The Dark Space (8 page)

We fell asleep together, warm drowsy breathing, skin and flannel and heat held close between us, two kittens at home in our basket.

I woke up from a dream of Beth’s dunes and Winnie’s smile, so hard my back teeth ached.

The room was quiet, no noise but Winnie’s whistling breath and the whoosh of dry heat pushing through a vent. A car went by on the road.

I was sweating. Winnie had encased herself head to toe in flannel, a nightgown over leggings and huge socks. Her comforter was warmer than mine, her room stifling.

I pressed the heel of my hand into my prick, willing it to stop torturing me for one fucking second, but that wasn’t going to happen. I was close to naked in bed with the girl I’d been dreaming of spreading open over a sand dune, and there was no such thing as punishing pressure on my dick at a time like that.

Good pressure, bad pressure — I could have gotten off clamping my dick in a vise. I had to bite my lip to keep from moaning, and even that felt good. Full and plump. Felt like Winnie’s lip.

She had her leg slung over my hip, her arm over my waist. If I’d rolled to my stomach and stood up, I could’ve carried her around like a baby monkey. I wanted to run my hand up and down her leg, but instead I stroked over my cock, put two fingers inside the opening of my shorts to feel how hot I was, how soft the skin there, over the head, swollen, wanting to drip.

I couldn’t help it. Probably I should’ve tried harder, but willpower isn’t really my area.

Mostly I just tried not to make too much noise.

Tried to be still.

Tried to stroke slow enough that Winnie wouldn’t hear slapping skin, wouldn’t feel me bucking into my own grip.

That I was a miserable failure on all counts became clear to me when her fingers circled my wrist.

Her knee clamped tighter at my waist, and I felt her breath at my shoulder, her gaze peeking over, watching.

She took her hand away, pushed down my boxers, and then her fingers joined mine, soft and loose. Her hips moved with mine, bucking into my hand, her arousal my arousal, her excitement joining mine — and when I say that, I don’t mean that she got excited because I was excited, or that her excitement amplified mine, although both of those things are true.

I mean that she was me.

My dick was her dick.

My head filled with what she was looking at, the view from my shoulder, and other stuff, too — Beth’s angry gaze, Beth bending me over and pegging me, Winnie running the tip of her tongue over the weeping slit of my cock, lapping at me, sucking me, Winnie face-down on the bed, spread wide, me pounding into her, Beth watching—

I’m pretty sure that last one was me, actually, because I could taste her surprise, the soft press of her mental fingers into the hot spot in my head.

She pressed harder and made us come.

Our coming made the room bright, made the sheets wet, made my hand hot, my heart sore, made me turn toward her and kiss her, hungry, so desperate that I forgot it was the first time and I just took it. Took the kiss.

I took her face between my hands and tongued over the smooth rise of her top lip, into her mouth, tasted her finally, smelled her, rubbed myself dry on her flannel nightgown against her belly, shameless and lost in her, happy.

Everything Winnie.

Theater 309: Contact Improvisation

Class Journal #8

Winnie Frederickson

I’m a senior, and I have a 3.98 GPA, which means I have exactly one class that I did not get an A in, Business Calculus, in which I received an A-. At the time, I was angry about that A-, even though Dr. Salter actually rounded it up from an 88. It was the semester I got a peritonsillar abscess and was in the hospital for a week, having surgery and IV antibiotics, and then out of class for another week, recovering from being in the hospital.

I missed a whole unit’s worth of instruction, and even though Dr. Salter gave me the chance to consider an Incomplete, so I could take my time with that unit and take the test I missed during break, I insisted three days was enough time to do it and I could take the test with the class.

I was about halfway through the slides she posted online when I knew I would fail that test, but I kept pushing myself, writing out all the lecture notes from the slides by hand, highlighting them, Googling stuff I didn’t get and printing it out, highlighting that, outlining the book’s chapters, highlighting those, doing all the practice problems in the back of the text.

What I never did was ask for help, even though at one point I had a dream where I was sobbing in Dr. Salter’s office, and then Jared Washington interrupted us and said he would explain everything to me, and in the dream I told him no, absolutely not, my sobs turning into screaming, screaming at him, so out of control that I woke myself up yelling. Jared Washington got 100s on all the tests and only went to class once a week.

When I went to class to take the test, I brought in all the materials I had used to study and stared and stared at them, flipping through them at my desk while everyone else talked and joked before Dr. Salter arrived. When I stared at the problems I had copied out and highlighted, they seemed to make sense, but I didn’t dare to imagine what the problem looked like without the answer beneath it.

Like how it would look on the test.

There were always two versions of Dr. Salter’s tests. She’d pass one row one version, and the next row another, I guess to guard against looking at our neighbor’s and cheating, though I could never imagine doing that. She would always copy each version onto two different pastel colors of paper. That day, I got the yellow test. The two rows on either side of me had baby blue tests.

I kept fooling myself. Before I could forget, I paged through the entire test and I wrote down the formula I was supposed to use under each problem. Then I counted up the points I would get for that and made tally marks at the top of the test. Some problems didn’t give any points for including the formula and this made me feel this incredible rage and frustration.

I knew exactly what score I needed to maintain the A I had going into the class that day.

Dr. Salter always included a problem from the previous test as the last question on the new exam. I did that next. Made my tallies.

Then I started with the first, easiest problem.

I had no idea.

I neatly tried to use the formula to plug in as much as I could. I copied out what I entered into my graphing calculator actually onto the test — made a drawing of my output screens like this meant anything at all. I convinced myself that if my test looked like a completed test, I would get my A, but I couldn’t bring myself to add tally marks either.

For the first time in my life, I attempted to look at someone else’s test, and when it was blue, like I knew it would be, I still wanted to scream.

I covered the test with writing. All of it meaningless. Walked it to the front table where Dr. Salter was waiting. I was one of the last students to turn the test in. She looked at me, smiled at me, and I remembered I hated her because she had the ability to smile easily, because she didn’t have to take this test, because she didn’t have two make-up papers to write and three hundred pages of reading and a presentation poster to put together and didn’t have a suitemate who watched reality TV all fucking night.

I got a 53 percent. Previous to this, the lowest grade I had ever received on anything else was an 82 percent on a computer science programming project my junior year of high school. When I got the test back, I sweat through my shirt, all the way through. I had never flop sweat like that, and my limbs felt disconnected from my body. I got a headache.

That night, I took two Percocets left over from my surgery so that I could sleep. When I woke up, I took two more and went back to bed.

I probably should have gone to one of the schools I looked at that don’t have grades. I remember how completely seductive that seemed — so decadent, in fact, that I actually believed I couldn’t, because it was a luxury reserved for students who required additional luxuries on top of the unimaginable-to-me luxury of going to college on a small, leafy campus with its own coffee shop.

But I should have listened to that visceral interest. I know that now. Maybe I would have done other things at a college like that that I understand now, too late, aren’t luxuries, but are just what you’re supposed to do. Done a semester abroad. Taken a J-term doing a vaccine clinic in Haiti. Picked a major where every class under its heading in the course catalog made me think,
I can’t wait to take that,
instead of some kind of smug satisfaction that all my classes lined up on my transcript will look good to the graduate school admissions board.

I printed a copy of my major’s course catalog section out, the first day I declared, and I pinned it to my bulletin board. When I got a class completed, I made an X through it, and making that X made me happier than anything I did all semester long.

Now I’m a senior. I have eight weeks left. One of them will be stolen by Spring Break. I’m finally in a class that I wish I had every day, that I wish was twice as long, that I wish was just one of twenty others like it that I had taken as a part of a major that made me happy, made a place for me in the lobby of the building of my major where I would have spent endless afternoons just hanging out.

The biggest struggle I’ve had in this class, this semester, has been doing the rest of my homework for my other classes. Did you know that in 10 weeks I’m scheduled to take the CPA exam? A year ago, I heard some random person in my building say that it looked better to graduate schools if you had a theoretical major, like econ, and an applied finance credential, like a CPA. So I killed myself getting an accounting minor and scheduled myself for the exam. I’ve paid my $750.00 to take it, signed up and paid for a $1,500.00 prep class that’s supposed to start after break. I haven’t even cracked the study book, and the old me would have had it color-coded and each part sectioned for study by now.

I don’t think I’m going to take that exam.

I’ve done the initial web applications for all the graduate schools I planned on applying to, but I’ve let the essay deadlines lapse for two of them, and I skipped the meeting this week about requesting GRE scores that’s required to finish the apps on all the rest.

Here’s what I don’t know, and I don’t know who to ask:

Will I graduate and regret that I’ve let every single one of my plans decompose from neglect and have no way of recouping the loss?

Now that I’ve found the people in this class, I’m never going to talk to any of them ever again, am I? After I graduate, I mean. After I go through the ceremony and keep going to whatever unimaginable new place my dad lives and . . . what? Look for some job I can get with a BS in Economics? After that, after it takes me six months to get an assistant manager’s job at a marketing company, everybody will just be some status update on Facebook, right?

If there is a part of me that wishes I had taken Art History instead of this class, just because I’d almost rather never have had this happen to me than grieve it when I’ve lost it, what should I do?

Tell me something more than the checkmark you always write on these journals.

I need more than a fucking checkmark.

A checkmark just means I was here.

On the first day of our three kissing labs, Winnie was absent.

I kept scanning the room as though I could make her appear just by wanting her to. Part of me still felt like I did on the first day of class — like Winnie didn’t exist until I saw her, folded up in her chair, saw her pointy knees and her slept-on hair and brought her into existence.

Most of me knew this was bullshit, though, and that I was just too full of myself to ever notice her before.

That day, her absence was an ache in my molars, and I couldn’t give a fuck about Jason and Finn, Beth, Sarah, any of them. I wanted to kiss Winnie. I
deserved
to kiss Winnie.

I knew this was bullshit, but feelings. What are you gonna do?

I saluted Mags on my way out the door, fingers flying on my phone’s screen before I was all the way out of the building.
Where are you, Winnie-girl?

I didn’t hear from her right away, so I pounded on the door to her room. I checked the lounge, the library, the student center. No Winnie. I checked the places I liked to go when I wanted to be left alone — down by the river, the quiet upper deck of the nondenominational chapel building, the dugouts at the baseball diamond, the clearing underneath the huge pine tree behind the library — but it was fucking cold, and I was grasping at straws. And being a dick, actually, because if I’d found her at any of those places she’d sure as fuck have been there in part to avoid me, and I knew it.

But all I was thinking, combing over this campus I knew like the constellation of freckles on my knee, was
No Winnie. Where’s Winnie? Gotta find Winnie. Something wrong with Winnie.
Like a dog that knows something’s wrong with its owner.

Fucking Lassie, right?
Danger! Winnie danger! Find now.