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out.
    “If you won’t have dinner,” he said, “at least we can have a drink.”
    Over coffee spiked with the dubious rum he kept locked in his desk, we talked. The liquor rushed my stomach and turned me loose; I was intoxicated by his presence, enamored with every detail of his life and eager to spill all of mine. I told him of my parents, who watched my films with anxious expressions, as if my work were one long oral exam to which they had no answer. He told me of his parents, who thought he was some kind of Indian Johnny Appleseed, planting trees for a living. Somewhere in that miasma of oversharing was the one story I still wish I hadn’t spilled, a name that Teddy would’ve hated me for spilling.
    Shelly Blake.
    As a senior, Teddy had made his thesis film about a sophomore named Shelly Blake. She was secretly, feverishly, in love with him, and thus willing to allow him access to anything, including her anorexia. She let him film her weigh-ins, her caffeine supplements, her homemade collage of runway models, her endless jogs. He gave her a camera with which to record “video diaries”on her own time; in one of these, she singed her arm with a lit cigarette.
    Shelly attended the end-of-year screening, along with hundreds of students, teachers, people she didn’t know. There was more nervous laughter than she had probably anticipated. Afterward she congratulated Teddy, went home, and slit her wrists.
    Ravi’s eyes widened. “Suicide?”
    “Attempted. Her parents filed a lawsuit …” I remembered how Teddy had nearly dropped out of school. I remembered him sitting on the edge of his bed, head in his hands, and all at once I realized I’d just betrayed him. “It was a long time ago.”
    We were silent for a time. My lips felt numb.
    “Lot of secrets,” Ravi said.
    “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
    “No?” He gave me a sly look. “You are not recording this?”
    “Recording?”
    “No hidden cameras, no mics?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “Good,” he said lightly, taking the mug from my hands and setting it on the floor.
    My feet were between his feet. I had my mother’s pinkie toe, a tiny embarrassing tuber with barely a nail to speak of. A certain energy seemed to rise around my toe and me, my heart gathering speed. He lifted my chin. He kissed me.
    I felt my head go light as we stood, as his two cool hands snuck up my shirt, lingering at my waist. I was too fleshy, too pale, unprepared on many levels (grooming included), and yet propelled by desire. There was something about the way he took his time, the way he handled the hook and eye of my bra withone hand. He was as calm and intent as he’d been earlier that day, as if he knew what to do, how it would happen, that all our banter would lead, eventually, to this narrow bed.
    “Wait—” I said and sat up, shocked by a hard, vehement pounding, someone’s door shaking on its hinges. “What is that?”
    “The new calf,” Ravi said. “Had to be quarantined.”
    For such a cute calf by day, the newbie had morphed by night into a battering ram. We listened for a moment to the clanking padlock. My heartbeat returned. I caught Ravi casually assessing my legs and felt a pulse of anticipation. “Ignore it,” he said, and soon enough the pounding folded into the white noise, all of it draining away.
    Later, he fell asleep with his arm around my waist. I lay wide awake, my back against his chest. The chest of my subject. (Which turned out to be not as hairy as his head hair implied, but sparse and pleasantly scratchy.) By then the liquor had burned off, and what had felt sweetly reckless only hours before had solidified into something irrevocable and real.
    I imagined this scene through Teddy’s eyes, an exercise that made my stomach buckle. It would seem as though I’d timed my sin precisely around his absence, a calculated plan, not a plunge.
    I thought of Teddy, apologizing.
I crossed a line. It’s my fault.
    And here I’d not only