’t make eye contact.

  If she’d been a friend like Gwen Tolbert, the whole year would’ve been fine. But she wasn’t. I was an immature jackass, so the more I felt for her, the more I talked about guys, anything to proclaim my heterosexuality. It was almost a compulsion. I never thought about it driving her away; I only did what my instincts told me—protect myself—because I didn’t think any of this was going to end well.

  Chapter Nine

  Adrienne

  I spent that year walking in a minefield. Sometimes we’d go to dinner at The Meat Grinder on campus. I’d catch her staring at me, as if she was trying to figure something out.

  “What?” I stopped eating. “Something on my face?”

  She lowered her eyes and smiled. “No.” She had amazing blue eyes, so clear, almost transparent. I wished I could see all the way inside, to know what she was thinking of me. I’d have given anything for a special power like that. Sometimes in those suspended seconds of being lost in the endless blue of her eyes, I would see us together in some alternate universe, maybe holding hands, talking to each other like normal people who said what they really wanted to say to each other. Then I’d remember that they were just daydreams.

  “What?” I repeated. She drove me crazy, making me think I was an idiot.

  “Nothing.” Her little intake of breath told me she wanted to say something more but wasn’t sure if she should.

  “I’m gonna throw my fork at you.”

  She smiled shyly. “It’s cute how you don’t want to wear your glasses in public.”

  My reading glasses made me look like Buddy Holly, and I only wore them in the room when I was reading. I hated having to wear them; they made me feel like an old person.

  “What’s cute about it?” I barked.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It’s just kinda…cute.”

  “You’re weird.” I did it again. Whenever she came close to something that resembled kindness, I ran away, whether with a sharp comment or something worse. I had to be the one in control at all times.

  “Forget it,” she said sharply. Of course I’m sure she regretted saying anything to me. I was not a person you could be real with, not until I was real with myself.

  No matter how much I tried to be normal—or at least my definition of normal—strange feelings took hold anyway. Those angry lips, that smooth skin…I just wanted to get closer. I had no clue what that meant either. Closer, quieter, able to touch her without feeling stra
nge about it. Thoughts like this were flooding my mind day and night. It pissed me off because I knew we had nothing in common.

  One time we were walking through the student union together after having lunch.

  “When’s your next class?” I asked her.

  “A half-hour,” she said, quickening her pace.

  “Well, hang on. You’ve got time.”

  “No, I don’t. I have to use the restroom.”

  We stopped at the two restroom doors.

  “Don’t you hate that?” she said, pointing to the girls’ restroom door.

  “The restroom?”

  “No, that.”

  It took me a minute to realize she was pointing to the restroom symbol.

  “Why would I hate that?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know,” she said in her haughty tone, “like all of us females wear skirts. Or maybe it’s because we all have triangle-shaped bodies.”

  I’d thought she was pissed off about things before, but clearly I hadn’t seen everything yet.

  “You’re pissed because it’s shaped like a dress?” I repeated, making sure I understood the logic.

  “Well, yeah. The guy’s bathroom has a symbol of a regular person with arms and legs. We have to be the other, even though we have arms and legs too.” Seeing my blank stare, she added, “They wouldn’t think of doing the guy like he’s the other, like putting an oval between his legs or something.”

  “Wow.”

  Her mouth tightened, shoulders stiff again. “Thanks for lunch,” she said, pushing against the offensive restroom door.

  As I walked to my class, I thought about what she meant—how the man is the standard and the woman is the accessory. But if she was going to be mad about restroom symbols, she was going to have to be mad about everything. It was exhausting to imagine changing the world at that level. I would have settled for not getting whistled at every time I walked around campus.