Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

Where were they? She called out to them again. The jumper began to look silly in the mirror. Sadie wouldn’t approve, would make fun of the jumper. Also, it was way too tight. It clamped around her stomach and pinched under her arms.

Then she realized — it was a child’s jumper. Her face flushed. She felt hugely stupid. Sadie will burst out laughing at this, yes, uncontrollably. Allison too. She tried to shimmy out of it, but it shrunk with every movement.

“Yes, what?” asked Sadie finally. Paulina saw her through the gap where the curtain failed to meet the wall.

“Oh, nothing. I had it on, but nothing now.”

“Let me see,” Allison said.

“No, I don’t need any opinions,” Paulina said, still imprisoned in the jumper. It looked like a doll’s apron. Sadie poked the curtain. Paulina hastily pulled it shut.

“Chill, girl,” Sadie said. She poked the curtain with her elbow and Paulina flinched.

“We found a lot of good things,” Allison said.

“Where?!” Paulina asked. Defeated, she stopped struggling and stood before the mirror, one arm in and one out. Her hair had looked ideal when she left for SUPERTHRIFT, but all order had been destroyed by the wind. Her life felt like a mistake. She looked and felt like a shipwrecked alien whose mission had gotten horribly derailed.

Art school had been an impulsive decision. Paulina hadn’t really thought she’d get in. Her portfolio was mostly doodles she’d drawn over the photos in her high school yearbook. When she showed up, she found that the other students knew much more about art history than she did. They drew better. They worked harder. After a week, she abandoned her artistic goals. It was preposterous to have “artistic goals.” She cringed at the very words.

Then she’d seen the Venus Flytrap crack up an entire party with her exceptional laugh. Wearing only a cardboard headdress and Troy’s boxer briefs, the Venus Flytrap danced with total abandon. She trembled and shook, sacrificing her body to the song, letting it fill with spirits. Paulina envied the performance. She decided her personality would be her art and revamped her closet with SUPERTHRIFT treasures. She overheard the disturbing life story of a deranged man downtown and adopted it as her own.

Paulina’s ass hurt from sitting on the tiny corner seat in her dressing room. With concentration, she finally managed to take off the jumper without ripping it too badly. Then, slowly, she put her clothes back on, as if her existence were futureless and blank, and dressing just an automatic, ceremonial act of the life she’d left behind. She listened to Allison and Sadie try on their finds.

“Oh my god, those pants rule!” Sadie told Allison.

“You think? I feel like a tightrope walker or someone,” Allison said.

“Check it out, Paulina,” Sadie called, but Paulina refused to view their successes.

While the two of them paid, Paulina moped in the parking lot. She missed Fran, and the feeling was unique, as Paulina made it a rule to miss no one. When Sadie and Allison came out, they barely acknowledged her and continued their conversation. This stung Paulina, but she followed after them, pretending she was an alien sent to study Sadie and Allison’s feeble minds. She thought, My findings are quite abysmal, Rolan, ruler of Rolanzil. Their preening techniques are surprisingly rudimentary. Especially the tall one, whose tresses hang off her head like dead grasses.

“You’ll be there, right, Paulina?” Sadie asked nonchalantly, like the three had been talking all along.

“Where?” Paulina asked bitterly.

“My apparel show!”

“If I’m alive,” Paulina said, clutching her fur as if it could leave her.

Julian sat in movie theaters long after the credits. He slumped around the cafeteria. He’d begun school with friends, until one day he realized it was easier to see movies without inviting anyone along, and this turned him into a loner. He completed his assignments mechanically, and the films were dim and infuriating. A salt pile growing and melting. A glove wandering through the grass. When his classmates discussed his work, he could hear the clock ticking on the wall.

In the library, Julian spied on Paulina and Fran, wondering what was between them. He imagined Blood Axe, muscular and blond, Fran, naked and shivering on a zebra-skin rug, and Paulina, bathing in a claw-footed tub, all of them lounging in a log cabin with crude quilts and knitted things nailed to the walls. At first the story hadn’t made sense, but with every step away from Paulina he’d begun to accept it. Of course it made him nauseous to imagine her with Blood Axe, but almost immediately his mind found refuge in Fran. Just a semester or two before, he had been a virgin too, before Paulina took him home.

The library was a maze of bookcases and parquet floors. Big windows were covered with dusty velvet curtains. There were few people in the library. Students were clicking away in the computer labs, wasting their eyes in the white light, while the library creaked on without them. A library is like a sunken ship, thought Julian. It doesn’t change as the world changes.

He walked down the aisle toward Paulina and Fran, scanning the stacks. He took a big book from the shelf and pretended to read it.

“Hey, Brains,” Paulina said brightly.

He turned as if surprised. “Julian,” he said, and extended his hand to Fran. Before the breakup, he’d never thought of Fran, but now saw she had her own peculiar beauty. She wore a long knit skirt and a Little League jersey. Between buttons, Julian could see a swatch of her bra and a small triangle of pale skin.

“I know who you are,” Fran said.

Julian leaned against the stacks.

“Your reputation precedes you, Fran,” he said, looking to her face for a reaction.

“I don’t have a reputation,” Fran said laughing.

“Really, she doesn’t,” Paulina said plainly.

“How are things?” he asked.

“Thingy,” said Paulina.

Fran studied him. He was holding a book on ancient casting techniques. There was something in his voice, something he had taken from Paulina, or something Paulina had gotten from him. Though Paulina had dismissed him, at some point she had chosen him for herself. Fran tried to see him this way, in Paulina’s high opinion.

Julian slid the book back into the stacks, stretching this motion out to draw their attention.

“What’s my reputation?” Fran asked. Paulina sighed loudly.

“That you don’t refuse an adventure,” Julian said. Fran laughed, but Paulina turned away as if to leave.

“Until we meet again,” he said, like the heroes of old movies the girls had never seen. Then he was off, ducking out the door, anticipating with pleasure the certainty that they would discuss him. Again, he imagined Fran in Blood Axe’s cabin. There was something peaceful about her nervousness.

“So corny! God,” Paulina said. A boy glared at them. The girls moved to another row and sat down. They often hung out at the library before their sociology class, lingering in the most boring stacks where they could talk freely. To the girls, a library was a dignified place. Like a graveyard, it made one feel very alive.

“Have you seen him since the river?” Fran asked.

“He’s obsessed with me!” Paulina said. She had no idea where he’d been before the library or where he’d go after. It unnerved her.

“I keep thinking about the river!” Fran whispered.

“I think a family saw us,” Paulina said, reliving it.

When Fran went to the Painting Building that weekend, Marvin was the only one there, crouched in James’s studio. “Look at these mouse babies,” he said and held one out to Fran. The captive mouse scratched at Marvin’s fingers. Light shone through its pink, round ears.