I wondered if the Mediterranean ever got snow that night when he texted. U up?
And I went, Who is this?
GUNNER. He sent a winking face, U busy?
I was writing out the Greek alphabet so I told him, Not really.
He called then, waiting on the bench outside my dorm. Could I please let him in?
Together, we walked a dank hall, climbed several flights of stairs, and he sprawled shoeless on my bed. I was sitting in the rolling desk chair, and I asked, How do you have my number? How do you know where I live? Is there something you need?
He grinned, put both hands behind his head. Apparently, he’d checked the student catalog at the mailroom where we both worked. He made a cigarette with his fingers, pretended to drag and spit smoke. He went, Waddaya say?
I said okay.
To everything Gunner asked, I said okay.
The only boyfriend I’d ever had was one of the line cooks from home. His name was Von and I told him I loved him. He told me he liked banjo music. We never broke up. He just never texted back, never called, quit his job at TGI Fridays after class last spring when I was still studying at community college. The last time I saw him, I was out front of the local bureaucracy building on my lunch break and he drove by honking his rumbling truck.
Gunner was alright. In a curious way, he was sweet. Between unwashed sheets, he told me my voice sounded like a song. I told him his voice sounded like gravel. This must have amused him. Then we went outside to smoke under a bridge in the woods across campus. I never smoked before Gunner, but I smoked his cigarettes and he smoked all kinds of things. Sometimes, we went back to the same dorm room and slept beneath the same comforter. Sometimes we split at the edge of shelterless woods and went our own way. Heto his room with one pillow. Me to mine with its budding magazine collection.
***
Classes picked up pace. I made a friend. A girl from Evolution (and) Rocks—that was really the course title—invited me to her dorm room after class one Monday. She’d plastered string lights and hung sheer curtains and bent posters to placate cinder block walls. She’d tucked in flowery bed linens. And although I thought it childish, she had a stuffed rabbit resting on the pillow. I told her it was like a picture from a magazine butdidn’t say what kind of magazine. She told me it was like totally-coquette-Lana-Del-Rey. She was always wearing bloody lipstick and red stains smudged her mirror.
We sat on a white area rug and I pulled the London Review of Books out of my backpack which would have otherwise been recycled from the mailroom. Aloud, she read Eagleton’s critique of Nietzsche, and it was imperious and praise-sick and 2,678 words. I read French verse from Bifrost. Then, between the hours of seven and one each night, she told me about steeping tea in the English Department Cottage with her friends. She invited me along. I told her, Maybe another night.
She swatted her hand, Whatever, let’s stay.
We split microwave popcorn and SpaghettiOs. She didn’t eat meat but read recipes for lobster puffs and cumin steak out of Bon Appetit. I read about Angkor Wat in The World’s Most Amazing Places. She read the moral panic column of Rolling Stone. My eyes drooped and she tucked me into her flower sheets. I said her voice sounded like a song.
She put her hand atop my ear, You should hear my on-again-off-again boyfriend’s voice—it’s pulverulent.
We laughed very hard until it was no longer night, but black Wednesday morning on the other side of her gauze curtains.
***
At the post office a few hours later, I collected a handful of mail from the black bin and said hi to Gunner. Gunner said hey. We sorted in silence. I found another Michel Mitchell magazine and tossed it in the recycling bin.
Michel Mitchell did not exist as a student in the mail system. My first week, I scanned all the M’s. No Mitchell. I searched several times across every label for first names and no Michel. I even had my boss Hammy investigate the online catalog of every student ever enrolled. No dice, Hammy shook his head, picked up a box, shook that too.
Michel Mitchell had periodical stacks of magazines delivered each Wednesday.The Economist and Forbes and National Geographic and also pure academic ones like Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy and Nature. I tossed them in the recycling, waited for my shift to end, collected them in my backpack, and I carried them with me. I studied them. I ripped out pictures of animals and microscope close-ups and ready-wear clothes and scotch taped them to my wall. I used a pair of my dead aunt’s stolen kitchen scissors to cut out models and posted those, too.
This was, of course, a felony. And I knew but did not care.
With what knowledge I had, Michel Mitchell was not a real, live person, and I’d taken things before. Working my bureaucracy job, I stole small things. Paper clips and pens, stuff like that. I also stole books no one wanted, pamphlets I was paid federal minimum wage to scan and destroy. I worked a throw-away job. They paid me to throw papers away. I shredded them.
I worked at the bureaucracy building that previous spring before I transferred out of community college. I needed to save for my education. I also needed spending money for TGI Fridays.
All the people from my community college chemistry class went to TGI Fridays for gossip. There were a few older ladies and a mall cop, my lab partner. There was also Von working in the back. They shared polychromatic margarita pitchers and I was only eighteen, could not drink on U.S. soil. Instead, I ate chips and dip and chatted with the mall cop. Von sometimes came to our table and touched my back. The ladies giggled at me every time they got tipsy, Girl! Get out of this town! You’re so young! You’re so young!
But I couldn’t get out of town, not then. I was living in my dead aunt’s apartment. I told the ladies, My dead aunt’s estate isn’t closed and I’m watching over her loot.
This made the ladies giggle more, You talk so funny! You talk like professor! She talks like professor! They clapped.
At some point, the chemistry professor told me I really ought to get out of town, to go to a four-year college, to study something that would ignite my soul like Ancient Greek. He wrote up a list of colleges that might take me. Then he hooked me up with the bureaucracy job. He knew I needed money and a recommendation of character from a person of authority. So I took his advice and I took the job.
And I took a big tote bag on days I cleaned the bureaucracy building cabinet so that some books would not be destroyed after their scanning, and I read them in front of my dead aunt’s bricked-in fireplace to procrastinate on community college homework—penal codes and legal dictionaries and other useless jargon.
I confess, I’ve always liked reading useless things. After post office shifts, I slid off my shoes and laid on my comforter and gleaned new conversation topics from those thin glossy pages. With the girl from Evolution (and) Rocks, I went to English Cottage Tea and had things to snoot over. Snooting, I earned new friends.
I prettied my comforter and invited them all to my room and they said they liked the walls. They felt like they were underwater, papers flapping all around. The girl from Evolution (and) Rocks went, It’s like you’re holding your breath you know what I mean? and I shook my head yes, but thought, Not really.
***
One morning, I was recycling Michel Mitchell’s Science when Gunner said, Wait.
He took the magazine from my hand’s extension, leafed through. He looked close at the back where a white box said Michel Mitchell above the post office address. I said, Hammy told me Michel Mitchell doesn’t go here.
Gunner pointed to the box, That’s my philosophy professor, babe.
My face went pink, Don’t call me babe. Don’t call me anything.
Quiet, he held a finger to his chapsticked lips. And Hammy came trotting past with a stack of boxes. Gunner turned to walk through the labyrinth of packages and to a secret shelf in the back of the post office for faculty mail.
When Gunner returned, I said, I did not know we had that.
We clicked our tongues. We clocked out. We went back to our dorm rooms where I pulled college-standard blinds. I piled up all the magazines from my backpack and bookshelf and put them underneath my bed, stood on my rolling chair and ripped down all the torn-up and cut-out pages, pulling away strips of paint. I kept only one page from GQ. The whole picture was white except for a sharp gray line at the center of a snowy tundra with a woman in a black snowsuit, skiing toward the camera. I creased it at the divide and put it in my planner, put the planner in my backpack. So neat, I stacked all the other loose pages under my bed.
***
I never quit my post office job. For two weeks, I just quit showing up. I quit showing up to class, too. I stopped talking to Gunner. I shut off my phone and laid on top of my bed, went outside at night and found two red rocks in the woods and clicked them together. Then I went back to my room to sleep through most of October.
This had happened before. I stopped showing up to night class last spring after the Von incident.
Although Professor didn’t know about the Von incident the way I did, he acquired my personal phone number and called it. The gray-haired ladies brought me take-out containers of spinach dip from TGI Fridays. The mall cop texted to say I was the most tepid, cryptic individual he’d ever met, but he missed me in class because he was always my lab partner and I was sweet to him, filled charts out real neat.
I could not skip my bureaucracy job. Bureaucracy Boss said he’d noticed I’d been melancholic—he really said that—which concerned him. He was bald and when he scrunched his eyes all sad-like, the top of his head wrinkled. I took a book off his desk during lunch and felt a little better.
***
That second week of skipping, Gunner texted to say Hammy was vexing. He and Hammy had a long face-to-face and I was in deep. He was standing outside of my dorm. Was I free?
So fast, Gunner was kissing me hard. I said I needed to go to the bathroom and left him under the comforter of my unmade bed, debated leaving, walking to the woods, finding larger, louder rocks to click in my hands. But I was wearing slippers and when I came back from the bathroom, he was leafing through Time in his boxers. He did not look up at me to toss the magazine onto tile floor.
I paused at the door, left it open, asked, Do you still like me or something?
He shrugged, There are others.
I told him to go. I pointed.
And I stopped hanging around the girl from Evolution (and) Rocks. I switched unassigned seats in class, ate dining hall food at odd hours, took long loops around campus to avoid her dorm. I went back to work at the post office.
Hammy went, You’re back!
I picked up paper mail.
Wait, Hammy’s shoes squeaked. You work desk today.
I do?
Uh huh. Hammy swiveled and the boxes tipped this way, that way, rocked back to center.
Alright.
The desk was alright. People asking questions I didn’t know how to answer. Gunner huffed through paper mail and Hammy teetered in the back.
Someone needed to buy stamps, so I had to call for Hammy who set down his boxes to sell the stamps. Someone got lost on a campus tour. Someone couldn’t find the bathroom. I pointed upstairs at the ceiling where admissions and bathrooms fleshed. I’d never been upstairs but knew there were things like offices and bathrooms and probably tables for studying. A guy wearing tweed and a pork pie hat strutted up to the desk. He was articulate, made every sentence into a question, Hello?
Hell-o, I was sing-songy about it. I tried being pepped. I asked how I could help him. He was looking around and I thought he might need some. Although the last part, I did not say.
He said he’d been communicating with a “Hammy” about an issue regarding his mail and would I please go fetch him?
I said of course. Could I get his name?
That’s when he said Michel Mitchell.
My face must have flushed. It was one of those moments where the world got heaty and blushy and sort of dark. I smelled cherry somewhere in the building. I smelled dirt. I smelled metal. It had happened once before. There, with Bureaucracy Boss, when I asked for a letter of character recommendation to transfer out of community college. He looked up at me—I was standing opposite the mahogany—and he went, You really think I’m gonna write for you when you’ve been stealing my books? I looked into the ceiling. I looked back down and Michel Mitchell was standing there stone-stilted, just blinking. He went, Might I write my name down?
I said no. Oh, no, no, that’s alright. I’ll be right back. And I was dizzy and sick to tell Hammy, Michel Mitchell is here.
Hammy nodded his head and set down a stack of chin-height boxes, swayed to the desk. He had cavity-studded molars when he opened his mouth and bad, alliterative news. Many of Michel Mictchell’s magazines were missing.
Michel repeated the word with three syllables, Mis-si-ng? He raised both arms with his palms up. What ever shall he do?
Hammy said to call the magazine companies. Email them. Send them something in the mail maybe. He didn’t know for sure, but for sure, Michel Mitchell’s magazines were not at the post office.
I sat busy at the desk pretending to laptop-type and parse through my planner when really I was sweating hard. That’s when Gunner strutted out from the back and went, Dr. Mitchell! I thought I heard your voice! They shook hands across me, across the desk. Good to see you.
Good to see you, too, dear student, dear child, dearest disciple o’ mine.
Hammy disappeared, crept backward and shifted a tower of boxes. Gunner bowed, pointed at me with hangnail hands, and without turning his head, asked, Do you two know one another?
Michel Mitchell said, She was helping with my magazines.
Gunner shook his pointer finger at me, Tepid one, she is.
Michel Mitchell said I really must have been, nodded, thanked us both without expression. He left.
Gunner leaned down like he was about to type something on my computer. He bit my ear. He blew air in it between chapstick-coated lips. Then he went back to stuffing mail into the wall and I listened to papers shuffle across one another.
***
I left without clocking out and far back I kept pace with Michel Mitchell. He took a long route to Faculty Row where I watched him climb the fire escape up the side of a Tudor house and jangle his keys and collapse into the darkness of an attic apartment. I stood behind a tree and watched him shut the door before I walked back to campus. And as I traced back to the quad, I remembered a man I sometimes saw near my dead aunt’s apartment who jangled a paper cup.
One night last spring I rode with Von in his truck past the man in the intersection one night after a rendezvous at TGI Fridays and I had a box of takeout, chips and dip. It was sitting half-full in my lap with the lid open as the air conditioner was going and the radio twinkled its banjo songs.
Von munched chips the whole ride back while I handed them one by one across the dash. At the intersection, the man rattled his cup. Before the lights changed, Von rolled down the window and theman started walking and holding out his cup the way he sometimes did. That’s when Von took the box from my lap and shoveled it into his face. In the rearview, I watched him wipe cheese sludge from his eyes, bend down in tail-light-dark.
That wasn’t funny, I said to Von.
He went, Shhh, baby, you get me, like, you get me like, it’s so hard, like, when you’re mad and—
You’re a fucking asshole.
He turned fast the wrong way down a one-way street. A car was coming, two. He sang off-beat to summer-sick radio, Tell me you love me, and he swiveled in a swan neck.
I don’t want to die in a fiery wreck, I told him.
Say it, bitch, he said. He wasn’t looking at the road.
And I didn’t say it. Not then. Then, he dropped me off at the apartment where I paced the room with the hot pad stoves, took everything out of the jewelry closet and rearranged my aunt’s sweater collection. None of it was mine, I realized, those objects of the dead. I waited for him to call, to text, but heard nothing. I texted him that night and he never texted back.
***
I called Evolution (and) Rocks girl. She picked up and said, What’s wrong with you?
So much, I said, and we were back on her flower bed next to the stuffed rabbit, re-reading US Weekly from three weeks prior when I’d left it there. It was American royalty and cheap flash on sunglassed actors and high-jewelry in New York. It was how to be younger for longer and how someone famous died. It was late afternoon, but she fell asleep so I left.
Outside my own dorm, I smoked and smoked until night turned glassy thick. While I stole nothing from her, I did steal Gunner’s cigarettes. He handed them to me one night under the bridge and never asked for them back so I kept them. I kept his lighter, too.
While it was still dark, I trekked across campus and tiptoed up several flights of fire escape to leave magazines at Michel Mitchells’s doorstep. I put the ripped-out pages into a cardboard box—also stolen from the post office recycling bin.
I got all the magazines in three trips before I settled on going solo to English Cottage Tea. I was tired and parched.
On my way, there was Gunner, trotting in my direction under an ellipse of light poles, high on some substance. He waved, Hi.
I tossed the cigarette and ground its guts into the asphalt with my shoe. He stopped and held the collar of my jacket, spun me to face him, and slipped a hand under my shirt on that block of sidewalk between the campus center and the dining hall. It was late. The dining hall was closed. Every campus center door was locked. He smelled like flowers. I said, Gunner, there might be voyeurs out here.
He said, Let them watch.
But I pulled back from him, started running the direction I came from until Gunner caught my backpack at the top—that handle backpacks sometimes have—and the bag split. Laptop crunched asphalt. Ballpoint pens went rolling. My planner splayedopen, flipping through March, April, May, and June with soft wind. The picture of the skiing woman stuttered out. Together, Gunner and I watched it tumble into a puddle where I left it.
Gunner stumbled back on his red-eyed path while I cradled what was left of my backpack and its dribbling contents to English Tea. I slinked in with smoke on my breath, and I must have looked sad-sacked.
The girls gasped, What happened?
I have a lot on my mind, I told them because I was not about to talk about Gunner. I sat on the green sofa and crossed my sneakers over an ottoman. The other girls shifted in their Windsor chairs to squeal, Tell us! Tell us! Tell us, please!
I gulped hot tea and told them about Michel Mitchell’s magazines.
The girls sipped from gone-cold cups until one coughed tea onto the floor laughing. I watched fragments of spit-take shutter and explode into the air’s condensation. They told me that was omigosh-the-funniest-mother-effing-story they’d ever heard and if they tried, they could not write something that funny or think something that funny or even day-dream or night-dream something that funny hahahahaha. Then they laughed about the girl from Evolution (and) Rocks, who was no longer napping in her floral sheets with the stuffed rabbit, who I’d just missed, who just got back together with on-again-off-again-Gunner. That cheater, that swindler, that rascal. Did I know him?
I shrugged, Yeah, I guess so. He’s a friend.
They leaned in, A friend?
I said, We work together.
They blinked mascara-heavy eyelashes, Have you two—you know?
I said, I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. But I must have fidgeted because they all readjusted their posture and bit their bottom lips.
I did, of course, know what they were talking about. Briefly, I thought of Elizabeth Taylor. I thought of Richard Burton. I also thought of Cleopatra. I’d been reading about Old Hollywood in Vanity Fair and I never went back to English Tea.
***
At the post office I was quiet, greeted Hammy, politely alphabetized mail out of the black bin. Gunner got desk privilege because he asked Hammy nice and Hammy couldn’t say no. I didn’t mind. I put Michel Mitchell’s magazines in the faculty mail tray and touched no corrugated boxes because that was not my job. That was Hammy’s job and he told me I was such a hard worker. I told him that’s what Bureaucracy Boss said before I took his books.
Bureaucracy Boss?
Yeah, my boss from the bureaucracy. Long story.
But Hammy wanted me to tell it. He pulled a sturdy box off a shelf and sat on it, crossed boot-laced ankles. He motioned for me to do the same. So I told Hammy about Bureaucracy Boss and community college before I transferred and all the books I stole. I stole so many books and told Hammy exactly where they were, pointed to my chest. Thefted books were in my dead aunt’s closet where her sweaters used to hang because I stole those, too.
Dead aunt’s apartment?
The estate wasn’t closed and still isn’t closed.
Hammy shrugged his hands, You speak Greek to me.
They can’t yet close her estate. There’s paperwork and stuff, I don’t know. She was a larcen.
He goes, That some sort of disease?
I told Hammy a larcen was a thief, a burglar, a criminal. I was a larcen, too, and maybe it’s genetic. I’ve been reading so much about genes and sweaters. I was the one stealing Michel Mitchell’s mail. Didn’t he know? Weren’t there security cameras or something? Can’t I be fired?
Please, I begged Hammy, have me fired, have me expelled, don’t let me come back.
Hammy chuckled and looked at his watch because my shift was almost up. He said that was a really great story and he almost believed it.
Gunner swiped his timecard and I swiped mine and we walked out to find our girl in the campus center atrium, beep-bopping on her headphones. She widened her eyes, looked at the ground, scuffed her ballet flat.
Their palms collided and they looked back at me, stepping—Gunner grinning and her doe-eyed dreary. They turned to exit through glass doors.
I tromped upstairs and sat in an armchair on the floor I’d not yet been. A tour ended and people filtered out of admissions. Some gray-haired woman ran into and walked out of the bathroom. Dispersed, kids studied at similar desks, locked into their work with headphones, violent-typing keyboards. I tucked my knees into my chest.
Since Gunner ripped it, I’d whip-stitched my backpack, safety-pinned the hem, and it was barely holding together. I shuffled through it looking for my planner and a list of things to do.
Finals were coming–this is true–finals were coming and I was worrying again so I dumped out everything,all the loose pens and papers and my scuffed laptop and close-to-dying cell phone. I called Von but he did not answer. I called Professor who picked up on the second ring. He asked, What’s wrong?
Professor, I said, So much.
Oh no, he said. He was a big chatter, used long, lofty sentences, and told me not to worry. If perhaps I just made some friends, things would look up. I looked out the window. Snow spit. He lulled. Trees shivered. He babbled. Professor said, You’ve interrupted my lab.
So sorry, I mumbled. It won’t happen again. And I should go, too, my phone’s about to die.
Professor’s tone changed to a lamenting one, Take care.
Then my phone died.
Admissions-officer-looking folks left one by one with their lunch pails and cheap suits. Collegers started packing up and lugging themselves back to dim-lit-coquette dorm rooms with wall decorations and proper sheets.
So I walked out, into the woods, into the snow. I did not go to the bridge but found a leaf-lack tree. On dusty ground, I picked up rocks and clicked them together again and again and again. Parading through campus, past the girl’s dorm, past Gunner’s dorm, past the campus center and dining center and back to my own dorm, I clicked rocks.
The girl was there on a bench with frozen mascara tears and lipstick smeared over her oily chin. She stood when she saw me and told me to cut it out with the rocks. They’re driving her nuts. I’m driving her nuts. Didn’t I get her texts? Her calls? Where, oh where, have I been?
In the woods. I dropped the rocks and they clacked, My phone died.
You can’t be serious. She flung up her arms, Who are you, Thoreau?
No, I said, I’m Sybil.
Whatever! She set her backpack on the ground. It was pink and glittered and held a stack of magazines. She took them out, These are yours.
No. I said, They’re not.
She dragged her treadless shoe through snow, I know.
I nodded.
I cut things off with Gunner.
There are others, I said.
I picked up the stack of magazines, buzzed into the dorm door, led us up echoing stairs and a hallway. She looked at my tape-scarred walls as I tossed the magazines on the floor and watched them glide, swell, dissolve into salt stains and snow tracks. Hey, she went, Do you have any scissors?
I pointed to the open drawer of my desk where tape and pens and my dead aunt’s scissors rattled. The girl raised them, snipped air, then sat on the floor. Picking up a magazine, she cut out the spine. One by one by one she cut out all the spines. Jagged pages went spilling, knocking into bed sheets and wheels of the rolling chair upon which I sat. She picked up a page of block text and she folded it into a triangle, trimmed off the excess, folded it into smaller, more difficult triangles, and cut out skillful fragments of paper leaving husks all over my floor.
She unfolded and handed me her paper snowflake. Her eyes looked deep and heavy. She said, Would it be alright if I put this up on the wall?
I told her that’d be alright.