Empress of the World

by Sara Ryan

  I pick up the straw that I got with my soda.

  “Do you see this?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Do you recognize it?” I demand.

  “It’s a straw.”

  “Yes. It is also what you are grasping at for an explanation!”

  I bite into my slice of pizza. My mouth fills with grease. “Makes me sick,” I mutter, and spit out the bite of pizza into my napkin.

  “Well hon, if it does, there’s somebody you should be talking to about it, and it sure as shit isn’t me,” says Katrina.

  “You mean the cook?” I ask. Katrina sighs.

  “No, I do not mean the cook. I mean our friend Battle. I would just like to point out that all this trouble started at the point that you stopped talking to each other. There’s also the fact that you haven’t talked to me about what’s behind all this, and there’s a limit to the amount of help I can offer if you don’t tell me what’s really going on.”

  “Katrina—I can’t. If you really want to know—and I want you to know, that’s not the problem—you’ll have to ask Battle, because it would be a betrayal of trust for me to tell you everything.”

  Just like it was a betrayal of trust for me to make up my own little soap opera about what happened when her brother ran away.

  “Well, I’m not going to talk to her for you,” she says.

  “Did I ask you to?” I’m outraged. I rattle the ice in my glass, and then suck one of the cubes into my mouth. I bite down on it. It hurts my teeth. I keep chewing it until it dissolves and the water trickles down my throat.

  Katrina throws up her hands. She says, “I give up. Look, I’ve got about a zillion hours of work to do before tomorrow morning. I’ll be in my room if you need me.” She gets up and leaves the table, abandoning her tray with the remains of her ranch-dressing-drowned salad.

  I came to this program to study archaeology.

  So goddammit, that is what I am going to do.

  I unzip my backpack and take out one of my books.

  After a minute or so, I’m suddenly flooded with panic. What if they decided to wait till near the end of dinner, too? So nobody would see them?

  I have to get out of here.

  I gulp the last of my Diet Coke and dump the tray in the garbage. Then I run back over for my backpack. I trip and hit my knee hard on a bench. It hurts a lot. I’ll have a giant bruise.

  Good.

  Okay, I’m outside the dining hall and I haven’t seen them yet. I should go back to my room using a different route than usual, in case they’re on their way right now.

  There’s an elevator on the far left side of the hall. We never use it, but I found it once when I got disoriented on the way back from class.

  I make a couple of wrong turns on the way to the elevator, and each time I turn a corner, my heart starts beating faster, until finally it feels like the big wooden metronome Ms. Edwards turns on sometimes during my viola lessons. “Allegro! Presto! Prestissimo!” And every time I see anyone coming down the hallway, I’m convinced for a split second that it’s them.

  I eventually resort to the strategy I used in elementary school for deflecting insults. I get a book out of my backpack and read it while I walk, only looking up when I absolutely have to. It would help if I could summon up some interest in Chapter 8 of Discovering Our Past, “Understanding the Past: Cultural Processual Reconstruction,” but that’s a bit too much to hope for.

  Finally, I get to the elevator, and I stand in front of it for a few minutes, grateful to have gotten to it unscathed. I’m just about to press the button to call it when the doors slide apart.

  She’s got her back to me. That’s because she’s turned toward Kevin, who has his arms around her. Her head is tilted back.

  They’re kissing.

  The only thing I can think of doing is to put the book so close to my face that maybe they won’t recognize me when they get out of the elevator.

  Kevin doesn’t see me, but Battle does. She stares, her eyes huge.

  I step into the elevator, press “Door Close,” and sink down into the corner. I wrap my arms around my knees and my eyes begin to burn. I don’t want to make any sounds. It hurts my throat not to sob, but I clench my jaw and hide my face between my knees

  After a little while, I get up and push the button for my floor.

  July 27, 10:30 a.m., Library

  I thought that everything that could conceivably suck already did, but I’m wrong. Ms. Fraser wants to see me, so I must be failing archaeology. I wonder what my problem is. After all, if I can’t get a relationship right, the least I should be able to do is learn about stratigraphy and systematics.

  A blaze of freezing air conditioning hits me as I walk in, making goose bumps appear on my arms. I ask the guy at the desk where Ms. Fraser’s office is.

  “Up the stairs and to the left; it’s the first carrel on the righthand side.”

  I hadn’t even noticed there were stairs. But now that I know there are, I look up and see that there’s a whole other level, a mezzanine. You could do a pretty decent Romeo and Juliet balcony scene from it. Not that I have anyone to play that scene with, now.

  Ms. Fraser’s reading the newspaper when I reach the cubicle. I clear my throat and say, “Hi.”

  “Nicola! I’m glad to see you,” she says.

  Glad? “You told me to come,” I say, realizing belatedly that this sounds rude.

  “Yes, I did. I told you to come to my spacious office.” She extends her arms, and they touch the opposite walls of the cubicle. “But we don’t have to stay here. I thought we could go for a walk.”

  I want to ask why, but she must have some kind of reason. Maybe she wants to show me some important thing about the soil here. “Okay.”

  We clump down the stairs. She’s in front. There’s graffiti on the walls on either side of the staircase. I read some of it in passing.

  “Zeppelin Rules—hey, there’s some data for future archaeologists,” I say.

  Ms. Fraser laughs. “Indeed. And if the music doesn’t survive, they may well decide that there was a large cult devoted to an inefficient air travel vehicle.”

  I smile, but since she’s in front, she can’t see.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Ms. Fraser pauses and looks up at me. She says, “Nicola, the reason I wanted you to come see me is that I’m worried about you. You haven’t seemed yourself lately.”

  This is the last thing I expected.

  I cross my arms over my chest and shrug.

  “It’s a hard class,” I say, with that sinking feeling I always get when I know I’ve just said something stupid.

  “Yes, it is. But I don’t think that the class is what’s hard for you right now,” she says. “Let’s get outside into the sunshine.”

  Our footsteps sound so loud on the old wooden stairs that lead down and outside.

  It’s like an echo chamber. Thud, thud, thud. It’s dark in this stairwell, too. There’s a little bit of light shining from underneath the big metal door at the bottom of the stairs. That door looks like an alarm will go off if you open it. Ms. Fraser pushes the bar forward, and it opens without any sound but the squeaking of hinges. It opens out into the courtyard.

  Too many people like the courtyard. I saw Battle and Kevin on one of the benches there yesterday. I turned and ran.

  “Can we walk more toward the river?” I ask.

  “Certainly,” says Ms. Fraser.

  I’m glad she’s not forcing me to talk. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what she wants to hear. Maybe if I tell her why I’m upset she’ll be sorry she ever asked.

  It’s sticky hot. For the first minute or two, I feel like I’m defrosting from the library air conditioning, and it’s almost pleasant. Then my tank top starts sticking to me, and my jeans start to feel welded to my legs.

  “I don’t want to pry into your life, Nicola. I don’t want you to feel that you have to share private things with me just because I’m you
r teacher. But you can talk, if you want to.”

  I sigh. I can feel tears starting to well up. It’s like I’ve got a pressure gauge inside my head but I’m not in control of it, and when the pressure builds up too much the tears just gush right out. I haven’t been looking where I’m going as we walk through the grass toward the river, and I slip on some goose shit and almost fall flat on my face. It’s only by flailing my arms wildly that I manage not to fall over.

  I say, and my voice comes out bitter and angry, “It’s a story you’ve heard a zillion times. The cast of characters is different, that’s all. There’s two girls and a boy, but they’re not in the roles you’d think they’d have.”

  Ms. Fraser says, “Ah.” It’s a very neutral “Ah”—it doesn’t sound shocked or as though she suddenly understands the whole scenario. It’s just “Ah.”

  I say, “But in a hundred years we’ll all be dead so it doesn’t matter.”

  Ms. Fraser says, “An archaeologist would say, in a hundred years we’ll all be dead so it does matter.”

  “I don’t even know if I want to be an archaeologist,” I say. My voice reminds me of the way Isaac’s sounded when he was saying he didn’t even know where he was going to be living.

  “You have a long time before you have to decide,” says Ms. Fraser.

  “You mean they don’t kick you out of college if you don’t know what you want to do right when you get there?” I ask.

  Ms. Fraser laughs. “There are people who get through graduate school without knowing. I know someone who got his Ph.D. in philosophy and then became a mailman.”

  I say, “Listen, I really appreciate you being worried about me. But I’m going to be fine. Archaeology actually really helps. When I inking about people from thousands of years ago, what’s happening to me now doesn’t seem to matter all that much.”

  This is true, some of the time. Just not as often as I’d like.

  Ms. Fraser gets a funny look on her face. “That’s good—but don’t go overboard with it. Don’t use what you’re studying as a way to get away from your feelings. It’s not good for you.”

  I look at her, and wonder what she’s thinking. “Okay,” I say.

  “Let’s walk back,” she says abruptly.

  “Okay,” I say again. “And thanks, again.”

  “I think of it as part of my job,” says Ms. Fraser.

  July 29, 2:40 p.m., Riverbank

  “Well, I think you should come to San Francisco,” says Isaac.

  We’ve been talking, of course, about the phenomenon of Battle and Kevin. Katrina was going to come too, but at the last minute she said that she had too much work to do. This “masterwork for Carl,” some giant program that she’s writing, really seems to be taking over her existence. Apparently she hasn’t even seen much of Battle and Kevin, because she’s been taking all her meals up to her room. (And to judge from the trash that’s been accumulating on her floor, most of said meals have been wrapped in plastic.)

  It’s colder today, amazingly enough, so I’m wearing a jacket over my T-shirt, and Isaac is wearing a baggy sweater over his.

  “Why?” I ask, trying to put all of my irritation into that one word.

  Isaac starts to say something, then coughs, then says in an overly manic way, “Because there are tons of dykes! I’m sure some of them would be just delighted to console you in your sorrow!”

  “I think there’s only one person who could console me now, Isaac, and it doesn’t seem like she’s at all inclined to do so. But I appreciate the thought.” I sigh.

  “I just have one question for you, Lancaster,” Isaac says.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Since you first saw them holding hands that day, have you ever done anything other than run like hell when you’ve seen her coming—whether she’s with Kevin or not? I’m not even talking about having a big conversation, I’m talking about something on the level of making eye contact with her. Have you?”

  I glare at him. “You know I haven’t. What’s your point? Why should I put myself through more hell than I’m already going through?”

  “Would you listen to yourself? Come on, Nic. This is the world’s smallest violin,” he says, rubbing his index finger over his thumb. “If you want to punch Kevin’s lights out, I say go for it. If you want to give Battle a big old bitchslap, I say go for that too. But turning around and running like you’re Bambi’s mom and they’re the evil hunters is doing dick for you.”

  “Shut up. If you’re so hot for direct action, why haven’t you asked Katrina out yet?” I ask.

  I know, of course, that the likelihood that Katrina would actually go out with him is close to nil, seeing as he’s not a toadish-looking Computer Science teacher. But I don’t want to tell him that.

  He shrugs. “There are a lot of factors,” he says, sounding uncomfortable.

  I say, “Yeah, and one of them is that there’s not a hell of a lot of time left, relatively speaking.”

  “Don’t remind me,” says Isaac. “I never thought I’d be dreading the end of PoliSci.”

  I realize belatedly that I’ve been self-centered during this entire conversation.

  “Hey,” I say softly. “You figured out where you and Rebecca are going to live yet?”

  Isaac sighs, and rips up a patch of grass. Isaac Shawn, Destroyer of Lawns. “I think so.”

  “Where?” I pull one blade of grass carefully out of the ground, and put it between my lips.

  “With Mom. She’s going to stay in the old house, and that means we won’t have to switch schools.”

  “Is your dad upset?” I ask. The blade of grass falls out of my mouth.

  Isaac laughs, a bitter laugh. “Hardly. I think ‘relieved’ would be a more accurate representation of his feelings on the matter.”

  “Is he moving far away?” I ask.

  “I don’t think he knows what he’s doing. He’s so—” Isaac gropes for the right word, throwing a handful of grass up in the air. “He’s so random. I mean for years, they didn’t even go to temple, okay? And now all of a sudden he’s like, ‘Maybe I’ll take some time off and go to Israel.’ Well, bon fucking voyage, Dad—don’t miss those settlements on the West Bank while you’re there.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  Isaac shrugs. “Not your fault he’s an ass-hole.”

  We’re quiet for a while, and I realize that we’re sitting closer together than usual.

  The silence gets louder and louder.

  Something in the air changes, and I feel suddenly reckless, filled with a desperate desire for everything to become boy/girl simple. I lean in even closer to Isaac, kind of tilt my neck back and close my eyes, and sure enough, that’s when he kisses me.

  After a while, I break the kiss, and we blink at each other like cave-dwelling creatures who have stumbled mistakenly into the sunshine. Isaac clears his throat. “I’ve known that was going to happen for a long, long time,” he says quietly.

  “You have?” I squeak.

  Isaac shrugs, of course. “I’m just not surprised,” he says.

  “Well, I am,” I lie. Isn’t this what I wanted? “I don’t know what it means, what just happened.” I move away from him.

  Isaac cracks his knuckles, methodically, one by one. The silence extends.

  “Well?”

  Isaac cracks his wrists, then his neck.

  “You’re running out of joints,” I point out.

  He sighs. “It just makes sense, on a certain level,” he says.

  “Why does it make sense?” I tear my thumbnail off with my teeth. Nervous habits “Я” us.

  Isaac shakes his head. “This is doing my male ego no good at all.”

  “Ha ha. So?” No blood this time. I’ll have to try the other thumb.

  “So neither of us can have who we really want,” Isaac mumbles.

  I stand up, furious. “You don’t know you can’t have Katrina, you haven’t even tried, and besides, I don’t want to be, or have, a c
onsolation prize.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Yes you did.”

  “Fine then, forget it. Walk away, pretend nothing happened.” Isaac tries to crack his knuckles again, but they’re all cracked out, so instead he takes off his glasses and polishes them with his shirt.

  “That’s not possible. It did, and I still don’t know what it means.”

  “Jesus-crucified-Christ, Lancaster. If you didn’t spend every goddamn second of your life trying to analyze the exact meaning of every single thing that ever happened to you, Battle might not have dumped you!”

  A lump forms in my throat and my eyes sting. I rub my fists into them to banish the tears, but it does no good. “That wasn’t fair,” I almost whisper.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Isaac mumbles. He stands up, and tentatively puts his arms around me.

  We stand like that for a long time.

  July 31, 4:47 p.m., My Room

  field notes: you said that words don’t always work. is that why you left me for that jerk? no, doggerel doesn’t help. it’s obvious that she’d rather be with kevin than with me, md I don’t really have any way of arguing with me, and i don’t really have any way of arguing with that. i can’t very well just say, “come back to me because i have a bigger vocabulary and a better sense of humor,” because maybe she wants him because he has muscular biceps and can play the guitar.

  and because he doesn’t try to explain her life to her.

  and because he’s a boy.

  katrina’s always busy, and I haven’t felt like I can talk to isaac since that day at the river.

  it’s too complicated. i don’t even know what i feel any more.

  so maybe i won’t always be able to describe precisely what i’m feeling. maybe i can’t pin my feelings to the wall with neat little labels.

  maybe i have to give up on having a typology of my emotions.

  August 1, 6:00 a.m., Shower

  I shut off first the hot, then the cold water. For a minute I stand dripping in the stall. Then I step out and grab my towel—and I’m face to face with Anne from my class, who’s about to get into the shower next to mine.