A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice

wanted to enhance the profile of the Cannon Drama Club: They could raise money through bake sales, schedule regular meetings, and name a chairperson—him.
    When Stephen jumped up to embrace her, Carolyn believed that for an instant she could feel the lump the ultrasound had discovered in one of her lymph nodes.
    As he left her on that day—the last day of his freshman year—Stephen walked numbly past Jeff Haugh in the English Hallway. Jeff nodded to him and mumbled a “hey” as he passed. Stephen didn’t notice.
    By the middle of June, the time of the year when two years earlier four children would have been riding their bikes to Lafayette Cemetery and chanting rhymes in the rain, Stephen and Monica left for Rome, Brandon was relieved of his position as a runner in his father’s law firm for calling one of the senior partners “an asshole”, and Greg and Meredith decided to have sex.
    Greg parked his father’s Bronco several yards from the lone street lamp illuminating the muddy bank of the lagoon in City Park, and turned to grab Meredith. He cocked his head toward the rear of the car. “More space in the backseat,” he said. She knew he was proud to have been considerate enough not to lose his virginity in his own room, which was right next to the Power Rangers-studded bedroom of his seven-year-old brother, Alex. Greg loved Alex hugely and dumbly, Meredith knew, and he probably treated him with more tenderness than he was exhibiting with her now, as he parted her clothes and her legs, pressing himself against her prone body, before shoving himself all the way in.
    Fire lit the base of Meredith’s spine. She bit her lip. Greg mistook it for arousal.
    She waited for the pain to subside, the way she had been told it would. It didn’t. He held her breasts as if they were handlebars and rode her as if her vagina was his own fist. Meredith tried to tell herself not to feel disappointed after he finished, dressed hastily, and kicked open the back door, letting in the sticky night air, which played over her body as she lay pressed to the leather. The drone of cicadas wafted into the car. After this night, Meredith would always associate the buzz The Falling Impossible
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    of insects with the feeling of sudden, flushed exposure. Greg had not even bothered to remove all of her clothes.
    “Did it hurt?” he asked her, standing several feet away from the open door and smoking a cigarette from a pack he and Brandon had shoplifted earlier that evening.
    “No,” Meredith lied.
    He nodded, without looking at her. “We gotta go to Brandon’s,” he said, dropping the cigarette in a flutter of sparks.
    Brandon’s parents had flown up to New Jersey to visit his older brother Jordan, who has just completed his freshman year at Princeton, and was threatening not to come home for the summer, mentioned taking some time off—which spurred Elise and Roger Charbonnet to book themselves on the first available flight.
    When Greg and Meredith arrived, Brandon had already set out three bottles of Tanqueray he’d retrieved from his parents’ liquor cabinet. Brandishing a Gatorade bottle, Brandon let his gaze drift from Meredith to Greg, who was standing behind her. Meredith felt a hot blush cross her cheeks before her neck stiffened and her hands curled into fists.
    A smile broke across Brandon’s face. He knew.
    He laughed and leaned against the kitchen counter, surveying the two of them as if sex might have lengthened their limbs. He picked up a Gatorade and gin off the counter and extended it toward Meredith.
    “Congrats, Mer!” he said, laughing.
    She took it. Greg stepped from behind her and Brandon shot one arm around his shoulders and wrestled him into a headlock. Greg let out a grunt muffled against Brandon’s chest. Meredith looked from the green-tinted drink to Brandon, whose face leered like a child’s, his tongue poking from between his teeth. He drove the knuckles of one fist into Greg’s scalp.
    “Dude!