Rachel Glaser: Paulina & Fran

Paulina was dissatisfied with her lover. He was too tall. He leaned on things. He thought he knew everything. Lying next to his sleeping body, Paulina considered his narrow, serious nose. The sheet was pulled to his waist, exposing a pale chest — like a CPR mannequin, she thought. She moved to feel if Julian was hard, but his penis was mushy in her hand. She dropped it and rose to her feet.

Paulina fluffed her curly, shoulder-length hair. She knew that curly hair was the hair of creative geniuses. It was a mark of originality in a woman, though she found it frivolous on a man. She yanked off her nightgown and stuffed herself into a tight dress from SUPERTHRIFT. It was long and virginal in a daydreamy, Renaissance-fair way, but with satisfaction she cut it to show her thighs. The remnants of the dress — strips of netting and cheap satin — she threw in the garbage over the ruins of last night’s dinner.

Julian mumbled in his sleep. Paulina nudged him and he didn’t wake. Julian slept through everything, even her industrial hair dryer. Months ago, she’d picked him up in the college library, initially impressed by his height, surprised when he had brains, a voice, a way of slouching that showed disappointment in the world. Paulina took a pen from her nightstand, then scrawled her name on his bicep and drew a wreath of flowers around it. His water glass was empty and she found herself walking to the sink to fill it, though this was something she refused to do when asked.

Paulina studied herself in the mirror, admiring her hair, which hung in elegant auburn curls, but faulting the dress for failing to express her mood. She felt a big ambition, a great horniness, the conviction that she was a genius, and pride in not knowing what kind. She wasn’t beautiful, she knew, but she was striking. Her face was not easily forgotten.

Paulina listened to the washing machine’s low rumbling from the basement. She threw off the dress and pulled the nightgown back on. She drew firmly on her eyelids with her eye pencil, then put on a massive fur coat. It weighed on her like the next decade. “Good-bye, Brains,” she said, then left.

Paulina walked quickly, anticipating the boys at Angel’s party — each the keeper of his own tepid garden. She smelled them in her classes. She slept with the boys in bathrooms at parties, in parked cars in the SUPERTHRIFT parking lot, in the woods behind the college library. She kept seeing Julian out of habit, but slowly he was becoming a souvenir to her, something better off sealed in resin and hidden in the back of her drawer. She imagined saying this to Sadie and Allison, both of whom she hadn’t seen for almost a week.

Across the street, an intimidating girl Paulina called the Venus Flytrap was covered with face paint and bearing the cold with hard nipples. Paulina shrank back in her fur coat. Oblivious to Paulina, the Venus Flytrap walked gaily in the other direction. One drunken night after Paulina jauntily linked arms with her, the girl had said coldly, “Just because we have friends in common doesn’t mean we must be friends.” It had been a stunning rejection, one Paulina wanted to try on someone else.

Paulina expected cheers when she walked in. “I have arrived,” she said loudly. “Straight from my bed.” She was instantly disappointed. Acquaintances were scattered around the small apartment. Grating techno blared from another room. Paulina looked expectantly for Sadie and Allison and waited to be found.

Paintings filled up a whole wall salon style. Paulina studied them — messy landscapes and muddy, vague portraits — automatically critiquing them in her head. Which best created the illusion of light? Questions like this had been eerily placed inside her by a charcoal-covered man who awed them and taught drawing. The school was one entirely focused on visual art. The students had a skimpy understanding of the world. If they’d followed current events before, if they’d known math, this information dimmed and dissolved. Here, any danceable music was exalted. A tidal wave of nostalgia knocked everyone over before anything even happened.

Paulina flung her arms around Sadie, an excitable apparel major. Sadie was obvious. She beamed when she said something worthwhile. She had butt-length black hair and bangs. Whereas Paulina was curvy, or one could say sturdy, or even, as her enemies would say, chubby, Sadie was thin with small breasts that bounced braless in her shirt. “Is that a nightgown?” Sadie asked.

“Julian prefers a child’s bedtime,” Paulina said.

“I thought you were breaking up with him.”

“Every house needs a house cat,” Paulina replied. Sadie laughed. Paulina felt glad they were friends. Sadie launched into a story about a boy she had met on vacation. As Paulina listened she looked Sadie up and down, wincing when she saw the red leather boots. Years ago, Paulina had stolen them off a scarecrow, but had sacrificed them to Sadie in exchange for completing her design homework freshman year. The boots pinched the feet of whoever wore them, but gave the wearer power. For the hundredth time, Paulina regretted the trade. A dull pull tugged at her mood.

“Where’s Tim?” asked Paulina. Tim was a tall, confident furniture major. Sadie shrugged. “The things I would do to Tim,” Paulina sung in a low voice.

“He’s with Cassie!” Sadie said.

“Who?” Paulina asked with mock curiosity.

Allison walked over and gave Paulina a beer. Allison was a painting major with bleak, depressing hair. She was imposingly withdrawn. Though Paulina had looked forward to seeing her, her capacity for enthusiasm was diminished by Sadie’s boots. Paulina gave Allison an empty hug, then stiffened when she spotted a boy with glasses whom she’d seduced and regretted in the girls’ cafeteria bathroom. “That beast follows me,” she muttered.

“Which one?” asked Sadie, turning.

Paulina dismissed her with a wave of her hand. The party showed no potential. The music was alienating. Paulina retreated into the palace of herself. She needed to end it with Julian. He was weighing her down. He was ruining her. She looked frantically for Tim, nearly making eye contact with the beast.

“I’m bored,” she announced, sweating in her coat.

“Maybe this will get fun,” Sadie said and did a dinky dance in her boots.

“Is there anything happening at the Color Club?” Allison asked.

“I’d know if there was,” Paulina said, finishing her beer. She watched two girls from her art history class try to convince a boy to dance. She overheard a girl named Eileen say, “He wrote his dad an e-mail to tell him not to kiss him on the neck.”

Allison walked over another beer for Paulina. The three girls were silent. People they knew talked and laughed around them, but they stood like trees. Someone complained about a bad crit he’d had, and someone else one-upped him with a worse crit she’d had. Sadie played solemnly with the fringe on her skirt, and then the fringe on her shirt.

Paulina watched Sadie and Allison dance around a hairless boy who made tribal masks. Initially, Allison and Sadie were solely friends with Paulina and merely tolerated each other, but when Paulina started dating Julian, Sadie and Allison became genuinely close. They enjoyed simple things Paulina abhorred — walking for the sake of walking, working side by side, and long, leisurely lunches at Thai Dream.