Empress of the World

by Sara Ryan

  I smile, just a little. “Well, you are.”

  “Nic—you knew more about me in an hour than he learned in weeks. Do you have any idea how scary that is?”

  I don’t know what to say, so I just look at her, and she says all in a rush, “It felt sometimes like you wanted to vivisect me, like you wouldn’t be happy until you had everything about me classified, labeled, and put into jars with formaldehyde.”

  “You don’t have to believe this, but I’m trying not to do that anymore,” I say.

  “I don’t know what I believe.”

  “Neither do I.”

  We look at each other.

  Maybe I shouldn’t try to label everything I feel, but right now, it’s definitely love.

  “We’d better get some sleep.” Why did I say that?

  She nods. Then she gets up, crosses the room, and awkwardly reaches out to give me a hug.

  I don’t want to let go, but at the same time, I have to. I don’t have room left for any more emotions tonight. So after a moment, I step away, and say “Sleep well.”

  “Sleep well,” she echoes from the doorway, and closes the door behind her.

  In the morning, I call Isaac’s room. Phones are easier.

  “Battle and I talked last night.”

  “Good. Took you long enough.”

  “We’re not back together or anything, but don’t think she’s with Kevin anymore, either.”

  “That’s good too.”

  “Now all you have to do is ask Katrina out!”

  “I don’t have to do anything, Lancaster. Except finish this paper.”

  “Sorry–I didn’t mean it that way. Isaac?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m sorry I got so weird about what happened at the river.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks–thanks for being my friend, Isaac.”

  “Don’t go getting all sentimental on me, Lancaster. I’ve gotta fight the Six-Day War in ten pages by four P.M.”

  I have to laugh. “Huh. How many days was our war, I wonder?”

  “It doesn’t matter now. Does it?”

  August 9, 4: 12 p.m., My Room

  field notes:

  katrina claims not to remember what she wanted the three of us to do so desperately.

  She doesn’t even clearly remember coming to my room. what she does remember is that about halfway through debugging her massive programming project, her crush on carl “just curled up and died like a dog,” at which point the whole debugging process became far less interesting, seeing as it was no longer a labor of love, so to maintain her alertness, she slammed coke and chain-smoked until she was out of cigarettes. but at some point she just lost it, and she guesses that’s when she came to my room.

  She felt so gross when she finally woke up that she is quitting smoking.

  other changes in the group dynamic:

  -haven’t seen kevin for days (yay!)

  -isaac is flirting with katrina much more blatantly now, and she is actually flirting back

  -battle and i are. . . mostly just acting like really close friends, which we are, regardless of whatever else we might be.

  but there are moments. one of us touches the other without thinking about it, and then pulls her hand back. one of us makes a comment with a double entendre, and we both blush. we haven’t talked at all about what we want to be to each other. i don’t think either of us knows and besides (one more time): words don’t always work.

  August 11, 4:12 p.m., Up in the Big Tree in the Courtyard

  Battle is compiling her notes for a World History paper–only Battle could be so organized that she can get everything in order while she’s sitting in a tree–and I’m trying to write the analysis of the four artifacts Ms. Fraser has borrowed from the dig for us to study. Right now, I’m just staring at the pictures I drew of them in my notebook. I’ve gotten so much more practice drawing this summer than I thought I would.

  I yawn, stretch, and look down. There was a Frisbee game going on earlier, but the players have now disappeared. It was fun to follow the game from above, watching the red disc sail through the air from one end of the courtyard to the other.

  Two figures come out of the double doors that lead into the dining hall.

  “Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, I’m free at last!” the first figure yells, throwing her hands up into the air. The first figure is Katrina. The second figure, I note with delight, is Isaac.

  “Battle, check this out!” I whisper up to her. She’s sitting on a slightly higher branch than I am this time. I point at Isaac and Katrina, and Battle grins hugely.

  “So that’s your last big assignment?” asks Isaac. They sit down on one of the benches, fortunately still within earshot. If they looked up, they would see us. But they don’t.

  Katrina says, “Yup, that’s right, only tiny little stupid projects for Mr. Toad till the end of the term!” She’s talking faster and louder than usual.

  “She’s nervous,” Battle whispers down to me.

  “I know,” I whisper back.

  “Hey, you know what else?” Katrina says, in that same manic voice. “It’s been a week. I’ve been clean for a week. No nicotine has entered my bloodstream, no tar has defiled my lungs. They say you keep smelling like smoke for a while after you quit. Do you think I still smell like smoke?”

  She leans her head very close to Isaac’s, and he sniffs the top of her head solemnly. “I can’t quite tell,” he says seriously. Katrina looks up at him. She says, “Well, then tell me if I taste like smoke.” And then she puts her arms around him and kisses him.

  Battle and I immediately start making the kinds of noises that seventh-grade boys make in movies when the heroine takes off her shirt.

  “Wheeeeooooo!”

  “Ow, ow, ow!”

  They stop kissing and look up, aghast.

  “Wish I had a camera with me, that was such a Kodak moment!” I yell down.

  Isaac frowns at Katrina. “Were you in with them on this?” he demands furiously. Katrina shakes her head vigorously. “I had no idea they were up there–you bitches! No idea at all.”

  Isaac stands up, craning his neck back to look at us. He shakes his finger and says, “You are so dead. You don’t even know how dead you are. Soon as you come down out of that tree, you are not even going to remember what it was like having all your limbs attached in the proper places.” He almost cracks up as he says this last sentence, but he tries to maintain a tough-guy voice.

  “Aw, come on, Isaac, I’m sure you can think of something better to do than wait for us to come down!” I’m so pleased I can hardly contain myself. If I could dance from up here, I would.

  Isaac pretends to consider this for a minute. “Do I? Do I have anything better to do, Katrina?”

  And Katrina grabs hold of his arm and begins dragging him out of our view.

  August 16, 7 p.m., Cafeteria

  “This is the lamest thing I’ve ever seen,” Isaac says at dinner on Saturday, brandishing a flyer that was put under all of our doors earlier in the week. The hot pink flyer advertises, in cutesy-looking handwriting, an end-of-term dance, to take place tonight. “They figure we don’t get enough of this shit at our regular schools, or what?”

  “Oh, come on, honey, don’t you want to dance with me to all the slow songs?” Katrina asks in a sickly-sweet voice, batting her eyelashes.

  Isaac says, “Nic and Battle, you guys should take the floor. Do a total gropefest and see if they try to stop you. If they do, you can slap an anti-discrimination suit on them and make a lot of money.”

  “Not my idea of fun on a Saturday night,” says Battle. I nod. I could kick Isaac. He ought to know that things are still way up in the air with the two of us. I also suspect that San Francisco Boy has no idea that there are people here who would act like Alex and Ben did. I haven’t told anyone about that.

  “
Oh, come on you guys, it’s an excuse to dress up!” says Katrina.

  “Like you need one,” says Isaac.

  Of course, Katrina manages to convince us all that we should go, and that we can always leave if it’s too awful. She wants to do makeup for everyone, even Isaac–she claims that her Head Costumer personality is taking over. “You have no idea how hot you’re going to look in black eyeliner, darling,” she says.

  “No, I sure don’t!” he agrees.

  “Trust me,” she says. “We’ll meet you up at your room–wear that cute black button-down shirt and you baggy black jeans. You can be our Goth boy tonight.”

  I didn’t bring anything even remotely formal looking with me. Katrina is delighted to discover this, because it means that she not only gets to do my makeup but dress me as well. She is obviously in her element.

  “Battle, don’t you think that Nic could fit into your jodhpurs?” she asks. We have converged in her room to get ready.

  “Probably, yeah,” says Battle.

  “Well, go get your black ones. I have a plan.”

  Battle does. She comes back with both her black ones and her brown ones. She says, “I thought I could wear these,” pointing to the brown ones, but Katrina shakes her head. “No, the concept here is to play up the whole butch-femme thing, only it’ll be kind of reversed because of your hairstyles.”

  “Get over it, Katrina! Why don’t you dress us like some of those wacky heterosexuals? I think they’re so exotic and interesting,” I say.

  Katrina ignores me. “Nic, I see you with a Prince Valiant kind of look, while Battle here will be a postmodern Tinkerbell.”

  “I don’t think so! Postmodern Tinkerbell, my ass.”

  I fall backwards into the orange beanbag chair, clapping my hands and cackling. “I do believe in fairies! I do I do! I do believe in fairies!”

  “Oh come on, just this once? Do it for me,” Katrina pleads, batting her lashes.

  “Hey, that may work on Isaac, but it won’t fly with me, girlfriend.” Battle shakes her head.

  “You haven’t even seen the dress!” Katrina says. She begins rummaging through her giant cardboard box of clothes, which she has continued to use in preference to actually storing her clothing in the closet or the dresser.

  “Here it is!” she says triumphantly. The dress she’s holding up is made of a fairly classy and subdued pale blue silk, but the bodice is outlined in purple sequins, and the skirt flares out at the bottom and is trimmed with a lavender feather boa.

  “More mermaid than Tinkerbell,” I comment from the beanbag chair. “Not worthy of Her Imperial Highness.”

  Battles smiles at me.

  The day after we talked, she asked me if I still had the Empress. I said yes. She said, “Good.” I didn’t ask her to explain why she asked. The day after that, she said, “It must have taken you a long time to make that puppet.” I nodded. On the third day, I set the Empress out on my dresser, and when Battle came to meet me for breakfast, she picked her up and put her into her backpack.

  Neither of us has mentioned her since.

  “It goes perfectly with your coloring,” Katrina insists, holding the dress up to Battle. Battle looks down at the strapless dress with an expression that can only be described as long-suffering.

  “Are you going to let her do this to me?” she asks me.

  I just smile.

  “Hey, when I’m done with her, it’ll be your turn, baby,” says Katrina.

  “Yeah, but I like Prince Valiant,” I say.

  Battle sighs. “Never doubt that I love you,” she says to Katrina, and takes her shirt and pants off, preparatory to putting the dress on.

  I look away.

  “Yay! Oh, I promise you won’t regret this!” Katrina says, dancing around. “Let’s see, you shouldn’t need a bra under it, it ought to cinch you up pretty tight in there,” she says, zipping Battle up in the back. “Perfect! Okay, now you, Nic–I want you both dressed before I do the makeup.”

  “Hey, what are you going to wear?” Battle demands

  Katrina looks down at herself. She’s wearing an old World Wide Web Conference T-shirt and a ratty-looking pair of jeans. “I thought I’d go in costume as a programmer.”

  “Katrina Lansdale, you are going to wear something every bit as flamboyant as this or I am never going to speak to you again!” Battle crosses her arms over her sequin-covered chest and frowns.

  “Kidding! I was kidding! I’ll get dressed as soon as I’m done with you guys,” Katrina promises.

  After what seems like hours, but is really only about twenty minutes, Katrina has dressed me to her satisfaction. I’m wearing Battle’s jodhpurs, which just barely fit me, with a voluminous purple silk Renaissance blouse and Battle’s black leather boots. One of the early and delightful discoveries the three of us made was that we all wear the same size shoes.

  “I feel like I should be stopping your carriage and demanding your jewels or your virtue,” I say to Battle.

  “What jewels?” Katrina asks.

  “What virtue?” Battle asks.

  “Okay, you have to close your eyes,” says Katrina, with her hands inside the cardboard clothes box.

  Battle and I close our eyes obediently. The sound of a zipper, fabric rustling, another zipper.

  “Okay, open them!”

  Katrina is wearing a green fifties taffeta dress with silver glitter squiggles, plastic skeleton earrings, and her purple combat boots. “Look, I’m Weetzie Bat” she says.

  “You don’t have a bleached-blonde flattop,” I point out. Katrina shrugs. “Battle does, so it’s artistic license. And besides, I’ve got the right makeup.”

  “I feel like it’s Halloween,” Isaac complains as Katrina carefully blends his eyeliner. I think he’d be complaining more if it weren’t for the fact that Katrina is straddling him as she works.

  “You look so good!” Katrina says. “Doesn’t he look great, guys?”

  Isaac does look great. I’ve never seen him wear all black before. It does something for him. And the eyeliner, I have to admit, is a really nice touch. It makes him look a little dangerous, which is not Isaac’s usual look at all. It almost makes me wish that kiss at the river had turned into something more. But not quite.

  “You’re gonna have to fend off the Angst Crows tonight,” says Battle, slapping him on the back.

  Isaac blushes. He reaches for his glasses, which Katrina took off and put on his computer desk. She grabs them before he can get them. “Nope, not tonight, babe. You have the rest of your life to be four-eyed.”

  “I can’t goddamn see without them!” he says.

  “Then I’ll just have to lead you, honey,” Katrina purrs.

  Isaac doesn’t have anything to say to that.

  The dance is going to be in the auditorium. Apparently they can actually move out all those horrible uncomfortable chairs when the need arises.

  “Somebody take a picture,” says Isaac. He actually has a camera, unlike any of the rest of us.

  Battle takes the camera and says “Sit on his lap, Katrina. That’s perfect. Isaac, you’re the Jewish James Dean.”

  “I’d rather be Lenny Bruce,” says Isaac.

  “But Lenny Bruce already is Jewish, so he can’t be ‘the Jewish Lenny Bruce.’ ” I point out.

  “I’d still rather be Lenny Bruce. He dated a hot redhead, too, you know. She was a stripper!” Isaac leers.

  Katrina blushes.

  “Take a picture of us, too?” I ask Isaac.

  “Sure,” he says. Battle hands him the camera.

  “I’ll do one of you and Battle, but you need one of all three of you, too,” he says.

  “Wow, Isaac, that’s really thoughtful,” I say.

  “What can I say, I’m just a sensitive New Age guy. Now put your hands on Battle like you’re just about to cop a feel,” says Isaac.

  Battle and I shriek and refuse.

  “All right, then just stand there holding hands and have a boring pic
ture, see if I care.”

  Battle and I smile at each other, and Isaac takes the shot. Then he says, “Okay Katrina, you get on the end next to Nic. Nic, put an arm around both of them.”

  “That I can do,” I say. We grin like fools, and Isaac snaps the picture.

  “My god, I’ve died and returned to middle school,” says Battle as the four of us survey the auditorium. Limp streamers and sad-looking balloons are festooned around at random intervals in the marginally transformed space. I say marginally transformed because the streamers and balloons and the lack of chairs are the only feeble stabs that have been made in the direction of decoration.

  I shake my head. “So what I want to know is, how do they reconcile this with all those warnings that What’s-His-Name gave us? Remember? ‘Making romantic connections is not an appropriate use of your time here’?”

  I was looking at Battle when he said that, I remember suddenly.

  “Why, Nic, I’m surprised at you. You don’t see any romance here do you? This is just good clean drug-free fun, a nice change of pace for all our overtaxed genius brains,” says Katrina.

  “I think they’re just hypocrites,” says Battle.

  The DJ is set up on the stage, in approximately the same position that Large Pink Bald Man was in when he gave his stunning speech. I can’t identify the song that’s playing now, but it features a drum machine and a syrupy female voice. There are a surprising number of people swaying around in vague time to it. I think I see Anne in the arms of some tall guy, and I feel pleased that she did manage to snag someone new.

  “Did I ever tell you guys about Anne from Archaeology?” I ask. I give them the brief précis version of the saga of Anne and John, and explain my own advice to Anne to seek solace in the arms of another. “And there she is.” I point to her. I think she’s wearing the same dress that she was wearing in that Homecoming picture she showed me back at the beginning of the term.

  “Dang!” says Battle.

  “What?” I ask.