Excerpt

The student stood before a bathroom sink, leaning over it to apply her makeup, a debutante at her toilette, her torso vaulting the gap from counter’s edge to smeared mirror. She wore a loose silken camisole that swung low between her breasts and revealed the suggestions of them and of ribs meeting sternum. The same skirt as last night.

Alessandra came in clad in her garb of the nocturnal.

“We’re headed to Mar’s sister’s off-campus to pre-game. Ready?”

They walked. The five of them lithe giants, clubfooted and slick-calved, bare-shouldered down the dorm blocks where other tribes brayed and bellowed pre-carnage. They brandished screens, lit boxes like torches glowing their faces and the student looked up to Venus visible even under streetlamps. This horde sutured into its garments strutted past packs of boys heated and visceral and whooping and it early yet. Things quieted just off campus, just out of the dorm realm where apartments sat and sported their own recklessness but a more private recklessness, weightier in the morning. Among these was Mar’s sister’s apartment on the ground floor.

They entered saying “aaayyy” with their hands up, chins lowered, backs bowed backward in some strange benediction. Around an island kitchen counter they collected. Bottles rested there, red cups quickly unnestled. Girls leaned on the counter with straight backs and one leg straight, one bent, their hips forming diagonals down which the earth could roll. The student sank low in a couch, cup in her hand, and raised one leg straight up before her and smiled and raised her cup as well and cried, “ow ow!” The girls looked at her and laughed.

They departed again flushed and formed their caravan across campus to the cloistered halls of Greek Row, that fixture of supposed nobility, actual debauchery. One house shook from the inside with the tremor of a heartbeat and it was toward this house the girls stalked.

They went in unquestioned, uninhibited, wafting into the dense booze, sweat scented air, into the darkness lit by shocks of lights, into the thud where they could no longer hear each other’s cackles.

Bodies ground together here and near the dj’s stand a boy with a camera scanned up and down the form of a girl bent over sending tremors through the flesh of her lower body as though it were unattached to her bones. A boy to her left grabbed her ass like meat and stuck out his tongue in wretched pantomime for the lens. A boy to her right poured some clear poison down onto her ass. She smiled over her shoulder and bit her lip.

All over the room people kissed, not kissing but slavering drunk and lust-eaten. They jumped and waved forearms like levers above heads. The floor stuck with unknown substances layered and weeping from cups held only precariously and girls bent over flat-backed grinning at the male motions behind them, this dry and public sex condoned. The music was no music but an illness, a possession also welcome. On a banister a cat lay like a sphinx and observed undisturbed by the melee, weathered to it. The strobes caught behind its eyes.

The student spun and hopped with the mosh, a gleam appearing on her forehead. At one point she stopped and stood still looking around her. A wall formed behind her eyes. She moved off from the circle of her pack and strode toward sliding glass doors that led out the back. Outside the sound was little subdued and people hung here too but she walked across the dirt and dead grass and out through a gate in the fence. She brought out her phone and its screen lit the blue in her face and then she brought it to her ear.

“What the hell Quinn,” came husked from the other end.

“Dexter. You were asleep.”

“Course not, wide awake and lucid as all get out, that’s why I sound so groggy.”

“Sorry.”

“What do you need?”

“I’m at a frat party Dexter and I can’t decide if it’s really just appalling on an unspeakable level because of the booze and fucking and the shitty music and the fact that for many here this is the ultimate joy and it’s not even a true unaided joy! Or if it’s sort of euphoric and beautiful because we’re all young and willing to throw up our hands and implement evil on our bodies without concern and feel what joy we can get our hands on even if we know there’s nothing worthy to it.”

“Well are you leaning one way?”

“Maybe but I want to know what you think.”

“I think it’s appallingly beautiful.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Cop out.”

“Okay, I think if you look close into each pair of eyes at that party you’re attending you’ll see mirth, because at the level they keep close to their eyes they believe they’ll live lives full of this similar euphoria, but below that surface they know they won’t—you know you won't—so since they can’t fully shake that cynicism, that fatalism, they drink and snort and forget about it for a bit and, well, that’s soothing, right? I don’t think it matters whether it’s beautiful or appalling because at one flash of the strobe you think the former and at the next the latter and then you go outside and call your brother and you ask him what he thinks but that’s not even really what you want to know. You want to know whether you personally are appalling or beautiful and if you’re wasting your time.”

“And?”

“And you are all three.”

“Dexter.”

“Yeah?”

“You good?”

“I’m peachy keen.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No one’s making you.”

“I’m gonna go get a drink.”

“Drink away.”

“You go back to sleep.”

“That I will.”

“Night.”

The student lowered the phone and stood looking across a bare cracked lot, a net-less basketball hoop on one side. She turned and looked back at the house which stood before her chimerical and comical, some sinister circus. She went back in.

Her group no longer bobbed in its inward facing circle on the floor. She went to the bathroom and found Alessandra and Mar doing nothing but giggling at each other, each with a hand on the shoulder of the other to steady herself. They bowed with their laughter as though the muscles of their abdomens curled them forward inexorably with each constriction. When the student entered they turned to her and their laughter ceased for a moment and then burst gushing forth into her face, drenched and warm as they relinquished their holds on each other to cling to, to hang from her.

“Where are the others?” she asked smiling.

Mar waved a hand absently. “Guys or other party.”

“Are you two about ready?”

Alessandra stood straight up, brow furrowed. “I’m hungry.”

“Come on, we’ll get food.”

“Oh my god I love food.”

The student led the way out of the bathroom, out of the house, the point of a female arrow whose auricles weaved and giggled and she took their arms and ushered them forth. At a campus minimart and canteen known for its late hours Alessandra and Mar ate thick breakfast burritos while the student drank coffee. Her companions spoke of boys she didn’t know in their slurred dialect and she watched two boys come in, sober-faced and silent. They strode to the refrigerated walls of the minimart and stood side by side staring into lit coolness at the serried ranks for but a moment. Then one of the boys wrenched open a glass door, snatched a slender can, handed it to his counterpart, snatched another and let the door thud closed. They strode to the counter, paid without a word and were gone out into the night.

When the girls finished their food Alessandra hung low over the table, head propped in her hand, smiling up at the student. Mar set her chin on her forearms folded before her and smiled at Alessandra. The student smiled at them both and gathered the napkins and wrappers and stood. “Bedtime,” she said.

“Ah bed…time,” said Alessandra.

They floated back to the dorm and entered their rooms in darkness and slept the sleep of the dead.