The Forgotten Hours(73)
It takes almost an hour, but when she’s done, she likes the face she encounters in the mirror. The shock and newness in the eyes. They declare: Here I am! Look at me! Two girls come in while she is in the process of shaving her scalp, but they don’t pay much attention to her; they smile. It is all in good fun. Fun, fun—that’s what college is about, isn’t it?
The skin on her head is alarmingly white and raw. Katie wears a cap at first but soon becomes accustomed to the garishness of flesh stretched over her skull. This strips away the complications of being a girl; it puts people a little on edge. Asks them how they want to respond to her. Her eyes look enormous, and she starts wearing black eyeliner and lots of mascara. She’s never worn much makeup before, and now she piles it on. The only thing that bothers her is her father’s expression of shock when she visits him. But every time she brushes her teeth and glances at the mirror or catches someone’s startled expression, it is confirmation that the timid girl she once was is being choked off like an unwelcome vine.
Winter, second semester. Too many neon lights hurting her eyes, too many books lining the endless shelves in the library. Katie runs track, running and running until she is so tired she can sleep. It probably isn’t a good idea to go to the party, but she wants to relax, just like everyone else. She and her roommate, Marissa, get a ride to a rental house shared by three boys on the football team. House music blasts from the speakers, and a boy in a black baseball cap and skintight jeans starts handing out Ecstasy. It doesn’t take long for her to decide to take one; after all, she is here to have fun. She pops a tablet in her mouth and swallows it dry.
The beer tastes like liquid heaven. Her body sings along with the music; she has never before been so in sync with the rhythms, so primed to move. With her arms raised above her head, she closes her eyes and sways, and every now and then someone bumps into her, and they let their bodies melt into each other for a while before moving apart again.
When she opens her eyes, the crowd has become dense. The air is tangy—marijuana and beer and sweat. Nudging through with her shoulders, she makes her way to the door. The sweat dries on her instantly as she steps outside. Reaching into the pocket of her cargo pants, she pulls out a pack of cigarettes and taps one out. She’s taken up smoking regularly. It’s her new thing. She can always blame the cigarettes if she fails to win a race or beat her own speed at track. Cigarettes as an insurance policy against feeling failure too keenly.
A bunch of kids mill around on the pavement, smoking, and there is a couple leaning against the aluminum siding, making out. The houses crowd into each other like misaligned teeth. The air around her pulses with noise. She will always remember the feeling of the music in her body, thrumming. One towering streetlight a few blocks down gives the impression of a yellow moon strung up on a sky-high clothesline. The cold feels great. Across the street, an old man walking his dog stares in her direction. She looks down and searches her pockets for matches. When she looks up again, the old man is standing in front of her.
“Hello,” he says. “Here you go.” He holds out a lighter. She leans forward into the flame and pulls back sharply when the heat hits her face. She sucks in and watches with astonishment as the paper catches fire and the tobacco starts to glow and then blacken. The fire seems to travel through the skin of her face, down her neck, and into her back. Her body is melting and liquid, yet she is not hot, nor is she cold. The man lights a cigarette for himself. One arm, thick and hairy at the wrist, has a leash looped around it. The hand itself is covered in paint, with blunt, creamy nails.
“I’m trying to quit and failing miserably,” he says.
He has a strange accent. She looks into his face dreamily. Close up she sees that he isn’t really old at all, in his thirties, perhaps. In the mixture of darkness and artificial light coming from the house, his skin looks creased, like a shirt left in the dryer too long, and tanned, even though it is wintertime.
“You shouldn’t be smoking,” he says after a while. “Bad habit.”
She is busy studying his dog, a fluffy brown bundle who has curled up next to his foot. The intimacy between the man and the dog is palpable.
“This little one,” the man says, tipping his head, “he’s tired. And lazy.” His eyes, hidden behind a squint, are trained on her. “I should take him home, but I’m trying not to smoke in the studio.” He gestures toward a large building a few houses down that looks like a warehouse.
Katie throws her cigarette into the gutter, careful to clear the dog, whose sides are lifting and sinking like miniature bellows.
“May I ask,” the man says, the cloud of smoke swirling in the air between them, “do you speak?” When he smiles, his eyes disappear entirely, and his teeth gleam as though illuminated from inside. They are pulsing at her. She wants to lick them.
“Yes,” she says, as he turns to go, “I do.”
Inside, the floorboards vibrate with music, and the reverberations travel through the soles of her feet, through her pelvis, and to her neck bones. Trudging up the stairs, she looks for her roommate in the bedrooms. One of the boys who lives in the house, Damian, is leaning against the wall in the hallway talking to an Asian girl. Their eyes meet as Katie passes. She knows who he is; she’s been watching him from afar since orientation. Sometimes in the mornings he gets bagels—always plain—at Francesco’s near Blodgett Hall, where she’s taking an econ class. There’s a cubicle in the library where he often sits, wearing big black headphones. His eyes, overhung with thick, pale eyebrows, are wary, as though he too keeps himself hidden just on the other side of his expression.