by Camille Roy
Just after the noon siren, I slipped through the school’s large front doors and saw Gray drifting at the end of the hall, lost, probably looking for me. Our eyeballs connected and he made a major lurch in my direction. I turned down another hall, pretending that I hadn’t registered him, and found a stairwell I’d never noticed before. I swerved in that direction, my feet clattering downstairs into a warren of halls, the walls of which seemed to be sweating, or perhaps it was just the gleam of brown enamel paint, and there were rumbles from the pipes and certain closets. Hot air gusting from ventilation ducts. Locked doors leaked smells of cleaning fluids. I thought about the pride I felt in breaking rules that no one cared whether or not I followed. I was in the basement; so what? I relied on such peculiar things.
I wandered until the zeal of exploration wore off. Just then (finally) an open door, and there was Alice, looking at me through the swamp water of her aviator sunglasses. She was sitting in the middle of a broken-down couch in the center of the room. She had the skin of a baby, and her long straight hair was ash blonde, so heavy it hardly moved. I must have seen her in motion all the time, because that’s what bodies do, but I don’t remember it. When she was at rest Alice became vivid, a teenage Buddha, impenetrable and serene. She patted the seat next to her. I went in and sat down. A half-dozen other students were scattered around the room, quietly eating.
—It’s hard for me, Alice was saying. My dad says it’s because I was kidnapped. But I don’t know. Was I really kidnapped?
She smiled gently at me.
Flummoxed, I leaned forward to check the reactions of the kids sitting on the other side of Alice. But they were blinking like dazed monkeys. A guy and a girl. Their arms and legs were twined around one another easily. I pretended not to notice. I opened my lunch bag and pulled out a sour plum.
—You don’t know the story, Alice said. Everyone but you knows the story.
She looked at me with a tender note of remonstrance.
—It was after the divorce. I hadn’t seen my mother in two months. But when she pulled up in the Buick outside of school and told me to get into the car, I did. Twenty-four hours later, we were in Texas. It was like a dust bomb, driving down a little dirt road for miles and miles, a dry irrigation ditch, dead cottonwoods. At the end of the road was a little house. The door opened, but the windows were covered with boards. What does that tell you?
—You were squatting, one of the kids commented wisely.
—At night, I slept in a closet. My mother said, Aliens don’t know about closets, so this way they can’t abduct you. During the day, she opened the front door a crack and scanned the horizon, watching for the feds.
A small mountain of cans was piled on the old kitchen floor. For meals we sat next to the mountain, selected our cans and ate out of them with plastic spoons. There were no lights, no toilet, no phone. After a week someone did come. I watched the cruiser throw up dust for miles. My mom gave it one hard look and then began wiping the counters with a rag. I wonder if she gave up right then. Texas Marshals. They strolled up the walk in their gleaming black boots and knocked on the door. Howdy, ma’am. Please open the door, ma’am. Their voices were calm and low. I couldn’t see their eyes behind their sunglasses.
Alice pushed her glasses up her nose, tilted her head back and looked at me.
—I surrendered, she said.
—To the real world, a girl added wistfully. Cheryl.
Cheryl looked at me, blinking tearfully over her hard contacts. Her black ringlets seemed to tremble around her pale face. With her big nose, I thought she was an interesting mixture of delicate and rough. When she laughed she leaned forward and cackled into her palm. The boy next to her was Erik. He was huge, awkwardly squeezed into the student chair, with waves of tousled, surfable blond hair. In the lull that followed Alice’s story, we regarded one another with a tinge of unease.
Erik. Cheryl. Alice. The entwined boy-girl pair. This was the beginning of social life and it caught me unawares. It was sort of like getting new furniture. I would forget I knew anyone until I stumbled into one of them.
It began the next day, when I turned, alarmed, as a load of books crashed next to me at the start of second period Social Studies. It was Erik, giving me a look of curious significance.
I had someone to sit next to. As Erik settled in, I stared with shock at Mr. Gibbs, our teacher, as he thumbed through his notes for the day. I noticed, not for the first time, that there was a repellent quality to Mr. Gibbs. It wasn’t a personal characteristic but something more off-hand and natural, like the way a penguin repels water. Mr. Gibbs was also pear-shaped like a penguin, and he had a penguin-like layer of fat, and rheumy eyes. I noticed these aspects of our teacher with an intensity bordering on grief. Mr. Gibbs waddled to his place in front of the class and began talking about the cotton gin. What kind of thing would have a name like that? My mind foamed up. Erik and I did not speak.
Deeply skeptical of any social encounter, with chilled waves rolling in and out of my heart, I dashed off at the bell to my next class, clutching my books. Nonetheless, passing the stairwell to the basement at lunch, I lingered for a moment, thinking of Alice. Her smile, Cheshire-like. It didn’t attract me exactly, but compelled me with a sympathy purer because the smile was so bland. I carried my lunch (as always, stiff-skinned sour plums and cottage cheese) into the basement. They were all there. Alice nodded at me for the second time, and I took what had begun to feel like my seat on the orange vinyl leatherette couch, next to her.
Alice inclined her head in the general direction of the boy-girl pair on her other side.
—We call them The Pretzels.
The pair looked at me with speechless melancholy.
Happiness blazed in my chest, and I grinned.
Days passed, social life continued. I rarely had to use my words. I spent lunches well inside the circumference of Alice’s honey smell and the soft gush of her voice. Second period every school day, Erik’s books crashed onto the desk next to mine. He was taciturn but his body was symphonic. His sprawling frame overflowed our little chairs, and his blunt cut mane of blond hair, that hair, was beautiful.
Giggles make wiggles in your face, Erik printed with a pencil on the margin of a handout, and pushed it towards me. When I laughed, he added, in even smaller letters, YAY!
Erik was yards of relaxed boy, with only the stiffness of his neck to convey suffering. In the hallways between classes, he barreled by without looking at me. Or so I thought. One day a dim apprehension led me to glance back after he’d passed, and I found his neck twisted, his gaze locked on mine.
I discreetly checked if Erik was flashing me one of these glances every time he passed. He was.
Get me out of here. His eyes buzzed mine like radar beams.
Out of what? Our world, the interstices of school and home and the floodplain of friendship. Was that it? Or was it the body? So big and mysterious, really its own planet.
He thinks we share a chunk of the same bloody heart. This thought popped up of its own accord. I didn’t know what to do with it. He could be my alien, if I wanted one.
Soon after this, Cheryl pulled me to the side in the hall. She leaned against a locker and shook her ringlets of black hair down her back. I looked with interest at the bright green contacts that slid around on her muddy green irises.
—Guess what I heard, she said. About Erik. You know his dad is a chemist, she said. He’s kind of a frog, and he works with a lot of other frogs, down at the sewage plant. Well, his mom was a fashion model. She’s just a gorgeous babe.
There was a pause as Cheryl and I struggled to imagine Erik’s mother.
—Poor Erik, I said. So that’s his problem. There’s an ugly person inside, struggling to get out.
There was a long snide girlish moment, followed by withering laughter. I’m not sure what got resolved, but afterwards I just stopped wondering about Erik.
One month slithered into the next, and then the next. My social life ac
quired a little solidity. There wasn’t much to it, but it did continue. One day I overslept. Late to school, I walked through streets deserted due to the cold. Erik came up to me as I climbed the front steps, a biting December wind at my back.
—Hey, said Erik.
—You’re late, I observed. Let’s be late for Mr. Gibbs’ class together.
The wind was blowing his hair all around and the tips of his ears were pink. He looked like a model in front of a wind machine. But it was the emotion that leaked out of him that, as always, caught my attention. Some wad of feeling that was sullen and stunning. I felt a sudden pang in my heart.
—Uhh, he said. D’ya have a moment?
—Sure. But can we go inside? Brrr…Erik frowned as he gazed fixedly at the ground. I sighed, rocking from one foot to another. I understood that we could not go inside.
—I’m bisexual, he mumbled.
I looked up at the winter sky, through a few filmy clouds, into a pale expanse of blue. This sky touches down everywhere, I thought. Amber waves of grain and purple mountains, etc. Now that’s promiscuous.
Then I looked at Erik and frowned. What was a bisexual? What was sexual?
—How do you know you’re bisexual?
—Well, I’m having an affair with a teacher.
—Wow.
We sat down on the freezing cold steps.
—Is that complicated? I asked.
Erik didn’t answer, which confused me. If he stopped answering altogether, my curiosity would never be satisfied and would turn into suffering. I decided to jump right to the point.
—Who is it?
—Mr. Gibbs, he said quietly.
—But Erik—
—What?
—That’s impossible.
—Why?
—He’s… He’s a penguin.
Erik gave me a cool, appraising look.
—You should dump him, I said. He must be thirty years old.
Erik shrugged and got up and I followed him into class. Mr. Gibbs eyed us but said nothing.
For the next few days I felt like I was caught in a whiteout, snow swirling all around. The actual weather was dreary, a late fall paralysis of clear and windless cold. The snow was my thoughts. I couldn’t fit the new information about Erik into the known world. When I looked at Mr. Gibbs, he became a wall of skin, a barrier with pores and body hair behind which lay an Unknown Lande. I wanted and expected him to disappear. Yet there he was, day after day, meaty and mundane, waddling and droning above us during second period.
Erik seemed a little glum.
Anything in life, is life. Anything at all. Gradually I absorbed this uncanny fact.
As I was drifting down the hall shortly before Christmas break, Erik stepped in front of me. He cleared his throat and his whole body seemed to rustle as if a wind was passing through it.
—Where are you going next year? he asked. Like, college.
—Dunno, I answered, shifting uneasily.
—You should go somewhere. Maybe here.
He handed me a state university application.
—That’s where I’m going. The app deadline is Friday.
He sauntered off down the hall. I didn’t say anything. I was too surprised. I recognized my future as soon as the paper was in my hand.
2. Obvious Thing
It was the obvious thing. The school was cheap and good and very big. Forty thousand students attended. My whole social life migrated there: Cheryl, Alice, Erik. But I never would have if Erik hadn’t put the paper into my hand.
My new home was located between a factory district and a small dreary metropolis (Toledo, if you need to know), with strips of pasture on either side. On a hot day, I could smell cows. The cornices of the school’s low red brick buildings were decorated with yellowed stucco knobs that looked like art deco frosting. I liked to stare up at the knobs and let the rivers of students (mostly in engineering and agriculture) turn into a smear.
It was perfect for me. It was an uprising for me. It was a blur.
Cheryl appeared in my doorway several times a day. She’d slouch there, staring at my floor for long moments, unable to talk. Horrified. I watched her moments of pain but they didn’t last long. Then her loud self came back, and she moved like a party, shaking her long hair.
We gossiped. Rumors, unconfirmed, that Erik had found a girlfriend. Our reflections on Alice, who’d moved into the room opposite mine and then was hardly ever seen.
I kept my most important decision a secret: I’d decided that it was time for me to try to process heterosexually. Squish. Boy on top. Squish. There was the boy whose mouth tasted like oysters and one who thought I was a German exchange student named Ingrid (I faked an accent). Tangles. Just so you know: I really did those boys. My mind foamed up when I thought about it.
My logic felt pure, based as it was in action. Our shared circumstances (of dorm, school, bodies) led me to believe that everyone else felt pretty much the same. This made my talks with Cheryl endlessly provocative, as there was virtually no one whose actions I found comprehensible. Why had Gray Loving followed me around for months, crying actual tears? Why, come to think of it, did Alice always smile at me beatifically? A smile that was unwavering, like a principle.
I told Cheryl about Gray Loving and she said firmly,
—Gray crushed out on you doesn’t mean that you have anything in common with Gray.
Then she gestured with her head towards the wall in back of her.
—That painted foot in the hall? Alice was out there in the middle of the night, painting that foot.
I peered over Cheryl’s shoulder into the hallway, and there it was. A giant well-made foot. The yellow paint blended with the dingy wall, making it both inconspicuous and spectacular.
—No one knew she could paint. Now people are saying she’s a genius. ‘She never goes to class and she’s doing reasonably well’: voila, genius. Well, I think she’s on acid.
As the days passed, the foot grew into one leg, then two, then a figure, a reclining male nude. He looked like a landscape of rolling yellowish green hills, spreading outward from the genitalia, which were a fruit arrangement: a banana and two plums. The nude floated dreamily at shoulder height down most of the length of the hall, his eyes half-closed. Then, on the opposite wall, another figure began to appear, a woman, in the same queasy yellowish tones. Her pussy was a little snatch of dark red cherries. The figures had small faces, shaped like cantaloupes, and that bland.
—I love the colors. They’re so ill.
—Sammy thinks Alice must have hepatitis.
Snicker, snicker. Cheryl continued,
—I knocked on her door and there was no answer. It was unlocked, so…I went in! Alice just smiled her Buddha smile. The window was covered with a tie-dye sheet, making the light purple and orange and blue in shafts.
I couldn’t believe that it was so simple for Cheryl. I hadn’t seen Alice in weeks.
—What did you talk about?
—Acid, like I told you.
—And she said?
—Saturday. She’ll do it with us.
It didn’t seem like a bad idea. Saturday came and Cheryl and I stood in front of Alice with our mouths open and she put little tablets on our tongues. I waited for mine to dissolve, waited to get off, then I couldn’t move. No wonder Alice hardly talks anymore. Where she lives now… speech is boulderish stuff. Insurmountable. I lay pinned against the bedspread by the weight of possible words. Trying to think in boulders, flitting between shafts of blue and orange and purple light. Finally my eyelids fell with a thud and I went somewhere. Into the interior, which was pure white, and I was lost in a fog. My blood ran around my body like rumors in a forest.
Perhaps I slept. Perhaps the hours rolled over me with such intensity that my memories were demolished. In any case, it was morning before I opened my eyes. I found myself sprawled on the floor. How had I gotten there? On the ceiling there was a long scrawl; I stared at it for quite a while trying to deciph
er it before I realized it was a crack, actually. Then I saw Alice sitting in her rocker, sipping tea. She smiled, though it was nothing so definite as a smile, more like an effusion. It filled the air around her. Mildly, she said,
—Your cunt tasted like orange pekoe.
A thrill collided with my chest. It rose like a bright bubble and burst and I felt like crying. I looked around for Cheryl. She was gone!
—I don’t remember anything, I admitted.
Alice nodded wisely, then said,
—Cheryl already left.
What had Cheryl seen? Was it possible I’d had sex with a girl and didn’t remember it? I lay there as uncertainty filled me and turned over and over until it finally became a slavish form of love. Such extreme feeling demanded sacrifice. I went to my room, which had a small sink in the corner with a mirror over it. I leaned over the sink and cut the letter A into my tongue. A is for Alice, the acid queen of my dreams. I watched in the mirror as the firm lines turned watery and dribbled red over my lips. It tasted like salt water. Then I rinsed off the razor and lay it in the sun, on a window ledge.
I went back and knelt by Alice. I showed her my tongue, blood on my teeth like a vampire. Her smile was calm and kind. She ran her fingers through my hair and I glistened with pride.
I began slipping into her room whenever I could. I’d scan the hall to make sure no one saw me before I opened her door and darted inside. The door was never locked, which I took personally, a sign of welcome.