Читать книгу Dreamland City - Larina Lavergne - Страница 8

I convinced Tommy to take off work for a few days and stay with me on campus so I could show him around. Tommy’s one of the smartest guys I know—he just doesn’t know it himself. He never got the chance to finish high school, and he’s always had an awe for stuff he doesn’t understand, which is why he can’t help going through all my homework and textbooks, tracing his rough fingers down the lines of symbols and math.

It’s nice walking around the usually threatening campus grounds with him holding on protectively. The other kids don’t know that he doesn’t go here, so we blend in as just another campus couple, and obligingly, I glare at the other girls checking him out.

I’ve known Tommy forever, and I remember the first time we kissed. It was maybe a year after I’d started fooling around with Beau. We were sitting out at the table behind his trailer. Tommy had this wide-eyed look on his face, and then his eyes closed, he leaned in, and his mouth swallowed me. God, that kiss was awful. But I taught him what I had learned from Beau, and he got a lot better. We had sex for the first time soon after, and he asked me how I knew so much, and I didn’t see any reason not to tell him the truth. He went all quiet, and sad.

Sometimes I like it, when he’s quiet and sad.

Not this time though. We go to lectures together, watch old movies, break into random professor offices late in the night for the heck of it, fill shampoo bottles with nail varnish and fuck every day with free condoms from the health center. He fixes my rickety bed and my chair doesn’t squeak anymore. But mostly, we just lie together and he makes me tell him more about my classes and explain what was going on in lecture that day.

Too soon, though, he has to go back. I stand forlorn at the window in my room on the third floor, watching his lonely red truck pull away in the distance. That truck could be my heart.

+++

Tommy leaving sucks. Worse, I get news later that day from the housing administration. They found bedbugs in my dorm—(in itself not news that would strike me as that horrible or anything), but it apparently violates some kind of health code and they have to relocate all the students in Randolph (my dorm) to temporary housing immediately while they deal with the problem. I lucked out this semester with a single, so the prospect of moving into someone else’s room is particularly undesirable.

I delete the email, as if that will make the situation go away. Then I shut my laptop and go outside.

The main quad is eerily quiet, and it’s getting dark. A couple sits on the far side making out. Odd infrequent light flickers in the massive buildings surrounding the quad. I stand, looking up at the shadowy sky. Then I lie back on the grass, relishing the feel of the pokey blades against my bare skin. Soon, it is completely dark.

I wonder where Tommy is and if he’s looking at the same stars.

I wonder where my mother is, and if she still looks at stars.