by Noir, Roxie
When I get upstairs, Margaret and Victoria are in the living room, Margaret on her laptop on the couch, Victoria eating cereal at the table.
“Halloween,” I announce.
They both look over at me, eyebrows raised, as if they can see the storm cloud over my head.
“Two guys,” I say, holding up two fingers. “That’s how many guys I’m gonna make out with. Two. I’m gonna dress sexy and have sexy fun and make out with people.”
Who are not my calculus professor.
“Okay,” says Victoria.
“Attagirl,” says Margaret. “Are we talking successive or simultaneous makeouts?”
“Don’t care,” I say, heading through the living room for my bedroom. “Either one, as long as there’s two, because I am getting on the express train to Makeout City. Good night!”
“Night!” they both call, and I shut my bedroom door behind myself, sling my laptop bag onto the floor.
Then I take off my jacket, and when I do, I realize I’m still wearing Caleb’s scarf.
In one final fit of pique, I take it off and fling it into my closet.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Thalia
“Okay, wait, give me a few more guesses,” Josh shouts over the thump of the bass from the next room, leaning in toward me. “You’re a sexy CEO.”
“No,” I shout.
He takes another sip from his red solo cup. I’m not sure what’s in there, but I’m pretty sure it’s blue, so it’s not beer. I assume the frat brothers here have some special booze stash in the back that’s only for them.
I, on the other hand, have some pretty strict guidelines about what I’m willing to drink at a frat party. If I don’t see it come out of a bottle, or preferably a keg, it doesn’t go in my mouth.
“Sexy lawyer,” he shouts.
I take a tiny sip of my drink — a now-warm beer that I got from the keg my very own self — and shake my head.
“Give me a hint,” he says.
“I’m a specific person,” I say, and point at the cigar in my pocket.
He gives me one more up-and-down look, and I glance away from him, back at the doorway to the dance floor.
“Sexy Bill Clinton!” he says, grinning, like he’s certain he got it. “The cigar is a total —”
“No,” I shout.
I knew I should have gotten a beard, because no one has any idea who I am, but I really didn’t want to wear a beard. It seems like a huge pain in the ass.
“Well, whatever you are, you’re totally sexy,” he shouts. “It’s a good costume.”
“Thank you,” I shout back.
I’m supposed to be making out with Josh. Well, not with Josh specifically, but the idea of tonight was that I would make out with someone and it would scratch my itch and I would stop thinking about Caleb and thus be freed to find a more suitable match.
It’s not working. This is the same story as always: some guy talks to me. I get intensely uncomfortable. He flirts. I try to imagine making out with him, and it weirds me out so much that I make some excuse and leave.
I don’t know what my problem is. It seems like everyone else I know has no problem doing this kind of thing, why do I?
“Guess what I am,” he shouts.
I take another step back and regard his outfit: basketball shorts, flip flops, and a tank top. It’s not really seasonally appropriate, but other than that, he looks like one of the several thousand guys on campus who wear that every day.
“An off-duty lifeguard,” I guess.
Josh looks mildly puzzled and drinks some more.
“Nah, man,” he says.
“A surfer on the weekend,” I try again, and now he laughs.
“I’m a Rho Gamma Delta!” he shouts, holding his drink way up, like it’s a torch. “Haha! Get it! They’re always wearing shorts and flip flops and shit, it’s like they don’t even own real shoes.”
“That’s really good,” I lie. “Super funny.”
I try smiling at him. Is this how you flirt? You tell a guy he’s funny and smile at him?
“Thanks,” he says. “Me and a couple of my buddies are gonna go over there in a little while, they’re having their own party and man, are they gonna be…”
He keeps talking, but I stop listening to stare at his mouth as his lips move.
Can I make out with him? I just have to put my face right there and then get my lips against his…
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with Josh. He’s nice looking. Good face. Athletic body. My own age. Not my professor.
And yet, the idea of putting my face on his and making out makes me feel like there are worms crawling over my skin.
I don’t want to. Even though, in the abstract, I really do want to accomplish my stated goals for tonight, I just don’t want to make out with this guy.
“That’ll be great,” I say when he’s finished with his plans for pranking another frat, or… something. “Super funny. Hey, I gotta go get a refill, cool talking to you!”
I don’t even wait for a response before I flee.
Like all the frats on campus, Kappa Chi Kappa is in an old house, and I duck around a staircase decorated with fake cobwebs and giant (fake) spiders, then through a hallway hung with skeletons and then past the party room, music pumping out.
I scan it quickly, but I don’t see anyone I know in the writhing mass of bodies, so I skip it.
The kitchen. Another hallway. A room that’s just filled with Christmas lights and people making out on beanbag chairs.
Then, finally, in a room that I think is some kind of closed-in porch, I find Harper and Victoria.
“Heyyyyy!” they chorus when they see me.
“Heyyy,” I say, flopping on the couch next to them.
I choose not to think about the things a frat house couch has probably seen.
“How’s the mission going?” Victoria asks.
“The mission is stupid,” I say.
“So, bad?” Harper asks, taking a sip of her beer. I think they’re both slightly drunker than me, but it’s Halloween. Everyone should be drunk. That’s the point of Halloween in college.
“I tried,” I say, leaning my head against the back of the couch. My extremely-short-cutoff-shorts are giving me an intense wedgie right now, but I don’t care quite enough to fix it. “I just… don’t wanna.”
“Then don’t,” Victoria says. “If you make out with someone just to make out with someone, you’ll only wind up feeling bad about that.”
“It’s okay to only make out with people you actually want to make out with,” Harper joins in.
“I know,” I say. “I just wish I wanted to make out with more people.”
“Do you?” Victoria asks.
“More beer would fix that,” Harper offers.
“I don’t want more beer either,” I say.
“Then I don’t know how to help you,” she says, finishing her own off.
“Where’s Margaret?” I ask, even though I probably know the answer.
“One of her harem boys is in this frat,” Victoria says. “They’re probably upstairs.”
Margaret is — in her own words — a slut, which she defines as “a woman who likes sex and isn’t shy about it.” At any given time, she has several friends-with-benefits relationships going on, all of which seem pleasurable and safe and consensual and am I jealous?
Yes. Kinda. It’s complicated. I’m jealous of some aspects, at least. Such as the ability to make out with someone without making it weird first.
“How come she can bang like twenty guys at once and I can’t even make out with one?” I complain.
“Because you’re different people,” Victoria says, her tone of voice suggesting duh. “People are different, it’s not a big deal.”
“You want to fuck your professor, she wants the whole frat to run a train on her,” Harper says. “Different strokes for different folks.”
I don’t think that’s quite what Margaret is looking for,
but I take Harper’s point.
“I need more beer,” Harper announces, then points at Victoria. “You need more beer. And you need more beer!” she finishes, the last statement directed at me.
“Accurate,” Victoria says, and shoves herself off the couch. “Then we should go dance before the organ concert. Shake that booty, you’ll feel better.”
I let her help me off the couch.
“Okay,” I agree. “We’ll dance.”
* * *
I’m not a very good dancer. I know that, as a Latina chick, I’m supposed to have rhythm in my soul and salsa through life or whatever, but apparently I missed that memo.
I dance anyway, with Victoria and Harper. After a while, Margaret comes down, looking pleased with herself, and she dances too.
We dance with some guys. We dance without some guys. I have another beer and loosen up a little and don’t care that I’m not a great dancer.
We’ve been dancing for a while when Harper shimmies over to me, grabs my wrist, and shouts in my ear.
“It’s eleven thirty!” she says. “We gotta go.”
We collect Margaret and Victoria, say goodbye to some other friends, and then grab our coats before we leave the booming frat house. The cold night air feels good against my sweaty, flushed skin, and I pull my hair back into a knot as we walk.
“You make out?” Margaret asks.
“Nah,” I tell her. “Not my night.”
She flings one arm around me and squeezes me close, nearly sending both of us stumbling off the path, and we giggle.
“I still love you,” she says, overly effusive and definitely somewhat drunk, but I appreciate it and slide my arm around her waist, and we stumble to Scarborough Hall.
Scarborough Hall has one of the largest pipe organs in the United States, so every Halloween, the school organist puts on an organ concert.
Yes, we have a school organist. I think he’s a music professor in his spare time, though I like to imagine that his main job is playing organ concerts, which also happen at Christmas, Easter, and graduation.
The concert is at midnight, so every Halloween, a huge chunk of the student body stops partying, grabs some blankets, and goes and sits on the floor of a huge, Baroque hall that’s got a pipe organ at one end and portraits of old white men adorning the walls.
We get there in plenty of time and find a space near the front, at the end of the hall opposite the organ, which is situated in a loft above the front door. The lights are off, except for a few spooky-looking sconces, and we sit on the blankets that Harper remembered to bring, bless her.
“Did anyone guess your costumes?” Margaret asks.
“Everyone,” says Harper.
“A couple people, but they really liked it,” says Victoria.
I just sigh.
“I told you that you needed the beard,” Victoria says. “You just look like A Clockwork Orange meets Rocky Horror Picture Show without it.”
Even though I’m lying on the floor, I look down at myself: ankle boots, thigh-high fishnets, thrift store gray trousers cut off to make booty shorts, a half-unbuttoned vest over a pushup bra, and a blazer with a cigar in the pocket.
I’ve been slightly self-conscious all night, but I also saw a girl wearing nothing but a thong under a fishnet dress with stickers over her nipples, so by college standards I’m practically a nun.
“Yeah,” I agree.
Harper took the Fifty Shades of Grey idea and stapled paint swatches to a black outfit. Victoria spent all week creating a complicated getup that’s half poofy prom dress, half football uniform, and has fairy wings attached.
She’s fantasy football.
Margaret’s just wearing a miniskirt and a crop top. It’s not even a costume, though I did overhear her tell someone that her costume was “college girl.”
We wait for the concert to start and talk about nothing at all: which of the white men’s portraits on the wall looks grumpiest, whether hot dogs count as tacos or sandwiches, how many times per week you can eat cereal for dinner and still claim to be an adult.
Finally, at five ‘til midnight, the lights flicker once, warning us that organ music is imminent. Harper squeals and claps her hands, and Margaret laughs and tell her to simmer down. I sit up, leaning back on my hands, looking up at the huge golden pipes gleaming above the entrance to the hall.
Then I look down, at the back of the huge hall.
Caleb’s standing there, leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and lie back on the floor.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Caleb
I get there just as the lights go dim. Perfect timing.
I almost didn’t come, even though I’ve come every year for the past seven, since I started graduate school here. The organ concert is awesome in the biblical sense of the word, unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced.
But it’s also filled with undergraduates, and even though I always taught undergrads as a grad student, being their professor is somehow… different. Seeing them drunk and dressed as sexy butterflies didn’t feel creepy when I was just a graduate student.
It does now. On my bike ride to Scarborough Hall I passed a girl who was — I think — dressed as a sexy mummy and seeming to be wearing nothing but haphazardly placed crepe paper, and I nearly stopped her just so I could offer her my coat, praying the whole time that I didn’t recognize her.
It’s bad enough that every time Thalia walks into my class, I have to remember pushing her against that wall, hard as hell, the way she gasped and dug her fingers into me. I can’t imagine having to teach calculus to someone whose nipple I’ve accidentally seen.
The floor in Scarborough is completely covered in students, most lying down, Halloween costumes dimly visible. I take off my coat and stand near the back, under the organ loft.
The lights go down. The crowd hushes. I close my eyes, and it feels like church.
“Good eeeeevening,” a voice booms from above, affecting a cheesy Transylvania accent. “And velllcome to the annual All Hallow’s Eve midnight organ concert!”
I can’t see Mike from where I’m standing, since I’m half-below the loft that holds the pipe organ, but I grin anyway. I appreciate a guy who knows how to play to his audience.
The students on the floor cheer and stomp. It’s more raucous than you’d expect for a pipe organ concert.
“Tonight, ve vill begin vith an arrangement of Handel’s Organ Concerto, Opus Seven, Number Vun, in B flat major,” he booms. “Please enjoy.”
The entire hall is dead quiet. It feels like the building itself is holding its breath, waiting.
I wait, eyes closed.
The first note floods the room like dark sunshine, low and vibrant, the sound so thick I feel like I could reach out and touch it. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The wall behind me hums.
I’ve never heard anything like this before. I’ve been to plenty of other concerts, but there’s something particular about this one: the way it feels like the air itself is the music, like the building and the organ and the people listening are all part of the same song, the same power.
And I needed it. I needed to go somewhere and feel something new and get away from myself, just for a little while.
It’s been a bad week. It’s been a long week, a rough week, because on top of everything else I’ve had to see Thalia sitting in the back of my classroom, taking notes and turning in homework and generally pretending that I’m invisible.
Of course she was angry. I’d been pretending that, as long as I didn’t touch her, the nature of our relationship didn’t matter. That it was appropriate to contact and walk her home and give her my scarf and flirt with her, as if all that wasn’t also wildly inappropriate.
I shouldn’t have. My entire life is laced through with shouldn’t and don’t and it’s laced through with an intense longing that knocks the breath from me sometimes, and underneath all that it’s laced
through with the queasiness at the knowledge that this is over a twenty-two-year-old student.
In that way, Halloween has brought a small measure of relief, that after seeing countless girls in various states of undress, my only thought has been she must be cold.
The organ booms and I feel the music on my skin, in my lungs when I breathe, and I make myself stop thinking about anything else.
I don’t know how long that lasts. The first song ends and another begins, then another and I stand there, against the wall, and float away on a wall of sound.
At last, the music stops. The last note echoes through the hall, a ghost floating away until it dissipates in a hall so silent I swear I can hear the building settle.
Then a thump, a creak from above, and I hear Mike’s voice.
“Sank you for your kind attentions,” he says, still with the same accent. “Ve vill now have ze briefest of intermissions and ven ve return, I vill be playing Louis Vierne’s Organ Symphony Number One in D minor, Opus Fourteen, and of course, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.”
Mike drops the accent when he names the songs, and right when I open my eyes there’s a swish and I see the brief flick of a red cape disappear over the railing of the balcony.
And then, before I can move from the spot where I’m leaning against the wall, I see Thalia.
Walking in my direction, though she’s not looking at me. Wearing short shorts and fishnet stockings with garters, the thin black strap snaking up her thigh, under her cutoffs.
She’s got on a vest that’s half-unbuttoned over cleavage and a gray sport coat over that, something poking out of the pocket.
My whole body floods hot, then cold. I swallow hard and shove my hands in my pockets and try to look away, I swear I do. I can’t. I feel like a cartoon dog going AAAOOGA, eyeballs popping out of their sockets, tongue lolling practically to the ground.
Stop staring. Stop staring.
I can’t. I hate this, but I can’t, and for long seconds I’m standing against the wall, just watching her, like some sort of pervert. She closes the distance between us, still not looking at me, and I dream of cold showers. I imagine standing naked in a snowbank. I think of hiking ten miles in the rain over rocky ground.