The section ended and I gathered my things in hasty disorganization, out the door before I’d even put my backpack on properly.
She caught up with me on the campus green. She’d taken off her heels and was holding them in one hand by the straps. Her feet looked good against the grass, like they belonged there.
“Hey,” she said. “You late for something?”
“No—”
“Just in a hurry,” she finished on my behalf. I could hear the smile in her voice, glanced quickly up to catch its edge. Her face was beautiful. And smug. Sure of herself, of what she thought she knew.
“I have a lot to do.”
“I could see a little of what you were drawing. Do you have more like that?”
I didn’t answer. I walked a little faster. My notebook worked its way free of my arms and she caught it before it hit the ground. I stopped, unwilling to ask for it back, and instead began stuffing the things I’d been carrying into my backpack. Then I stood waiting for my notebook but not reaching for it.
She looked at me and opened the cover. Beside and across and over my notes were the pictures. Animals and more animals. Small, big, predators, prey. Women’s bodies working in and out, hinted at and started. Most broken in some way: arms twisting and elongated, heads vanished, legs bent at odd angles. A few were explicitly changing, feet growing claws, fur sprouting. She closed the cover and handed it back to me.
“You’re really good,” she said. “But how do you get such good grades in Anthro, if this is what you’re doing during class?”
“I don’t get good grades,” I said.
“Yeah, you do,” she insisted mildly. “I saw your test paper when it came back last week.”
I put the notebook into my backpack, zipped it up and started walking again. She stood where she was.
“Hey,” she called after me, “I moved into Forest House this semester. I bet we’d give you some commissions if you wanted. They’ve been talking about having murals and paintings and stuff, and this would be perfect.”
Forest House was this co-op of mostly lesbian wiccan types. Bitches. Girls playing with dolls, that’s what they were, and calling it real life. Just the thought of those bitches and their crystals and their spirit animal totem shit made my gorge rise. I swallowed it again.
“We’re having a party this weekend. If you wanted to come by.”
I turned back to look at her. She was still standing there, beautiful, smug, and hopeful. Her shoes dangled crimson from her fingers. She was not small. She took up space and she smiled.
“Fuck Forest House,” I said, loud enough for her to hear. I turned again and made my clumsy, fast way back to my dorm room.
My dorm was not a co-op. It was concrete and tall, bland to the eye and the touch, but insulating, which is what I required of it. I ran up the stairs to my room and threw my backpack to the floor. The room was small and crammed, but I liked it. It was decorated, multicolored scarves strewn and hung everywhere. I had gotten some of those washable wall crayons and scrawled lines and colors all over the wall, but no discernable shapes like in my notebook. No good to have specific suggestions staring at me all the time. I felt good about the space, though no one but me ever came in.
I dropped to the floor, onto a braided rug one of my aunts had made, round and spiraling and a little rough. I pulled off my jacket, shirt and bra, and lay with my stomach and breasts pressed to the rug. The prickly soft grains scratched at my nipples. I pulled open my jeans and shoved my hand inside. My vulva and clit were warm and swollen. I touched them through my underwear and quick pleasure stabbed me. I rubbed until my breath came fast, pushing my breasts harder against the rug. I rolled over onto my back and arched against the rug. My first two fingers stroked firm and slow, all the way down and up again, and then focused, circling and circling my clit through the fabric.
My breath stopped. I pushed against my hand, sucked in more breath and came, in fast, shuddering waves.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I muttered. I got up, wiped my forehead with one hand, left my jeans on the floor with my shirt and bra. It hadn’t been enough: not the kind of arousal that would be satisfied with orgasms, not the kind of anger that I could stave with odd outbursts on the green. My body was quivering, under the skin, way under. The basic level, the level almost nobody can feel. Muscles, bones quivering.
Inside your body, there is a whole code, everything working together, keeping you you. Every cell cooperates, participates, lives and dies according to this, so that you stay perceptibly yourself. Everyone knows this, right?
My code is fucked. My code is magic. I don’t stay myself. There is no center.
My body shook, convulsed. I lay on the bed. The pain started, like a crazy burn-itch all through me, like a muscle you want to stretch, like a cramp you can’t relieve, pain growing and unremitting. I was consumed and I panted in it.
Then compression. Small, small, small. Quivering, twitching. Settling. Now relief. No more pain. No more words. Hunger. Heartbeat. Fast. Run run run. Skitter. Forever. Food. Small opening. Squeeze. Run run run. Fast. Fear, frozen. Big eyes big heat near me. Frozen, frozen, fear. Claws at me, flying. Run run run. Fast fast. Run.
I came back to myself in the basement of my dorm, naked and covered in sweat and small scratches. I moved quickly, too quickly still, and found the simple pullover dress I’d hidden behind the washing machine. I tried to keep my clothes widely scattered and available, but of course it was hit or miss. I smelled my skin and thought back as best I could. I hunted around and found a small pile of droppings with a finger. I hated mouse-times. Mouse-times were dangerous and scary, especially because some assholes insisted on sneaking kittens into their dorm rooms. But really, all times were dangerous and scary, to me, to others. Even woman-times. Maybe woman-times the most, because in woman-times I knew.
I made my way back up to my hall on shaky legs. I slipped into the bathroom and showered, then pulled my dress back over my wet body and headed back to my own room. I fell into bed, piled on covers despite the stuffy heat and slept.
The next day I found a flyer for the Forest House party, jammed in with hundreds of other flyers on a corkboard. It was light pink, with a drawing of a woman who seemed to be turning into a tree, her curves winding and sensual, melding with bark and trunk and pushing into the ground. FUN FUN FUN, the flyer said in big letters to the side of the tree woman. FOREST HOUSE FALL MIXER, SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 18TH, 10-??? The poster made me smile, then laugh. I touched the tree woman with a finger and traced her outer lines. What would it be like to be a tree-person, a plant-person? Safer, or would you have to rush to soil and take root and hope to be large enough not to be stepped on or eaten? Perhaps it was all more or less the same. Still, irrationally, I liked her; felt she had a freedom, a pleasure, something I did not. I took the poster down and hid it in my room.
For minutes together, later that week, looking at the tree woman’s form in half darkness, touching my own body and rising and falling, sea-like, I felt something like forgiveness for those crystal-wielding, herb-taking, cunt-licking bitches who prayed, secretly and openly, for the changing of their limbs and the release of animal-selves, animal-muscles.
But even as I opened, ascended, came and came again, I shut off the sensation of forgiveness when it approached myself.