by Nathan Holic
Feeling lighter and quicker, I lean over the sinks and hold my breath and spray the mirrors with Windex, spray the sinks, spray the floor, Windex everywhere, slip my hands into the pair of yellow rubber gloves, pick up the orange chunks in the sink first, then make wads of brown paper towels and scoop up the rest. And I spray again, scoop, spray, wipe, minutes passing, stretching to the mirrors, leaning over drains, my ass crack hanging out of my boxers.
Spray, wipe, shower still going strong…shower stopping…then the sound of Tara opening the curtains—I freeze, still crouching—and her hand creeps between the half-opened curtain, grabs a towel, slips back into the shower.
I toss the crumpled paper towel wads into the trash mound at the foot of the janitor’s closet, leave it all as it lays, leave the Windex and the yellow gloves under the sink, leave the entire area a sparkling fresh masterpiece, better than new, stand, sprint to the door (shower curtain opening again), dash into the hallway and back to Maria’s door, open it, creep inside, pull the sandal from the doorframe, close the door—
And I’m safe! Safe again! Clean bathroom! Empty bladder!
I can only imagine what Tara, this freshman girl who only wanted to get ready for work without any hassle, must think when she sees the sink and mirrors spot-free but the closet door hanging open and the trash mound remaining. The janitors cleaned while girls were still showering? And it’s exhilarating to picture her face, to know that I got away with it all!
*
Last night, once we got back to the dorm, there were no awkward moments between me and Maria. I know that. I hadn’t become pathetic with my text messages, only more deeply sought-after. A mission. A prize. No questions about what I wanted to do, whether she wanted to do this; when we slipped into the room, Sam and Shelley behind us, we said very little, just breathed heavy and turned out the lights, each couple pulled to their respective bed, Maria turning on the radio, loud, and in no time we were under the blankets and I was sliding her black pants from her legs, hands traveling over smooth thighs and then sliding her thong from her waist and pulling it over her feet and around her toes and tossing it onto the floor and her hands were working at my belt, at my zipper, and my head was spinning and I unrolled a condom that I got from somewhere—I know I had a condom, please say I didn’t imagine this—and I barely saw her naked body and she barely saw mine in the darkness, but she dug her fingers into my ass and pulled me forward and we fucked under her sheets, still drunk, laughing and whispering “shhh” even though the radio covered our noise, and we moved, tried to change positions, and there was no grace to the sex and I can’t even say if it was satisfying. I can’t say how long it lasted, if I came, if she came, if I went limp or if I had an explosive orgasm, savoring sex secondary to simply having sex. The act, and the knowledge that it had happened: the exclamation point on the evening: that was most important.
Later in the night, of course, I woke up and tossed the condom into the trash and puked in the sinks and, well, we all know the story there.
Right now, I am a man in a girl’s dorm room; my clothes are missing, my wallet, my cell phone, all of it, lost under a pile of sorority t-shirts and sports bras and Five-Star notebooks. But I am there again. The blank side of a business card.
*
When I step forward into the dorm room, my foot lands on something sharp—another thumbtack or a staple—and it slips into my skin with such ease, such painful ease, that I’d swear I stomped on the little—
“Fucker!” I shout, knowing my foot must be bleeding. Bleeding all over the carpet, bleeding all over Maria’s jeans and camisoles and gym shirts.
I stand on my free leg, raise my injured foot into my frantic hands, hop to steady myself, bang into a bed, fall against a wall, raise my foot to chest level, squint, still can’t see anything—dark, dark—fumble for the spot where the pain is sharpest.
Lights now flooding the bedroom.
“Charles?” A high, perplexed voice from the corner of the room, but I don’t look that way, can’t, because my foot is finally visible and I spy the offending object, position my fingertips—my fingernails—around it like tweezers, can’t get a good grip—
“Charles?”
—looks like green glass, and I think I’ve got hold of it now, yank—
“Charles, what are you doing?”
—and in my hand, I hold a bright green sword, the kind which skewers maraschino cherries and orange slices and pineapple chunks on the rims of fruity cocktails…a green sword with one side striped red in blood. I drop my foot to the floor, holding the sword before me, and it’s a broken sword, actually, only half a sword, not very large at all. Plastic.
“Charles, bro,” A male voice from the bed beside me. “You all right?”
I wipe my forehead, don’t drop the sword.
“Yeah,” I say, huffing. “Yeah. I got it. I got it out.” And a laugh escapes my mouth, the same sort of relieved laugh that spiky-haired Michael made on Saturday night when his humiliation had concluded and he stepped down from his chair.
But no one joins my laughter; only silence around me.
Across the room, Maria stares at me from her bed; she’s slipped the sheets and comforter from her upper body, sits upright and unblinking. On the other bed, Sam’s head pokes out of the sheets, and his eyes are filled with ripped-from-REM-sleep puzzlement…he seems to be coming to a gradual understanding of the scene before him: A dorm room? And Shelley is not in the bed with him? Shelley is on the floor! On the floor beside the pile of clothes, just inches from the spot where I grabbed the baby T I currently wear, so close that I probably came inches from touching her as I searched the floor earlier. On the floor, curled up, backpack as a pillow.
“I went to the bathroom,” I say finally. “And then I stepped on this sword.”
“Fuck, Charles,” Sam says.
“Are you all right?” Maria asks, and her voice is not heavy with shock: she remembers enough of last night that she isn’t frightened by two men in her room. “I have band-aids.”
I examine my foot. Strangely, it isn’t bleeding.
“I think…” I say. “I think I’m okay.”
“Poor baby,” Maria says.
“Gaahh,” Sam says. He looks left-for-dead, has a prickly growth of facial hair. “So bright in this room. What time is it?”
“Nine,” Maria says, checking her cell phone.
“Fuck,” Sam gurgles.
“Guess I missed my Psych class,” Maria says.
“It’s too early to be conscious.” Sam closes his eyes.
“The early bird catches the worm,” I say, forcing a goofy smile.
Sam snorts and falls back against the pillow, but Maria scoots up on her bed, revealing a bright orange “Powder Puff” T-shirt, and she squints hard and runs her hands through her hair. Wait, did I just say, “The early bird catches the worm?” And I didn’t even have an ironic edge to my voice? And I’ve been giggling, stepping on plastic swords, acting like a maniac. Tangles of hair fall across her face, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” she asks.
“Never felt better.”
She pushes the hair from her forehead. I hold my breath.
“So, um. You have a good time last night?” I ask.
“Of course,” Maria says. “You like Juarez?”
“I’m never going to Juarez again,” Shelley moans from the floor.
“Yeah, don’t know if I have the energy to go back,” I say.
“You’ll always remember your first time, at least,” Maria says, and now—yes!—she is smiling, has that look in her eye, the one that regards me as the Most Interesting Man in the World, the one without suspicion. She scoots farther up in the bed, against the wall and out of the sheets completely, and she’s wearing pink and white booty shorts, maybe just regular old sleep-wear but they’re the ass-hugger type so skin-tight and ultra-short that they might as well be lingerie. Maria stands and stretches, s
heets collecting in a lump at the foot of her bed, her bare arms stretching skyward as she faux-yawns, her legs viewable in their entirety, and she stretches some more, eyes closed, and Sam and I are taking it in, breathing it in, ignoring the growing buzz of traffic outside, ignoring the noise in the hallway, the smell of dirty laundry and dorm floors, channeling all of our energy and our focus into this…absorbing that gorgeously proportioned shape before us.
She opens her eyes, glances at Sam. His arms are crossed behind his head as though he’s settled in to watch a movie. She knows we’ve been watching. She lives for this. Maria sighs. “I shouldn’t have taken a roadie last night,” she says through still-glossy lips.
“A roadie?” I ask.
“That’s where the sword came from,” she says.
“She took a margarita for the drive home,” Sam says, gaze fixed prominently upon the smooth fabric rounding Maria’s ass. “A roadie.”
“I got pretty drunk.” Maria gives a flirt-frown. She walks to me, takes my hands, takes the sword from my hands, examines the stripe of blood. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I say.
“I haven’t been that drunk in a while. You brought out the worst in me.”
“Oh, ha. Don’t say that.”
She kisses me on the lips—we press together—and it isn’t a goodbye kiss; she thinks this is the start of something. That last night was the first of many times that I’ll wake up in her room and use the community bathroom and sneak back under the covers to hold her. She doesn’t know that I’m leaving for Lubbock.
“Plenty of time for that later,” Sam says. “We got class, Charles.”
“You’re leaving?” Maria asks.
“We got class, Charles,” Sam says, and shit, my flight leaves El Paso at noon. He remembered, but I didn’t. “We need to get home. Just looking out for you.”
“Right,” I say. “I need my clothes.”
They’re somewhere under the sheets, and Maria digs for them and holds them out for me. But when I try to grab them, she says, “Not so fast.” I pull back, unsure what I’ve just done.
“You’re too cute in that outfit.” She reaches across her dresser and picks up her cell phone. Opens it, pushes a button, and it clicks and flashes. Camera phone. All the world has gadget phones except me. “Had to get a picture. Facebook?”
I scratch the back of my neck, then struggle into my jeans.
“You’re not keeping that picture, are you?” I ask before we leave.
“Charles in a baby T,” she says and laughs. “Call me later.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. Away.
We plod through the dorm’s hallways, Sam and I, bumping into walls. Sam slams into a door, hard, grabs his elbow but doesn’t make a pained grimace, just keeps holding it as we walk. Finally we exit through the main lobby, burn under mid-morning sunshine in the parking lot as we trudge to Sam’s car. The world around us is in perfect working order, an achingly perfect machine, sun still shining in the same spot as this time yesterday as if it was programmed by some technician somewhere for the sole purpose of keeping the business day on schedule. Professors and administrators, dressed in starched shirts and dry-cleaned blazers, walk to offices and classrooms, retracing the same steps as the day before.
Meanwhile, students move in packs, girls holding notebooks and textbooks against their bodies, each in the same flimsy way, boys tucking their notebooks under their arms as if to say, “I don’t care about class and I damn sure don’t care about this notebook.” They walk in packs, four or five of them together, purses and shoulder bags and occasional backpacks, paths unsure, floating in life’s sweeping unpredictability. Eyes, like mine, glossed with the effects of last night.
“Did you drive last night?” I ask.
“You don’t remember?” Sam fumbles with the keys, almost dropping them, but seconds later he unlocks the doors and we climb inside and he starts the engine.
“Just the ride home. It’s foggy.”
“Ha,” he says and even though he doesn’t smile, I can tell he’d like to show some amusement; like me, his brain isn’t working properly yet, his facial muscles have apparently short-circuited. “We had a pledge drive us.”
“A pledge? Everyone was drunk?”
“Wasted,” he says. “Shit, I spent sixty bucks at Dios Mia. Kept buying Shelley drinks cause she played that I-forgot-my-purse card. Must be great being a hot girl.”
“We didn’t have any pledges with us,” I say. “It was just the four of us in your car, and then Jose and Brandon in the other car.”
“You really don’t remember?” he asks, pulling out of the parking lot. “We made some calls.”
“Who? I didn’t make any calls, did I?”
“I saw you on your phone a couple times,” he says, “but no, you didn’t call the pledges. That was all me. Didn’t think I’d drink so much, thought I’d be good to drive. But I was breathing Jack by the time we left for Pub, and Shelley was a mess. Shit, that backfired on me.”
“When did you call the pledges?”
“End of the night. You said you were cool with it.”
“We had them come all the way to Mexico to get us?”
“That’s what pledges are for,” Sam says in the same authoritative New Member Educator voice he used when he read the critiques after the Etiquette Dinner. A voice sharp with humor, but thick with military seriousness. “Designated driving. Teaches them respect.”
I force myself to breathe easy.
According to Sam, several pledges actually made the drive to Juarez at 2 AM so that Sam’s and Jose’s cars would not be left in Mexico. And when we arrived back on campus, Sam—craftily, cleverly—asked the pledge driver to drop us off at Hanson Hall. “Maria and Shelley had to invite us back up to their room after that,” Sam says. “Our ride was gone.”
“They didn’t want us to come up?” I ask.
“They probably did. I just needed an insurance plan.”
Our conversation is interrupted briefly when Sam stops at Jose’s apartment so I can pack. Thanks to yesterday’s mall shopping spree, I’m leaving Las Cruces with more clothes than I brought, and my suitcase feels heavier, lumpy in certain spots. When I toss my luggage into Sam’s backseat, my bag crunches and rattles (notebooks breaking? shampoo bottle cracking open?), and I have to force myself to not check the damages.
Jose is at work, so I don’t get to say goodbye. Apparently, though, I gave him a bear-hug last night and told him he was an amazing president, he was my “dog” (“Yes, you actually said that,” Sam informs me). Last thing I do before I leave, I change shirts and give myself the “Axe shower”: a quick spray of deodorant.
“Those were tiny beds,” I say when I get back into Sam’s car. “Back in the dorm?”
“Shit, yeah,” Sam says. “Dorm beds are the worst.”
“Move an inch, and you’re on top of someone.”
“Shelley slept on the floor.”
“You hook up?” I ask, but I realize that in the heat of last night, I never stopped to think about what I was doing and if Sam might have been watching. And as I ask, “You hook up,” I’m also aware that I’ve lapsed back into college-speak, into the sort of slang that came so naturally as a student—“that’s tight,” “just made hella cash,” “what up, yo?”—but that I tried to banish from my vocabulary as soon as I spent my graduation money on that Ralph Lauren suit.
“I barely hooked up,” Sam says. “She was damn-near passed out.”
“Oh.”
“Obviously you weren’t paying attention,” Sam says. “You were busy. I don’t even remember how it happened, but Shelley crawled onto the floor just a little while after we got back to the rooms. I passed out, too. Didn’t even realize I’d passed out until you got up an hour or so later for the bathrooms, woke me up.”
“When I puked?” I ask.
“You puked?”
“I mean…I’m not sure.”
“You puked,” he says and nods. “You cov
ered all the bases last night, didn’t you? Went to Mexico, got wasted, hooked up, puked. Grand Slam, bro.”
“Well, I try.”
“Got a question for you, brother, a serious one,” Sam says as he pulls to the curb beside the Departing Flights doors of the El Paso International Airport. “Why are you doing this?”
“Why am I doing what?”
“Consulting. You say you don’t make any money. So what made you decide to do it?” His voice is disarmed, low and confidential, so honest that I don’t even know how to respond.
So I say that: “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” he asks. “Seems like a hell of a hassle, all this flying and the meetings and what-not, if you don’t even know.”
Others have asked, and for the last several months I’ve had a script from which to read my answer: “I believe in the mission of this fraternity. I believe that a fraternity is something powerful and influential in the lives of young men. I believe that we needed to protect the institution, save it from those who have the wrong priorities.” That is the recorded response that so many have heard. And it was true. But now things feel more complicated, missions and motives not so clean.
“There’s a lot of reasons, I guess.”
“Why did you take the job to begin with, then?”
“Fraternity,” I say, looking at the dashboard, where the vinyl has begun to peel away at the edges, cracking and wilting under the constant sun. I don’t ever admit the real reasons, do I? “It was my life. For four years, it was all I cared about.”
Behind us, someone revs his engine, honks.
“I could recite The Marathon backward and forward. I could tell you the GPA of every member in our house. I went to every intramural game, showed up at every Dead Week study session to help our pledges. My degree should have been fraternity. That’s the only thing I was really pursuing in college.”
Sam doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, the fever of realization slowly burning through him.