Lunatic Fringe (3 page)

“
Like they give girls worse
grades?”

“
Not so much. Don’t worry
about it.” Blythe grinned. “Listen,” she continued, oblivious to
Lexie’s meandering focus as she scanned the boxes and bags of her
room with increasing anxiety. “Every month, my sisters and I throw
a little brunch at our place.”

Lexie had never heard anyone refer to
women as their sisters unless it was a literal reference. Coming
from Blythe, the term sounded rich with subtlety. Lexie envisioned
a harem of sorts, with fountains and silks, where women brushed one
another’s hair while others serenaded with harps. As quickly as the
vision entered her head, Lexie shooed it out, rolling her eyes at
her ridiculous naiveté. Were women so foreign to her that she
couldn’t even imagine what a group of them spent time doing
together? Lexie felt as though she had stumbled upon a lost tribe
and didn’t realize it until she was sharing their
campfire.

“
What?” Blythe
asked.

“
Nothing,” Lexie hurried,
waving her hand in front of her face to dispel her ridiculous
imaginings. “I just thought you were going to warn me about the
rare wolves.”

“
Oh please. You don’t have
to worry about the rares anymore,” said Blythe, wiping her hands on
her jeans as she stood. “You’ve got the Pack on your side now.”
Blythe moved to the hallway, and Mitch followed.

“
Anyway, you should come,”
said Blythe. “I think we’d have a lot to offer each other.” She
squeezed Lexie’s shoulder with a wink, and in a moment, she and
Mitch were gone.

Lexie shut the door behind her with a
hollow thud. She stooped to rifle through a box, pulling out a
candle and lighter. Her laptop sat on her desk, ready to play a
song to help remind her where she was and where she came from. The
air, so similar to the air she breathed at home, tasted unfamiliar
and rare. She knew she was not home. Whether this could be a home
to her, she had yet to find out.

Chapter 2

The crescent moon lay on its back,
striking a menacing gash in the otherwise unblemished sky. Its
creamy grin mocked Lexie, whose red, raw eyes passed between the
sky and the clock. Four-fifteen. It was the point of no return, one
that Lexie knew all too well.

She wasn’t surprised that her insomnia
resurfaced the night before classes started. She had hoped for a
respite, but the gods decreed otherwise, yanking her strings just
as the warm blanket of slumber wrapped itself around her body. Each
time she drifted off, they jolted her from the downy sanctuary of
rest and back into the lonesome reality of the deepest part of the
night.

She imagined each brain cell fizzling
like a water droplet on a hot skillet. Tomorrow would tell the same
story of burst blood vessels, flaccid skin, bad breath, and sunken
eyes. She’d move through the world at a fumble.

That was what she had to look forward
to in three hours, a self-perpetuating cycle of foolishness and
alienation. Lexie had a hard enough time fitting in without the
motor skills of a drunkard to seal the deal.

Yet it was also in these thick,
invisible hours where Lexie felt the most at home. She could wade
through time like walking on the floor of a warm, dark sea. The
night wasn’t the menacing part; it was the threat of dawn that
caused her grief, when the still and fecund air receded to give way
to the glaring and the loud. When the fear of day didn’t trouble
her, Lexie felt perfectly comfortable crossing the night like a
raft down a wide, lazy river. But tomorrow held plenty to undo her.
New people to meet, to impress, to befriend. Schedules, buildings
and texts to commit to memory, and the same befuddling questions
that followed her every day, now upgraded to include majors,
minors, relationship status, and political identity. The mere
thought of it made her stomach roll over itself.

She crumpled in her chair, elbows
planted atop her desk next to a stack of books. Her laptop cast a
cold, impassive glow into the darkness of the room. She leaned to
the window, struggling to open it with clumsy hands. As the window
slid in its casing, tiny branches from the great oak tree outside
screeched against the glass. A flood of cool, moist air swirled
into her stale room, as clear and blue as Van Gogh’s night sky. Her
laptop threw its blue light out the window, making the great tree’s
bark look as craggy as a relief map. Leaves mottled green and red
clung to the branches, steeling themselves for slow death. They
rustled in a faint breeze. Otherwise, everything was
silent.

Lexie folded her computer shut, casting
the darkness over her body. She lowered her chin to rest on crossed
arms, wondering what mindless task could distract her enough to
feel a sense of minor accomplishment despite the hours of
nothingness extending into the distance in all
directions.

Her eyelids grew heavy, and she turned
her cheek to rest on her cool forearms. The outside air teased
across her forehead, lulling her into sleep. The tension along her
temples and jaw relaxed. Her consciousness was the last to go, as
her body relaxed into the depths. As the mechanics of her brain
whirred to sleep, her ears picked up a bold, faraway sound. The
pitch slid from low to high to low, with a gentle warble at the
end. The howl repeated with subtle variations, stitching together a
story from the rolled pitches of a melancholic tune. It was a
curious, perverse lullaby, and as the final tone echoed into
silence, Lexie drifted off.

In the woods again.
Moonlight dripping down tree trunks like liquid mercury, leaden and
poisonous. The woods are made of words, and the words made of lines
and curves that mean nothing to her, yet endlessly stretch and curl
and bend around one another. The trunks are Braille; the branches,
runes; the wind through the leaves: the tonal speech of distant
cultures. The meanings of the words, fleeting and skittish, are
lost in the endless shadows cast by the moon through the trees;
they run away like small, spooked creatures. The bark scratches at
her skin as she tries to divine those meanings. The branches
reconfigure as she sets her eyes on them. The wind dies to
stillness when she trains her ears on it; it remains unwilling to
give up its secrets. She pats her hips, seeking her mother’s knife,
but it is not near her. She stumbles, blind and weaponless. Her
ears strain for the delicate crunch of leaves beneath a furry foot,
for the wild heartbeat of prey pursued. The ciphers reassemble upon
one another, never repeating, offering no code to break. She runs
further, pursuing an unknown beast that seems always at her back
and in her head, but never trained in her eyes. The trees speak:
Divine the answer and find peace.

Another dream, another diatribe in
gibberish. No matter how many times and how many spellings she
offered the Web search box, the results were always the same: a
page or two of nonsense, meaningless code, or most often a big fat
zero. It seemed impossible to Lexie that these words would be a
stream of nonsense; there was such clarity in the voices, messages
conveyed in a language that meant nothing to anyone except those
who spoke it. The voice was most often the memory she held of her
mother’s, speaking those gentle yet insistent words. They would
drone on for hours, sometimes all night, filling her head with
unchartable sentences.

Her groggy morning reverie was
interrupted by one sound she knew well, telling her a tale she
could decipher: the mechanical beep screamed at her in no uncertain
terms to wake up, get her act together, and get her ass to class.
The sun streamed through the window, clearing the treetops to stab
directly into her crusty, bloodshot eyes. An ache throbbed through
the muscles connecting her eyes to her brain, and she wished for
tiny fingers to reach back there and massage them to
release.

Seven-fifteen. Time to face the firing
squad.

Chapter 3

Lexie wasn’t sure what she was doing in
this class. It had seemed like a good option last Tuesday, sitting
in her dorm room with a yellow highlighter and the thick course
catalogue. “Intro to Women’s Studies: Gender, Conflict, and
Context” had a long description, four credit hours, a discussion
group, and a required reading list longer than all her other
classes combined. Lexie hoped it would illuminate her consideration
of anthropology as a major, and perhaps, as a side bonus,
illuminate women, too.

Now she sat trapped in the first
meeting of the class, the post-lunch slump pulling her head down
toward the desk like the ghost of a drowning victim seducing her to
follow it below black waves. Lexie wondered what she had signed
herself up for. Scanning the room, she counted thirty students in
all, twenty-five of whom were girls and one who looked like a boy
but was likely a variation in the key of Mitch. Of the remaining
four students, one looked gay, one was yawning, one was trying to
chat up every girl around him, and one was Duane Ward. It was as if
the sonofabitch was trying to make her look bad.

At Wolf Creek High, Duane had graduated
second in their class, played baritone horn in the marching band,
and was the goalie on the varsity soccer team. He aspired to be a
cardiologist, which he announced throughout senior year whenever an
ear was bent in his direction. It was the same way she had learned
that though he had been accepted to a number of the Ivys, none
offered him enough money to make it worthwhile.

Duane had been one of seven black
students at their high school, and four of those were his younger
sisters. His family was gregarious, well-heeled, and good-looking,
not one trait which Lexie could claim for herself. More infuriating
than all that, though, was how well he seemed to know himself. She
couldn’t even decide what intro classes to take, and here Duane
was, ready to apply to medical school at eighteen. Lexie had
assumed it was part of adolescence, to waffle on every aspect of
one’s identity. She did it with aplomb nearly twice a day. Yet here
was Duane, handsome, smart, and seemingly in harmony with his race,
achievements, gender, sexuality, and even his damn life’s calling.
It wasn’t fair.

At their graduation ceremony, Lexie
couldn’t help but feel childish and small standing alongside him on
stage as they were announced as the two winners of the Milton
Residential Scholarship Program. She had never been called “white
trash” to her face, mostly because she was no worse off than over
half of her school, whose fathers were mostly lumberjacks, miners,
or utility workers, but that’s how she felt. No mother, no money,
no real ambition. She did what she was supposed to do: she studied,
got a scholarship, and now she was leaving home to start college as
one of only a handful of her classmates to even plan on a degree--a
minor victory that paled in comparison to Duane’s
achievements.

The pretty blonde sitting next to him
monopolized his attention with her chatter. Without even speaking,
he was winning her affection. Lexie slumped in her
chair.

She tried to stay alert as the
professor led the class through the course syllabus. Ms. Whitmeyer,
a silver-haired woman in ill-fitting tweed pants, read the names of
the texts as though she were auditioning for a summer stock
production of Macbeth. Each word was so well annunciated that even
if Lexie were to drift off at some point, she imagined the
information would still drill itself into her brain. Whitmeyer
continued through page after page of text, listing the tomes her
pupils would have to slog through. Lexie pressed her fingers to her
temples, trying to push back a developing headache. Maybe a music
class would have been a better idea. Her unease was driven to a
point when the professor dropped the syllabus on the
lectern.

“
How many of you are
feminists?” Whitmeyer asked.

Snickers echoed through the room as
half the students raised their hands. Duane’s was among them;
Lexie’s was not. A tiny brunette sitting in front of Duane, wearing
a lime-green polka dot dress and heels, her hand held high, shouted
“What?!” when she saw the showing.

“
Alright, hands down. Let’s
look at a definition for a moment,” Whitmeyer continued. She
clicked her mouse to progress a slide show projected at the front
of the room, casting a sickly-green glow on the faces of the
students. On it was an excerpt from Webster’s Dictionary. It
read
feminism n. (1895) 1 : the theory of
the political, economic, and social equality of the
sexes
.

Whitmeyer tapped her index finger
beneath the work “equality” as she spoke. “Everyone got that?” she
asked, eliciting nods from the class.

“
Notice this word. What is
equality? Is it equal opportunity? Equal pay? Equal social
standing? How do we know when we achieve it? How do we know we
haven’t yet achieved it? What are the hindrances any individual or
community encounters in pursuit of equality, how do we recognize
them, and how do we defeat them? Is it even possible or
advantageous to society for everyone to achieve
equality?

“
This semester we’ll
explore equality and what it will take for our society to embrace
this concept fully, proudly, and passionately.

“
Now, for you skeptics in
the class, please note that this is the only definition. There is
no number two: Must hate men. Nor number three: The lack of a sense
of humor,” she said, earning more laughs from the class.