what she is: a sweats-and-sneakers kind of girl, a big, loose athlete, on her way to or from practice. But when she decides to look good? When she hits the shoes and skirts and makeup? It’s like she swooped down from some other world, a sudden alter-Caroline of extreme beauty and dazzle.
But it’s nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning and Caroline is on her way to class, so—what gives?
A good question, a fair question, but Caroline must fly—running late again, always running late, Audrey watching through the glass as her friend fast-walks toward campus in her short jacket and short skirt and her tights, leaning into a cold headwind that seems to push at her with actual purpose, as if to discourage her, stop her even, turn her back—Go back to your room, Caroline Price, go back to your bed, curl up under the heavy quilt the old women of home sewed just for you, no warmth like that in the world, not even a boy’s . . .
Caroline’s boot heels clock-clocking on the sidewalk, her long fingers stuffed as far as they’ll go into the fake pockets of her jacket, batting tears from her thickened lashes and asking herself too, perhaps, what’s going on. A meeting with a professor, that’s all. After class, if she has time, said the email. So, OK. Lose the Adidas and the hoodie for a change, but that’s it, effortwise.
It’s not anything sexual, this looking nice—she has a boyfriend, after all.
And the professor is old—like, forties-old.
But there are girls she knows who want that A so badly, who learned in middle school—hell, grammar school—how these things worked. The world. Power.
But that power is a false power, girl, says her memaw. With her dentures and her bent little body. That power will turn on you like a stray dog.
And the profs themselves, these older men, these wise and fatherly teachers; you could always tell who they had their eye on. And you watched it progress over the semester, the favored girl bringing it for a 9 a.m. class: the clothes, the hair, the earrings, the lashes.
But that’s not what this is. Caroline would wear a damn Snuggie to class if she felt like it, and she would earn her grade according to her performance, just as she’d earn a win on the volleyball court where there are no grades and no flirting, only muscle and sweat and the unambiguous counting of points.
As for the perfume . . . well, a girl wanted to smell nice when she looked nice. Just a touch, a fingerpint, on the neck. That was for you and not for anyone else. Certainly not for some forty-year-old man who wanted to see you after class, if you had time.
But it was the good stuff, Audrey knew, having caught its scent over the smell of coffee even before her friend sat down: the little French bottle Caroline bought on her trip to New York City last summer, and the scent of which Audrey now associates with Caroline almost as intensely as the potent green slime she’d rub into her legs before practice and before each game and sometimes, in those old dorm room days, before going to bed. And it’s this weird remix of scents—French perfume and overpowering muscle gel—that Audrey smells as she, too, leaves the café, stepping into that same cold wind but the wind pushing at her back as she moves in the opposite direction of Caroline—a wind not to stop her but to hurry her along home, the sooner to pack, the sooner to be ready when Caroline comes to get her, the sooner (though she knows this is not logical) to get home to her father, who of course has told her not to come, to stay in school, nothing to see here, says he, just a little touch of the inoperable cancer is all, nothing that won’t keep until you come home in the spring . . .
And with such thoughts fluttering within her it seems actually a piece of these thoughts, like an escaped fragment, when the air itself bursts into violence just above her head—a sudden flurry and a kind of shriek as a bird nearly crash-lands on her head, close enough to fan her with wingbeat, low enough to sweep something soft and alive along the part line of her hair; it’s the plush tail of a squirrel, she just sees, a juvenile, who rides like a pilot in the bird’s claws, this