Growing Up Wired

by David Wallace Fleming

  I hadn’t grinded with a girl sober since I had been a junior in high school and, actually, as I watched our dance party in the Pit, the idea of it seemed frightening.

  “I think I’m going back upstairs to fix myself a drink,” I told The Snitz.

  “My work is done here,” he said.

  I took a step and turned to say something else to The Snitz but he was no longer beside me. He was on the dance floor, ramming his tight, blue jean-covered crotch between the legs of a seventeen-year-old girl with a grin like he had stolen Christmas.

  I headed back upstairs and unlocked my door to fix myself a drink. The orange house-party mug was hiding behind textbooks. I poured in grape Cool-aid from the mini fridge and mixed in several fingers worth of plastic-bottle Tequila. I stirred with my finger… perfect! It was my own invention as far as I knew. And I would soon learn if it was any good. I lifted it to my lips… horrid.

  It didn’t take as long for me to make my way back down to the Pit. I walked down the stairs, drinking off the Cool-Aid/plastic-bottle Tequila. It would be Grapequila. The knot tightened. So many young kids enjoying themselves with such leisure, liquor and technology. Like the System of the Down refrain we were taking a promise for a ride.

  Outside the mouth of the Pit in the basement hallway, a crowd of sweaty people forced my orange mug against my chest. I took a gulp with watery grape lurking above tequila. Away from the Pit, closer to the staircase, there was a small opening in the crowd that looked comfortable. I fought my way through male and female shoulders. Almost all the girls wore slinky and form fitting clothes. A pair of girls popped out of the stairwell doorframe in gold and silver, Lurex halters. I rubbernecked to a girl in slinky, low-cut, turquoise rayon with jade pendants sliding between her sweaty breasts. She smiled, glowing with her possession and her paunchy, young eyes thirsted like an underclassman vampiress about to chomp her own neck. She had these sexy freckles, each fading dot a lingering mark of innocence.

  A dainty, cat-eyed girl walked past. Crimson florid lacework led from a plunging ‘V’ down a single strip, demarcating the center of her snug, gauzy cotton. She stopped and held her phone to her cheek.

  Behind her, near the hallway’s back wall, a strawberry blonde of just over six feet stood waiting for a heated boyfriend/girlfriend conversation to end. She poised in thigh-clinging Capri pants of Platonic whiteness.

  Over by the glowing red and white pop machines, a girl thumb-texted for all she was worth to keep four striped-shirted vulture-guys at bay. Her archetypal beauty made me grab a half step: ‘80’s chic, hot pink T with the neckline roughly cut out. She looked up at someone with the svelte cheekbones, the jaw line and the disdainfully wealthy eyes to prove that she had it—that the force of her stare held everything and anything a mind can manage to horde unto itself before rupture.

  There was no question. After another Grapequila it would all be mine. I downed the remnants and headed for the stairwell. The crowd had thinned so that I could climb stairs at a decent rate.

  In my room, I mixed my Grapequila a little more generously, thinking that I would drink it slower. This seemed reasonable though its wet/dry duality tempted as it gushed over my tongue.

  As I headed back down to the Pit and entered the crowd, the Q vibrated in my pocket and I took it out:

  ‘Victor,’ Drake IM’ed, ‘there’s a lot of IM chatter about getting the house keys to sneak into Ma Red’s suite and steal back the house letterhead cause she’s gone for the weekend. You in?’

  I turned the Q’s ringer off and put it away. I didn’t share their delusions of grandeur about overthrowing Ma Red and controlling our own destinies. In high school I had been the student council president my senior year and I couldn’t have gotten anything done without the experience of our faculty advisor. So I knew that braintrusts were important in organizations like our house which had high turnover.

  I laughed as some dancer jabbed me with his pointy elbow—braintrust: that was a funny word. It grew hotter in there, with everything almost in front of my eyes.

  The song changed. Twenty inch teal and black woofers thrust and shimmered in strobe light. My ears flushed with blood. A barback yelled at a young girl as he held two silver beers in each hand: “Get a wristband! Get, get a wristband!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FRAT PARTY, PART 2 OF 3, PURGATORY

  It seemed to me that the crowd had thinned considerably in the past twenty minutes; enough to take two steps freely.

  Now, check this out right here because I’m not kidding around. There’s something special and intimidating and wondrous about when everything falls into place. I’m talking about when the heredity of maybe a hundred rich, intelligent men find a hundred desirable, dark haired, dark skinned Mediterranean women, each one perfecting on the last and they make a girl that wears the finest clothes of her day. A pair of flesh enhancing, dark denim jeans showing long, slender curves and a tight lavender sweater with every ridge and seam of her lacy bra beneath revealing the intricacy and history of her body. Her breasts looked like large, red apples—you know? the dark red kind that farmers grow with steroids and still taste extra sweet.

  I remember her from my freshman year. Her name was Emily. I was sure of it. Freshman year, I had won over one of her friends at a small frat party. This friend of hers—Shannon was her name—she led me over to Emily for the obligatory, girl-to-girl approval. Emily gave me a quick once-over and then spoke only to Shannon.

  Emily had committed the ultimate affront. She had taken me down a peg. My drunken mission was lucent and unquestionable: Get that peg back. Plus APR interest.

  Just then, she weaved through the crowd surrounding the DJ bar, flinching and furrowing her brow as she pressed her way through the incidental body contact. She wasn’t wearing a wristband. She said five words to the barback and got her silver beer, stowing it in her small black purse. Then, she bee-lined for an opening in the crowd near the side wall. She examined the crowd with the aloofness of a swimming instructor, supervising five-year-olds.

  I slapped some letter-jacket-wearing collegiate wrestler on his back to let him know I was coming through. I came into the opening with my eyes on her. She wouldn’t notice me.

  She fiddled in her purse and from her facial expressions the Marlboro Light was entitled to her before it rested on her lips.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I asked.

  She didn’t look up, she turned her head. We were the same height. A small fluorescent light, duct-taped above us, lit her face. She was so beautiful. She had a haughty look of youth in her stares and her coyly parted lips—full and crimson with a lavender tinge. I could picture her flipping Father Time the bird as she sun bathed with no-SPF banana oil, outstretched in a white string bikini and smoking one of her Marlboros.

  “Why do you smoke cigarettes?” It was an honest question.

  “Okay, mom,” she said. Her voice was raspy and sweet. I wanted to know what she sounded like in the morning or after a long, afternoon nap.

  “It’s just a question.” I said. “You probably don’t remember me.” I looked at her. “You don’t, do you?”

  “No.” She glanced me over. “Should I?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose that’s up to you; isn’t it. But if I were you… I’d remember me.”

  She squinched her eyes. “Now you’ve got me curious.”

  “It was a little earlier than this time last year,” I said, turning to watch the crowd with a smirk. “Your friend Shannon came over here and we hit it off.” I looked to her and our eyes met. “You spent most of the night running around the Pit trying to convince guys to get her away from me.”

  Emily took a drag and turned to blow it away from us. “Well, if I did do that it was nothing against you. Shannon was out of control that semester. She was flirting with all the guys at the Epsilon house and they were literally fighting over her.” She dropped her cigarette and stomped it under a black, pointed boot.

&n
bsp; “Regardless…” I said.

  I got pissed. It was the drunken flashing kind of anger. I didn’t want to impress her. I knew I wasn’t worthy of her. But I was arrogant. This was another of my experiments: “You didn’t help my game any.”

  She grasped lovingly over my forearm, smiling, leaning in with a sincerity I couldn’t gage, “You’re a smooth talker.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So you know Shannon?”

  “Yah,” I said. “We’re acquaintances.”

  “We probably hang out with some of the same people.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked. This, of course, was the sleeper-question. It was the question a college guy was supposed to ask without asking. After that much tequila, however, it didn’t hurt me to ask so soon.

  She closed her mouth, leaned back and studied me with a painter’s eye.

  I grinned, smug in my apathy.

  “I had a boyfriend. We broke up.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He was too possessive. We’re trying out a separation.”

  “Separations are good,” I said.

  She smiled. “Yes, they are.”

  It was working! Whatever I was doing was working. “So, you’re an Omega, right?”

  “That’s right. Wow. Cute and smart,” she said with sincerity.

  “Who do you normally hang out with from there?”

  Emily reached into her purse and pulled out her beer. She passed the beer to her left hand.

  Her right forearm ended in a cherry-red stump! The stump seemed to sprout a thumb and two fingers, which expertly popped the top on her beer. Emily caught me staring. She took a swig. “I’m sorry,” she smiled. “You didn’t notice?” She smiled as she held up her small digits to curl and pedal them in the fluorescent light like upside-down legs.

  Her hand was a pink, sweaty monster from some science fiction movie.

  “Actually, no, I hadn’t. Was there an, uh… an accident?” I swallowed and grabbed a half step backward.

  “Actually, yes. A motorcycle accident. It was pretty bad. It happened last summer. Geez, I thought everybody had heard about it by now. It was even in The Daily. Where have you been?”

  “Umm,” I said. “I’ve been… busy, this semester.”

  “Doing what?” she said. “You know, you look familiar.”

  “Yah. From last year. You saw me last year.”

  “No. It’s something else. Have you been on Youtube?”

  “No,” I said. “Not that I know of.” Oh shit! Had I been on Youtube? I had to change the subject. I felt like a jerk because of my reaction to her hand. It was like she had played a trick on me. Like she was mocking me for my own superficiality with that hand. The perfection of everything I wanted was so close to the defect of everything I feared. If my emotions were a circle, she would have touched the boarder of Hate and Love with an intriguing twinge down my spine: “Can I see your hand again?”

  She smirked. “Sure,” she raised her right hand. “Most people are afraid of it.”

  I felt the calluses and scar tissue around the reattached fingers. The scar where the middle and index fingers had been amputated had probably been sutured midway along her hand bones. The remaining thumb and fingers seemed to have been shortened and reattached. “It feels like you have calluses.”

  “My doctor said I wouldn’t be able to get it strong enough to do anything strenuous.” She turned over her hand to curl her two fingers upward. “Pull on them.”

  “I don’t know, I—okay.” I grabbed her small, weak-looking fingers.

  They jerked my torso forward like iron hooks.

  “Wow!” I said.

  “That’s why I have calluses.” She smiled. “Training.”

  “I see.”

  “Are you done playing with my hand?” she asked.

  “Well…” I looked at her, playfully, as if she’d caught me. “I guess I am.”

  She lowered her hand. “Good. It was starting to get a little weird there for a minute.”

  “What’s wrong with things getting weird?” I asked and glanced around casually.

  She crinkled her nose. “You’re cool. What’s your name?”

  “Victor. Victor Hastings.”

  “Victor… Hastings,” she considered. “I know that name from somewhere—”

  “No you don’t. Don’t be ridiculous. What’s your major?”

  “I’m in special education. I plan to teach kids with disabilities.”

  In my mind’s eye she sat on chrome steel elementary school chair with her pointed leather boots and her designer jeans, spooning applesauce to a helpless, nine year old boy. “That’s impressive,” I said.

  “No it’s not,” she retorted.

  “It isn’t?”

  “No,” she leaned in to slip me a secret, “It’s love.”

  My drunken, T & A bombarded psyche chewed on this for a while, “Love… love… hmm.”

  She moved closer and her perfume was all roses and lilacs, “What? You thought it got buried? It’s still out there; I promise.”

  “It’s just that…” I had no idea what to say.

  “You’re fun,” she said. She giggled and I saw her white teeth.

  I couldn’t stop looking at her body and thinking about roses and lilacs and that voice and those lips. The secrets of that voice. “Can I call you sometime?” I asked.

  “Yah. You could. The question is: ‘may I’?”

  “May I,” I asked.

  “Yes,” she grinned. “You may.”

  I got out the Q. I didn’t know how to put her phone number in that thing so I handed it to her and she started doing it. “It’s not my phone,” I admitted.

  “You better erase this before you give it back. I don’t just give my number out to any guy.”

  “I will,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  She handed it back to me. “I’m here with Sarah and I’ve been neglecting her. I have to go. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay. It was good meeting you, Emily.”

  “It was good meeting you too, Victor.”

  I watched her walk away.

  I stood there for a while, enjoying the buzz, watching the crowd thin. Out of the corner of my left eye, I saw Emily coming toward me with a seductive look on her face. She had drunk her beer, circled the dance floor and come back after me from the opposite side. She walked right up to me and rubbed her boobs on my chest with a look of power burning in her eyes. This type of thing had happened to me before. It wasn’t uncommon for a girl with nice boobs to do this type of thing in college. In pick up artist circles’ something like this would be referred to as a ‘shit test’, meaning a very brief test a woman employs to evaluate a man. I had no idea of the correct response to this shit test. It seemed to me that if I let myself enjoy it, she’d get the attention she wanted and lump me in with all the other guys. So I stood there emotionlessly as she rubbed her boobs against my chest and then she walked right on past before I could say one word. I didn’t think much of it, though. So much had changed since our parent’s went to college that it was hard to gage certain behaviors.

  I stood there for a while, riding out my buzz as the crowd continued its thinning from two free-steps to three. I pretended to enjoy a few false conversations with house members and girls as I watched Emily talk to Sarah. Her face was half concealed by a support I-beam as she talked. I never once got the impression she was looking at me. This was because she wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t know what to do. She had rubbed her boobs on me. Maybe the ball was in my court. I envied my grandparents. They had gentlemen callers, the waltz cut-in system, pinning and promise rings. What did I have? I had grinding, boob rubbing and I-beam hiding. Which was fine. I was willing to make lemon-aid from lemons. But what were the rules? What was the expected conduct?

  I glanced over to the DJ bar as one of our barbacks argued with some Epsilons. An Epsilon threw his hands up in the air and walked away. I checked the I-beam. They had va
nished. I looked over the Pit for her and couldn’t find her. I assume she flew straight through the hallway and up the stairwell because I went around looking for her and she was gone.

  I was so tired and drunk. The alcohol had snuck up on me. I went upstairs to my room, changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt and brushed my teeth and put on clearsil in the bathroom.

  In the rack room, beneath the sheets of my rack I couldn’t sleep. Was the motorcycle accident Emily’s fault? I bet she’d been speeding. Despite her fire and what I had noticed in her and the other girls as this emerging feminine bravado, there was something about that smile—those eyes; it made me feel like there was a lot more kindness in the world than I had originally guessed. I got out of there and went to my room to write:

  A touch—but some presses

  last longer, hold stronger than others.

  A sight—but some visions hold stronger

  last longer than others.

  A sound—and some voices burn deep

  and then others…

  A taste—and that’s just your

  skin, could it be ours?

  A scent—and that’s just a

  new name for what holds me.

  A being—and here we are.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FRAT PARTY, PART 3 OF 3, PARADISIO

  I went back into my rack and closed my eyes to give myself over to some deep sleep. There was a quick flash of thought where I was certain I’d rest there in my bed, peacefully, until late morning. Then a dream about fingernail extensions that gator-clipped onto one’s own fingernails and somehow required constant gasoline replenishment to do absolutely nothing. Someone grabbed my shoulder—blackness—shapes: Wilfred. It was Wilfred. He leaned inside my rack with the hanging covers pulled back: