Egghead and MeI got here early so I wouldn’t have to deal with the crowd. That’s what it’s all about these days: avoiding the onslaught of bodies that accompanies every dining hall, every lecture, every aspect of life these days. I look over the outline for the lecture, and breathe a sigh as I sink back in my chair. Another ninety minutes of the meditative rehashing of simple concepts. It’s as big an ego trip as Chem 207 is ever going to give me.
And then he sits down next to me. He doesn’t really sit, it’s more like a flying leap, followed by a good minute of rustling and then settling into his seat. Beside me.
Why?
“Oh hey, wassup? I didn’t see you there.”
You short little fucker, you knew I was here, that’s only reason you picked this seat. That’s the only reason you flung yourself over 5 other people for a mediocre view that’s seven rows away from the professor. “Hey. Nothing really.” My words are come out cool, like the gritty slap of flesh against concrete.
He says some things after that, but all I can really make out is the word “dawg” dispersed here and there and the way his jaw, attatched to that egg-shaped head of his, seems to have a life unto itself. “Yeah, medical school is dawg eat dawg, man. Dawg eat dawg.”
I nod politely. That’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s the submissive, bitch-like position that I assume as the listener. Really I want to slap him. To take my pencil and drive it deep and angrily into his spiral notebook, to kiss the top of his egg-shaped head. Just to shake up the system. I just keep nodding.
The woman at the front of the room starts to lecture. Her arm fat ripples with each dash she makes across the blackboard. I wonder what my own arm fat would look like if I wrote on the board. I wonder if anyone else is as aware of that jolted rippling as I am. Beside me, Egghead is making offhand comments and shouting out answers. Some are wrong, some are right. He doesn’t seem embarrassed either way. Behind me people are laughing, throwing tight little wads of paper at one another, making farting noises. For a moment, I’m back in high school; a really expensive high school that I pay “one really nice car” –worth of money to go to every year.
I can feel my lips pursing into a tight frown. I try to relax, but someone is bouncing their knee up and down on the back of my seat. I bounce right along with them. It kind of feels like rape. Or how I imagine it might be.
I copy a few of the simple concepts from the board. Things I’ve copied a dozen times before (at least). Things that any high school sophomore would probably know, but that I’m paying thousands of dollars to learn. I painted my nails a deep red last night. The paint has little glittering flecks of some unknown substance in it. Probably fish scales or baby tears or something. An ingredient so precious and bizarre that only the cosmetics industry would think to use it. Against my striped sweater, I realize that my arms look like the legs of the Wicked Witch of the East after she was crushed by the house that fell from the sky. Those crumpled limbs that would eventually wither and retract into themselves. Maybe someday I’ll do that to.
But first I need to be crushed by a house.
Egghead is talking again. Something about orbitals. Something about nodes. Some one throws a piece of paper and it rebounds off his head, but my mind switches gears and suddenly I’m thinking about you.
It always happens this way; the steady, persistent ache suddenly culminates, like the subtle pain in the arm that eventually turns into a heart attack. I think of the next time we’ll kiss. I imagine it as a rush of oxygen or those first desperate gulps of water after days and days of thirst. I wonder if you remember that one time when we fed the ducks on that precarious bench that teetered right over the water’s edge. The ducks didn’t come to us that day (they had other things to attend to), so we sat together and watched the soggy wads of bread on the water’s surface.
And then the fishes came. Like sneaky little water elves, they came to the surface and made short work of the duck’s forsaken bread. All they left was a quick popping noise and a few ripples. It’s amazing how wasteful humans can be (like feeding perfectly good bread to fat ducks) when the rest of nature works so hard to conserve. I probably had my head on your chest as we sat there. I could probably hear your heart beat, but I would never admit to something like that.
Egghead says something to draw me out of my dream. I go kicking and screaming back to that place that I don’t want to be. To what degree I don’t want to be here, even I’m not sure.
(You have no idea how hard it is to take a picture of your own hands.)
