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Cuffing Kate
    “I can’t fucking believe it!”
    A debate is a game. There is always a winner and a loser. This
is why I don’t debate. Sonia sees things differently. She never loses.
    “What’s up?”
    My roommate slammed into my bedroom so hard that the door hit
the wall. Another ding in the plaster. I shoved the dirty book I was reading
under my pillow, but Sonia didn’t even look my way. She was already pacing. I
kept quiet about the fact that she’d entered my room without knocking. Sonia
loves to make an entrance, which means that she rarely ever knocks.
    “The fucking bastard.”
    I stared at her, curious. I’d never seen her like this before.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Sonia’s hot-tempered. She gets all riled up
during debates about war in the Middle East or why tofurkey is the wonder food. But this was different. Her cheeks were
flushed a bright fuchsia and her dark espresso-hued eyes looked huge and
wild.
    “Did you have a fight?” I asked tentatively.
    “A fight? No, not a fight.” She bit off each word as if chewing
on a piece of that nasty papaya fruit leather she buys at the local health food
store. I watched her stomp out of my room, heard her clomping toward the kitchen
in her vegan no-cows-were-killed boots. Silently I trailed behind her,
dumbfounded as she pulled a Guinness from the fridge—one of my beers. I’d never seen Sonia drink an alcoholic beverage.
    “Then what happened?”
    “The bastard. He actually tried to…”
    She swallowed a huge gulp of the brew and leaned against our
fridge. The Well-behaved Women Rarely Make History magnet was poised over her
head on the freezer. It read like a caption. I waited, but she didn’t
continue.
    “Tried to…” I prompted.
    “He really thought I would let him…”
    “Let him…” I echoed, faux helpfully.
    “Never mind. Chalk the experience up to a bad fucking
date.”
    “What did he try to do?” And why did I care so much?
    Sonia strode into the living room, threw herself onto our
thrift-store sofa and grabbed the ugly comforter her great-aunt had crocheted.
She was calming down. I could tell. Maybe she wouldn’t tell me the rest.
Sometimes she kept things from me. This is why I read her diary on a daily
basis.
    “He was kinky,” she said with finality.
    Sonia was decidedly not kinky.
That’s mostly what I’d discovered by reading the tightly cramped handwritten
pages in her recycled-paper journal. She wasn’t kinky, and she wasn’t that into
sex, and she wasn’t that into men. But she didn’t seem to realize this last fact
yet. Maybe when she discovered the latter the former would change.
    “What do you mean, ‘kinky’?”
    She shrugged and turned on Bill Maher, dismissing me by not
responding. I thought of pushing the issue, of trying to take our roommate
status to a higher level. Sonia considered us good friends, but we weren’t. She
never shared her feelings with me, and she didn’t seem to care about my own.
Mostly she preached her beliefs in my general direction—trying to guilt me into
giving up things that she thought I shouldn’t do, or eat, or drink, or
think.
    I went to my room, consumed by visions of the man she’d been
out with. Jules Rodriguez. I knew him from school. Senior. Handsome. Of course,
I understood perfectly why he’d asked Sonia on a date. She looked as if she’d be
hellfire in bed. Anyone with an ounce of imagination could envision her in the
heat of the moment—long twists of black curls spiraling as she moved, huge eyes
glazed with lust. Aside from that, she dressed like sex on wheels: tight clothes
in electric colors, earrings that jangled when she walked. Men were drawn to
her. She baited them, and then dismissed them. Over and over and over.
    I thought again about the recent one. Jules. What naughty thing
had he suggested to Sonia? And why did I so desperately want him to try that
same thing out on me, whatever the trick might have been?
    My mind made an instant laundry list