Rachel Glaser: Paulina & Fran

Paulina felt dizzy and stopped dancing. She felt her own curls, now puffy and disorganized. She’s cool, a voice said in Paulina’s head. “If brain-dead, naïve Valley girls are cool,” Paulina said out loud, stalled in place.

“Hey, I’m from the Valley!” Sadie whined.

Paulina mentally pushed beyond Sadie and Allison. Away with the fools that flock my sides , she thought, in a semiconscious daze. Fran danced in a corner seducing the wall. Fran, said a voice inside Paulina. For a brief, exhilarating moment, Paulina forgot the name of the boy snoring in her bed. The Venus Flytrap joined Fran and they danced like their hair was on fire.

“What a glutton for attention,” Paulina said, turning back to the crowded room.

“There you are,” said the boy with glasses. Paulina looked away. “Where have you been?” the boy said, leaning toward her.

“I have a boyfriend,” Paulina said dispassionately.

“The other night—” the boy began.

“That was then, this is now,” she said with exasperation. The boy’s eyes squinted as if in pain, then he turned and left. Sadie and Allison immediately filled his place. Sadie put her hand behind Paulina’s back and they danced very close together. Paulina silently forgave Sadie for the boots. She liked the way Allison danced, like a toy with dying batteries.

Apollo pulled his bandanna over his eyes and danced recklessly around the Venus Flytrap, humping air. A joint was passed around, burning those who danced into it. The forgotten eighties song came on again, the synthesizer stirring up feelings, and everyone screamed the sound of youth loving youth. Everyone was inside the same big mood.

Suddenly Tim was on the dance floor and Paulina saw only him. She pushed through people until she reached him. They danced entangled for a few songs — his hands on her breasts. The song sang to her. The semester had been slow, excruciating foreplay. Paulina pushed Tim against a wall. Everyone cheered and danced while she knelt before him, unzipping his fly.

It felt wrong to watch, but Fran watched. “That’s the girl who slept with Gretchen’s boyfriend,” Angel told Fran. “She’s going on the Norway trip.” A police car drove past, and Tim’s erection shone in the light, then it went dark again. Sadie and Allison fell into each other laughing.

The dancing became more flamboyant. Girls draped themselves on each other, and shook each other off. Straight boys danced carelessly with the Color Club boys. Then Cassie broke through the crowd and dragged Tim away. Her face was red from crying. Paulina stood flushed, wavering, then strode out the front door. She listened excitedly while Cassie told off Tim in the middle of the street. Cassie wouldn’t accept his apology. She spit on his shoes and ran back to the party.

Paulina and Tim walked down the street, but Tim kicked rocks and wouldn’t look at her. “Let’s just go to your place and finish this,” Paulina said, annoyed.

“We can’t go to my place. I live with her. Let’s go to your place,” he said and looked at her with a sort of hatred. All her feelings of affection for him melted away and were replaced by stronger feelings of desperation and lust. She thought of Julian, asleep in her bed.

“Fuck it, how about here?” she said, motioning to an alley full of trash bins.

“Can’t we use your place? I won’t stay over or anything.” They were almost to her place anyway. They walked without looking at each other. Paulina matched her steps to his, then consciously unmatched them. Once or twice she’d kissed someone at a party while Julian was in the other room, but she’d never had another guy in the apartment while he slept.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “My place.”

He nodded. She tried to picture how it could work.

“That mopey dude won’t be there, right?”

“He’s a heavy sleeper,” she said, her cruel laugh echoing through the night, surprising her.

In the laundry room of her apartment building, a half-finished painting leaned against the wall, depicting one of the girls upstairs with a mermaid tail. Tim nudged the painting toward him, revealing a smaller canvas behind it — a fish with peace-sign eyes. “With art like this, who needs art?” Paulina said, throwing her coat on the floor. Tim just looked at it. They kissed clumsily, stubbornly remembering what they had wanted before.

There was a barren feel to the basement, like it hadn’t been made by humans. Paulina pulled her neighbor’s laundry from the dryer and threw them on top of her coat. “I thought they’d be warm,” Tim said as they climbed on the cold pile of sheets. His body held none of the qualities she’d expected of it. His torso had no drama. Languidly, without purpose, and then quicker once their bodies caught on, they worked on and finished what she had begun to think of as her Degree Project. Her orgasm was like a shooting star one pretends to have seen after a friend ecstatically points it out.

There were twelve students on the ten-day trip, along with an expert on Nordic history; Sampson Harris, the head of the Painting Department; and Nils, the painting grad who hung by Sampson’s side. Tim’s name on the signup list had been Paulina’s incentive to sign her own, so she was wounded when she couldn’t find him in the airport van. Paulina glumly surveyed those around her: Illustration majors and others whose majors were meaningless to guess. She spoke only once on the ride to the airport, loudly interrupting a discussion about a blind illustration teacher. “There is another van, correct?”

“Yessir,” said Sampson Harris (late forties, portly, and beaming). Paulina disliked him. When Sampson gave a crit, his forehead wrinkled in thought, his eyes twinkled with self-love. His bravado and pride were typical of male painters. Male painters weren’t self-deprecating like male illustrators. God, did she hate anything self-deprecating. Male painters weren’t neat like male architects — but then neatness also annoyed her. And male sculptors thought themselves sensual (if clay) or brave (if metal).

Her opinion of Tim had worsened the night of the party, but in the days since then it had buoyed back up. All semester she’d clung to the idea of him. The laundry room was the only time they’d ever had sex, but this event had been christened and bedazzled in her memory until it bore little resemblance to what had taken place. Tim is in the other van, she told herself and sat back, letting the talk fade around her while she imagined herself and Tim, naked in a hotel suite, stoned, glamorous, inseparable.

But the airport was Tim-less. “His girlfriend made him cancel,” an illustration major told her with unconcealed enjoyment. Paulina examined the others at the airport, people who didn’t go to the art school. Stubby little families huddled near the TV monitors. Brain-dead teens wandered in toxic groups of two. Forgotten children sat like sentinels on top of mounds of luggage.

Paulina stood in despair, scrutinizing the pattern on the carpet, which stretched for miles. An unstable mind had created the pattern; Paulina assumed the designer had or would soon end his or her life. Paulina ran her boarding pass over her lips. She eyed a swarm of graphic designers and illustration majors, fearing they would try and befriend her. One of them, Marissa, was either the clueless graphic designer Paulina had met the week before or a girl so similarly flawed that the two might as well have teamed up and become one. Paulina noticed a gay freak from the Textiles Department whom she’d never felt akin to. Nervously, she took the little gray piece of cloth she carried in her bra and rubbed it against her lips. Her breasts were sweating in a tight shirt from eBay that didn’t fit her.