by Mona Awad
“Yeah.” I don’t do that. I can’t afford to. I stiffen a little.
“Hey, do you think you’ll go to this?” He holds up the play postcard.
“No,” I snap. Then I feel bad. I add, “I sort of hate plays, Jonah.”
“Oh. Me too, mostly. Hey, I saw you at the party last night. I had an extra smoke waiting for you in the alley but you never showed.”
“Yeah. I left early.”
“Oh.” He nods in a dreamy, knowing way. I’ve basically gotten to know Jonah over shared cigarettes in the alleys, corners, and back porches of the various department parties and functions I’m trying to dodge. I’ll be sneaking out the door, desperate to escape, and I’ll find him out there in the dark cold, shivering and smoking by the dumpster. Hey, Samantha. That’s how I learned that, like me, he’s the only one in his cohort who didn’t come from a renowned undergraduate program. That he too applied to what we are continually told is one of the most exclusive, selective, hard-to-get-into MFA programs in the country on a lark, thinking No Way in Hell.
Isn’t it a trip to be here? he said to me on the back porch at one of the first parties.
Yeah, I slurred, my eyes on the Bunnies, already in the midst of one of their communal, eyes-shut-tight, boa-constricting embraces, even though they’d only just met.
It’s sort of like a dream, Jonah continued. I keep thinking when will I wake up, you know? Like maybe I should ask someone to punch me.
You mean pinch you?
A pinch wouldn’t wake me up from this. And if it did, I’d be back in Fairbanks, living in my dad’s basement. Where would you be if I punched you, Samantha?
Staring at the brick wall of my life from behind a cash register in the intermountain West, I thought. Writing myself elsewhere in the evenings.
Mordor, I told Jonah.
We better not punch each other then, I guess, he said, grinning at me.
“So how’s your writing going, Sam? Did you take advantage of the summer?” He smiles. He’s making fun of our Mixed-Genre Workshop leader last spring, Halstrom, who kept telling us we must not let the summer pass us by. Because this year, the final year, in which we’re all expected to produce a complete manuscript by April, would go by oh so quickly, we wouldn’t believe it. Literally in the blink of an eye, all of this—he gestured with his manicured hand to the stale classroom air around us, the fake pillars, the unlit fireplace, the cavelike walls—would be gone. I watched the Bunnies shiver and give each other a group hug with only their eyes. The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.
“I pretty much wasted it,” Jonah says. “I mean, I wrote like two volumes of poems but they’re terrible so I’m back to square one. I’ll bet you wrote like crazy this summer, though.”
I think of the summer, my days spent gazing at dust motes from behind the Warren music library information kiosk, my nights on Ava’s roof, drinking and tangoing ourselves into oblivion. Sometimes I’d stare at a blank page, a pencil held limply in my hand. Sometimes I’d draw eyes on the page. Scribble the words what am I doing here? what am I doing here? over and over. Mostly I just stared at the wall. The page and the wall were one and the same to me all summer.
“I don’t know about like crazy. . . .”
“I still remember that piece you brought into Workshop last year. You know, the one everybody hated?”
“Yeah, Jonah, I remember.” The horrified faces. Heads slightly bowed.
“I still think about it. I mean, it was pretty hard to forget. It was so . . .”
“Mean?” I offer. “Willfully twisted? Aggressively dark? I know, I think that was pretty much the consensus.”
“No! I mean yes, it was mean and twisted and dark and it actually scared the living shit out of me for weeks. But I loved all that. I love how mean and twisted and dark it is.” He beams at me. “Who ever thought going to an aquarium could be so treacherous and horrifying, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“But if you really think about it, it kind of is.”
“Thanks, Jonah. I liked your piece that everyone hated too.”
“Really? I was going to scrap it but—”
“Don’t do that, that’s what they want.” I say this more intensely, more bitterly than I intend.
Jonah looks confused. “What?”
“Nothing. I should probably go. Late for class.” I’m not late for class. There is no class now. But I imagine Ava waiting for me outside by the bench, giving undergraduates her death stare. Hurry the fuck up, Smackie.
“Oh, okay. Hey, Sam, can I read more of your stuff sometime? I kind of dig it. I mean, I really dig it. I was actually kind of jonesing for it after I read it, you know?”
“Um—I guess so. Sure.”
“Cool. Maybe we could hang out sometime and . . .”
Down the corridor, behind Jonah, I hear the elevator ding and my stomach flips. Because I know before the doors even open who it will be. I know even before I see his tall, sleek frame exit the doors, whistling. Mane a carefully cultivated chaos. Arms inked with watchful crows. The Lion. Approaching us. Wearing his usual obscure noise band T-shirt. One of the bands we used to talk about back when we used to talk. He carries with him the scent of the green tea he used to brew for us in his office, which he would ceremoniously stir, then pour into mud-colored, handleless cups. How’s the writing, Samantha? he might ask in his deep Scottish lilt.
Now I see his leonine face fall slightly at the sight of students with whom he must fraternize. Ask about their summers. Their writing. Did they get their stipend checks okay? And then there’s the fact that I’m one of the students. Makes it much more difficult. But he smiles. Of course he does. It’s his job.
“Hello, Jonah. Samantha.” Definite voice drop when he said my name, though he tries to make it sound cool, even-keeled. Small, subtle nod of his maned head.
I watch him busy himself at his own cubby, which is full to exploding with letters and books. Humming a little. Taking his time.
“Samantha, are you okay?” Jonah says.
I should just walk over there like I’ve imagined doing how many times, tap him on the shoulder and say, Look, can we just talk? He’ll look surprised, perhaps. Caught off guard. Talk? he’ll say, his gaze sliding from side to side, assessing routes of escape. As if it’s a highly suspicious activity I’m proposing. Illicit. I’m afraid I can’t talk now, Samantha. But perhaps you could come by during my office hours?
Or perhaps he’ll play dumb. Look at me with a chillingly neutral expression, revealing nothing. Sure, Samantha. What’s up? Meeting my eyes like go ahead, absolutely, please, talk.
“Samantha?”
And then what? And then I could just cut to the chase and say, I don’t understand what happened between us exactly, but can it just not be weird anymore? But my fear is that he’ll look at me like I’m insane. Weird? Happened? Between us? Samantha, I’m sorry but I really have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m afraid. And he won’t look afraid at all.
But now when I see him standing there, humming, checking his own mail slowly, smiling to himself, my body goes rigid with—I really don’t know what, but I have to go.
“Samantha, wait—” Jonah says.
“I’m really late for class now.”
The Lion looks up from his mail. He probably knows that I am not late for anything. That there is no class right now. That I’m running from him like a scared little bitch. What’s the prey of a lion again?
“Oh, okay. Have a good class, Samantha.” And then Jonah waves and waves and waves at me and I’m reminded of myself, last night, waving, my hand high over my head.
3.
Before I leave to meet Ava, I shove the invitation in my pocket. She said she would wait for me outside the Center for Narrative Arts, sending check vibes. Because I’m not going in there, Smackie. Sorr
y. You know why. I nodded solemnly. Yes. Even though the truth is I don’t really know why, apart from the fact that she’s militantly anti-Warren and feels it’s full of entitled pricks. Also that it’s killing my soul/creativity. She knows firsthand because she went to the art school right next door which is almost as famous and elite as Warren, and it nearly killed hers. But she didn’t let it. She dropped out before they killed her soul. Fuck that. Fuck them. Now she works in the basement of the nature lab down the hill, shelving dead bugs. Every single dead bug gets its own tiny glass drawer. It’s kind of nice. And infinitely better for her spiritual and creative well-being than hanging around the fake poor and fashionably deranged, aka the art school student body.
The only thing Ava enjoys about Warren is raiding the dumpsters behind the undergraduate dorms and fucking with student campus tours. From time to time we’ll even get drunk on a bench by the infamous flying-hare statue and wait for a drove of would-be students and their parents to pass by. The mothers always look around the campus like extremely interested buyers, their jeweled hands rubbing the backs of their fawnlike spawn as if to say: This could be yours, this could be yours. The future students gaze hungrily or with proprietary ease at a campus green that shimmers like their own skin, perhaps imagining their lavishly appointed dorms or the school orgies they’ve heard about, which Ava says are only attended by the very lame and unexcitingly naked. Not imagining, I’m sure, the very real possibility of being beheaded on their way home one night from a student bar. Or else beaten with crowbars by the roving gangs that stalk the campus and its surrounding area. Because the violence of this place, existing as it does in the fragile heart of seething poverty, doesn’t exactly feature in the script of the Warren campus tour, which is always led by some undergraduate tool in designer sportswear who is quite expert at shouting cozy factoids about statue erection and chandeliers while walking backward. Hence Ava’s pointed disruption.
Warren was founded in 1775 and over here—
Blah, blah, BLAH, finishes Ava on the bench beside me. What he’s not telling you is that there are people right here on campus who will chop your head off, she shouts to the mothers, who look at her, appalled. That’s right. With an ax! Like this. And then she’ll stand up and take a step toward them with an invisible ax over her shoulder and one or some or all of them will scream.
Though I’m horrified, I laugh until I cry every time.
Now that bench has actually become our unofficial meeting place. It’s where she should be sitting at this moment, glaring at the passing students, drawing what she calls the monstrous truth in her sketchbook, as is her wont.
At the sight of the empty bench, I panic. All my lonely days last year swell up in my heart and my vision goes swimmy. Then I feel my right arm being grabbed and I am blindsided by a waft of familiar scent. Two hands swathed in fishnet mesh cover my eyes.
“Boo!” she whispers into my ear.
Though I know who it is, I act surprised. Gasp.
Raucous laughter. She claps her hands. “Jesus Christ, you’re easy,” she says.
“I know. Where did you go?” I ask.
“Two idiots were having a discussion about Virginia Woolf with such orchestrated earnestness, I had to move. What the hell took you so long, anyway? You were gone for like five years.”
I remember the invitation in my pocket, the swan beak poking my stomach flesh as we speak. “I talked to Jonah for a bit.”
“The dreamy poet boy who wants to fuck you?”
“He does not.”
“It’s ridiculous how much he does.”
“He called me dark, twisted, and mean.”
“How sweet. He’s in love.”
“Can we not talk about this?”
She looks at me. “Something else happened. Tell me.”
“Nothing. Just. I had a run-in. Near run-in. With . . . you know.”
Ava nods. She knows, of course. “Did you talk?”
“I couldn’t. You know. Face him. After, you know, everything . . .” I trail off because she’s staring at me intently. I can’t tell if she’s disappointed in me or angry at him.
“You should really consider setting his office on fire,” she says at last, and smiles. “For a second I thought you got kidnapped by those bonobos.”
“Bunnies,” I say, feeling myself flush. Recalling those smiley faces on the invitation. All those hand-drawn hearts.
“Whatever. I was worried.”
She shivers at the view of the grand trees, as if they’re not trees at all but something truly vile, like all the rosy-blond light that seems to forever bathe the campus is about to punch her in the face like a terrible fist of rich. She looks at it all with disgust—the tall old buildings, the ornately spiked gates, the endless stretch of carefully manicured perfumed green teeming with bright-eyed squirrels and rabbits, the students walking here and there, discussing Derrida and their nose jobs, their hair kissed by a September light so golden and perfect it’s as though they’d paid the sun to beam down on them in just that way. I am not immune to the beauty. All year last year I took lots of pictures of campus—click, click, click with my cracked, ancient phone during every season, at different times of the day, in all kinds of light—that I don’t look at anymore and which I sent to no one. A placarded bench between two weeping trees. A two-hundred-year-old bell tower. A fireplace you could stand up in like the one in Citizen Kane. There’s a selfie of me I took in that fireplace. There’s one Ava and I took by the fireplace together, temple to temple, not smiling, as is our way. Her arm is around me, swathed in holey lace. There’s one of just Ava. Because of the way she’s standing before the flames, she looks like a witch being burned at the stake.
Now, she puts a hand on my cheek, gives me a small smile. “Can we get the hell out of here, please? You know I only come here for you.”
* * *
—
I don’t say anything to Ava about the Bunny invitation all day. Instead, we celebrate what she continually called my final day of freedom by going to the monster diner where she draws and I write. Supposedly. I just sat there with my notebook open, watching her draw. Then the zoo to say hello to the Moon Bear in his pit. Then out for Vietnamese iced coffees at the sketchy place we like downtown, where I almost got shot.
“You did not almost get shot, Smackie. Jesus Christ. That was a car backing up or something,” she said when I brought it up.
“Yes, I did.”
“You need to get out more.”
“I get out. I’m out with you, aren’t I?”
Now we’re back at her place drinking the sangria she made that’s so strong I’m pretty sure it’s poison. It’s that time of evening she calls the hour between the dog and the wolf. A time that actually makes this sorry swath of New England beautiful, the sky ablaze with a sunset the color of flamingos. We’re on her sagging roof, listening to Argentine tango music to drown out the roaring Mexican music next door. We’re practicing tango, like we did all summer, taking turns being Diego for each other. Diego is an imaginary panther-footed man we dream will one day come into our lives and whisk us off our very large feet. He has the smoldery, dangerously mesmeric looks of Rudolph Valentino but with the trustworthy eye crinkle of Paul Newman, the smiling insanity and very long torso of Lux Interior of The Cramps, but with the swoon-inducing earnestness of Jacques Brel. Diego wears white suits or black Cuban shirts patterned with orange flames. He bakes bread for us in the morning. He cuts fresh flowers and leaves them in jars all over our apartment. He does not write poetry, but he reads it for fun. He has a pied-à-terre in Paris, a mansion in Buenos Aires. Most importantly, he tangos like a dream. I’m Diego right now for Ava, which means I’m leading and she can close her eyes.
The Bunny invitation is still ticking in my pocket like a little bomb.
R u coming tonite? ☺ one of them texted earlier this afternoon.
“Sorry.”
“What’s with you tonight?”
“Nothing.”
“You seem distracted.”
I should just text Sorry, sick ☹ and be done with it. Because I shouldn’t go. Because even being in their vicinity, hearing their childish voices from the other side of the room, hurts my teeth. And yet the sun has set. And I have yet to say no. Probably they don’t want me to come anyway. Probably they did it just to be nice. Nice? No. Not nice, exactly. So they can say, Well at least we tried. She’s the one who didn’t show.
See, Bunny? I told you she wouldn’t come. This is how she wants it. She wants it like this.
Why, though? Creepy Doll will ask. She’ll be wearing the cat ears they stuck on her head last Halloween that she has yet to take off.
I told you, Cupcake will say, petting her. She’s a freak.
Oh, you’re so funny, Bunny. I love you.
I love you, Bunny.
“Okay,” Ava says, “let’s stop.”
“Why?”
“You’re obviously not into this tonight.”
“No, no, I am,” I lie. “I am.”
“What’s going on with you?”
It’s now 6:30. I have to decide. I shouldn’t go. I just won’t go.
“I might have to go out tonight,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow. Understandably. In all the days that have passed since we first met last spring, I’ve never had other plans.
“This thing at school,” I say.
“Didn’t we just go to one the other day?”
“This is another one.”
She looks at me. “You’re not sick of me, are you?”
“No. Never.” I say it fervently because it’s true.
“You can tell me, you know. I’m not going to cry or anything.”
I pull the invitation out of my pocket and hand it to her.