Empress of the World

by Sara Ryan

  “Hi,” I say, wrapping my towel quickly around me. Anne looks startled, then says, “Oh, hi.” We exchange embarrassed smiles, and then I notice that Anne looks more than startled. Her eyes are red, as though she’s been crying.

  “Hey, are you okay?” I ask. It’s incredibly strange to be asking this question, while wearing only a towel, to another person who is also wearing only a towel. But Anne has been nice to me, and I want to be nice back.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she says, and I can tell she’s lying because her voice cracks a little on the word “fine.”

  “Are you sure? Because you seem pretty upset,” I say. I would reach out a hand to put on her shoulder, but then my towel would fall.

  “I’ll be fine—I just need to take a shower!” she says, dismissing me.

  “Okay—well, I guess I’ll see you on the bus,” I say.

  This is the day we visit an in-progress dig. I’m pleased—it will get me away from everyone.

  Obviously Anne’s not fine, I think as I get dressed. I yank my brush through my hair and tie it back. Maybe I’ll ask her about it on the way there.

  After I get coffee and a bagel, I end up being one of the first people to arrive at the place where the bus is waiting. Unfortunately, the people who have gotten there before me are Ben and Alex. I attempt to ignore them, wishing I’d brought a book.

  “Oooh, Little Miss Bleeding Heart Lesbian’s by herself today,” says Ben. “Did China Girl turn you down?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I demand.

  Ben grins. He says, “You know what I’m talking about. I know about you—I’ve seen you around with that other girl, the skinhead. Well, she ditched you, so now you wanna put some Chinese food on your menu.”

  “Moo goo gay pan,” Alex chimes in.

  Elementary school. I’m totally back in elementary school. I never talked back, I just let them insult me until they got bored and left. But they’re not going to leave, they’re waiting to go to the same place I am. And of course, my face is doing its usual impersonation of an overripe tomato.

  Dammit . I have to say something.

  I say, “Boy, you guys are going to make super archaeologists. You’ll write really sensitive analyses of oppressed cultures.”

  God, that was a stupid thing to say.

  “Oh, we’re all about sensitivity. We think that people like you should be given every opportunity to return to normal—like your girlfriend did,” says Ben.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I say, a lump beginning to form in the back of my throat. I will be damned if I let myself cry in front of them. I go on, “And hey, why do I always see you guys together all the time?”

  Somewhere underneath my anger and fear, I’m amused to see Alex take a step away from Ben.

  “Doughnut?” a voice asks from behind me. It’s Ms. Fraser, and she’s holding two big boxes from the campus bakery.

  “No thanks,” I say, absolutely relieved.

  “I figured that since I was making you all get up so early, it was the least I could do. Sure you don’t want one?” she asks.

  “I have a bagel, thanks.”

  “Boys?” she asks, turning to Alex and Ben. They each take a giant cream puff, which strikes me as entirely appropriate. In a minute, their mouths are both smeared with the viscous yellow-white doughnut filling.

  More people begin to arrive before too much longer, and I drift farther and farther out of range of the doughnut-eating homophobes. Eventually, Anne turns up. If I didn’t already know that she was upset earlier, it would be hard to tell now. “Hey, how are you doing?” I ask.

  Anne sighs. She appears to be going through some kind of struggle, presumably about whether or not she can share her problem with me.

  “Promise not to tell anyone,” she says.

  I nod. Who would I tell?

  “My boyfriend—he broke up with me, yesterday. He called me and said he met someone else at the pool where he works. And he wanted to still be friends! I hung up on him.”

  “And it just came right out of the blue like that?” I ask.

  She nods. “I mean, there was one time when I called and his mom said he was working, but I didn’t think anything of it—he’s always taken as many hours as they’ll give him at the pool. He really likes lifeguarding.”

  “Lots of bikinis,” I say cynically.

  “He didn’t used to be that way!” she cries. Then she says more softly, “I think—I think maybe if I hadn’t come here, we’d still be together.”

  “Okay—everybody on! Let’s get this show on the road!” says Ms. Fraser. Anne and I get in line with everyone else, and make our way onto the bus. We find seats near the back. I note with relief that Alex and Ben are sitting up near the front—perhaps the better to harass the driver.

  “You can’t second-guess yourself like that,” I say once we’re sitting down. “I mean, he’d still have been doing the lifeguard job whether you were here or at home. He would probably still have met the other girl, regardless.”

  “I just don’t think it would have happened if I’d been at home. He didn’t want me to go, you know. He said it was a waste of summer to go to some nerd tank,” she says. She takes an apple out of the brown paper sack she’s been carrying and bites into it.

  “It sounds like he was intimidated by your intelligence. Hey, I know you don’t think so now, but you’re probably better off. I bet he was holding you back.” It’s amazing how easy it is for me to fling these platitudes around.

  “But I still love him!” she says.

  “Yeah. I know how you feel. I got dumped this summer, too,” I say, realizing belatedly that this may have been a really stupid thing to bring up.

  “You did? I didn’t even know you were dating anybody. Was it somebody here, or back home?” she asks, suddenly interested, taking another bite of her apple.

  I forgot that it’s always compelling for somebody who’s upset to focus on someone else’s problems for a while. I think I forgot because I was being compelled by Anne’s problem to stop focusing on mine.

  Damn. Truth or lie? Oh, the hell with it.

  “Here,” I say.

  “Do I know him?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so. And just so you know, you may not want to associate with me anymore—it wasn’t a him. It was a her.”

  Anne looks at me for a minute. “I’m straight,” she says nervously. “I mean, just in case you were thinking—I mean, it doesn’t bother me or anything, but you know, you should just be aware that I’m straight.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m glad it doesn’t bother you.”

  If I were really mean, I would give her a hug right now. But then she’d have a heart attack.

  “She ditched me for a guy,” I say. “That was the worst thing about it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anne says.

  We sit in silence for a while. The motion of the bus also reminds me of elementary school. Fortunately, the bus doesn’t have the elementary school bus smell, which always seemed to consist in approximately equal parts of sack lunches and vomit. This is actually a pretty deluxe bus. The seats are covered in cloth instead of vinyl, and they don’t have bits picked off of them the way the seats always did on the buses at home. And there doesn’t seem to be nearly as much gum stuck under the seats.

  “When you met her,” asks Anne, evidently consumed by curiosity, “how did you, like, know?”

  For a moment, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Then I say, “Oh, you mean how did I know she was queer? I just flashed the universal hand signal.”

  “Oh,” says Anne. Then I take pity on her.

  “I’m kidding. There isn’t really a hand signal. I don’t know how I knew—how does anybody ever know?” What, no analysis? No documentation, no diagrams? Ms. Lancaster, are you quite well?

  The bus goes over a large bump in the road. I hope Alex and Ben are feeling queasy now after those doughnuts. I sip my coffee, which is lukewarm but
still good.

  “Love just sucks,” says Anne.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s put our careers first like the modern women we are.”

  “Right on,” says Anne. After a minute, though, she shakes her head and says, “No, I can’t do it. I want both. I need a challenging career and a fulfilling love life.” She sounds like somebody on a TV talk show, and I can’t quite tell whether or not she’s doing it on purpose.

  “Well you know,” I say thoughtfully, “there’s still some time left in the program. It would be great if you hooked up with somebody here and could write him a letter agreeing that yeah, you should just be friends because you’re really infatuated with Pierre, or whoever.”

  Anne begins to giggle. “That would be cool,” she says. “Except that I never see any guys except the ones in class—bleah.”

  Alex and Ben are merely the worst in a class of male zeroes.

  “Bleah indeed. Couldn’t you catch someone’s eye in the cafeteria?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah—while you’re eating is always such a good time to meet guys,” Anne says sarcastically.

  “Well, do you do anything else?”

  Anne thinks for a minute. “I go to the gym and do the Stairmaster in the morning.”

  “There you go! There’s got to be somebody there for you. All that sweat and energy—you can’t lose!” I say this as though I actually darken the door of any gym voluntarily.

  Anne says, “Hmmm, there are a couple of hotties there. I never really let myself notice them before, but now . . . all right. I will not be wounded!” She’s sounding like a talk show person again, but this time I’m pretty sure she’s putting it on.

  “You will survive,” I say, trying to use the same overly emotional kind of voice. We laugh.

  At the front of the bus, Ms. Fraser stands up. “I need your attention!” she yells. The bus ride seems to be making us all a lot noisier than usual. Slowly, we quiet down.

  “I want to tell you some things about the site we’re going to see. This is an excavation of an Iroquois longhouse, and it’s an area excavation. Somebody tell me, is that a common kind of excavation?”

  “No!” various people yell.

  “Why not?” she asks.

  “’Cause it’s too expensive!”

  “That’s right. These folks have gotten a large grant, and that’s what’s allowing them to do this project. In fact, if any of you are wondering how you’re going to spend next summer, I happen to know that they’re looking for people to help out,” Ms. Fraser says.

  Next summer? I can barely think about next week.

  Another of the guys, whose name I can never remember, raises his hand. “Would they pay us?” he asks.

  “Not much, if anything. But it would look very good on a college application,” says Ms. Fraser. Those are the magic words.

  Ms. Fraser goes on. “You’re going to meet the director of the dig. His name is Peter Francis—Dr. Francis—and I’m not sure if he’s going to show you around himself or if he’ll have one of his assistants do it, but either way, remember that they’re doing me, and you, a big favor by letting us observe today, and please act accordingly.”

  “So don’t step on any artifacts!” somebody yells. A few people laugh.

  “We’ll be having lunch on site with the rest of the team—I’m hoping that will give you an opportunity to talk to some of the students—and we’ll be coming back in enough time for you to get dinner in the dining hall. I can’t encourage you enough to ask any questions you have; the team will be happy to answer them. Do you have any questions now?”

  Silence. “All right, I’ll assume you’re holding all your brilliant queries until we get there—which should be in another ten or fifteen minutes. At ease,” she says, and sits back down in her seat.

  Anne is still adjusting to the concept that she’s actually free to look around. “John and I were together for so long—it was like, over a year—I don’t know if I even remember how to flirt!” She giggles, then looks suddenly penitent. “I don’t know about this, Nicola—I mean, maybe this chick is just a summer fling for John. What if I come back with a new boyfriend and then I find out he wants me back? What’ll I do then?”

  This conversation is fascinating. I never suspected that this was the person lurking underneath Anne’s cool and collected exterior. I say, “I think it would serve him right if you did. He was toying with your affections. Besides, you can always break up with your new guy to go back to John if you really want to.”

  “That’s true,” Anne muses. “But now I’m going to have to wear only nice stuff to the gym—like color-coordinated workout gear! I don’t know if I can handle it.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine,” I say.

  For a moment, I entertain the concept of following my own advice. But I don’t even know if I’d be looking for a girl or a boy, let alone how to attract the object of my hypothetical affection once I found it. Besides, the idea of trying to pick up some random person just so I can stop feeling shitty about Battle strikes me as morally questionable, even if I could somehow manage to do it.

  Well, what about Isaac?

  I think about the kiss, try to remember exactly what it felt like—and I can’t.

  I can remember standing in his arms, afterwards, crying, but the kiss itself is like something I saw in a movie. Whereas everything that happened with Battle has been seared into my brain with a branding iron. Does that mean I’m definitely a lesbian, not bisexual, or just that I love Battle and I only like Isaac?

  Maybe you don’t get to know, Nic. Maybe you need to stop trying to pick it all apart.

  The bus begins to shudder to a stop, and I look out of the window.

  It’s not a parking lot per se, it’s more sort of a wider-than-normal dirt road. It must be miserable when it rains. There are four or five cars all clustered together at one end of it, as though they’re whispering to each other.

  I look beyond the parking area and all I see is a large grassy open field. It looks like one of the places you drive by all the time on country roads, that always end up having a sign somewhere that says “5,000 Acres for Sale or Lease,” or “Jesus Died for Your Sins.” Or “Clean Fill Dirt Wanted.”

  Anne and I stand up and stretch. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” I ask.

  “I think the main part where people are working is over that way,” Anne says, pointing in the opposite direction from where I’d been looking. There’s still a fair amount of grassy field, but beyond it I can just see a pile of dirt, and a large area that’s been roped off into a grid, the way I’ve seen in the illustrations of our archaeology books. People are moving around in various sections of the grid. It has sort of an anthill quality, although I suspect that effect is enhanced by the pile of dirt.

  I find it very hard to focus on the tour Dr. Francis is giving us. He reminds me of Large Pink Bald Man from the convocation at the beginning of summer, which feels like a million years ago. I wish he’d just shut up and let Ms. Fraser talk. He’s telling us all this useless garbage about how they wrote the grant and the other projects they were competing against for the money. He says, “This is the first time in over a decade that an area excavation of this magnitude has been funded to this level. It reflects a true understanding of the importance of our site by the foundation.”

  Why don’t you tell us about what people are doing, instead of about how impressive it is that you got the money to do it? I look over at Anne to see if she’s bored too, but whether she is or not, she’s totally absorbed in taking notes in her little leather notebook.

  Because this talk is so abysmally boring, I start to wonder if Anne’s note-taking is anything like mine. I try to catch a glimpse of the page she’s working on, and I can only see a few words: “green Adidas—yes.” She’s planning her gym wardrobe!

  I bet I can learn more by looking around than by watching Large Pink Dr. Francis while he pontificates. He’s been talking an amazingly long time without saying an
ything. So I shift my focus over to one of the grid squares where people are working–and freeze. That’s Battle over there!

  I look again, and realize that no, it isn’t, it couldn’t be–Battle doesn’t have long hair any more. But this woman, whoever she is, has hair that looks just like Battle’s did at the beginning of the summer. She has her back to me, so I look at her for a few more minutes. Then she turns around, as though she’s seen me looking.

  She’s a guy. A long-haired, blue-eyed, cute guy, who’s sifting dirt through a screen to find the smallest artifacts. He gives me a big smile and waves. Blushing, I wave back, imagining telling him, “I’m sorry for staring, but you look just like my ex-girlfriend from the back.”

  Suddenly, what Dr. Francis is saying penetrates my consciousness. “I think we’ll be having an early lunch today so you all will be sure to have some time to interact with the team. Team, please show our visitors where they can find lunch.”

  There’s scattered cheering among the people working, which gives rise to scattered cheers among our group. The guy who isn’t Battle puts down his screen and starts walking over to me. When he reaches where Anne and I are standing, he extends his hand and says, “Hey, I’m Doug, and you are?”

  “Nicola,” I say. Not Nic. “And this is my friend Anne.”

  Anne looks up from her notebook and smiles hugely. She must also think Doug is cute.

  “Well hello, Nicola and Anne–congratulations on surviving that speech. Dr. Francis is a good guy, but you get him in front of a group of people and he just goes into fundraising mode. What you heard was just about exactly what he says to people who are visiting because they want to donate money to the project. I think he forgot you guys were coming today. Where are you from again?”

  “The Siegel Institute,” says Anne. Doug looks confused for a minute, then says, “Oh yeah! I always forget that they host that at Prucher in the summer. Hey, you know, I went there for undergrad. I love Prucher Hall. Do they still have all those great trees in the courtyard?”