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“Remember? She run out on you or what?”
    I wondered what the statistical odds were that someone would assume abandonment over death. “No. She died. Of cancer. When I was eight.” The beer was working overtime. I never told anyone that unless they really pressed me, because the
C
word immediately brought both sympathy and fear to people’s faces. They felt instantly bad for me, yet at the same time they were momentarily afraid that it would touch their life like it had mine, and they had to whisper the word.
Cancer
. Like if they spoke it too loudly it would be conjured up in their bodies like a destructive demon straight from hell. People had told me that straight out, that cancer was from the devil, a horrible affliction of otherworldly implications, unstoppable.
    Others had told me that the government most likely had a vaccination for cancer but was keeping a lid on it, to drive the medical economy. This seemed unlikely to me for more than a dozen reasons, not the least of which was that it didn’t make sense on a cellular level. It wasn’t a virus but a mutation. Yet I understood people wanted an answer for the randomness of why it struck, why it killed.
    I had stopped asking why a long time ago.
    Tyler seemed to get that. His response wasn’t an uncomfortable apology. He said, “Well that’s about as fucking unfair as it gets, isn’t it? My mom is a selfish bitch and she’ll probably live to be ninety, and yet yours died.”
    It was kind of nice not to get the same pat response of sympathy, the one where everyone was sorry, but at the same time so damn glad it wasn’t them. I appreciated his matter-of-fact attitude. “You don’t get along with your mom?”
    “Nope.” Tyler pulled into the driveway that led to my dorm. “She’s not all bad, though. She did give birth to me.” He turned and shot me a grin.
    It was so unexpected that, for a second, I blinked, then I let out a startled laugh. The sound was foreign and awkward to my ears, but Tyler didn’t seem to notice. His face changed when he smiled, and his eyes warmed. In the dark, they still looked like deep, black holes, but with his lips upturned and the corners of his eyes crinkling, he wasn’t so intense, so remote.
    That was when I realized why I’d always been slightly nervous around Tyler. He was what people always accused me of being—there but not present. Easygoing, but distant. Smiling, but intense. Maybe it was the alcohol, my ears still buzzing, my insides hot, my skin cold and clammy, but for the first time I didn’t feel uncomfortable around him.
    “So are you really a virgin?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Or were you just saying that?”
    No longer comfortable. It went away faster than you could say
Awkward Moment
.
    Why he thought I would want to talk about that made no sense to me at all. I was drunk, but I wasn’t
insane
. If I hadn’t even told my roommates until that night, why the hell would I sit in Tyler’s car and spill my guts? I wasn’t the confessional type. I never had been.
    So I just looked at him.
    “I’m going to take that as a yes.”
    I wanted to tell him to mind his own goddamn business. To stop pressing a girl he didn’t know for intimate details about her sexual experience. That it was rude. But I remembered that he had, in fact, saved the very virginity he was questioning, so I didn’t want to be a bitch. I just shrugged. Really, what difference did it make? I was already a collegiate abnormality. Likes to study! Hates to talk! Won’t go tanning! See this freak-show exhibit in her natural dorm habitat . . .
    But I actually surprised myself by opening my mouth and saying, “Yes, I am.”
    My admission silenced him for a second, but then he drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel as he put the car in Park in front of my dorm, a seventies-built tower of glass and steel. Light from the streetlight was flooding into his car, showing even more clearly how dirty and ancient it was