by Liz Miles
“You girls are still awake?” It was Lisa, the warden. Her face was a scowl. She was wearing long cotton pajama pants with little lambs on them.
“Yeah,” Kiana answered.
Lisa glared at her, then straightened, pointing at the door. “You’re here to take college classes, and even though you might think college is all about staying up late, it’s not. Your first class is in, like, five hours. You all need to go back to your dorms.”
We exchanged glances, and Joan was the first to slink past Lisa, squeaking apologies. The rest of us stood up and followed. “Bitch,” Kiana mumbled as we walked back, to which Mira and Katie laughed loudly. Before Lisa could say anything, though, we were back in our rooms, the doors snapped shut in her face.
• • •
I never thought that writing could be exhausting, but after two days of classes, I was beat. They kept us constantly busy, herding us from Comparative Literature, to lunch, to a lecture on Memoir, to our Poetry class, then to dinner. After dinner was the only time we could do our own things.
Tommy I talked to on the phone once while I was there. I had a phone card, and one of the wardens let me use the phone in her room while everyone else was downstairs, watching a movie. When I came out of the room after hanging up, there was heated talk coming from downstairs, in the lobby.
“This is completely irresponsible of all of you. You are here at Alfred by the recommendation of your families, your teachers. People who trust you.”
I crept to the top of the stairs and watched from the banister. Mira, Terry, Kiana, and Jackie were lined up against the wall. Three wardens were across from them, along with a woman with a black bob whom I recognized as the Director. She was the one speaking. Mira noticed me above them, but didn’t register it—her face was a deep scowl, which made her look younger than any of us, like a baby. Other girls who had been watching the movie crowded around the doorway in their large T-shirts and flannel pajama pants. Slippers. Flip-flops.
When Lisa saw me, they all turned and looked. The Director whipped her head around to look at me.
“You need to come down from there,” she said sternly.
I quickly came down the stairs, thinking of defenses, even though I hadn’t done anything. “I was on the phone with my boyfriend,” I said quietly, darting looks at my warden.
The Director, though, had turned her attention to Kelly and Lisa. “I need to speak with you and the other interns.”
Kelly nodded. Lisa even uttered a “Yes, Ma’am.” To which Mira rolled her eyes.
We were all told to go to our rooms for the rest of the night. Lindsey was on the stairs in front of me when we were herded up.
“What happened?” I whispered.
She glanced to see that Kelly and Lisa were ahead of us, then shook her head. “They went over to the boys’ dorms and then walked around in their bras!!. Pretty dumb.”
“Are you kidding?”
Lindsey shook her head. “It just sucks that we’re all on lockdown now.”
In our room, Katie wrote in her journal, the reading lamp clipped to her bed shining warmly. I shifted in my own bed, opening and closing my book.
“How much trouble do you think they’ll be in?”
Katie shrugged, her pen still bobbing across the page. “I don’t know.”
After a few minutes, she added, “The program ends on Sunday. I can’t imagine they’d send them home now.”
“Yeah.” The book I had brought—Letters To A Young Poet, which I had already read, but brought in the hope that one of the girls would see me reading it and think me cool—was covered in cellophane and stuck to my bare legs under my shorts.
“It’s kind of dumb,” I added. I wanted to be more specific, to say it was dumb to go to see the boys. If we had all walked around here in our bras, just us girls, we probably wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. I thought of the awkward sight of Mira Albany, lanky in her white cross-my-heart bra, the way the fabric would cut across her small breasts. How Jackie probably wore a bra that was black, or purple, or brown. It was probably made of silk.
Katie didn’t say anything.
The next morning at breakfast, Mira, Jackie, Terry, and Kiana had to eat with their wardens. They looked pissed off. Their wardens just looked nervous.
I went back to the buffet to get more strawberries. From across the room, I saw Mira get up from her table and walk quickly toward me. I paused, pretending to pick good strawberries from the rotten ones.
Mira slid her tray next to mine.
“Are you in trouble?” I whispered. Mira shook her head, smirking. She glanced dramatically back at her table, then turned to me, her head bent low. She began spooning yogurt into the same bowl her oatmeal had been in.
“Whatever,” she said. “How fucking stupid. They threatened to call our parents.”
“They didn’t?”
“Nah.” She dropped the scoop back into the yogurt, and some splattered on her hand. She licked it off. “They’re just gonna tell them on Sunday when it’s over.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Totally.”
Mira’s warden was now on the other side of the buffet, picking out an orange. She watched Mira, then looked away when I noticed her. Mira and I tried not to giggle.
“Hey,” Mira whispered, both of us sliding our trays slowly toward the end of the buffet. “You never told me who your crush is.”
I felt my heart clamp shut, just for a second. “Oh.”
Mira laughed, her eyes and mouth both wide. “I bet he was with us last night.”
I tried to smile. She stood up taller, looked at the warden, then smiled at me. “I totally made out with John.”
Here I had to smile. What else could you do?
We were back in Poetry, our last class. When we came in, there wasn’t an assignment on the whiteboard. Our notebooks were still in a pile. It was just George, sitting on the table. He nodded at us as we came in. I wondered if he knew about the bra incident.
“Something different today,” he said. “I know I promised you the most poetry writing you could cram into a classroom, but today, we’re not gonna write.”
He slid the pile of books closer to him. “Today, I want you to share them.”
“But what about the ones you said we never had to show?” Jackie said, clutching at the strap of her bag across her chest. “The ones at the back of the book?”
George held up his hands like he was surrendering, closing his eyes. “Those,” he said slowly, “you do not have to show anyone. I’ll keep my word. But I’ll take a shot in the dark and say that those poems may be the best of what you’ve written here.”
“You read them?” Joan squealed.
“No,” George laughed, “No, honest to God, I haven’t read a damn one of them.”
“You better not have,” Jackie deadpanned, and everyone giggled.
“He means that your best writing happens when you’re totally uncensored.” Everyone swiveled their head to look at Mira, who had taken her usual seat at the desk at the back of the room. I’d sat on the table next to her, and beamed—so close to her.
George picked up the first of the notebooks, glanced at the cover, then held it like a frisbee.
“Albany.” He nodded.
She leaned forward, gracefully catching the notebook between both palms. He tossed the others back to us—Joan and Katie, Jackie, Kiana, Terry, Lindsey. Mine he tossed last, just as I had stood up, walking toward him to retrieve it, afraid that if I tried to catch it it would just land on the floor.
“Here are the rules,” he said. “Everyone can read a poem. Just one. No feedback. No workshopping. Not a word. Then when everyone’s read, we can discuss.”
Everyone nodded. “Just one?” Kiana asked. He nodded. “Make it a good one.”
He hopped from the desk and went to the front of the room. “I forgot to rearrange,” he said, and there was a loud dragging noise as he pushed a table away to the edge of the room. We hopped off
our tables and followed suit, creating a semicircle of awkwardly placed tables, with a blank space of dirty green linoleum floor in the middle. From down the hall there was the sound of a power washer, echoing off the emptiness. George shut the door with his foot, then clapped his hand.
“Sacrificial lamb?”
Jackie hopped down. I thought about flipping through my notebook, finding the poem I wanted to read, even though in my heart I knew which one I was going to share. There was the safe poem, the one about my mother and the divorce, the one I knew everyone liked from workshop. But there was a poem at the back, one that I wrote after we played Never Have I Ever, a poem that scratched at me like an itch. That was the one for me.
Jackie, for all her swagger, rocked her leg back and forth while she read. Her poem was peppered with pauses, full phrases that got caught in her mouth, a cocked eyebrow at the end. Kiana let out a whoop and we laughed and clapped. “Girl!” Kiana started, but George threw an arm out like a referee.
“Nope!” he said. “Next!”
It went like that, some people popping forward—Kiana, then Terry—others needing a few moments of peer pressure. After Katie read, I nervously put my hand up and made eye contact with George, smiling.
He made a hand motion telling me to go ahead.
“I hope she reads that one about her mom,” Kiana said, eliciting another bug-eyed look of exasperation from George, and giggles from the rest of us.
“This one,” I said, “is called ‘Back of the Book.’”
If the back of the book is for no one to see,
then dear Jesus
I want you.
Like the one whose lips I knew in February,
like the body I pulled close in March,
but closer still.
You’re taller than me
I wonder how I’d fit into you
chin to collarbone
sweetness jammed up against my heart.
I’d call you baby
I’d hold your hand
I’d hold you in your
Sleep
Everything’s a dream, though,
just mirage, imagination,
unless I tell you.
Unless I open my mouth.
Unless you open yours first.
I closed my notebook with one hand and sauntered back to my seat. Kiana and Katie hollered, and Mira had a grin on her face a mile wide. It made me laugh. George was clapping, smiling down at the ground.
“The back of the book,” he remarked. Kiana gave him an exaggerated hush, and we all laughed. The only person who hadn’t read a poem yet was Mira.
She slid from her spot on the table and walked forward. Then she looked at George. “Do I have to read something I wrote this week?”
George shrugged. “I suppose not,” he said. “If you have something else.”
“I do,” she said, and turned to put her notebook on the table to her right, long arm stretching to reach. Then she closed her eyes, took a breath, and began. Her poem, from memory, started out loud, with short words sewn together, a pace that slowed, her eyes meeting ours, then quickened, a dramatic pause, a careful gesture forward. It was about being an adult in another life, why being a teenager sucked because she had been here before—a poem drawn with what-ifs and tongue-in-cheek metaphors, and the ending—an ending about love, about how sad it was to be a girl who had loved big but couldn’t find anyone her age to love big, too.
“I keep thinking,” she slammed, “is it you? Is it you?” She turned her gaze, eyes meeting mine, a funny smile on her lips. “Is it you?”
I nearly missed the ending, my brain wrapping around the look she just gave me. She’s just performing, my brain told me, she’s just showing off. That wasn’t about me. That wasn’t about me.
Everyone clapped and some hooted. I clapped and laughed at the same time, giddy with admiration for Mira. She brought her lanky form back to the table and hopped up beside me.
“That was fantastic,” I told her, and she responded by leaning her head on my shoulder, then burying her face there. And I don’t know what did it, I don’t know what came over me, but I turned and kissed her on the head. Just small. But enough. George was saying something to us all at the front of the room. When I kissed her, she lifted her head, and anticipating disgust, I found her face lit up with surprise. She grinned.
“I don’t know what you are all planning to go to college for,” George was saying, “but poetry is something you should continue. Major in it, minor in it, write it on the sly, but for goodness’ sake, keep writing,” he begged us. He led us in a discussion of our poems, asking some of us to repeat lines, to talk about images, to ask how we thought up a particular line or part. When we talked about my poem, Jackie whipped her head around.
“Was that about your boyfriend?” Everyone laughed. I opened and closed my mouth a few times, eyebrows raised.
“No, actually.” Everyone laughed again. Jackie made her eyes wide at me, like, can you believe this girl?
“Who’s it about?”
“That might not be important,” George interjected, but everyone ignored him.
“It’s about your crush, isn’t it?” Mira was giving me a sly look. I threw my head back when I laughed, bright red.
“Who’s your crush?”
“I fear this discussion has veered away from poetry, ladies,” George said. “What is it about the poem that makes you want to know?”
“Because,” Katie said, “it was about wanting someone before you get them. Right?”
I nodded.
“That’s the best part,” Kiana mused.
“Sweetness jammed up against my heart.” Joan tapped her pen. “I wrote that down, I loved that so much.”
“What did you mean by that?”
I shrugged. “It’s just how I picture it, I guess. What I want.”
“Who you want,” Jackie corrected, causing everyone to laugh again.
Mira hadn’t taken her eyes off me the whole time. We had moved closer, so that our thighs touched. And sure, other girls were sitting this way, too, but I wanted this to mean something. It was a difficult thought, one that I didn’t want to let myself think and kept cutting myself off at—it’s nothing, I thought feverishly, this is nothing. This is coincidence. She doesn’t like you. And even if she did, what about Tommy?
Tommy was the most dreadful thought. It was like they couldn’t even compete. If Mira were a boy I would not have been flirting at all; I wouldn’t even have dreamed of it. But Mira, with her mop of black curls and awkward tall body, her daring, the way she paid attention to me …
I didn’t know what I wanted to happen before Sunday, nothing or anything, but suddenly Sunday seemed way too close.
• • •
For our last night, they took us all out to dinner in town. While we waited for the reservation, milling about on the small sidewalk—the wardens looking like nervous sheepherders—Mira found a stairwell around the corner and sat there to smoke a cigarette. “I’m right over here,” she said loudly, waving her arms at her warden, who nodded, then blinked. I had followed Mira over because my cigarettes had run out and she said I could have some since she had taken one of mine the first day there.
Pulling out two cigarettes, I reached for one, but she pulled them away, a sudden smile lighting up her face.
“Wait a minute,” she said.
“What?”
She cocked her head at me. “I will give you this cigarette on one condition.”
“Technically that is my cigarette, since you owe me.” I was glowering at her, but it quickly became a laugh. “What?”
She pinched the cigarettes close to her chest. “Tell me who your crush is.”
“Oh, God.”
“Tell me!”
I looked away, smiling, but the slight pause bloomed into an awkward moment of silence. Mira stared me down.
“It’s complicated,” I said finally. I turned to see what comment she’d throw at such bullshit, but
she just kept looking at me. I put my hands out in front of me.
“Have you ever liked two people at once?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Well, what if they were really different? Like, so different they couldn’t even compare?”
She squinted. “That’d make an easy choice, though. You’d choose the better one.”
I bit my lip. “It’s not like that. It’s like …” I exhaled. “It’s like, Tommy is my boyfriend. But my crush is a girl.”
I held my breath. She nodded.
“Have you been with a girl before?” Her voice had dropped to a whisper, even though everyone was half a block away.
“My first kiss was a girl.”
She raised her eyebrows, a quick smirk.
“But have you ever slept with a girl?”
I shook my head.
“Do you want to?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
She nodded. “Me too.”
“You do?” My laugh was too loud for our conversation. I clapped a hand over my mouth and moved back. She smiled.
“I think about it a lot. I mean, but I don’t know anyone, who, you know, so.”
I nodded.
“There are, like, just two hundred kids in my whole high school. I know everyone. I grew up with all the girls. They’re all …” She frowned, then she turned, putting both cigarettes in her mouth and lighting them. She handed one to me and I took a drag, turning my face to blow away the smoke.
“They’re seating us now,” Lisa called to us.
Mira held up her cigarette. “Can we come in a minute?”
Lisa scowled. “They’re seating us now.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mira mumbled, taking a drag on the cigarette. I watched her for what to do.
“We can save them,” I offered.
She rolled her eyes. I felt awful, like the closeness I had just felt for her was being violently pulled away.
“Okay,” she said, stubbing hers out on the wall. I did the same and we carefully slipped them into the box.
Walking toward the restaurant, she turned to me and put her hand on my wrist. “Sit with me, yeah?”
“Of course,” I said.
• • •
We were all on curfew after the bra incident, so while the kids from the other groups roamed the halls and watched movies in the common room, we were made to stay in our rooms after nine. In our room, Katie was reading a magazine and listening to her headphones. I wrote for a while, and I wondered if I should have called Tommy. I felt guilty, and then I looked at Katie.