Love Her Madly Read online

  “So, I found a solution to my new economic crisis,” she said, the words pulsing out unevenly under the strain of our exertions. I hated to run and had only come along because Cyn didn’t often get it into her head to do any real exercise. Her muscles magically required little more than a few hours of weekend party dancing to appear lean and sculpted.

  “Awesome,” I exhaled. “What?”

  “I’m working at Ecstasy II. Dancing.”

  I stopped running. “Ecstasy II? That dumpy adult store that we make fun of every time we pass it? Are you serious?”

  She kept jogging in place as I labored to speak, which annoyed the shit out of me.

  “Kelly hooked me up with it. She says when she worked there last summer, she made four hundred dollars on a typical Sunday afternoon.”

  “Yeah, doing what? Sucking old man cock?”

  A small smile of amusement spread across her face. “I knew you’d be upset.”

  I started jogging, and she easily matched my pace. She was right, I was upset. That also annoyed me. It wasn’t any of my business how Cyn made her money, but I hated the thought of her demeaning herself in front of creeps who would only see her as a shimmying tower of T & A. We rounded a corner, and a sharp pain in my side forced me to stop. I leaned on a mailbox for support.

  “Side cramp?” Cyn asked.

  “Yeah.” She waited patiently, not jogging, as I caught my breath. “Okay. Sorry. It creeps me out. But if you can do it and you’ll make a lot of money, good for you.”

  “I hope I will. I made two hundred today, but I had to spend seventy on wardrobe.” I caught the perverse twinkle in her eye.

  “Oh god, what does that mean?”

  She giggled. “G-string and star-shaped pasties, of course. Oh, and platform heels. Ridiculous. I chose this magenta number, on the advice of Gabe, the manager. He says the Barbie look goes over well down here.”

  “Two hundred is good, I guess. What do you have to do?”

  “Nothing too terrible. Nobody gets to touch me, at least. I’m going to be a private booth dancer. The client sits in this little cubicle with me, and I do a strip tease to cheesy pop music. Gabe or some other clerk is always keeping an eye on the situation through a two-way mirror, so I don’t think things can go too horribly wrong.”

  “That’s good. And the guys, they just touch themselves?”

  She shrugged. “It was half and half today. Two did, two didn’t.”

  “I see.” I was feeling light-headed and nauseated. I think it was from running in the heat, but it could have been blood loss from the bruising of my delicate sensibilities. I sat down in the grass in front of someone’s house. The cramp in my side refused to loosen.

  “What if your professors see you there?”

  “I think confetti would fall, and we’d both get an award for being big clichés. Seriously, Glo, I don’t care. I know I’m commodifying myself, but that happens at any job. The only difference here is that exactly what I’m commodifying and why is plainly obvious and not accepted in polite society, yet because it’s not polite, I get to make more money and work fewer hours. In my thinking, it’s the most elegant solution wrapped in a cloak of total seediness.”

  “Well, if you’re okay with it, then I guess it is a good solution. I didn’t know you just inherently knew how to perform a strip tease.”

  “I didn’t. The spirit of Grant possessed me and did all the work.”

  “Grant?” I asked, finally feeling like I might not throw up.

  “Dead President on the fifty? Get with it, girl.”

  “Oh. That Grant.” She helped me off the grass, and we began walking back toward campus.

  “You wanna jog again, or are you spent?” she asked.

  “Spent. Go ahead. I’ll see ya back there.”

  Cyn bounded off, her blond ponytail swinging a wide arc behind her. I knew it was pointless to worry about her, but as she gained distance, she seemed to grow smaller and more delicate.

  For some bizarre reason, I thought that Cyn would keep the whole dancing at the adult store thing under the radar. Ha. Our inner circle knew about it by that night, as Cyn went so far as to model her silver platform stilettos for those assembled. No one seemed as shocked as I had been, though Tall Tim blushed tomato red, and I noticed Max shifting around uncomfortably, supporting the rumor that he was as easily excitable as a fifteen-year-old.

  “Oh my god, Cyn. Those are so horrible. And awesome. I’m going to make a documentary about you for my Feminist Studies course,” Lila said with a gasp.

  “Um, thanks, but no thanks. This isn’t really a statement job. It’s more of a desperation job.”

  “No, a desperation job would be going all the way,” Max interjected.

  “Who asked you, Mr. Man,” Lila snapped. “I just think it’s very bold. Very strong and very bold.”

  Cyn eased onto her bed and began unstrapping the heels. “Well, if you want to find out for sure, there’s plenty of booth time available. I can hook you up.”

  “Please. This one is not a dancer. Dominatrix, maybe,” Max said, wincing in anticipation of the sharp slap that Lila reflexively inflicted on his thigh.

  “Ow.”

  “Don’t ‘ow’ me, you naughty little ass-licker, unless you want another.” She raised her thin hand threateningly.

  Cyn kicked the heels under her bed. “Well, if anything, I’m sure I’ll have some interesting stripper tales to share in my golden years.”

  Max snorted. “Cyn, I have just one piece of advice for you: don’t date anyone you meet at work.”

  “How could I date anyone, Max?” Cyn demurred. “You know I’m still carrying a giant torch for you.”

  “And I’m carrying an equally giant torch for you.”

  Lila smirked. “Giant torch. Yeah, right.”

  Max pouted.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t think I’ll be picking up any guys at the shop,” Cyn said.

  “The shop,” I repeated, laughing.

  Tall Tim followed with, “The factory.”

  Lila rolled her eyes. “The old mill.”

  “Oldest mill there is. But, right. Of course you wouldn’t date anyone from there,” Max hectored. “She turns down every guy who asks her out. What’s the secret, Cyn? Seriously. I know a lot of dudes who would pay me big cash money to know the right way to ask you out.”

  I smirked. “The right way? Like at sunset atop a lighthouse? In rhyming verse?”

  “If that’s what it takes, I’m sure some guys would be willing to try.”

  “It’s not for want of being asked, doofus,” Cyn said. “I’ve always gone after the guys I wanted. I just haven’t met anyone here worth pursuing.”

  “You consider yourself a huntress,” Tall Tim diagnosed in his deep basso.

  Cyn shot him a look. “The only thing I need to hunt down at the moment is some z’s, thanks.” She made a show of fluffing her pillow and crawling onto her bed. I yawned loudly in agreement. Max protested that the night was young, but Lila dragged him out the door by his ear. Tall Tim executed a low bow to us before closing the door, his trademark exit move.

  After Cyn snapped off her light, we sat in the darkness, staring out at the tops of the palm trees and the sky beyond it, listening to the scattered voices from below in the quad.

  “So, do you think you’ll find some dude worth hunting?” I asked.

  “Dunno,” she answered, lying back onto her bed. She was quiet for so long that I had drifted into a half sleep when she began speaking again.

  “I sometimes wonder if there’s something wrong with me that I don’t feel that need. The few guys I’ve dated . . . they were never serious. They were all relatively smart and interesting people, especially considering where we grew up.” She paused. “Sex with Jake was okay, but it wasn’t this huge cosmic thing,
at least not for me. It was just . . . fun.”

  I stayed quiet, expecting more. We hadn’t talked about sex all that much. I knew she’d had two partners: one briefly, and then Jake, for more than a year. Since I’d known her, she hadn’t so much as kissed any of the guys we met at parties, though they always seemed to sniff her out and circle like wolves.

  “There’s nothing wrong with fun,” I said quietly. “Why should there be?”

  Cyn rolled over to face me. “Is that what you really think?”

  Her voice had an edge that I didn’t appreciate. When I didn’t respond, she rolled back over.

  “You know, you don’t have to have a casual attitude toward things just because I do.” Her voice sounded strained in the darkness. “I know you still haven’t given up the big V, and I suspect that you’re one of those girls who believes it should be special. And that’s okay. You don’t have to pretend.”

  “Who says I’m pretending?” I snapped, my defenses triggered. So what if I was perhaps harboring soft-focus visions of love and romance? I wasn’t a prude, and that was none of her business anyway. I’d been supportive of her becoming a stripper, and now she was belittling me as some sort of blushing virgin?

  “There’s just a lot of things you don’t know about yourself until you go there. Sex isn’t all love and romance and explosive orgasms. There’s pain and regret, fucked-up power dynamics. It can get dangerous quickly. You can get hurt or hurt other people.”

  She quieted, and her words hung in the air like the smoky skeletons of spent fireworks. The window of silence that followed seemed like an open invitation to ask the obvious.

  “Did you get hurt, Cyn? Is that it?”

  She chuckled drily. “Other way around.”

  “Oh. Jake?” I probed, and got nothing but silence from her side of the room. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. Because then I’d have to think about it, and I’m already feeling like shit.”

  “Okay. Well, if you ever want to, I’m here. Best pal on duty.”

  I waited for her to answer, and when she didn’t, I got up and filled my glass in the bathroom. When I came back in, I saw her silhouetted against the window. She was sitting up, and sniffling.

  “Are you crying?”

  She didn’t respond, but her sniffles increased. I hovered by my bed, glass in hand.

  “Hey. What’s wrong?”

  “My life is just so fucking trashy,” she said, her voice tightrope tense and equally quavery. “I wish it wasn’t, but it is and that’s fine. I never really had lofty ideals for myself and my life, but what the fuck, I’m working as a stripper now? It’s just, it’s not exactly how I imagined my college experience, and if things are already this low-rent, what the hell is going to happen next?”

  I sat on her bed and gave her a hug. After a moment, she shrugged me off. “Tissues,” she whispered, reaching for a box on the floor. I sat there as she blew her nose, unsure what to say.

  “I really thought you were okay with it.”

  She sighed and seemed to regain control. “Fuck. I am okay with it. During the day, when I was there, I was totally fine with it. But now, when I’m worn down, I start to picture my life from the outside, and it seems so tawdry, like I’m a big, unfunny joke. And now, after today’s developments, it’s even worse.”

  She wiped her eyes again, then pressed the tissue to her forehead as another wave of emotion hit and she shook silently. I put my arm around her and waited. She took a few deep breaths and cleared her throat.

  “It’s not about the stripping. That’s obviously a fresh issue. It’s everything. I think I have some major malfunction where I can only get interested in realities that aren’t there and people who I’ll never meet, and I’m numb to everything else. I’m stuck on the outside and I can’t get interested.” She looked at me, her eyes shining in the near darkness “You don’t know what I mean, do you?”

  “I think I do.” I was so blindsided by the turn the night had taken that I couldn’t think straight. Privately, Cyn was my model of female unflappability, and now I’d seen her completely break down twice in forty-eight hours.

  She was crying quietly, a jagged, uneven weeping. She was human, just like the rest of us, so I decided to do what my mother and father had always done for me when I was disappointed after a loss. They told me what they thought I wanted to hear.

  “It will happen, Cyn. Someone will enter your life that you’ll be crazy about, and things will snap into focus, and all the stuff you’re worried about now will seem really small. It just hasn’t happened yet. But it will. I know it will.”

  She groaned and shook her head in disbelief.

  “I guess I just thought things would be better. I thought I’d be discovering things and growing and learning to be more empathetic, but instead I’m just pulling away and getting more lost in my head, and the more I meet people, the less I even want to be human. I just thought college would be . . . better,” she said. A second later, a tiny smile glimmered across her face.

  “But, honey, you’re in Flooorida,” I drawled, reviving one of our best inside jokes, an overheard phrase we’d co-opted to deal with any topical disappointment.

  “I knew that was coming,” she said, rolling her head back in mock agony.

  “You bet.”

  Someone outside howled with laughter.

  “Sorry about all this.” She gave me a quick squeeze and then brushed her balled-up tissues onto the floor. “It wasn’t about you. I love you. I didn’t mean to tell you how to be.”

  “It’s okay. You’ve had a tough couple of days. And anyway, I meant what I said. I think there are good things ahead, for both of us.”

  “I hope so,” she said.

  The rest of the spring semester flew by. Since we didn’t have the cash to do anything great for spring break, we spent the week at my parents’ house and took trips to the beach almost every day. It wasn’t full-on beer bong, Jell-O shot, Slip ’N Slide bacchanalia, but it was enough to make us feel young and alive. Cyn even kissed some guy, Danny, at a beach bar one night. Danny was gorgeous, but had eyes only for Cyn, so I spent a long evening discussing war movies with Danny’s married serviceman pal. It was an epic shock when I glanced across the bar and discovered Cyn in a deep lip-lock with Danny. I was mesmerized and a little skeeved out, watching his Adam’s apple dip up and down as they went at it. It felt like ages since I’d gotten that sort of attention. But, good pal that I was, I swallowed my jealousy and heroically managed to keep smiling at Pvt. Talksalot. We closed the bar down, me waiting impatiently in the car for her to disengage. On the drive home, she thanked me profusely for “falling on the grenade” for her, giggling drunkenly at her own dumb joke while I bit my tongue. When the hangover wore off, she had a happy glow about her, and considering her messed-up month, I couldn’t begrudge her some joy. Fittingly, as soon as we got back to campus, she reverted to her prickly ways regarding all things romantic, almost as if Danny from the beach had never happened.

  The last two weeks of school were ridiculous. I was drowning in notes for term papers, and Cyn was always at the library, cramming with her science pals for their epic exams. It was nothing but coffee, classes, coffee, a few words of commiseration with equally dead-eyed friends, a small anxiety attack, followed by hours spent stringing words together on a computer screen, hoping they made sense. Lather, rinse, repeat. Just when it seemed like we would all die from sleep deprivation and stress, it was over. Our papers were turned in and tests completed. We were, strangely, free.

  The party started on Friday and lasted until Sunday afternoon. Word around campus was that Silence had gotten in a nice supply of pure MDMA. Half of the student body was going to be rolling all weekend. This time, I asked Cyn if she wanted to roll with me. I’d undergone a sea change in the months since my freak-out over the weed. Now I wasn’t at all nervous. My pap
ers were in, and I wouldn’t need to use my brain for a few solid months. Cyn had told me what to expect: good feelings, happiness, and the uncontrollable urge to dance. It all sounded great, and it was. I remember dancing with my arms around Cyn’s and Lila’s necks, all of us screaming along with the music. It seemed like there were thousands of people in the quad, every one of them having the best time, every one of them dear friends, even the ones I’d never met.

  We danced and got lost trying to find the way back to the dorms, and then got un-lost and decided to walk to the bay. Tall Tim was there, and at some point I was lying with my head resting in his lap, playing with his enormous hands that seemed to block out the gently brightening sky. When it became light enough to see, we all rambled back to our room, crossing through the quad, where a handful of energetic souls were refusing to concede to the sunrise and were still dancing. We closed the blinds and collapsed, passing joints until sleep finally grabbed us.

  When I awoke, everyone was gone. Cyn stood looking out the window, smoking. Her face looked drawn and tired, as I’m sure mine did.

  “Is that a cigarette?” I croaked. She had quit a few weeks after we met, with the offhand explanation that smoking wasn’t doing anything for her anymore.

  “Yeah, I found a pack in my bed. Who they belong to, I have no idea. You want one?”

  She walked over with the pack. I shook my head and collapsed back onto the pillow.

  “Did you have fun?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I did. It was lots more fun than I thought it would be, even. But today is going to suck, right?”

  She took a drag and nodded, then disagreed with herself and shook her head. “Depends. Your serotonin levels are fucked, so don’t expect to feel happy, or much of anything. Just limit yourself to mindless tasks and try not to get emotional.”

  She returned her attention to the window.

  “Did you have fun?”

  She smiled. “I had an amazing time. This sounds weird, but I swear, I really only feel like myself when I’m . . . altered.” She sighed and stubbed out the cigarette in an empty soda can. “But I guess last night wasn’t really life, though, was it?”