I always drift into it, in cycles. I'll have a good week, waking and sleeping like a model citizen, Ben Franklin style. Up at six, bed by nine. It's funny, waking up with the morning light, it really is perky.
Especially if you have nothing to do.
But then time slides. You have a good book in hand, and even though you're sleepy, the pages are delicious. And the sleepiness is delicious too, a rich undiscovered indulgence. Sleep, that's only an undiscovered country. But sleepiness: now that's pleasure, a sweet decadence. Like dancing, fucking, getting high. An elixir sprinkled on your eyelids and left to tingle, shooting quicksilver deep into the eddies of your brain.
And so it goes. A few nights suffice before I'm up to three am. I can hold that pattern for a couple of weeks, but then inevitably 3 turns to 4, and soon there's that same perky morning light creeping up behind the blinds. A stern greybeard Apollo glaring in judgment. Probably it's Jehovah, in fact. Old bastard. Then I'll be up till noon.
Soon enough. But for now, I'm still konking out by 3. Not for long though, I have too little to keep me occupied.
****
I'm a creative writing student. I'm the kooky chick. I don't like my school, or this town. I came here to get away. At a sufficient distance my parents won't bother to nose around. The electronic tether isn't too tight: texting is an alien concept to mom, let alone the language of it. As for my father, to him language itself is an alien concept.
I have money to blow. I'm not ashamed of it. Not obscenely rich, but I can be self-indulgent. It's an attitude as well as a fact. Maybe it's the attitude that's poisonous, but the attitude is the part I'm least ashamed of.
Did I say 'creative writing'? Well, maybe that's getting ahead of myself. Maybe it's just an English major. I'm second year. I love literature but I don't get the whole 'English' thing anyway. I have no intention of ever reading Beowulf again, least of all from a scholarly perspective. They don't like to mention the stupid thing was basically made famous like in the 1930s, so it had zero influence on actual British Literature. Or that "Old English" is a completely different language. They'll sit around in the 400-levels chanting that Germanic crap or that Middle English Chaucer shit like a bunch of fucking hobbits. Why don't they just learn French or Latin? Those are real languages, with real books written in them.
Seriously, why don't they just have a fucking Department of Literature? Nobody wants to major in Grammar and the Song of Roland. Besides, all they talk about is post-post-feminist politics and the Third World anyway. It's all Social Science for Retards.
****
I look at myself in the mirror. Do I like what I see?
Oddly, yes. It's sickening to admit, but sometimes I'm a bit entranced with myself. It's ridiculous, no one else is. I'm a solipsist, yes. But why not? Is anyone else falling over their heels to love me?
I'm a bit of a munchkin. I'm too short, I suppose. But I really do love the face I have. It's round, pale, innocent. I wear heavy glasses, I have little piggy eyes. It's a 19th Century face, Victorian; not the perky, fake, plastic face the world wants you to wear today, a face so frozen it's not even capable of a sneer, let alone a sincere smile.
And you think I'm hateful, but really, I know how to smile. I like to, if you're special.
I say mine's a Victorian face: but post-modern too. I've got a labret piercing, the smooth round ball setting my mouth off like an exclamation point, neat, steely, decisive. And a pierced eyebrow, a steel banana bell in my right brow, to set off my sarcastic little eyebrow-arching fits just so. I'm very happy with them.
Maybe it sets other people off, so what? Nobody complains to my face, at least with the parents at a distance. If you ask me why I have my piercings, I won't tell you the truth-- that I actually think they're pretty.
I just won't tell you anything at all.
Besides, Katy likes them. They singled me out to her, she says. "Emily, you're--funky!" she told me when we met, doing some silly clubster gesture with her hands.
She thinks I should get more.
****
My earliest class is half past noon. I had a morning Comp class, but I complained to the professor I was bored and out of their league. Kind of a high school-issue gripe, I know, but he asked me if I'd like to move into the Contemporary American Lit class instead. A 312, pretty steep learning curve for a sophomore? Blow me, please.
I sit in the back, disaffected. We’re reading stuff like Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, some Southern writers of something. I sit behind this guy, I'd seen him around. David’s his name. Sort of the Tourette's case of the English department. He'd mouth off, I heard, in his classes, piss off all the Adult Learners who were blowing their scrimped-up savings trying to Better Themselves Professionally taking classes or something. I figured I'd either hate him or like him. I spent my first day in the class drilling into the back of his head with my eyes, willing him to turn around and stare at me. Nothing doing.
Today I sat in front of him. I had my hair back in a bun, putting my barcode tattoo on the nape of my neck on display, and the helix ring in the back of my ear. I slung my black backpack, with its mantle of pink anarchy buttons and dead Hello Kittys on the floor behind me, up against the side of his desk, making him feel trapped and possessed, I hoped. Trapped by me.
You know, sometimes you just have to make people conscious of you like that. Just corner them and piss them off, get in their space. I felt like I could feel the heat of his stare on me. Tingles.
I touched the sides of my head a lot during class. When we were dismissed, I turned around and asked him, "Read much Kundera?"
I had tried out all sorts of openings in my head and this one appealed to me. I had tried reading "Immortality" and I hated it, stopped around page sixty.
He blushed. I like it that he was easy to fluster, but I had pinned my chances on the idea that his ego and his curiosity wouldn't let him dismiss such a precise, taunting little question.
"Uhm, what kind of question is that?" he said finally.
Shit. I wanted to ask if he wasn't the type, but would he like it if I were ascribing him to a type already? No, no. I just repeated, firmly, "Well, do you or don't you?"
"Read much Kundera?"
"Yes," I said, smiling. I enjoyed this.
"What if I only read a little?"
"How much is 'a little'?"
"Well, actually I don't read him at all," he said. I knew he really meant this as a dismissal of Kundera, but I took it as a good sign he wasn't dismissing me too just for asking the question.
"That's interesting," I replied. "I don't read him either, but you remind me of that Daniel Day-Lewis character."
It would've been funny if he had asked me how, since he was sandy-blonde and wore thick glasses and had a kind of pleasantly pitiable air about him, not remotely like some guy who could juggle two women and political repression. But he seemed to take the compliment (which it was, though I wanted to be ambiguous about the why and how) in stride, without gloating, and more importantly he didn't think the conversation was over. I let him tag behind me.
"I'm Emily, by the way," I said.
"Yes, I know," he said. "I'm--"
"Yeah, I know you," I replied. How does he know me again?
"What do you like to read?" he asked as we went down the hall, as though he were actually curious to know.
"What kind of a question is that?" I challenged.
"Oh, just a friendly question. Didn't you ask me if--?"
"I made a very specific enquiry. Your question is like some fishing expedition. I don't like people who try to pick my head."
"Well, maybe I like your head. Maybe it'd be fun and enlightening to pick at it," he added gamely. I was on.
"Well, you can come look at my bookshelf if you want. That'd give you a more honest answer than I'm prepared to make."
****
I doubted he'd find that much to say about the contents of my shelves-- not that he wouldn't think something, but I doubted he'd share it. Actually, I kinda wanted to throw a curtain over it or something. He just kept looking over them, surprisingly at ease with himself but not being all overbearing and actually pulling the books out and looking at them or anything.
"I'm not sure how I feel about all this Fitzgerald," he said presently.
"What 'all this Fitzgerald'? That's just my high school Great Gatsby."
"No, I mean your Fitzgerald translations of Homer and Vergil."
"Well, that's Homer and Vergil I'm reading, not Fitz-somebody," I replied peevishly.
He studied me for a long while, I was really wondering what he was thinking of me.