Empress of the World (12 page)

Battle and I are working on our respective homework. In my case this means a haphazard pile of xeroxed articles and notes with drawings in the margins; in hers it means a neat stack of books with post-it notes marking relevant passages.

This is the first day in the past several that hasn’t been incredibly hot. The sky is a mix of pink and lavender, fading into blues and grays, and there’s the slightest bit of a breeze blowing.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere! I assumed you were enjoying each other’s favors in some secluded corner,” says Katrina.

“That is what we’re doing. These articles are all actually from the Kama Sutra,” I say.

“It is imperative that you come to my room immediately,” Katrina continues, ignoring me. “We Must Talk.” I can hear the capital letters.

“Why can’t we talk here?” I ask.

Katrina ducks behind the tree and sticks her head out at an angle. “Spies,” she says in a stage whisper. “They’re everywhere! Plus that’s where all the caffeine is. And the rest of my cigarettes—I’m almost out!”

“Oh, horrors,” says Battle. “You mean you might have to live without your daily dose of toxins?”

“Shut up. Come on!” Katrina is jumping up and down.

We get up, too slowly for Katrina, and follow her inside and up the stairs to her room.

Battle’s hair has already started to grow back. I thought it would be a prickly stubble, like when you shave your legs. But it’s more like suede, and even as short as it is, it still catches the light and gives her a halo.

“All right, so here’s the thing,” Katrina says, falling backwards into her beanbag chair. “You may think this is kind of weird. But hey—you guys are all deviant and sinning, at least according to my grandparents you would be, so you don’t have any excuse to be shocked.”

“I’m so glad we can be a National Enquirer article for you,” I say as I stroke the fuzz on top of Battle’s head.

Battle asks, “What deviant thing are you doing?”

Katrina lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. “Nothing—yet. But I just have this feeling. I really think it’s not just me.”

She’s finally come to her senses! I want to call Isaac.

“Yeah,” she continues, “the way he’s been acting in class, just the way he looks at me, how he asks me questions sometimes, the things he writes on my assignments . . .”

Wait, Isaac doesn’t have class with her.

“Katrina, are you talking about your teacher?” I ask. Teacher comes out as a shriek.

“Of course—why do you think I said deviant?”

Battle’s shaking her head. Through her held nose, she intones, “Beyond bad plan. Do you want to get kicked out? Besides, I’ve seen that Carl of yours, and he looks like a damn toad.” She leans her head on my shoulder. I take her hand.

For a split second, Katrina grins, but then she is all righteous indignation. “Carl is very distinguished looking, and he has a brilliant mind.”

“Jesus, Katrina,” I say, coughing. “Would you blow that out the window?—sorry, Battle,” I add, since I dislodged her head when I coughed.

I’m just so angry and sad, suddenly. I hadn’t realized how much I was rooting for Isaac. Obligingly, Katrina gets up, perches on the windowsill, and blows her smoke outside.

I pick up one of Katrina’s red plastic lizards and test how far its tail will bend. Then I start whacking myself on the leg with it. Battle gives me a weird look.

“Promise me,” I say, “that you won’t make some Lolita move on him.”

“Excuse me—” Katrina stubs her cigarette out on the windowsill and tosses the butt—“I thought I was asking for some support from my girls.”

“This is support,” says Battle. “Support means not letting your friends do stupid things.” She takes the plastic lizard away and then holds out her hand to me, apparently as a substitute. I take it.

It takes about an hour to talk Katrina down, and even then, I’m not convinced that we’ve actually made a lasting impression.

I understand about brain lust. I know what it’s like when you hear someone’s voice and, no matter what they’re saying, you want to sit and listen for the rest of your life. I even understand getting a crush on a teacher—it’s like an extreme version of the teacher’s pet scenario, which most of us with more than a few brain cells to rub together have experienced. But thinking, even expecting, that the teacher is going to respond . . . not good.

“I don’t get what this whole teacher crush thing is about. I mean, didn’t it seem to you like she was into Isaac?” I ask Battle as we walk back to her room.

“It’s safe,” says Battle quietly.

“But why would Katrina worry about being safe? She’s had cybersex! She wears leggings that say ‘Fuck’ on them! She’s the most flamboyant person I’ve ever met!”

“Exactly,” says Battle, unlocking her door.

“Exactly what?”

“Everyone wants to be safe.”

“Oh. I think I see what you mean,” I say, even though I don’t, really. Because we’re about to go inside her room. Which means that we’ll probably not be talking for much longer.

We’ve been doing this for the past several nights. She’ll go to my room or I’ll come to hers, “things” will happen until one of us mumbles something about a paper, or reading, that we really have to do, and then whichever of us whose room it isn’t will leave. I don’t know what to think about this. I always thought that if you were with someone, you’d talk about it: what it meant, things that scared you, something. Battle’s right: words don’t always work.

You’d never know that around my house, though. Even when Mom and Dad are fighting, they never resort to the silent treatment. They just speak in precise, overly enunciated voices. In fact, their words get longer. How was I supposed to learn to deal with someone who doesn’t want to talk at all?

I’ve been doing a lot of drawing: goofy, dreamy little sketches of her nose, her right foot, her hands—parts of her. I don’t know what they add up to.

Battle holds her hand up to stop me from following her into her room. “Wait,” she says. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Why?

I sit cross-legged outside her door, imagining insane, inane things. Is she putting on special lingerie, like in a romance novel? Did she actually make a mess for once in her life and has to clean it up before she’ll let me in? What if—? The door opens, and she steps out, carrying a blanket and wearing jodhpurs instead of the shorts she had on before. Are jodhpurs romantic?

“Remember our hike?” she asks. “Your ankle’s better, right?”

I nod. “It’s past curfew,” I say automatically.

“So?”

“
Okay, sure.”

Battle’s walk looks peculiar, more cautious than usual. Both of us are cautious as we walk past the RA’s closed door, as though it will suddenly pop open and our alleged chaperone will say, “J’accuse!” It doesn’t, of course.

Battle is heading for the woods. I think about suggesting that we go to the river instead, but somehow, that’s Isaac’s and my place, and I want to keep it that way.

Sharp pine scent fills my nostrils, and the trees make it suddenly much darker, and we have to walk even more slowly. The needles are damp on the ground. I feel them on my toes, since I’m wearing sandals.

The woods are different at night. When I was very little I had this idea that there were day-trees and night-trees: two completely different species. The night-trees were dangerous, but more beautiful than the day-trees.

“Here,” says Battle. We’re in a tiny clearing. The tree stumps look like they would make perfect chairs, so I sit down on one. Immediately my butt gets wet and I feel foolish. Then I look up, and Battle is taking off her jodhpurs. “Yes! It worked!”

Oh my god. Am I supposed to strip now? What worked?

Battle’s jodhpurs are at her ankles. She has carefully untied two scarves from around her right thigh. The scarves were securing something wrapped in a third scarf, which she hands to me before she pulls the jodhpurs back up.

I’m relieved, yet disappointed.

“Unwrap it,” she says. My hands are a little shaky as I unwind the warm purple silk. I can’t stop thinking about where this something has been during our walk into the woods. Then I see what it is, and start laughing at Battle’s ingenuity.

“I was going to tie a loaf of bread to my other leg, but I ran out of scarves,” she says.

“Just a bottle of wine and thou is perfect.” I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy. If I looked up, I could see the stars. But I’d rather look at Battle.

“How did you get it?” I can’t believe Battle has wine.

“I brought it with me . . .in the one bag that Mom didn’t stand over me while I was packing. It’s left over from a cast party.” She smirks.

“Wow. So you just randomly thought that you might want some wine while you were at the institute?” I ask, still holding the bottle.

“I thought this year would be different. I just didn’t know how different.” She smiles, a little nervously.

“Wow,” I say. “Uh, so do you have a corkscrew?”

Battle looks stricken. “Oh hell. Give it here.”

I hand her the bottle, and she scrutinizes the tinfoil that covers its top. Then, she rips the foil off decisively and announces with triumph,

“Twist-off!”

She sits down, twists off the cap, and takes a swig from the bottle.

“I’d forgotten how awful it is,” she says with horrified delight. “Have some.”

I say, “With a recommendation like that, how can I resist?”

She passes me the wine. I put my lips to the bottle’s mouth and tilt it back to drink. The wine rushes onto my tongue and down my throat faster than I thought it would, and I cough and sputter.

“Yuck! It tastes like rotten grapes!” I say, when I can talk again.

“Isn’t that the point?” Battle asks, taking the bottle from me.

“I didn’t think it was supposed to taste so much like rotten grapes,” I say, while Battle takes another sip. When she’s finished, she says, “Well you see, Ms. Lancaster, you simply have not educated your palate properly. If you had an educated palate, you would see—”

“That this is really vile!” I interrupt. “Give me more.”

I take a larger gulp this time. As awful as the wine tastes, it’s already making my insides buzz and my face flush in a way that I like. It reminds me of sometimes when I do line drawings and the lines are too harsh. I smudge the lines with the edge of my pinky, and they get softer and more blurry. That’s what’s happening to my brain.

I slide off the stump and onto the blanket next to Battle.

“Your face is so red. It’s cute,” says Battle. She reaches over and strokes my cheek.

“You’re so beautiful,” I say. She blushes.

“Don’t lie,” she says.

I grab her shoulders and stare into her face. “You are.”

“You have been drinking!” she says.

I want to say “I love you,” but I’m scared to.

So I kiss her instead. Then we have more wine.

The wine makes it easier. Everything we’ve been awkward about, all those steps we haven’t taken yet, all of it gets blurry and soft until all that’s left is sensations: cool night air on skin, hands and mouths moving over each other, the scent of pine mixed with lavender, the sound of breath.

 

“You were so beautiful, I had to draw you. But I didn’t admit to myself what I was feeling until I was trying to write this thing for class, about you, and it was supposed to be objective and I just couldn’t be—”

“You wrote about me?” She doesn’t sound pleased, I realize dimly, but I’m full of love and wine, and my voice is running on,

“I didn’t turn it in! Anyway, that was when I knew, and it just got more and more intense—like when I was cutting your hair, I can’t believe I didn’t stab you with the scissors, I was so nervous! When did you know? Was there a particular moment when you realized it? Were you worried? Were you happy? What made you decide to come to my room that night when I had the headache?”

“Why do you have to take everything apart?”

“So I can figure out how it fits together.”

“What if it breaks? Don’t talk. Shut up and feel.”

“Come on, we have to get back.” Battle’s voice is abrupt.

I blink dazedly, my head beginning to throb. It’s still dark—we haven’t been out all night, anyway. I hope I haven’t been snoring. My mouth tastes like something died inside it. Battle is standing impatiently over me. “What’d you do with the bottle?” I ask.

“Buried it. Come on!”