Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  Anna had never seen Bamert chastened until that moment. He got off the stool and sank back into the dirty futon. Then he grabbed an empty Snapple bottle and drooled down a line of dip spit that seemed to have the tensile strength of a circus tightrope. The saliva broke, then made a little lasso and settled down on his lapel, where it sat upright for a few seconds before settling down into a permanent stain.

  “You’re right,” Bamert finally said. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”

  “Why do you even wanna break out of here?” Burton asked him.

  “You know me, I get bored. And this place is too orderly. Everything is too clean. All the kids go to class on time. There’s no mess. And New England sucks. It’s a flavorless region. I need a taste of chaos or else I’ll go mad here.”

  “I’ll steal Vick’s phone,” Anna said. Both boys quickly forgot what they were fighting about. “I got no problem with that.”

  “Are you sure?” Bamert asked.

  “I’m not gonna make Burton steal it, and there’s nothing you can do quietly. That leaves me. Burton, can you show me how to take out the battery?”

  “Yeah. In fact, I have an even shrewder idea for what to do once you get it.”

  “Our girl is so brave,” Bamert said proudly. “Gets smacked down at the big boss level and wants to go right back at it! Unreal. You’re the real dash of pepper, my dear.”

  He took another swig of his drink, only this time the spiced rum didn’t sit right. Anna could see it: that moment when drunk people realize they’ve taken it one drink too far. Bamert’s eyes seized up and his whiskers went limp. His face turned gray. He let out a small hiccup that acted as a warning sign to the other two. He held his breath, terrified of how the next taste of air might make him feel.

  “If you’ll excuse me.”

  He broke into a run out the door. They could hear him projectile vomiting into the sink even though the bathroom was at the opposite end of the hall.

  Burton stood up and grabbed his tambourine case. “Check, please.”

  “Does he do this every night?” Anna asked.

  “He wouldn’t be Bamert if he didn’t. I’ll walk you back.”

  They paused in the Kirkland common room to feed poor Fucko the hamster, then made their way across South Campus, along the perfectly manicured trees with spotless dedication bricks, past the cube-shaped edifice of Helton Library, where half the student body willingly hotboxed themselves every night to cram for tests in monk-like silence for hours on end.

  She paused outside Helton for a second and took in the air. The walking was still a drag, but Anna was already learning that the best parts of Druskin came in between being wherever you were supposed to be. All the stolen places and moments, those were the true gems. These were the dark parts of Druskin. September here was truly perfect. Even a cynic like Anna would have been a fool to deny it. It felt like living in a world that had been set designed. The air tasted better than anything on the menu at Main Street.

  “I hate that library,” Anna told Burton.

  “You should. The architect who designed it had three families on three continents, and each family had no clue the other two families existed. I’d tell you to read all about it but the school strangely has no biographical volumes on him in the library that he designed.”

  “Funny, that.”

  “Yeah. Listen, Anna.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry. What I said tonight, I was out of line.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You sure you wanna go through with this? I know what an awful start this has been for you, but you’re full ride like I am.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked Burton.

  “Because I can hear your shoes coming from two blocks away.”

  Oh God, another thing for people to gawk at. “I keep meaning to go to George & Phillips to replace them, but there just hasn’t been time.”

  “It’s very easy to get caught up in Bamert’s Bamert-ness, you know? But as much as this place sucks, it’s valuable to you and me, right? It means more to us than it ever could to Bamert, or even to Lara.”

  “I know.”

  “But you still wanna break out. Why? You worked hard to get in here. Why risk all that, and why risk it so soon?”

  She clutched at the shoulder strap of her back pack. Pulled it close, nuzzling against it.

  “Everyone else gets away with everything,” she told him. “Why can’t I?”

  “You know why.”

  “Yeah well I’m not just gonna sit here and accept that.”

  “You’re not gonna like me saying this,” Burton told her, “but you should forget Lara. There’s no shortage of rich girls here to chase after.”

  “That’s not my angle,” she insisted.

  He took a step back. “I swear I wasn’t implying that.”

  “She’s not just a rich girl and I’m not just a sucker with a crush. Plus I have other people I’d like to find, and deans I’d like to ruin, and that’s all gonna be a valuable learning experience on its own, Burton. I promise you that.”

  “Deans? You mean Vick.”

  “Of course I mean Vick.”

  “Why do you go to his house every Wednesday?”

  “How do you know I go there?”

  “I saw you walk in once.”

  “He makes me go.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I don’t even know if I can tell you that I can’t tell you, do you understand? Keep your trap shut about it, especially to Bamert.”

  “I will.”

  She walked away, covering her paces all the way back to Sewell, past chatty seniors and quiet couples on their way to the chapel to hold hands for Evening Prayer. She reached the dorm and began the trudge up to Room 24. The stairwell existed inside its own cruel dimension, growing skyward and adding on extra floors in accordance with her level of exhaustion.

  When she finally reached her room and cracked the door, she realized that she wasn’t alone.

  SEWELL HALL

  Anna’s bed had been stripped. Her clothes had been torn from the dresser and stuffed hastily into boxes. Someone had tried to move her mini fridge too, dragging it roughly six inches before giving up.

  You’ve been expelled. Somehow they caught Bamert and Burton and you conspiring on video, and now you’re all doomed. Except maybe Burton.

  Maybe Emilia Kirsch had ordered her room trashed, which would have been strangely awesome. Then, in her quiet frenzy, she spotted a pink rollerboard suitcase and a stack of cardboard boxes next to the window. Also, the room smelled like butter now.

  What the hell is going on? The bitch who moved your shit is a dead girl. Wait a second. Oh no.

  She had been a fool to assume that her room would remain a single for the rest of the year. This was Druskin, after all. The Druskin admissions office could barely suppress its glee whenever they told new enrollees, Anna included, that they had been selected from an impossibly deep pool of applicants. It provided those kids with a cheap thrill that lasted far beyond what it merited. Now another new junior had scored a magic ticket. Still, Anna wasn’t ready for Lara to be replaced. It hadn’t even occurred to her. It also hadn’t occurred to Anna that her new roommate would move all of her crap without asking.

  A squeaky, British voice came from directly behind her. “Right, I can explain.”

  There, in the doorway, was a girl wearing a flower dress and sporting a mound of frizzy hair that could have filled a moving box of its own. She was barefoot, her legs and ankles painted in a black mendhi pattern: a perfectly symmetrical whorl of flowers and curls and ornate latticework. Anna was so mesmerized by the design that she could barely look up. The girl held out her hand.

  “I’m Asmi,” she said Anna. “I’m your new roommate.” She had a fantastic accent. Anna wanted to grab it and try it on. But first, anger.

  “You moved my shit,” Anna said. />
  “About that, yes. It’s horrible, I know. Awful. You probably think it’s rude and just ugh! But actually it’s ace. Once I explain it, you’ll understand. I’m diabetic, you see.”

  “Okay.”

  Asmi grabbed a small black kit from the front of her suitcase, then removed a slim black pen.

  “You have to vape when you’re a diabetic?” Anna asked her.

  “What? No. AHAHAHAHAHA bloody Christ no. I wish. I only like sniffing glue; none of that vaping nonsense.”

  “You what?”

  “This is not a vape pen, dear. Like I told you, I’m a diabetic, which means that every two hours, day and night, I have take out this fucking pen and jab myself with it to get my blood sugar level. PRICK PRICK PRICK! all the time. If it’s too low, I get to eat candy, which sounds brilliant but is not something I’m in the mood to do at 3am, and it always happens at 3am and never at a proper time, like after tennis. If it’s too high, I take insulin. Another lousy prick. But I have to do it. Me mam ports to Canada to get me that insulin for cheap.”

  “All right.”

  “And I have a weak bladder, which means I have to go pee whenever I wake up to do the whole blood-and-candy thing. So there you have it. Candy munching, needles pricking, doors flapping open and closed. It’s a whole bleeding racket, and I don’t wanna have to subject you to it at odd hours when you’re down for a kip. Hence—”

  “I take the small room,” Anna said.

  “Right. But I have a peace offering, because I figured you would be mad. Are you mad? You’re probably mad even though I’ve explained it perfectly.”

  “I’m not.” A lie.

  “I’d be mad. I’d say to myself, ‘Who does this Pakistani dickhead think she is barging in and moving crap around and munching on Cadbury Dairy Milk in the middle of the night?’”

  “I swear I’m not mad,” Anna said. Again, a lie. Anna was furious. The worst part of it was that all of Asmi’s reasons for the switch were perfectly acceptable. Anna wanted to have the right to be mad, but all of that had been cut off in an instant: her rage tied into a knot and left with nowhere to go.

  “I can make it up to you. In fact, this is well beyond what you probably deserve,” Asmi said. She reached into a plastic bag resting next to her rollerboard and took out a container with a plastic top. When she popped off the lid, the entire room became perfumed with an even heavier scent of butter. After sitting in Bamert’s room for so long, Anna had forgotten about all the good smelling things. She looked down and saw a bowl of perfectly fluffed rice, topped with a generous helping of chicken that had been carved off a spit: all dark meat, freckled with reddish sumac, glistening with fat and ready to break apart at the touch of a fork.

  “It’s the best you’ll ever have,” Asmi promised. Anna dropped her boulder of a backpack to the floor and took the kebab. She ate while standing in place. Asmi was right. It was heaven in styrofoam. For the moment, there was no homework, no lovesickness, no forced relocation to a new bedroom, no Vick, no Coach Willamy screaming at her to keep her legs straight. There was only buttery paradise.

  “Do you want hot sauce?” Asmi asked. “I keep it on me at all times.”

  “I wuld but I don wanna thtop,” Anna said, her mouth full.

  “I made it.”

  “You make hot sauce?”

  “The kebab, stupid.”

  “Oh, wow. You made this?”

  “I could bring some back to you after any holiday break. But you better like it, you slag, or else I’ll split your head open.”

  “I like it!”

  Anna was finished within two minutes. She gamely scoured the bottom of the container with her fork to pick up every last grain of pillowy rice, every last drop of juice. She could have licked the thing clean, but wasn’t about to do that in front of her new roommate.

  “Thank you,” Anna said quietly. She placed the garbage into the paper bag and cinched it up. “I can throw this out. Then I’ll move my crap.”

  “I can help, although your fridge is stunningly heavy.”

  “We can get that in the morning. I’m tired.”

  “I understand.” Asmi went over to the window and looked over at the Academy Building, lording over North Campus in all its brick majesty. Asmi took out a tube of Gorilla Glue and took a deep whiff. Anna was aghast.

  “You really do that?” she asked Asmi.

  “Why? Do you want some?” Asmi asked. She started giggling from the fumes. “You have to get your own at some point if you like it.”

  “Should you be doing that if you’re a diabetic?”

  “If you had to prick yourself with a needle a dozen times a day, love, you’d need to take the edge off occasionally as well. Give a shit. Now, you want a huff or not?”

  “I’m good,” Anna answered.

  “What’s your name, dear?”

  “I’m Anna Huff.”

  “Fuck off. That’s not your name. You’re mental.”

  “That’s my real name, swear to God.”

  “A huff for a Huff! Fucking hilarious.”

  “There’s a Jubilee in this dorm, too.”

  “Well that name is just shit, innit?”

  “Yeah, and a fitting one for that girl.”

  From the widow’s walk on the roof of the Academy Building rose a clock tower with an oxidized copper dome. The dome was crowned with a weathervane hammered into the shape in of an old ship: anchored in place, prey to the fickle winds, lazily twisting in the growing chill, forever without a route or destination.

  Asmi stopped giggling for a moment. “I can’t believe I got into this place.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why do you think, Anna Huff? Because I was waitlisted forever! Imagine spending three weeks in the dirtiest, poorest, most crowded comp in England, with bobbies outside the door constantly asking you for your papers because you’re not some cream-white little English shit. Imagine all that, only to have a letter arrive one day telling you, ‘Um actually, no. You, Asmi, get to go to fucking Druskin!’ I mean, Jesus! Top. Just a fucking top night. Tell me I should be excited.”

  You should not be excited. This place will suck you dry within days.

  “You should be excited.”

  “Have you been alone in this room the whole time?”

  Anna had no crisp block of prepared text at her disposal this time around. How could she have? She wasn’t ready for ANY of this: the ransacked room, the sudden move, the considerable presence of a new human being in the room (one with significant medical needs), the incredible late night dinner. She needed life to slow down, yet all it seemed to do was accelerate.

  “I had a roommate for a day,” she told Asmi. “But then she left.”

  “After one day? What’d she do?”

  “Nothing. I guess she just changed her mind about being here.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “She was all right,” Anna lied.

  “I’m a fucking warrior, Anna. I can beat just all right.”

  Anna mustered the best possible smile she could. “I bet you can. That kebab…”

  “You will dream about that kebab.”

  But Anna didn’t. Instead, after dragging her relatively paltry assortment of belongings to the inner room, she lay down on her new bed, Lara’s bed, and spent all night rustling. Three weeks had been enough to purge the room of Lara’s presence. The air was stale. The sheets were laundered and smelled like industrial Uline detergent. The walls were barren. There was no Lara here, and frankly, there never really had been.

  And yet, Anna’s love only grew. That first night was all she needed. In her imagination she was always winning Lara over; much easier than trying to do it for real. She would listen to bad love songs on her school-issued phone all day long. This was shit she would never be caught dead listening to on a loudspeaker. She even played songs from the 90s. Then she would concoct elaborate fantasies of her reunion with Lara and the relationship blossoming forth from it. Lily Beach. Vanco
uver. A stolen alcove somewhere on Sardinia, near the crowds but not of them. VIPs for life. Sometimes Anna imagined asking Lara to go steady, like 1950s teenagers, and Lara saying yes. Sometimes she fantasized about becoming a massive pop star and giving her body to the stage, whaling away at a grand piano and performing elaborate four-hour sets that would leave her physically and spiritually drained. She dreamed of retreating backstage, bypassing all the himbos and the PR stooges to find, in her dressing room, a waiting Lara: wearing that fringe dress and brandishing a wicked smile that told Anna everything she needed to know.

  Sometimes she pictured the two of them making out in a London penthouse (replete with another grand piano for serenades, of course), or on the bearskin rug of a ski lodge in Park City, or in the sun-kissed surf of The Maldives. This was Lara Kirsch after all; you couldn’t help but concoct moneyed daydreams about her. That was no sin. Every time she thought of Lara, new reasons to love her materialized. Their imaginary rapport only grew stronger. There were so many more things she would tell Lara, so many real things. Sometimes she pictured Sarah’s killer abducting Lara, with Anna then mowing him down and rescuing Lara from harm. These were workhorse daydreams, as easy for Anna to return to as a movie that’s been paused.

  You could have kids together. You two could live on a farm if you wanted to. Don’t push it. You’re going overboard.

  It would have been nice if Anna still had her sister to talk to about all of this. Sarah had a boyfriend one time, in between attending the occasional global HotPort “speed greet” party: parties that Sarah would inevitably beg Anna to rescue her from. Sarah had been in love before. Sarah was the only person Anna ever seriously entertained advice from. Everyone else, even Sandy, gave her advice as a poorly disguised order, tinged with the certainty that they knew everything and that she knew nothing. Sarah wasn’t like that. Sarah was much older than Anna, but still young enough to be fucking up in real time and be continually learning from it. Her wisdom was fresh, always passed along to Anna with zero premeditation.