(no subject)
"Pretty"
I had him in my arms briefly and everything seemed just right despite how wrong things were. The music was too muffled as it was coming out the small speakers of my black laptop on the edge of desk. He and I were too graceless, too clumsy for swift turns and effortless dips but instead held hands, moving back and forth, occasionally paying attention to the beat of the song. As we spun around and around in the middle of my room, between my lofted bed and my roommate’s ill-constructed entertainment stand, I saw the reflection in my dorm window of not him or I or of the scuffed white walls of my room or the Reservoir Dogs that had just hung recently on the back of our holes-covered door but of a dream, a lark of sort, that I’d had several times while sleeping. It had been a comforting dream, the kind so soothing one is greatly disappointed to have end when you roll out of bed and trudge your way to class in the morning. As we kept dancing and the song went on repeat for the second time, I kept thinking of the dream but something came over me. I pulled away a bit before the song could start again. I looked at his face, his pointy but not pointy nose, his high cheekbones, his feminine green eyes with long lashes, and I wanted to let go of him immediately because I had suddenly remembered the dangerous nature of dreams. They can shackle you to a hope, a wish, a man, a future that's never going to happen. I then wanted to just move away from him, dash off. As he smiled at me and tried to pull me back to him, my mind remembered all those other dreams that I’d had before, most importantly the one I had of myself being a different person: the one that did not smoke, and was blonde, and was pretty, and wore puka shell necklaces and had abs, and did not care about him or me but just about us. And then, I thought, I would be desirable to him. As I pulled away and flopped down on my gray futon, I looked at him staring at me and saw that in spite of smoking and not being blonde and pretty and wearing puka shells and having nice abs, I still had ended up just caring about us and he in return had ended up just caring about me.
“You know,” I said, “you really too pretty for your own good.”
He smirked a bit and sat down next to me. “Isn’t that kind of like being too popular or too rich or too smart?” He reached into his black messenger bag and pulled out two brightly colored packages of taffy. “Want one. I stole them from the gas station.”
As he unwrapped the taffy for me and bit into his own grape-flavored one, I tried to mentally pinpoint the exact moment when he had become that friend that when younger was viewed as cutely mischievous but upon the onset of adolescence was thought of as the bad influence that made ne’er-do-wells out of the normally restrained and virtuous. To be honest, I guess I secretly hoped that my association with him would besmirch the pristine reputation that I had gained not from a wealth of good deeds but merely from a dearth of bad ones. He caught me staring at him and grinned a little and raised an eyebrow and then went back to eating his taffy.
“You know, you always say such weird things,” he said in between chews. “Like the first time I met you. You remember that? You asked me for a light. I just kind of stared at you. You looked some wholesome with your glasses and your back pack and your Edith Wharton novel in hand that I couldn’t believe it so I just kind of stammered, ‘You’re a smoker?’ And you just said, in the driest tone of voice I have ever heard . . .”
“ ‘Actually I’m an arsonist, the cigarette is just a cover,’” I finished, biting into my taffy and leaning my head on his firm shoulder. “I just thought you were odd, always walking around with shirts without sleeves on them. I imagined you had trash bags piled up in your room of just the sleeves of your shirts.”
“I did if you had ever bothered to look under the bed,” he replied, pulling on the taffy in his mouth with his clenched teeth. “So how’s that novel going?”
“It goes,” I sighed. “Very slowly but there are traces of movement.”
“Is it still about me?” he asked.
“Trust me,” I replied, “my writing’s too expansive for just one man but there are parts of you in it.”
“Which parts?”
“All the ones that I’ve enjoyed,” I said in a tone intended to be seductive but came out rather frosty.
“I hope you included my sense of humility,” he joked. “Everybody knows me for my sense of humility. It’s my greatest feature.”
“I always thought your lips were your greatest feature,” I said.
“They’re a close second but I doubt you’re writing that kind of novel,” he said.
“How would you know?” I said.
“You’re not that kind of guy.”
“But I could be that kind of author.”
“If you are you’ve certainly been holding out on me then,” he said, chewing slowly on his taffy.
I opened my mouth to say something but he turned his attention away me and zeroed his eyes on something right outside my first floor window. There she was, one of those girls that people whenever pressed upon to ask what she looks like refer to as a “classic beauty” or “statuesque” with her thin yet curvy frame, straight-posture, and intimidatingly symmetrical face. She paused for a moment in front of the window, digging through her purse for a cellphone. She had a back made of concrete as she stood perfectly upright, sifting through her purses. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, most likely freshly highlighted by Georgie at Andy’s Salon in the mall where all the girls of that beautiful ilk frequented. As she passed by the fluorescent light, I could see her pink lipstick shimmer. She was at the peak of preppy perfection and she knew it. And if she hadn’t known it, she would’ve gotten the idea quickly. An informal fan club of gawky boys decked out in their best junkie-punk-meets-hardcore-skater apparel were standing underneath overhang of the neighboring residence hall, all not-so-stealthily eyeing her while whispering among themselves with a fervent passion pubescent boys generally restrict to the subjects of sports, video games, and girls as she sauntered by because girls like her never learned how to walk. There was a certain bit of satisfaction as she heard them comment, albeit in most likely a crude bordering on objectifying way, on her momentarily uncontested hotness as she floated past them.
“Now she is too pretty for her own good,” he said admiringly. “Don’t you think she’s very pretty?
“Yes,” I said sheepishly. “Yes she is very pretty.”
“But you know,” he said with a lilt in his voice, still chewing on his taffy and looking out the window, “I’ve had better.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and I looked at him. We stared for a second, each of us still chewing on our taffy, and then we started laughing hysterically and fell over on the futon. We didn't know quite exactly why we laughed so hard and it didn't really matter. Reasoning never matters with pretty.