Tantalized Read online

  “Jessica, right?”

  I shrug my shoulders.

  “Welcome to Fielder University.”

  FU. It really is such a fitting name for this college. Welcome to Fuck You.

  “She must be shy,” the blonde says.

  “No, just rude,” my dad responds.

  “Well, it's certainly nice to meet you!”

  Silence spans between us.

  “Don't you have something to say, Jessica?”

  “Nothing nice,” I sneer. If my father is going to treat me like a child, then I am going to act like one.

  Blondie looks startled, her doe eyes as wide as if she is going to cry. I hope she does. It'll take the ass-sucking smile off her stupid face.

  She gives my room key and prepaid laundry card to my father, who takes them both with a grim expression. I zone out while she yaps about the dorm rules, residential meetings, and some vague-sounding directions that hold no real value to me.

  The initial plan was that my parents would stay to see me settled in. Then we'd endure one another's company for another hour or so (i.e. have lunch) before they took off. However my behavior is so inappropriate—their word, not mine—that they have decided to leave early. As they gather up their shit, my father says, “I suggest you think long and hard about your behavior, and its consequences.”

  It is clear that this is intended as punishment but the truth is, I'm really glad to see them both gone. I don't want them hanging around and micromanaging me, pointing out my faults and apologizing for me to other people the way they did with that blonde bimbo. Acting like martyrs who are forced to carry my existence around like an oversized cross.

  “See you at Thanksgiving,” are my parting words to them, followed by an ambiguous, “maybe.”

  Mom and Dad don't rise to the bait. They shake their heads and walk away.

  I want to run after them, beg them not to leave me, to tell me that this is all some sick sort of joke.

  I watch them head back out towards the street. My father doesn't look back once. Mom does, shaking her head, and then she, too, turns away. I watch them until they are completely out of sight, refusing to move, or even cry.

  I go into my new room and lock the door securely behind me. I don't bother unpacking my things. Everything I need is in my purse except for the joint Mom confiscated this morning before we all got into the car. God, the way she carried on, you'd have thought it was cocaine she found, not weed.

  I raise my eyes heavenward and catch a glimpse of the fire alarm. Probably for the best, I think. It's illegal to tamper with the fire alarm in a public place. Shame. I could really use a joint to take the edge off.

  One upside to living in a college town, though, is that there are a lot of drugs floating around. Easy pickings, if you know where to find them. But my last act of petty rebellion has exhausted me.

  I don't have the energy to do anything but turn on the AC and lie in bed. I listen to the white noise of the air humming through the grates as time melts like butter in the shimmering heat.

  Sleeping is terrifying.

  When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself—voluntarily—and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again.

  Usually you do.

  But sometimes you don't.

  It's that uncertainty, more than anything, which kills me. That I might not wake up, and wouldn't know it.

  That I could be dead, dreaming I'm alive.

  When I awake, my soul's pockets feel as if they have been weighted down with the heaviest of stones. I stare at the yellow light pouring in through the gaps in the blinds and try to guess what time it is. Time to get up, I know. But knowing is different from doing.

  I close my eyes, and slide back into the abyss.

  The visible light has grown darker, more orange in tone, when I next open my eyes. Several more hours have passed. I have fallen asleep with my iPod playing full blast and the current song is Gloomy Sunday, an old favorite. Nothing can weep as convincingly, or as beautifully, as a fine-tuned violin.

  The song matches my malaise, and in spite of the heat and the brightness radiating from outside, I could be in the darkest depths of winter, with rain thundering against fragile glass panes.

  “Little white flowers will never awaken you,” I half-sing, voice cracking a little from sleep.

  Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you, Billie sings back raggedly, like a square of old velvet.

  I feel like I'm caught in a glass bauble, the kind you shake to make snow fall down on trapped miniatures. My tired heart is hibernating in this psychological winter. It has been for years, and I'm starting to think that part of me will never wake up.

  Maybe that's why these jaded old songs, with their alcohol dreams and film noir outlook, appeal to me. The best songs are about universal human experience. The kind of experiences you can point at and say, “Yes, that's how it is.”

  The old pop singers, they knew how it was. That's why their songs are always so sad, and why so many of them drank and died young. They understood that bitter walks hand in hand with sweet.

  The battery is just about dead so I tear out my ear buds before the song can reach its mournful peak because I don't think I can take it today. At least you can recharge an iPod's batteries. There isn't a whole lot you can do with me that isn't just a quick-fix.

  I slide out of bed and check my cell phone. Half of me expects ten missed calls, all from my parents. The other half tells me not to bother. The fact that there are none suggests that Mom and Dad are angrier at me than I initially thought—or else they've just decided not to take my thinly-veiled threats to off myself again seriously this time.

  Callous, I think. Real callous. Risky, too.

  I almost want to prove them wrong, just to make them sorry. What the hell do they have to be so angry about? I'm the one who was sent away. They got what they wanted. I should kill myself.

  I should, but I won't.

  I contemplate my empty room and think of a skeleton, all the flesh and humanity stripped clean away. I should open up some of the boxes. It looks like I might be staying here for a while, and I want my iPod charger, my leather jacket, my toothbrush. My mouth tastes like the way I imagine a public toilet would; I can smell my breath all the way from here.

  I pick a box at random and start scratching at the tape. My cuticles are already raw, the nails split. One of them catches on the box's fibers and starts to bleed.

  I rub finger and thumb together, but continue my efforts. Each lick of pain is a reminder to keep going.

  Keep calm and carry on, I think. Fuck that.

  Muted voices carry through my closed door from the hallway as I begin to peel the tape back from the flaps. I can hear the muffled cadences of their speech, punctuated by abrupt changes in inflection and tone.

  My neighbor, I imagine. She sounds disgustingly perky. Like Gidget, from those TV Land reruns.

  Blah blah blah, I hear, all chipper. Blah blah-blah!

  Statistics suggest that she is probably not a serial killer. Personal experience leads me to believe she is just as unlikely to be interesting, as well.

  There is no point in investigating the matter further except to be social, which I have zero interest in doing. Like I said, I don't want to get to know anyone here or form any close attachments.

  I've never understood the point of small talk, either. You only have so many breaths. Why waste them on subjects you don't care about, with people you hardly know or are never going to see again? You're only going to walk away from them later, so who the fuck cares? It's cheap, and it's dishonest.

  So many things that we call “being social” are. Why else do we always answer 'fine' when people ask us how we are? Even when we're not? Especially when we're not? I'm the kind of person who will say, every time, “I'm fucking terrible, yourself?” Mom just takes this as further evidence that I'm a freak.

  Fuck her.
/>   Fuck my neighbor, too. What the hell does she have to be so happy about, anyway?

  The tape is thicker on the other boxes so I have to use my room key after I crack one of my nails down the center, trying to open it up by hand. I suck on the blood as I use the grooves of the key to cut the tape.

  That's another thing my parents took from me, by the way. They confiscated my Swiss Army knife, which I've had since Girl Scouts. That was a pretty dick move. I never cut myself with the knife. With broken glass, paperclips, coils of wire, and even the backs of my earrings, yes, but never with my knife.

  Oh well. Easy enough to buy a new one. Even easier than buying drugs. Now what does that say about the world, I wonder? Certainly nothing good.

  “We didn't start the fire,” I sing, as the key does the trick, slicing the tape with relative ease. “It was always burning since the world's been—ha.”

  Inside are clothes, which I toss aside impatiently. Beneath the clothes is a layer of books which I don't remember packing. It's been a long time since I've read for fun, probably not since middle school.

  Mom must have put these in here. They look as if they've been gathered at random. I even recognize some of my old books from grade school days. Fantasy novels, mostly, with plucky female main characters. I roll my eyes and toss them to the floor with the clothes. Typical.

  Beneath the books I may or may not have packed are my toiletries. Toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, what little makeup I own. All that good stuff. I'm thinking a shower sounds good at this point so I grab the baggie without sorting it and head right into the communal bathroom to see how shitty the water pressure is. If only misery washed away as easily as dirt, I think, as I lock both doors behind me.

  While standing under the shower spray I close my eyes and imagine myself on a tropical island. This is something Dr. Fields suggested I do whenever I feel stressed out or angry. To slow down and picture myself anywhere calming.

  This isn't recycled sewer water cascading down on my head, I tell myself, it's a light drizzle scented with hibiscus and the salty ocean.

  What I actually smell is the apple freesia shampoo I've brought from home. It appears to have gone rancid in the heat. How disgusting.

  I rinse off the stinking suds and shut off the tap—and the therapy—prematurely. Ordinarily I might try and masturbate before getting out of the shower but I'm not in the mood. The soap smell is making me queasy and I can still hear the voices outside, which keeps me too on edge to submit to fantasy.

  Are they still here? It's been hours. God, my neighbor really does have the most annoying voice, and if that's her mom I hear out there with her, it's obvious that it's a hereditary affliction. Yeesh.

  Luckily it sounds like they're saying their farewells now and I'm glad when the closing door corroborates this theory. I think it's so lame when parents stick around, like they're guilty that they were so eager to dropkick their children off the front porch in the first place, and that they believe five minutes of hugs and kisses will make everything all better.

  Newsflash—it doesn't.

  I step out of the shower, checking to make sure the bathroom door is still locked. Both of them. They are, so with the towel wrapped snugly around my waist, I glance myself over slowly in the foggy mirror.

  Like I said, I cut, so my arms are a mess of pink, puckered scars. There are more on my thighs but they're covered by the towel at the moment. I have one or two on my ribs, but that's harder to do, since I have to make the marks upside-down.

  On some level, I know I shouldn't be doing this to myself. It isn't healthy, I'm putting myself at risk for permanent scarring or infection, blah, blah, blah. At least, that's what they tell me. But I've been cutting for so long that I can't remember what I look like without my scars. They've become a part of me, my armor, and if they disappear, I might just go with them.

  When the psychiatrists asked me why I did it, I told them that it was like scratching an itch. An itch that's as physical as it is psychological. There's no resisting that siren call. Maybe that's sick, but that's life, and that's the way it is. There's no way around it.

  Sighing, I get dressed and gather my things together. On my way to the door I toss the shampoo bottle into the trash. Now I have to get more, which means shopping—unless I want to try my luck with the soap dispenser nailed to the tiled wall.

  I open the door and take a step back, crying out in surprise. My neighbor is standing outside with a plastic shower caddy dangling in one hand. What the fuck? Who the fuck does that?

  “Can I help you?” I ask coldly.

  “Oh,” she says, like she's pretending to be embarrassed or sorry when she's actually neither. “Hello.” She has one of those chubby, chipmunk-like faces, the kind doomed for obesity in the middle age. Right now, though, she's disgustingly cute. I kind of want to slap her for it, as well as for scaring me with this pathetic attempt to introduce herself.

  I move around her instead. “I'm done. All yours.”

  She blocks my way again. “I'm Angela.”

  “Do you mind?” I ask her, nodding at the Ziploc baggie full of crap and armload of soiled clothes. Flushing, she stands aside. “Thanks. Oh, and by the way—I'm not here to make friends. Just so you know. And even if I were, it wouldn't be with you. Okay?”

  “But—”

  “And I don't want to see you fucking hanging around the bathroom door while I'm in there, either. I don't want to have to worry about you hearing me while I'm trying to masturbate.”

  She flinches.

  “Cool. So glad we had this talk.”

  With that, I shut the door behind me, leaving her standing there, stunned, in the hall. Like nobody has ever not wanted to be her friend in her life. Well, that'll teach her to fucking stalk me when I'm in the bathroom. What a pathetic, desperate loser.

  For a moment, the cardboard sets come crashing down to reveal that squalling monster, reality, locked up in the confines of its man-made cage. It is a fearsome thing, beautiful, inherent only to itself. Faced with such naked, existential truths, I understand why humans worship flesh-eating monsters and bloodthirsty gods.

  But only for a moment.

  A moment is all it takes for the veil of subjective human experience to slide back over my eyes. When I look through the peephole, I see that she's still standing there, shaking her head like she's trying to shake away the tears. What a melodramatic bitch.

  Then I pause.

  This wave of anger has taken me aback with its sheer force and intensity. It crashes over me in a wall of darkness, washing away what little self-control I possess, and leaves me trembling, naked.

  Am I a terrible person?

  Yes. No. Probably. Depending on who you ask.

  I sink back into apathy and it is like sliding into a warm bath. It's better not to care, to solely live in the now, where there is no such thing as consequences.

  Maybe the Powers That Be are punishing me for brushing off that girl so coldly because that afternoon I receive an automated message from the school informing me that my pass time for registration is at 6 fucking A.M.

  I set my cell phone's alarm for 5:45 A.M., since it takes me a good couple minutes to get out of bed. Just thinking about that dull gray light of the predawn makes me feel prematurely exhausted.

  Why would they even schedule people so early? Don't they know most college students would happily sleep past noon if left to their own devices?

  My alarm went off at 5:45. I woke up bleary-eyed, thinking I might kill someone for some coffee. I didn't have any instant in my dorm, though, and I'm pretty sure the dining commons doesn't open before 7. I throw my phone across the room and hear it hit something with a muted, reverberating crash.

  “Let's get this over with,” I mutter, rubbing at my temples. The flesh feels sunken and doughy. Rough patches of acne blossom in the hollows of my cheeks. I don't go to the bathroom, because I don't want to see myself in the mirror. I have a feeling what I look like, when I first wake up in the
morning. There are mushrooms in caves that have rosier complexions.

  I jolt my finger across the touch pad to wake up my laptop and wince at the brightness of the screen. I check the settings in the lower right hand corner and groan aloud when I see that I have the brightness settings on the dimmest possible option.

  I shut one eye. Keeping the other squinted, I manage to make it to the school website. Freshmen always get shitty pass times. The only exceptions are for the courses nobody else wants to take. It's like an exercise in the curing of chronic insomnia.

  I have Rate My Professor open but it seems stupid, redundant, even. No matter how good my professors are, it is unlikely that I'll learn anything of value, even if I can dredge myself out of bed to attend class. Information just doesn't sit well with me. Most professors transcribe their lectures on Powerpoint verbatim, anyway.

  I type the names of various professors into the data base and look at the results without reading. Easiness, clarity, hotness. Hmm. Hotness. Maybe I'll choose all good-looking professors so at least I'll have something nice to look at while zoning out.

  Quite a few of those names have that little chili pepper icon beside them, though if they aren't full-up by now, the teaching skills of these professors probably leave much to be desired.

  I have two hours before the registration window closes, so I sign up for Philosophy of Biology with Javier Rojas; Intro to Psychology with Morgan Fineman (comically appropriate); Intro to Philosophy with Jason Gupta; and Comparative Literature with Jason Gupta.

  I X out of Rate My Professor and open Google Images instead. I'm curious to see if these professors are worth their salt—pepper.

  I spend more time searching than constructing my schedules, but only manage to find professors Rojas and Fineman. Javier Rojas looks a little like Enrique Iglesias but with a more pronounced nose and darker skin. Morgan Fineman, on the other hand, reminds me of that guy on The Office everyone likes.

  They're more cute than hot, though. Certainly not chili pepper worthy. I look, but Gupta and Delacroix do not readily turn up in my halfhearted Google search. I pick them anyway. The majority has spoken.