Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Never thought of that,” he’d said. “But, nope. Marjorie Fairwell was the wife of the university’s first major donor. She’s got scads of descendants still pouring money into the place. They’d rather let it sit empty than change the name. Eventually they’ll make it a charity dorm, I suppose. All the girls there will be on financial aid or academic probation, and just grateful to have a place to sleep, period.”

Jeff leaned against her office wall, looking down at Mira’s legs. He always got there eventually, it seemed to Mira. She was surprised it had taken him so long. It must have been an indication of his sincere interest in the topic they were discussing. She asked him, “How do you know about it, this runaway, if it’s been kept so quiet?”

“A friend of mine works in the provost’s office,” Jeff said. “She’s sworn to secrecy about everything that goes on there, but a couple glasses of wine and she’s all tongue.”

Mira tried not to picture the scene inspired by the choice of words, his female friend’s tongue. Jeff was, himself, an exceptionally sexy man—tall, olive green eyes, a head of shaggy brown hair. But Mira found him as attractive as a catalog model of men’s underwear. Sure, you looked twice, but there was that problem of you existing in the three-dimensional world, and his being just a flat, glossy surface. Plus, there was Jeff’s absolute lack of discernment, it seemed. (“If she’s breathing, he’ll sleep with it,” one of the part-time language teachers had told Mira once in passing. “It’s pretty sad, really. If he were a woman, we’d all feel sorry for him and be worried about his self-esteem.”)

Mira looked at her watch (where was Clark? she needed to call) and thanked Jeff, who took the paperclip out of his mouth before he said good-bye, and put it back on her bookshelf.

So many years in an academic environment: that had to be the reason that Shelly’s first thought was, It’s not a dead metaphor.

Her blood really had run cold . It dropped twenty degrees in her veins as she looked up at Josie in the doorway, realizing that, because Josie never apologized for anything she did wrong in the office, this was something else. This was something bad.

Josie swallowed. Shelly could see it in the muscles on her neck, hear the little wash of spit in the girl’s mouth, as her own mouth went completely dry.

“What?” Shelly asked, curling her toes inside her suede boots. “What is it?”

“Oh, God, Shelly. You’re going to be so mad at me.” The girl was whining, but she also sounded strangely as if she were reading from a script. Without realizing it, Shelly found that she had stood up, and that she was stepping backward, as if to put some space between the two of them. “And I don’t blame you. But. Well. You know those pictures I took? With my cell phone? You know, when we—?”

Shelly raised an alarmed hand to stop Josie from going on.

No, the hand said. Don’t say it. No need to remind me. Of course she knew:

They’d been lying together in Shelly’s bed. Skin to skin. The top sheet and blanket were crumpled on the floor at the foot of it. Josie had been kissing Shelly’s neck, and her Cover Girl lipstick was smeared all over Shelly’s throat (something she’d noticed only later, at the bathroom mirror, with alarm, thinking at first that she was bleeding) and they’d been drinking red wine, and a splash of it had landed in a violent-looking slash across the bottom sheet. Shelly was a little drunk, and Josie had seemed more so. She’d giggled hard enough at a very stupid joke Shelly had told her (while licking the girl’s hip: “What do the hippies do?” “They hold the leggies on”) that she’d finally jumped out of bed squealing, “Oh, my God, stop it, Shelly, or I’m going to pee in the bed!” (Shelly had noticed that the more Josie drank the more her speech became less and less of the Valley Girl and more harder-voweled Midwestern.) After the bathroom, Josie had stumbled back to the bed with her cell phone and snuggled next to Shelly, and held the phone an arm’s length away from them, and then scooted down and sunk her sharp little front teeth pleasantly into Shelly’s nipple, and snapped the cell phone at the same time.

A giggle.

Shelly said, “What did you do?”

She knew, of course, about camera phones, knew her own cell phone had such an application, although she’d never bothered to learn how to use it, but it still took a few seconds for her to process that Josie was snapping photos, and in those seconds Josie had managed to snap another, and another, and then she climbed on top of Shelly, straddled her pelvis—the incredible warm-moist sensation of Josie’s crotch pressed onto hers—and held the phone at arm’s length again, and managed to get them both together, smiling and naked and, surely, from a distance, completely obscene.

Then Josie had snuggled back down to show Shelly the photo:

It took her breath away.

This miniaturized image of herself as a fit, creamy-skinned middle-aged woman holding a dark-haired sylph in her arms. She was lost, completely lost, and knew it, even as she took the phone from Josie herself and snapped a photo of Josie reclining, sloe-eyed, one hand cupped under her breast, and another of Josie’s dark hair floating around Shelly’s hips as she flicked Shelly’s clitoris with her tongue. After that, Josie took a photo of Shelly propped up against the headboard, legs spread, and Josie’s hand—thrillingly recognizable by the little gold and ruby ring she wore—between them. A single bright index finger disappearing inside her, and Shelly’s face registering the pleasure of it, her mouth a subtle O , eyes half-closed, the bliss of the moment, and the bliss of capturing it, perfectly and suddenly, like something snatched out of the air still buzzing and humming and coming and pinned to time forever with a tack.

If anything in this world had ever excited Shelly more, brought her more fully into this world, she could not have said what it was.

Now, as Josie stood before her in the Chamber Music Society offices, one half-naked shoulder raised in a tiny apology, Shelly recognized it, all of it, for what it was: insanity.

The undoing of her small, carefully constructed life.

Oh, how they would love it, too. After so many male professors had been taken apart, witch-hunted down for their dalliances with undergraduates, how satisfying and self-affirming it would be to chase a lesbian out the door.

“I was, you know,” Josie said, “going to email them to you, you know. I thought…” Shelly groaned a little, closed her eyes tightly. “They were on my computer. And my roommate saw them, and I guess she turned them in to the Omega Theta Tau Board.”

“Oh, Josie. Oh, my God. How could—”

Josie lifted her chin defensively, and shook her head so that the dangling pearl earrings she was wearing began to swing around in her hair.

“Well, Shelly,” she said, sounding petulant. “I’m really scared, too. I mean, I won’t tell them who, in the pictures, you know, I’m with . But I think there might be something about this in the by-laws. Like, maybe if I won’t tell them, and they think you’re a professor, or my boss, or something—”

Shelly put her head in her hands and went back to her desk chair, sank down in it. After a few seconds she said into her hands, “Please. Just let me have a few minutes to think. Alone. Please. Go.”

“Sure.”

It was said so brightly that Shelly looked up, and it was a shock to find that Josie hadn’t moved an inch, was still leaning against the doorjamb, was smiling down at Shelly, quite happily, it seemed, from a very great height.