OH
With glittery dance lights swooping overhead, I watched Shar/Cher’s eyes shift down to my moustache. Watched her eyelashes with the tiny rhinestones on the rim twinkle as her weight shifted forward, into my arms, and her lips pressed against mine.
“WAIT!” something inside me screamed. But then Shar/Cher’s fingers pushed into my back and whatever ideas I had for self-preservation floated up into the rafters like so many soap bubbles, popping against the bass of the music while a little piece of me slipped out of my mouth, into hers.
Shar’s kiss was ravenous and overwhelming. Her arms wrapped around me, pulling me tighter.
“Let’s go, Sonny,” she mumbled, her breath pushing against mine. “Let’s get out of here before I change my mind.”
We ended up messing around in my bed, mostly kissing. I think. I tried to focus and steady myself but my brain was awash with lips and ss="body-text_
SEVEN
Sex is a problem
The day after Halloween, I rolled out of bed and into the bathroom where I barfed. Violently. Several times. After a period of recuperation, a swig out of a pop bottle of mystery brown fizzy contents, and a shower, I managed to collect myself and find my way to Social Problems.
One twenty-five p.m. Time for my “morning” class.
I was late, and fumbled my way into a seat as Professor J paused to take a couple of chugs from her giant bottle of green Gatorade. The auditorium was a mass of hungover students, clearly unable to sit up unaided. The seats closest to the walls were in high demand. I caught sight of top hat, a.k.a. Pumpkin Head, a.k.a. Jonathon waving at me from his perch in the top row.
“Sorry.” tcking to " aid="BE6O8">I wondered if he smelled like pumpkin. I immediately stopped wondering when it became clear that thinking about food made my stomach want to turn itself inside out.
“The question we must ask ourselves, of course,” Professor J was saying, “is whether we as a society even know we have a problem. Or, better yet, how we know when something is a problem.”
In the seats next to me, two girls were doodling back and forth on a notebook. One girl drew a sperm and the other started making a jacking-off motion in her lap.
“You’re going to say, ‘There are symptoms.’ Of course there are. How do we know we have an economic problem? We have symptoms. We have a rise in unemployment. Debt. But what else? How else do we know we have a problem?”
College professors ask a lot of questions they don’t want answered. I’d had no idea what a rhetorical question even was until after a couple of weeks at college when I went back to my room and out of boredom searched “questions you don’t answer” on Google.
I got a page about talking to kids about sex and a page on “rhetorical” questions. Rhetorical questions sound like questions but they’re not. They’re leads people use for talking about something they want to talk about.
On the screen behind the podium, a series of posters flashed. Propaganda. Pictures of kids smoking pot with the word “MARIJUANA” in big monster-green letters. World War II posters of the “ORIENTAL MENACE.” A pamphlet about promiscuity with a girl sitting in a doctor’s office weeping.
“We know we have a problem because people tell us we have a problem. Not always so bluntly. It’s not every day that someone comes up to you on the street and TELLS you that you have a problem. No. Society tells us we have a problem in other ways.”
I wrote down in my notes, How know if have problem? And then promptly scratched it out because it seemed like the stupidest thing ever written.
Especially on that particular day.
“Sex is a good thing to talk about with regard to this phenomenon,” Professor J noted. “And when I say sex is a problem I’m not saying what you think I’m saying.”
Baffled-slash-hungover silence.
“That was a joke.”
More silence.
No one ever laughed at Professor J’s jokes. Ever. Listening to her tell jokes reminded me of being in grade five. My parents had given me a subscription to Jokes, Jokes, Jokes magazine with the idea that it might make me loosen up and/or gain more friends at school. All it did was give people the impression that I was insane. A chronic teller of unfunny jokes. To this day whenever anyone utters the phrase “Knock, knock” I get queasy.
Professor J was not unfunny. I sometimes thought about catching her in the hall and saying, You know, I think you’re funnier than that class would indicate. Although I had the impression she didn’t give a shit whether people thought she was funny. I was also pretty sure that if I was to approach her anywhere outside that classroom she’d have no idea who I was.
At that point, I hadn the Tower of Power, c’t seen Shar all day. She wasn’t in class and hadn’t called me and I basically hadn’t called her either, given that I was totally freaked out. Because?
Because sex with people who are your “friends” messes things up. Sex with girls, especially, messes everything up.
That’s not what Professor J’s lecture was about, but that’s what I was thinking that afternoon: sex with girls. Sex with girls, I thought. Problem? Which is a question I should have known the answer to by then.
Like, take Anne for example.
About a week after Anne and I slept together, which happened a little after Christmas break, she told me she’d realized that the whole thing was a horrible accident and that she was really upset about it. This conversation will always stick out in my brain as one of the worst verbal exchanges I’ve ever had. Even better, it happened on the PHONE. January 15. At Starbucks. Like, four o’clock in the aft, I was getting a hot chocolate and I had her on the phone, crying, while I was paying. She was crying so loud that the girl giving me my change actually stopped and tried to listen in.
“JESUS CHRIST I’m not a LESBIAN. JESUS you didn’t tell anyone I’m a lesbian, did you?”
“No.”
“Did y—” There was a series of choking and sobbing sounds.
The barista smiled a weak smile, leaning so far forward she could have grabbed a sip from my hot chocolate.
“WHAT? Did I what?”
“Tell anyone about—THE THING?”
“What thing?”
“THE THING! The thing we did.”
More sobbing.
Messed up.
I spent an hour sitting on the curb next to my quickly cooling beverage, talking Anne down, reassuring her that everything was cool. That what had happened between us was not only a distant memory but a non-issue. Like, it never happened. I was erasing it from history as we spoke. Every word felt like chewing on a dirty caramel, hard against my teeth and throat.
“It’s okay. Anne. It was just like, a little mistake. Seriously.”
After that phone call, Anne was only, like, grudgingly my friend. She’d invite me to things and then cancel. In March, she got a boyfriend and texted me a message.
I have a BF now. So you know.
Then she didn’t speak to me at all.
Which is to say that after the St. Joseph’s Halloween party I basically tied my stomach in a knot and hated myself all day for having been a stupid asshole. Of course, I thought, I’ve done it again. I’ve royally messed up AGAIN and now I’m just as screwed. AGAIN.
And then. And then, that night, Shar just sort of showed up at my door. She looked like how she always looked. Not nervous or weirded out or anything. She said she wanted to go find hair bleach.
“So are you coming or what, Allison?”
“Uh, coming. Yeah, okay, let’s go.”
It was dragged him back to apologizeOIAFn’t until later, sitting in the bathroom on Shar’s floor with her hair all wrapped in Saran Wrap in a chemical soup, that she finally turned to me and said, “How long have you been gay?”
“What?”
“You’re a lesbian, right? Or. Are you bi?”
I’m not really sure what bi is, to be honest. Like, to me it sounds as if you know you’ll sleep with the same number of boys as girls. But how would yo
u even know that? Does it mean you have to sleep with a boy after you do it with a girl? What if all the boys in your town are stupid?
“I guess I’m a, uh, into girls.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
I must have looked stunned.
“You have a girlfriend?! You just cheated on your girlfriend.” Tapping the plastic wrap to check for heat, Shar looked suddenly satisfied.
“Yeah. NO. I didn’t. I don’t. I mean, I had this girl I went out with for a while in high school.”
“Ooooo, Allison! High school girlfriend.” Shar grinned. “You break up with her?”
I pictured Anne sitting in a huddle with her other friends while I sat in my little homosexual seat. OutCAST. Why would anyone want to reveal that experience? Like, yeah, I slept with this girl and she instantly regretted it and then decided she hated me. And then I totally flipped out and couldn’t talk to anyone, which was fine because by then I was a complete social pariah. Now I’m here.
I had a brief thought that somehow, if I told Shar about it, she might do the same thing.
Like, hate me.
Everyone knows that people hate/dump people who get dumped all the time. I have this feeling that it’s easier to dump someone you know someone else has dumped. It’s like throwing out something you bought at a garage sale.
The other side of the lie being, of course, that I didn’t want to be that desperate lesbian dumped by a clearly non-lesbian anymore. And lying was the easiest way to make that true. In, okay, a very superficial way.
“Yeah, well,” I sighed, “you know how it goes. I’m not really a commitment person.”
“Ha. You fucker. You’re all, ‘See ya!’”
Outside, Shar’s floormates were screaming the lyrics of a pop tune I didn’t recognize. It was nine p.m., and they’d just come off of watching their weird singing sitcom. Sitcoms made Shar’s floormates crazy.
“Your floormates are weird.”
“Allison. My floormates are neanderthals. Some idiot THREW UP in the hallway last night. Little upchucked candy corn and Bailey’s right outside the bathroom. How high school is that? Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s too much trouble to walk two steps and barf in the sink like everyone else?”
“Totally.”
“If I knew who it was I’d barf on HER door, see what she thought of that. I think it was Asian Patty.”
Shar turned and looked in the mirror, then stroked the underside of her chin with her finger. “I dragged him back to apologizeOIAF’m not into girls, but I mess around with them sometimes.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I probably should have told you that, but I figured you were gay so you wouldn’t care.”
“Oh. Right. Sure.”
“It’s because I think they’re safe, you know? Girls. After having so many messed-up boys in my life.
It’s like, I know that girls won’t turn crazy on me or mess with me. Also. I had a boy in my life who was very fucked up. Like, abusive. He used to, you know, hit me.”
“Fuck. Shar. I’m so sorry.”
“It totally wrecked me up for a while.” She stopped for a moment to stare at her reflection, like she was looking for something, checking for something. “But I’m over it now.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” Shar turned from the mirror to look at me. Whatever she saw on my face made a tiny smile feather into the corners of her lips. “I’m so glad I can tell you this shit, Allison. Seriously. I’m so glad you’re here. I would shoot myself in the face if you weren’t here.”
“Same.”
It took a while to rinse all the bleach out of Shar’s hair, but when we were finished her already blond hair was, like, translucent. It made her look like a ghost.
When she disappeared to get her hair dryer I took a long look in the mirror. I’d probably never had as many mirrors in my life as I did in that dorm. Everywhere you looked there you were, reflected in the walls, looking back. I’ve pretty much always hated looking at myself in the mirror. I look weird. Like, even though I’m seventeen, I have grey hairs. Not a ton but enough. I’m like a faded version of a person, really. Even my clothes, because I washed them in the crappy dorm machines, were faded: black T-shirts gone grey, dark jeans, light blue. I wondered how Shar could even believe I’d had a girlfriend, let alone dumped one.
My burn, which had stopped hurting on any regular basis, was seared and sore today where Shar’s fingernail had made contact. A sharp red line dissected its shiny, slightly puckered layer of new skin.
“I need to fix my hair,” I said when she returned with a fistful of hair product.
“Yeah. You should go black,” Shar mused, rubbing a drop of product into the fragile ends of her bangs. “You look a bit washed out.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Yeah. And maybe sometime you could borrow some of my clothes. My black jeans would look good on you.”
“Really?”
Shar shrugged. “Why not?”
Outside the door there was a thump, followed by a whimper. We peered out of the bathroom to find Rattles in the hallway, lying on the carpet, clinging to her cell phone.
When I walked up to her she rolled over into a fetal position.
“Are you okay?” I asked, bending down on one knee.
Rattles turned her head and pushed her face into the carpet, possibly dragged him back to apologizeOIAF breathing in small particles of leftover barf.
“Noooooooooo,” she moaned. Her body, appropriately, rattled with sobs.
“Allison. ALLISON.” Shar stood by her room. “I’m starving. Let’s get out of here.”
“She’s upset,” I mouthed, one hand tentatively placed on Rattles’s shaking shoulder.
Shar frowned, pushed the door open, and disappeared into her room.
“Rat— Natalie?” I whispered. “What happened?”
I had no idea what to do. She clearly didn’t have any bleeding wounds.
Just then Rattles let out a howling sob from the bottom of her lungs. Which is about when Asian Patty cracked open her door.
“What’s WRONG?” she cried. “NAT! HEY, GUYS!”
Asian Patty’s cry was enough to alert the whole floor. Pretty soon a small mob had gathered around Rattles, squeezing me out of the immediate circle of assistance. Carly arrived from out of nowhere and was soon wedged under Rattles’s sobbing frame.
Someone I didn’t recognize pressed her ear close to Rattles’s face, like you’d press your ear against a train track. “Oh my gosh, her boyfriend broke up with her,” she whispered. “On the PHONE.”
“NO!”
“SHIT.”
“Oh Nat. I’m so sorry. It’s going to be okay.”
“I’m ordering pizza,” someone in the back piped in.
“I’m getting beer.”
“Oh I have some booze left.”
“I have chocolate!”
“Someone get ice cream!”
A potluck. Actually, these group get-togethers over boyfriend breakups had been springing up with increasing frequency since September. By November, more than half the girls who’d arrived with boyfriends were single/slutty.
“Is she going to be all right?” I asked Carly, for no reason other than the fact that she seemed to be at that moment the most physically bonded to Rattles.
“It’ll be okay.” Carly smiled. “Right, Natalie? This boyfriend stuff sucks but it will pass.”
Eventually Shar reappeared from her room and tapped me, hard, on the shoulder.
“She’s not DYING, Allison, and she’s got the whole ER now. Can we go?”
In the elevator, Shar scratched at a heart that someone had carved in the faux wood finish of the wall. “Those girls are so fucking pathetic it kills me. You know, the more you pay attention to someone like that, the worse they get.”
That night, to celebrate her new hair, we went to THE KEGGER, a fraternity fav hangout, and spent the whole night vying to see who could get away with stea
ling more beers from drunken boys. Extra points were awarded for whole pitchers. It wasn’t really much of a contest. I was too timid. Shar stretched out an early lead. She swiped beers directly from frat boys’ fraternity">OH sweaty palms, distracting them with a smile and a flash of platinum blonde. Every stolen drink was followed by a hysterical victory lap on the dance floor, which became increasingly jubilant as morewith one perso
EIGHT
Perished-ables
The theory of evolution, as I’ve always understood it at least, says that creatures need to adapt to their environments … in order to survive. So, it’s either adapt or, you know, “perish,” which is a nice way of saying “die,” although it’s also, confusingly, a term my mom used to use for dairy products that had gone bad.
Perished-ables.
To “adapt” to college life can mean a number of things. For some people it’s adapting to the schedule, which is not really all that different from high school’s if you go to classes. Other people talk about adapting to the party life, to drinking and staying up late. Technically this is a matter of building up your tolerance. Although from what I saw, the puke patches became more frequent, not less, as the months got on.
Really, adaptation is change that you eventually become used to or okay with. It’s change that’s not accompanied by a meltdown.
Some things can adapt. Like people—okay, most people. There are other things that can’t adapt.
Like fish. Fish are pretty much screwed if you try to make them adapt. I know this as someone who has killed the odd goldfish. You can’t even mess with the temperature of their water. They will die on you. Truth.
People not adapting at things I needed to be doing bwhoel college seemed to experience similarly drastic consequences. The boyfriend breakup thing is a good example of typical college freshman freak-outage.
There was a mix of responses to the breakup. Girls who’d once stayed home waiting for phone calls started going out and getting wasted and then loudly calling their (ex-)boyfriends when they returned. One girl, in the room right above mine, broke up with her boyfriend on the phone and then threw her cell out the window. It hit some guy’s car parked on the street and cracked the windshield. Which is a $2000 fine.
(You) Set Me on Fire Page 7