I’m still in the midst of ripping, my fists full of crumpled glossy paper and tape, when my Wonder Woman phone starts ringing. I’m hoping it’s Mel, but I know it’s him. Wanting to know if I sent them yet. Oh, he can’t wait. He really can’t. I imagine telling him there’s something wrong with my computer. I don’t know what happened. Some sort of glitch.
While the phone rings and rings, I lie on the floor, close my eyes. I do what I’m trying not to do, which is dream myself into her clothes buckle by buckle, zip by zip, and then into her skin. Until I am her limbs and her long curving back, Steppenwolf branded on my knobby spine. Until I am her lips and her sharply cut cheeks and her eyes clouded in their glittering gray smoke. Until I am her eyebrow arching itself at me from the opposite shore of the room. Sure, I say to this sad girl. I’ll show you. The only thing I keep of myself is my hair, which fans out around me like Ophelia drowning. In the corner is a beautiful blue-haired boy whom I’ve let in out of the rain. I’m letting him watch me sleep. I’m so very kind.
? ? ?
All the way to school on Monday, I picture turning back, shafting her. Just leaving her there alone without the cued DVDs or the Peter Gabriel music or the overhead maps of Haiti we’re going to point to. Drowning up there without the necessary visual aids I’m clutching in my hands. I even smoke a cigarette in the stoner washroom past the first bell, staring at my now nearly unmade eyes, my too-dark red lips in the mirror.
In class, I let China do most of the talking. That was our agreement. If I took care of the visual aids, she’d do the talking. I let her explain The Difference Between Charity and Grass Roots Change, let her go on about how in Haiti there is this organization—she can’t remember which, but it isn’t grassroots. And what they did was just show up and stick a well in the middle of the town. They just dropped it there, didn’t even check to see if there was a water source underneath. Or was it a pump? It might have been a pump, she says.
I realize she has no idea what she’s talking about.
“Was it a well or a pump?” she asks, looking at me like I would know, even though this is her story. Today, her smoky eyes don’t look globbed on at all. They have that four-tiered effect, a look that takes time and skill. Apart from a shadow of gray dust in the crease of my lids, mine’s gone. When I looked in the mirror earlier, I saw the girl I was before she dragged me into the farthest stall from the door and sat me down on the taped-up toilet lid.
“A well or a pump?” she prompts.
All the eyes have left her briefly and are on me, waiting. I let the question hang there in the ugly room. I let her hang there all on her own for a breath, before I open my mouth.
If That’s All There Is
So one night, on a dead shift, my coworker Archibald casually tells me there are things he’s been picturing doing to me of late and when I say, “Like what?” he hands me a small scrap of paper with the word cunnilingus written on it in red ink.
I stare at the jagged letters. All lowercase. The cunni written eerily straight, the lingus curved and veering downward like a tail. Each letter separated by a space as though they’re acronyms for other words.
I look at Archibald sitting in a swivel chair beside me, his thirtysomething face red from the low-grade grain whiskey he keeps in a giant coffee mug under the desk. He’s looking at me like I’m not twice his size and wearing a turd-colored shirt that says MUSIC! BOOKS! VIDEO! on it and a blue apron over that that says WE HAVE IT ALL!!! He’s looking at me like I’m donning what Mel wears to go dancing on fetish nights at Savage Garden, which is basically just a few strategically positioned scraps of black lace.
I tell myself, Laugh. It’s a joke, obviously. But when I force a one-note laugh like a cough, Archibald doesn’t laugh with me.
“I’m good at it, Lizzie,” Archibald says. “Quite good. I play the harmonica semiprofessionally. Chromatic scale.”
I look back down at the note. He’s scribbled it on one of those torn bits of scrap paper we keep in a fishbowl at the desk so customers can scribble whatever out-of-print or obscure book they want special-ordered. A dated history of the Ottoman Empire. Herzog’s walking diary from Munich to Paris. A photography book featuring extreme close-ups of female genitalia, where they don’t look like genitalia at all but like sea plants.
“I’m sure an attractive girl like you has a ton of admirers,” Archibald continues. “Boyfriends.”
He’s looking at me sideways, but I say nothing. I just look off to the left like it’s too true. After all, Archibald did once tell me that Fergie, our obese coworker who walks with a cane due to a childhood case of polio, is deeply in lust with me. When I pointed out that Fergie is old enough to be my grandfather, he said that Roland, the little troll man who works in receiving, has a profound boner for me too. So there’s that.
“You can’t be serious about this,” I say, shaking my head at the note.