Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

The song ended. Paulina and Fran stood hunched, breathing hard. Paulina bent her knee in a stretch. They had barely recovered when Marvin walked in. No one had seen him for weeks. He’d cut his own hair. The next song came on. Paulina immediately resumed dancing. Fran reluctantly danced. Paulina danced at double speed, her breasts rocking an extra beat. The girls danced close together in a sexy way, but it only made Marvin laugh.

The old Color Club song came on, and Paulina and Fran danced even closer. Their eyes met and neither looked away. The music was an electronic whine, machines confessing to machines. Everyone ran onto the dance floor. Fran could feel the sweat on her back and between her breasts. She danced limply, like laundry on a line. She could feel the others dancing around her. She heard their tinny voices in the lyric breaks, and several spirited screams.

Fran’s hair was in her eyes and she braided it out of her way as she danced. The cramp had faded, or the natural drug of dance had cured her. They’d called it “dance drugs” in Norway. They didn’t run out of moves. They kept making up new ones. A happy heat emanated off their skin.

Paulina watched Fran’s hair curl out of its braid and whip her face like pretty underwater plants. Paulina could not leave beauty alone. She leaned close to Fran. Fran was unable to resist anyone who wanted her. They kept an inch between their lips, while the room shook with dancing. The anticipation was so overwhelming that Fran couldn’t tell who it was, but one of them leaned forward. The kiss was dizzying.

Like most bathrooms at school, there was dirt between the tiles. A discolored shower curtain clung to the tub. A bar of soap sat in a milky puddle. Someone knocked loudly on the door and Paulina locked it. She pulled Fran’s jumper off, ripping a big hole in the seam. Laughing, Fran pulled Paulina’s dress over her head.

Fran’s bra was the flimsy kind with no underwire. Her breasts were soft and palmable. Every part of her told Paulina something, something she’d already known but never felt. Someone knocked again and Paulina yelled, “Get lost!” Fran started kissing Paulina again, this time with confidence. Her hands crushed Paulina’s impossible curls and felt the hair clips beneath it all.

Paulina pulled Fran onto the floor, where she lay short of breath, staring at the rusted underside of the sink, someone’s lumpy bathrobe, and a collection of half-full shampoo bottles. Paulina dragged Fran’s threadbare underwear down her legs.

Fran had this bedroom feeling to her, a feeling Paulina had often noticed. Everywhere Fran went, she inhabited like her bedroom. Her joy, her moping — none of it was hidden. Paulina pressed her cheeks against Fran’s thighs. Fran felt herself dissolve into the mess around her. Hot blood coursed through her veins, which she imagined like thin streets that led her to Paulina. To Paulina’s streets.

Fran’s melodic gasps tightened Paulina’s heart. Emotions thrashed around like toys. Though it lasted about eight minutes, the girls would think of this moment so often that it became notched in their memory, a place they got stuck thinking. Hearing Fran orgasm drove Paulina insane. After, Fran reached for her, but Paulina evaded her. Cool fear filled Paulina while Fran lay catching her breath. Pleasure ran druggy sprints down Fran’s legs. She couldn’t think. Everything she thought seemed marvelous. She laughed.

Paulina washed her face in the sink, her heart pounding. Fran leaned against the door. “What about you?” Fran said. “I can get you,” she said, her breasts lolling on her chest. “I want to.” Paulina didn’t respond. She dressed quickly, then nervously took out her hair clips and redid her hair, staring hard at her own face.

“Paulina!” A boy called through the door. Fran’s mind raced. What would people think when they left together? How could she get the ripped jumper back on? Safety pins? What about Eileen? Where was she?

Then again, “Paulina!”

Paulina silently unlocked the door and closed it behind her. Fran looked for her underwear. Her legs felt weak, as though Paulina had stolen her power.

Fran held her ripped jumper closed as she walked away from the party. Where had Paulina run off to? Things could be like Norway again. Fun like that. In the same room. Going places together. Where the street split, Fran took the turn to Paulina’s. Her shoes eagerly slapped the pavement. She touched her hair. She imagined finding the door open, sneaking into Paulina’s bed. Paulina waking and finding her. What happened in the bathroom happening again and again.

Fran passed a weird sculpture glued to the sidewalk. It was the letter E , sculpted in papier-mâché, but the top bar had collapsed onto the other bars, and ants were eating it. Metal pieces hung off the sculpture with string. Photographs had been glued onto the piece: pictures of Eileen weaving on a loom, blurry dancing, Dean in a dress at the goth club with Sadie, freshman-year Marvin posing with naked Apollo, Eileen helping Cassie paint her room. Fran searched them for herself.

Paulina knelt above Tim in her bedroom, giving him the longest blow job in human history. “I told you,” Tim said, bunched against her pillows. She waved him off.

“If anyone can do it, I can do it,” she said, her words garbled. They laughed. Paulina worked like a motor. There really is no other feeling like this, she thought. It felt like praying to a needy god or resuscitating a drowned toad. She could think of nothing to drive her forward except the distinction of breaking his record. She pictured Fran and kept going. Fran’s orgasm had sounded so sweet. She could picture a whole life with Fran. A sunny apartment, where, Berlin? She kept her hand moving up and down Tim’s dick, while she stretched her neck.

“You can stop if you want,” he said. She narrowed her eyes and put it back in her mouth. Cassie couldn’t give him a blow job! Cassie, who’d spent her whole artistic worth on a droopy monument for Eileen. Tim groaned.

“It feels so good, but I know I’m not going to come,” he said, with a little too much certainty. Paulina sped up. She pictured Fran on the bathroom tiles with her legs open. Fran on the dance floor with her hair flying. Paulina had gotten all of Smith to come; surely Tim’s dick wasn’t as complex. Muscles in her back seized up like armor. She imagined leaving Tim in her bed and running to Fran’s. Likely it had already ended for Fran, she realized. Fran rarely questioned a good feeling, but by now she had realized who had given it to her, and probably she wanted her lovers to be male, and of a certain look, of a certain major. A lot of Smith was this way. College girls intuit that they’re supposed to try something while they’re young, but rarely can they love or accept it. Likely Fran was already at Julian’s, telling him, having him.

She let it fall out of her mouth. “I sucked Tim Henley’s dick for four hours and all I got was this stupid T-shirt?” she said. He laughed. “I chased Tim Henley all year and all I got was this stupid blow job!?”

“Hey,” he said, getting serious, “you started it.”

Fran knocked, but the sound yielded nothing. She saw a pinkish glow from the window of Paulina’s room. Fran wanted to yell to her, but she didn’t want Paulina’s neighbors to hear. She heard laughter and shrank back. Was Paulina looking at her through the blinds? Was it all a joke?

Fran had so much work to do, and here she was, shivering in the night, while Paulina laughed her villainous laugh. Was there a sorrier state? Paulina had won, had worn Fran down, had all Fran’s power. Was Julian up there too? She felt sick. Wind flew through her ripped jumper. She wanted to scream to Paulina. “Paulina,” she said. Light played in the window. If Paulina really liked her like that, Fran thought, it wouldn’t have taken this long. When Paulina wanted someone she walked toward them, put her hands on them. Fran’s eyes were glassy with tears and yearning. She couldn’t yell. “Paulina,” she said to herself.