Oksana, Behave!: A Novel by Maria Kuznetsova

Author:Maria Kuznetsova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2019-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

III.

By the time the Delta Chi spring formal rolled around a year later, I thought I would never graduate. I was browned out and solo when we got to the bar; Frankie, my sort-of boyfriend, got too high to leave the house after the pregame. Kornberg and Becky were guzzling water at the bar, and he stared at her like the world had been ravaged and she had risen out of the ashes with her brown hair and modest green dress and cute little nose and he couldn’t believe she was his. They had signed a lease on a place in the West Village, which basically made them married. I’d spent the previous summer interning at a literary agency in Manhattan and didn’t care for the city. It was just a place to escape Mama and her now-fiancé, Sergei, hook up with randos, and work on my MFA applications. Most of the places I applied to were in remote, artsy towns that wouldn’t have many Duke types in them.

But it didn’t work out. I got rejected by all the MFA programs I applied to except Iowa, which I still hadn’t heard back from; I was trying not to get my hopes up. If I didn’t get in, I decided, I would go to California to start my life, just as Dr. Monroe had done. I wasn’t adventurous enough for a cult or a commune and didn’t know what I would do there. I wanted to just go.

The charges against the lacrosse players were dropped that week; they never even went to trial. The prosecutor was disbarred for dishonesty and fraud, and the string of allegations against him and his team was long and convincing. The stripper, an NCCU student whose name and identity were revealed, faced no charges for her false accusations. Of course it wasn’t fair that she chose those three guys at random from a messed-up photo ID process, but it was hard for me to get pumped about this victory for Duke and the players. They transferred to play lacrosse at other colleges and were heading to Wall Street just fine, not to mention the millions they got in the settlement. The only one who had a rough go of it was the emailer; he was suspended for a few months and then allowed to return to school, but no one could forget what he wrote. I had been thinking about Ellie a lot during that time. Had she been following the case? What would she do next? I pictured her entering the Peace Corps or going to law school to become the good kind of lawyer.

I approached Becky and Kornberg as the night wore down. He and I were cordial, but there were no more drives to Cook Out and he hadn’t read a word I had written since he’d gotten a real girlfriend. He’d spent all year cooking with Becky and reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and applying to law school.

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