by Liz Everly
He turned away.
The econ guys were one kind of horrible, but Turner was another horrible all together. She would rather die—just die—than have him find out about her little problem. He kept expecting some her to understand some mutual hipster code and respond accordingly to his silences and significant glances. She didn't speak one word of hipster.
With a deep, twisting feeling of agony, she fled past him out the door and headed off towards the café to mainline some coffee into her system so she could stay awake until night.
The econ guys were all in line at the café, getting gassed up on caffeine before settling in for the long afternoon session. She was angry when she saw them, but didn't feel she could blast them with her condemnation. The last thing she wanted to do was tip them off. She wanted Nadia to get the cameras up. She wanted to see for herself. So she got in line behind them and greeted everyone in a soft voice. They greeted her back warily, no one asking why she'd been missing that morning.
"So what did you guys do last night?" she found herself saying, her tone a little artificial and a little defensive.
Rick finally said, "You know, hanging out in the lounge. With everyone." No one looked at her directly.
She turned to Bonifellow. "What did you do?" she asked.
"I was hanging with Rick. Had some popcorn." The word popcorn seemed to have special significance for him. A leer quickly faded from his face. "Why you asking? What did you do last night Jennifer? I mean, Jenny."
A quick glance that went down the line at the word. Jennifer. Jenny knew they all played poker sometimes, but their poker faces needed work. They knew something they weren't telling.
Oh I was walking around and then suddenly decided to get myself off. In front of you all…
What if she really was masturbating in front of them at night? No wonder they gathered around the lounge with popcorn. Jesus!
Jenny went back to library, forced herself through a ton of database research, printed up her articles, and fell asleep with her head on the desk. She woke up to a puddle of drool and a cold Red Bull someone had left for her on the table. Did Turner leave it for her? She sucked it down and made her way back to the dorm while everyone was at dinner. Looking left and right on her way to her room, she marveled at Nadia. If there were hidden cameras about, she couldn't see them.
Nadia showed up at ten pm exactly.
"The natives are restless," Nadia said, bustling in. Nighttime seemed to be when everyone talked over their work from the day. Late night was when everyone did their work for the next day.
"I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight," Jenny confessed.
"You didn't nap today did you?" Nadia asked. Jenny knew her face revealed her guilt. Nadia chided her with one finger. "Remember, no naps."
"No naps," Jenny echoed contritely. She started emptying out the cans she had gone through that day into her recycling wastebasket.
Nadia looked at the over-flowing receptacle. "I can see you're fighting the impulse. That's a lot of Red Bull."
"You're telling me."
"Jenny, how many cans did you drink today?"
"All day? Only four. I also had maybe two quattra-venti's at the café as well but that's all. I don't do more than that," Jenny added, trying to be helpful, "because it makes my heart beat too fast."
Nadia sat in the chair. "I crunched the data and you're definitely having what we call confusional arousals in your sleep." She pulled out the white tray from her bag.
"What's that mean?"
"It means you're having periods where you're awake and asleep at the same time. Because you're awake, you can get up and perform activities, unlike someone who normally can't move in their sleep. But because you're also asleep," Nadia said, placing the first felt dot, "you have amnesia, and you can't remember any of it."
"Awake and asleep at the same time? Isn't that an oxymoron?"
"Not really. Sleep isn't an off on switch. You're coming out of your different phases of sleep, but you're not staying out long enough to wake up. Basically it's a classic marker for sleepwalking."
"So I am definitely sleepwalking." Please let it be sleepwalking, please, please, please.
"Yes. But let's see what else."
Jenny didn't like the sound of that.
Fifteen minutes later, the dots were in place. "Okay, my work here is done," Nadia said, yawning. "Back to the lab for me. I'll finish examining the samples I took this morning while checking on the monitors. Goodnight." Another jaw cracking yawn followed the first one.
"Geez Nadia. Are you getting any sleep yourself?"
"As they say in my profession, I'll sleep when I'm dead."
***
By eight am the next morning, Jenny was hunched over Nadia, seated at the desk with an open laptop in front of her.
The room, so neat the night before, was once again trashed. Jenny watched a bleary-eyed Nadia get her laptop configuration all set. Jenny felt like someone had removed her brain through her nose, crapped on it, and then shoved it right back up into her cranium. Maybe it was all the Red Bull from the night before.
On the computer screen there were videos divided into four quadrants. They were labeled Nanny Cam 1, 2, 3, and 4.
"I used these at home," Nadia said.
"I didn't know you had a kid."
"Two."
The cameras showed the current scene—which was people slowly wandering down the halls towards the bridge on their way to breakfast. Then Nadia called up the saved file and all the people disappeared. The time stamp at the bottom of each mini-screen lit up in green numbers and the rooms seemed different because it was night and they were darker. The bottom left corner was grey. Jenny's bed was black her sleeping figure white.
"That's infrared," Nadia said tapping the screen. "Your light is out but we can still see you.
The other three cameras covered the hall, the lounge and the elevator.
Nadia looking tapped out. She was wearing glasses today her curls bunched into a hasty rubber band knot as she silently tapped away.
"You ready for this?" she said. "Here, you sit. I'll stand."
Jenny sat down in front of the screen. She didn't like the tone in Nadia's voice. This wasn't going to be good.
The first part of the screens showed the guys gathering in the lounge. There was a time stamp at the bottom, one-thirty-five. It was distracting watching four screens at once, but Jenny found she quickly got used to it.
Rick came with a big bowl of popcorn, and the guys gave each other bullshit greetings and fist pumps.
"They're excited," Jenny said.
"Yup," Nadia nodded back at the screen. "Just watch." Jenny started feeling the anxiety inside her ratchet up.
"This time," Bonifellow said to Rick, "She wants your fucking kettle corn, you give it to her, asshole."
"Don't worry about it," Rick told him, grinning around the mouthfuls he munched on.
Meanwhile, the bottom left corner the white figure was up.
"Hey, that's me!" Jenny said.
"Wait," Nadia said. "Watch."
Jenny in the bedroom was throwing off her shirt, and then she was fumbling around the room in the dark. Jenny looked over her shoulder for the actual camera. There it was, stuck right next to the outlet that rested next to her the bureau. Nadia was good at this.
Jenny watched herself stretch, then pace more swiftly about the room, head down. It was weird watching herself like this. On screen the white figure pulled her hair up into the high pony tail, looked at herself sidewise in the mirror, put on some make-up, and then pulled down her pj's to a few inches down to her hip bones and folded them over the waist, revealing the flat space of her belly, making the pj bottoms sag over the tops of her feet.
Nadia reached forward and punched a button. Everything went fast forward until about 1:47am. At that point Jenny watched herself on camera going out into the lounge area. By now the halls were empty, but the six guys were still waiting in the lounge. Four from her
group and—her stomach started to shrivel up—two guys she didn't even know.
"Is she going to do it – is tonight the night?" Bonifellow whispered. They talked about her like wasn't even there, but she was standing right in front of them.
"Who are those two other guys?" Jenny pointed.
Nadia pointed at one with her pinkie. "He sits at the psychology table, I think."
"You've watched this already?" Jenny asked Nadia, who didn't answer. She was watching the screen and had taken out her iPad to take notes.
"I'm feeling lucky," Rick said to the other guys. "Hey, hey! Jennifer, come sit on my lap."
Rick put his bowl of popcorn on the fat arm of the chair and patted his lap invitingly.
"Jennifer?" Jenny asked, her voice pitching up an octave. Nadia shrugged. Suddenly Jenny couldn't sit still anymore. She stood up as well next to Nadia and folded her arms across her chest.
Meanwhile, on-screen Jennifer went over and straddled Rick where he sat in the overstuffed beige chair. She covered his eyes, playing guess who. Jenny covered her own eyes.
"Oh, I like that," Rick said. "Now what?"
"Why is she wearing so many clothes? That's not our Jennifer," Bonifellow said.
Rick leaned back to avoid her breasts in his face, and said "Jennifer, aren't you hot?"
"Of course she is," the psychology guy said.
Jenny shuddered and continued peeking through her fingers while on the camera her parasomnia self slowly pulled down her pj bottoms as the guys ooh'd appreciatively, and skipped out of them all together. Suddenly Jenny felt cold. She went over and got her pj bottoms and put them on.
Oh, taking off her bottoms, yes, that's better, that's more like it, the guys all crooned.
Great. She was their own personal strip show every night.
At least she didn't have on a thong. Instead she was in aqua boy shorts with thin lace insets on the sides. On-screen ponytail Jennifer got up from Rick and bent over straight-legged to pick up the bottoms. She started to gently beat Rick across the face with them, which he didn't seem to mind at all. He grabbed them and, ew!, smelled the crotch. He slumped a little lower in his chair pumping his pelvis towards her. Jennifer then leaned forward and this time rubbed her breasts into Rick's face.
"Motorboat, motorboat," the psych guy chanted.
"She's going to suffocate him," Bonifellow said.
"Yeah, but he'll die happy," psychology guy said.
Jenny thought she was going to throw up. Nadia tapped out more notes.
On-screen Jennifer stood upright again, rubbed Rick's hair—or what was left of it—and dumped the big bowl of his popcorn all over his lap. She walked away while the guys cat-called, and Rick remained sitting where he was, his body stiffening up, a stunned expression on his face. Well, the one good thing about all this is I really have a pretty good looking tush, Jenny thought, stunned.
"I think he just came in his pants," Nadia said.
"Probably the closest he's been to having a lap dance… Wait, where'd I go?" Jenny asked. She looked at all four cameras, but her nighttime doppelganger was gone from the screen.
Nadia pointed with her pinkie nail to the screen again.
"They watch you go out that way and then there," She moved her finger right. "They're looking out that window. I think they can see you through the window, so I went this morning and looked. There are about five dorms you can see from the window."
And the bridge, Jenny thought. That connects through the mezzanine to the other dorm.
But that wasn't all. Nadia fast-forwarded the footage, until Jennifer came slinking back.
"There—you're back." Jenny watched herself collapse across the bed, unconscious. Nadia stopped the recording.
"And that's that." She tapped the time marker: 4:45.
"So where did you go for almost three hours?" Nadia asked.
"Where do I go?"
"And what did you do when you got there?"
"I don't know, I don't remember." But she could guess, couldn't she?
Jenny looked at the clock. She was due at the morning session in half an hour.
"I will find out. I have ways," Nadia said, sounding more than ever like a high voiced gypsy. "I'd like to follow you tonight—then the mystery will be solved." Something about Jenny's face made her lean in. "Is that okay?"
"How am I going to face them?"
"Listen, the men seem to think you do this regularly, so there's a good chance we can capture it on tape tonight."
"You know what I'm doing, don't you?"
"This is a huge huge advance for my research project. You're saving me two years—maybe five years, or ten."
"Then I'd better get a big thank you in your paper."
"Sure, that and my first born child." Nadia turned around suddenly and faced her directly.
"Look, I've got something else to tell you. I studied your vaginal sample under a microscope."
Jenny's stomach hit the floor.
"Jenny, did you have sex with someone last night?"
Jenny could only manage to raise her voice to a hushed whisper. "No."
"I think you did," Nadia said. "I think you don't remember because you did it in your sleep."
Which one? Jenny spent the morning session looking from one member of the group to the other. Rick. Please god, no. Please. Bonifellow. Not him – not him either –or him… she wouldn't have shown up to the session, only she was waiting for one sign, one slip or tell that would reveal who it was.
She heard nothing, took no notes. The distant drone of the older professors was mere background noise.
What if it was more than one of them? At one time? What if there was a broom closet or something somewhere—or not even that. The place was full of deserted dorm rooms—.
She groaned, covering her eyes, trying not to notice as several pairs of eyes turned her way.
At lunchtime Nadia dragged her along to the cafeteria. "You have to eat."
But Nadia didn't really care if she ate. Nadia just wanted to grill her.
"Did you have any sexual dreams that you can recall last night? Or did any sexual fantasies go through your head?"
Jenny ducked her head in shame. "Yes."
Out came a notebook, her pen poised above the blank page. "Tell me."
"…about him." Jenny's voice was a whisper.
"Him who?""Mr. Stares-a-lot from the other side of the cafeteria." She hiked a thumb behind her towards Turner.
"The varmint guy?"
"The varmint guy."
Nadia wrote it all down on her notebook.
"What happened to your iPad?" Jenny asked.
"I forgot to charge it." There was a stain down the front of Nadia's shirt and she smelled like someone who hadn't showered for a day or two.
Jennifer gulped down her cereal, which was all her stomach could handle. She felt nauseated. What if she was pregnant? The closer she got to having a definitive answer for what the fuck was going on, the worse everything was getting.
Meanwhile, sleepwalking, shedding her clothing about the dorm, practically giving lap dances to the guys she wanted to respect her intellectually—and let's not forget the all-too-common masturbating that might be going on. Gee, she was just her own little porn channel, wasn't she?
"So we lost you at the bridge," Nadia was saying.
Yes it could. Hands over her eyes, she said, "I want to die."
"Tonight I'm going to put a tracking sensor in your hair. Just a little thing, it clips on. Then I'm going to follow you, and record your behavior. From a distance. You won't know I'm even there." Nadia gave a big yawn. "Well, of course you won't know anything—"
Jenny stood.
"But I'll hang back so I don't scare anyone off."
Jenny imagined herself as an evil twin. She imagined her evil twin rolling around with one of the guys—probably Bonifellow—in another dorm. He was handsome, but a true slug on the inside. She pushed away the cereal.
Nadia eyed her di
staste for food. "Hey, you're not having stomach pains, or burping or anything are you?" They tossed things back and forth until Nadia decided Jenny was probably not going off and eating in the night.
She saw Bonifellow across the room. God please no. He was not worthy of the tiniest, most forbidden sexual fantasy. Not like— She stiffened. She knew where she'd been last night.
Chapter 4
She didn't bother saying anything more. She got up and left Nadia, went back to her room, and napped uneasily with horrible dreams during the rest of the day. Jennifer came out in the dream. Jennifer was a mean sorority girl and was laughing at her. Jennifer morphed into Johannes and grew teeth all over his/her body and then—Jenny woke up with a scream.
That night it was easier to let Nadia came by and do her dot thing. Jenny pulled on another cami, this one pinkish, put her hair up in something that looked a little like the sexy ponytail Jennifer had worn the night before. She changed into a pair of slinky silk pj bottoms with pale peach stripes and, with the uniform on, she was ready to go.
She'd sipped so many Red Bulls that evening she felt on the verge of tachycardia while she practiced Jennifer's slinky walk and hooded stare in front of the mirror. More like she doesn't give a damn. Eyes lower, chin up. More like everyone else is cow shit.
When she mastered the trick of moving about like she owned the goddamn place it was time to roll. The first steps outside her room were the hardest. She strode down the hall, swishing her hips, feeling the wide legs of her slinky pjs slap at her ankles.
She could bypass the lounge, but she wanted a little practice. She wanted everyone to think she was Jennifer that night, everyone.
Bonifellow was eating ice cream. She sat on the arm of his chair, tucked her leg over her knee, and grabbed his hair in one hand, pulling it back. With the other hand she took a spoonful of his ice cream and licked at it like she was making love to the spoon. Bonifellow swallowed hard, but seemed to enjoy himself.
She passed.
She stared through them all one by one, letting go of Bonifellow's hair, and going over to Tucker who was sitting on the edge of the back of the couch.
"She's up," Rick said.
She turned around and drifted up against Tucker. His arms tentatively wrapped around her waist. She pulled away, worried that she'd gag or actually feel the boner he probably sporting.