Adam Levin - Hot Pink

“Hook your arms around my neck,” Carla says.

“Really?” Susan says, but she’s hardly gotten it out before she’s in midair, her stumped thighs at Carla’s soft sides, under her unzipped parka. It is two steps to the wheelchair, and so two bounces, from which Susan deduces that the thing rubbing against her is a navel piercing.

“Okay,” says Carla. With one arm, she turns the wheelchair around, then lowers Susan into it, slowly, their bellybuttons meeting for a sliver of a second. “Do you need me to push you?”

“Not at all,” Susan says. She follows Carla out of the lecture hall.

“Nice knowing you, ladies,” says the professor.

CHAPTER 130,027

IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE OF LOGIC

“That guy’s such an asshole,” Carla says.

“He just wants to fuck you.”

“I think maybe he wants to fuck you .”

Susan’s first impulse is to insist that what Carla has just said is not true at all. Instead, she says, “He probably wants to fuck us both, simultaneously. If he had it his way, he’d have us from behind, have us each bent over his office desk. He’d slide his dick in and out of your pussy, so he could watch your beautiful ass twitch beneath his sloppy thrusting, and he’d keep his unclipped fingers rhythmlessly whittling away in me, so as not to obstruct the freak-show view of my lower half.”

Carla gasps and does a cat stretch. “That made me tingle, what you just said,” she says. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Susan Falls.”

“That’s a pretty name. You want to go somewhere and get really fucked up?”

“I have my Moderns in Paris seminar in an hour but… Fuck it. I was born to get really fucked up with you, Carla.”

CHAPTER 130,028

A DANCE, A DAMNED GOOD TIME TOGETHER

Carla rents a second-story room from a professor of music on 59th Street, just east of Ellis Avenue. The home is a standardly professorial Victorian, rampless. Carla wheels Susan through the alley and up to the garage. Punching out the command code on the number pad, Carla bounces a little and turns her head to smile at Susan, twice. “That’s my Ali Baba dance,” she says. The garage door opens. “Have you ever smoked opium?”

Susan considers telling a lie, but chooses not to. “No. Never.”

“Good,” Carla says. She wheels Susan into a corner of the garage and crouches down in front of the chair, the tip of her ponytail touching Susan’s half-lap. “Wrap around me,” Carla says. Susan obeys, lets her hands fall where they may on Carla’s chest. Carla stands up.

“You’re strong, Carla. How’d you get so strong?”

“I speedskate.”

Rather than remarking on any number of the positive effects that she imagines speedskating would have on the ass of Carla, Susan utters a simple “Wow,” but her face is pressed against Carla’s face, and she feels Carla’s face get hot, as if Susan had remarked on the likely effects of speedskating. Susan likes that.

Carla brings Susan up the stairs to her room. There aren’t any chairs. “Where do you want to be?”

“The bed’s fine. If you can get me somewhere near the headboard, so I could lean…” she is saying, but Carla is already getting her somewhere near the headboard so she can lean.

“Good?”

“Good.”

“How old are you, Susan?”

“What?”

“You seem older than most freshmen.”

“Actually, I’m fifteen.”

“Wow, you’re like one of these genius kids who basically skips high school, aren’t you?”

“Ah well…When you’re legless—”

“That’s really hot, Susan.”

CHAPTER 130,029

OPIUM

It doesn’t matter that the opium came as a gift from Dan Batner, this totally evil ex-boyfriend who Carla had met at an MBA mixer she’d accidentally wound up at last semester. It doesn’t matter that he gave it to her last week. His reason for giving it to her — to let her know that, had she not decided he was such an evil young man and then told him to stay away from her, she could have still been with the only opium dealer on campus, and likely the only opium dealer in the tristate area, had she not been so cold — doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter, either, that the opium is not opium, but rather Nopium, an incense that Dan Batner mail-ordered for $19.99 per forty-ounce brick off an ad in the back of a glossy head magazine. Nor does it matter that the black brick of Nopium isn’t crumbly/gummy in the same way that opium is crumbly/gummy: doesn’t matter because any underclassman at the U of C who’d have researched opium’s texture on the internet — no U of C underclassmen had ever had opium in hand — would have only found words such as “crumbly/gummy” to describe opium’s texture, and words like “crumbly/gummy” could really mean anything within reason if you thought about them hard enough, anyway. Plus, Nopium smells like real opium, which is a smell that anyone anywhere in the world can become familiar with, as Carla and Susan have, by watching the movie The Wizard of Oz and imagining the smell Dorothy smelled when she fell into stuporous sleep in the field of poppies when the Wicked Witch of the West said, “Poppies, poppies,” and caressed the crystal ball with long-nailed and delicately fingered green hands while winged monkeys cheeped and yapped and giggled.

It doesn’t matter that Susan and Carla are smoking incense out of Carla’s color-morphing glass pipe, because even if it were real opium, Susan’s not inhaling it. She doesn’t know how. Inhaling vs. not-inhaling is not a dichotomy she is aware of. And even if she were inhaling real opium, it wouldn’t matter, because it is not the drug but the shared will to use the drug, to share the mouthpiece of a pipe, and to ditch class together, and drag ass across campus to Carla’s room, which smells like Carla’s hair, like almonds and autumn and soap, that matters. The undone inertia of unlikely emotion-laden circumstance, of tears and knocked-loose wheelchair brakes riding on the sound of blue nylon snowpant-legs rubbing one another is what matters.

“I’m so high, Carla,” Susan Falls says.

“So am I,” Carla says. They are stretched out on Carla’s double bed next to one another. “Since we’re both so high,” she says, “let’s pretend we’re not.”

“As you wish. You know, your room smells so good.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Hey, Carla. I’ve been meaning to ask you. What’s your major?”

“I’m undecided.”

“What between, Carla?”

“Between psychology and dropping out of college. I like the way you say my name all the time, Susan.”

“I think I want to drop out, too. Do you ever take those things off?”

Carla giggles.

“Do you?” Susan says.

“Are you coming on to me, little girl?”

“I’ve never come on to anyone before.”

“You want me to take them off?”

CHAPTER 130,030

A LEOPARD

Ten seconds later, Susan says, “No, not yet. Leave them on for a little while.”

“Do you smoke cigarettes, Susan?” Carla pulls a pack of Marlboros from a secret pocket inside her snowpants. “Here. Smoke this cigarette with me and tell me how you lost your legs.”

Susan drags on the cigarette, but, as with the opium, does not inhale. She says, “I’ll tell you, Carla.”

“Tell me.”

“It was a leopard. A leopard bit my legs in the jungle when I was an infant. I was lucky to survive. Gangrene set in, though, and they had to hack off my legs with a machete to prevent it from spreading.”

“A leopard?” Carla says. “Are you making fun of me?”

“Not at all. And I was an infant, so it wasn’t so much the leopard or the gangrene, I guess. An infant can’t watch out for—”