Our Belly Button Rings
“I don’t know what it is,” Amber said, “but I feel like I can tell you my entire life.”
When Amber accepted my friend request, I scrolled through an embarrassing amount of her tagged photos. I concluded: my roommate was extremely hot and cool. Her hair was long, dirty blonde, and beachy; the flat surface of her torso, pictured in many a crop top, was only disturbed by her belly button ring. Proven wrong I was that belly button rings were trashy — she could stick her tongue out in pictures and still look cute.
Recently, I cut all my hair off and dropped fifteen pounds, byproducts of a deep depression. I decided to transfer from my Westchester liberal arts school. I just wanted to be someone else. Before, I had been a sad, weird loser — a fluffy, unbecoming self-given haircut at my shoulders, a nose piercing that had closed up before I could find the right ring to put through it, a body that was badly proportioned and too much — who didn’t go after any dreams at all, who kept putting off suicide like yet another homework assignment. With our move-in date fast approaching, I wondered if Amber would think I was somebody cool.
First semester at New Paltz, partying in Bell, the dorm across campus, was our cornerstone. Because: Bell had the boys. When Amber brought me to their suite on move-in day, I recognized them from photos of trips to LBI, Bonnaroo, and high school parties.
Nathan was her high school sweetheart. In the common room she’d sit next to him as if fulfilling some sort of duty, holding his hand. Anthony was wild. When they got drunk, he’d toss Amber around the dance floor, yelling made-up songs. Ethan was sweet; he laughed heartily at Amber’s jokes. His arm was in a cast after jumping off the roof of a building on a dare, and she would carry both her tray and his in the dining hall.
Without Amber, I wouldn’t have made friends for at least another semester. The Bell boys knew people, including older students who could buy alcohol. In the suite, we danced and pregamed under their string of twinkle lights and multi-colored disco ball, ironically cool.
I was instantly popular among the Bell boys. They regularly greeted me with cheers; they played music they thought I’d dance to.
They even gave me a nickname, after Anthony posted a picture of me with a plastic crown on my head, balancing a can of PBR between my knees, tongue out. #QueenT. Maybe, I was actually as cool as they thought I was.
I pierced my belly button, and after my first FourLoko, got monstrously drunk. I began crying for no reason. Between fits of laughter, Amber, Ethan and some girlfriends held a plastic bag to my mouth. I didn’t throw up; instead, I woke up a few hours later in their dark common room alone. On Tuesdays, everyone went to the 18+ night at one of the bars.
At first, my dehydrated brain did not put together the plosive t, the hard r, the Italian off-glide that made up my name. Ethan was calling out to me.
“What’s wrong?”
In his bulky cast, he had stayed home. He put his free arm around my shoulder. I hadn’t realized I was wailing. Ethan put me to bed in his twin XL.
The next day I avoided eye contact with him, embarrassed. At best, he might’ve held me while I cried; at worst, I might have slobbered on his face. But I was sure of the rugged scratchiness of his cast against my fingers. It had anchored Obliterated Me in his dorm room, which spun around and changed colors.
I tried not to be jealous when Ethan started hooking up with this girl down the hall from us. Marichka was unfriendly, and apparently also crazy. She was constantly texting Ethan, threatening to slash her wrists in the shower or jump off the roof of our dorm.
“Ethan was basically crying when he called me to check on her, and she was just sitting in bed watching Bravo with Jordan.” Amber whispered to me like their room was next door.
“I don’t know what it is,” Amber said, “but I feel like I can tell you my entire life.”
Though I backed off after that FourLoko night, my crush on Ethan persisted. His broken arm was endearing, as was his laugh, which was girlish. He wore Converse, was pudgy around the middle, and was an English major, like me. According to Amber, I kept taking my face out of the bag that night to give him heart eyes.
I ate up this new knowledge of Ethan’s vulnerability, bestowed on me by Amber. When she and I chatted from our bunk beds, or on the increasingly rare occasion we went to the dining hall together, I relished her undivided attention. In those moments when it was just the two of us, I would listen to her unload.
Nathan would get pissed when she was shitfaced. She was ashamed of being naturally thin when her sister dieted intensely. Her relationship with her arch nemesis, Hanna, a hot girl who lived in Bell too, had once taken an unexpected sexual turn. I was the only person Amber told. My roommate’s trust in me had my head spinning.
For my twenty-first birthday that winter, we went to Towers. It was the Thursday thing to do at DeeGees; you could get a tower of beer for mere cents. Seasoned pros would rush the bar and come back with two or three. This bar was nicknamed “Dogs,” because the guys there were douchey. Something disgusting was always happening there, and now, of age, I was part of it.
We guzzled these towers. I wore a crop top that zipped up the front. Anthony picked me up and flung me around. Amber danced on me, like girlfriends do. Ethan took my hand, spun me around, and kissed me. I left him quickly to do my first tequila shot, and then I had sex with Hanna.
Salt, shot, lime, kiss. I told her she could follow me into the bathroom, and in the stall she unzipped my top. It wasn’t my first time having sex with a woman, but my bold prowess was brand new.
We weren’t sure class would be canceled in the morning until outside the bar it rained hard, and then snowed. When we trekked back to Bell, my Docs were soaked through, and my ratty Forever 21 peacoat was caked with snow.
Amber led everyone in a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday, loud even against the February wind.
“Shut the fuck up!” someone yelled from a window.
“FUCK YOU!” my roommate yelled back, wild. She hollered my name, throwing her arms around me.
We thawed in the stairwell; I was wasted and still wired. To us, last call meant nothing; we’d sleep when we were dead. This is what I wanted, clicking through photo after photo when I got my roommate assignment; when I couldn’t stand to be myself any longer, disappearing under unread classwork and oversized sweaters. I was here; I was surrounded; I was also, unbelievably, crowned. Queen T.
But at the boys’ door, Amber wouldn’t let me in. She pushed me all the way down the hall to the girls’ suite. I was laughing in a fake way; I didn’t get what she was doing and I wanted her to stop. Now that I think of it, I don’t remember wearing shoes or socks as she guided me across the carpet with a heavy hand.
She set me down on the couch in the girls’ common room, insisting it was time to sleep. She tucked me in tightly under a throw blanket, lest I escape; with a slam, she left me in the dark. I wondered if Hanna was home already, and if I could tell her what happened, but we weren’t close.
By senior year, my belly button ring had rejected. A pus developed between the two holes, and I picked it until it revealed a third, self-made hole. My friends laid me across someone’s bed at a Halloween party to unscrew the ring with random pliers.
I hardly saw Amber and the Bell boys anymore. Somehow over the course of the last two and a half years, I became someone I liked. I had found something I deeply cared about: theater. Now, I spent my free time preparing for class scenes and memorizing lines for the school play.Falling into my character, to memorize, to rehearse alone, and then with the ensemble at our weekend rehearsals, was my favorite pastime. In the mornings I wandered around the dance studio, saying my lines out loud; at night I listened to the playlists I made for my characters until sleep crept up on me. If I had rehearsal the next day, I didn’t drink or stay up late. I hung out with my theater friends and my roommates. I met them through the Bell boys, but they had their own extracurricular activities (student body council, French club) and their own lives and were queer. Four of us moved to an apartment above a sandwich shop. Theatre people came with their own dramas, and I took on a central role because my classmates and, even sometimes, my teachers, singled me out: as talented, as attractive, as cool. In March, I was invited to a party at Oak. Amber, Ethan, and Anthony lived in this party house on Oak Ave; vaguely I remembered going there first semester.
Amber and the boys still partied hard, with coked out girls and gross guys I didn’t recognize. At a party, I watched Anthony do a bump from a coke spoon, fashioned into an earring by some art major. Amber’s tagged photos showed her in a kiddie pool filled with wine. My roommates referred to the group as “the cult” with an eye roll, like we didn’t all want to be inducted.
We entered the house through the back, as per the instructions on the Facebook event page.
“Queen T!” Ethan called. I rarely heard that nickname in my new life. It reminded me of the first times I felt I was worth being liked.
Ethan pulled me into a hug. Amber was cheering.
My crush on Ethan had waned in the two years, but it flared up when I ran into him on campus.
“You’re the coolest. I’m so happy you’re here,” he gushed.
Amber and I were alone in her cozy attic room while the party raged below. Tapestries hung on the two long walls, billowing forward like a blanket fort. I didn’t recognize the things on her dresser or bedside table, but they were familiar in the way they lay there — a mug with a tea bag, now cold, still inside, a lanyard flung across the desk, earrings loose on the dark wood.
Amber had taken a semester abroad in India, and then she was gone so long everyone thought she was never coming back. She was drunk on Main Street on a Friday night the next time I saw her. Her hair was dyed the color of red wine. She and Nathan had broken up. “I’m so happy now,” she told me.
“I don’t know why,” Amber always said, “but the second I see you I want to tell you my entire life.”
“So how are you?” In her room, I offered the opportunity for her to unload on me, like always. It still felt good that she trusted me. If she had asked how I was, I wouldn’t have known where to start. My sense of self was getting better and worse at the same, rapid pace. I didn’t know how graduation loomed so close. At that point, I was sure I would stumble to my diploma, hopefully passing it off as a tuck and roll.
“I actually have something for you,” she said. “I went to the Harry Potter theme park with my family. And I was trying to think of someone who would like something from here.” She handed me a Chocolate Frog, still in the Universal Studios shopping bag.
Amber’s gift stayed tucked safely in the folds of my coat hidden under a chair. In the basement, a band was playing and everyone was dancing. My roommate Jordan and I smoked our entire pack of American Spirits.
For a buck, Ethan poured me a shot from their makeshift bar. The tequila, from a plastic jug, tasted worse than anticipated, but I didn’t care. I had blown through my Dragonberry Bacardi and Sprite. When I went for another, he kissed me.
He pulled me over the bar and up the stairs. He pushed me against the wall.
Another kiss.
One party months before at Bluth, I disappeared into his room. I sat on everyone’s coats, sipped on my beer, and entertained the fantasy of us hanging out. He would come into his room to get something, but then decide to sit with me instead.
Rolling around in his bed, I confessed: “I’ve had a crush on you forever. I’ve always wanted something to happen.”
I woke up in his bed. The sunlight came through the trees outside his window; being there then felt like a better invitation than any dead of night party.
Outside Ethan’s room, I heard sounds of empties clanging together, a vacuum whirring, light chatter. Music floated through the house; a song I knew I knew, but couldn’t name. Maybe I could know now; I could know the artist’s name, the year, why the song was so beloved. I’d have a memory to attach to it, this morning at Oak. Mon Cherie amour, lovely as a summer day…
Just as this fantasy occurred to me, so did Ethan’s absence. I’d woken up alone in Ethan’s bed.
My head hurt from the alcohol, and my throat hurt from cigarettes, but something, not alcohol-induced nausea, turned in my stomach.
The door opened a crack.
“Hey there.” It was Amber.
“How was your night?” I was glad to put my attention on something else.
“Good. That orgy was pretty crazy though.”
I laughed. Amber had spent half the party chanting its Facebook event name, “Oak Orgy.” Everyone was always giving parties unhinged titles.
“No, really. We had an orgy. I thought it would be fun, and we’d all be rolling around and laughing but…no, it was intense. We had an orgy.”
I snuck out the front door without saying bye to anyone. I laughed like the night was all insane and funny, but my opinion changed by the time I got home.
In a hazy way, I remember Ethan leaving me when someone walked in on us. He promised he’d come back. I don’t know how long he was gone, but when he returned he was naked, covering himself with his hands.
Ethan had pulled me over the bar and pushed me, when I hadn’t given any indication I wanted to leave the basement, and definitely zero indication I liked to get pushed around during sex.
“How did you know I’d be into this?” I had asked genuinely, not flirtatiously.
“Just a feeling.” He pushed the question away with his hands on me.
Tears were hot on my puffy, hungover face when I told my roommates. They had left around 2 a.m., and I wished I had gone with them.
Maybe we laid next to each other after I told him to stop. His body was vibrating. Maybe he forced himself into me before that, and not after, how it is pulled from the deck of my memory.
“Marichka used to say he was weirdly aggressive with her,” Jordan told me.
Jordan was Marichka’s roommate during their fling. Amber had told me how manipulative and crazy Marichka was. Why didn’t anyone tell me about Ethan?
I remembered my twenty-first birthday, how Ethan had taken my hand and whipped me around the floor. I wondered what made him want me then. At so many parties before, I made myself available to him on the off chance we’d kiss. He had pulled me close and kissed me hard. I was surprised I wasn’t into it. I untangled myself to go down on Hanna in the bathroom.
Once at a party, Ethan had kissed a girl we both knew with no warning. “What the fuck?” she laughed. “Ethan just randomly kissed me.” Usually this girl was vigilant, angry; men were always throwing themselves at her in varying degrees of aggressiveness. It was funny because it was demure, nerdy Ethan.
Amber bounced, whooped and hollered. Her hair was unbrushed under her graduation cap. She pumped her fists in the air. I cheered as she crossed the stage.
She descended the stairs, diploma in hand. My breath caught in my throat before I could stop it. Could I tell you? I looked at her desperately, as if she’d find me in the sea of caps and gowns and nod, listening.
I feel like I can tell you everything, she’d said.
I have a new name the next time I visit our college town. Amber spots me across the bar; I wish she hadn’t. She holds me close with a beer in one hand and the other looped around my shoulders. She asks if the name on Facebook is my name now. She yells it over and over into my ear.
I remember her shouting my former name in February years ago. I took her shouts, her gift, our drunken nights at every bar in town like they were all I needed to be loved. She can tell me everything, like that was all I needed to matter to someone. I knew so much about her; I filed away the details of her life. Perhaps not as a friend but as someone to emulate — my belly button ring, my clothes, her boys.
She shouts my name into my ears. I want her off me, but I wait for her to let go.