been able to see through my helmet visor. I hadn’t recognized Barry among the sons. I hadn’t seen this particular facet of his previously incomprehensible power. It didn’t seem plausible, it didn’t even seem possible that a rational institution would assign him such a consequential appointment. “Barry is on the disciplinary committee?”
“Not just the disciplinary committee. He’s on the higher boards. Several of them. The Estlins created this campus—they’ll always control it. He’s the current crown prince. Why do you think people love him?”
“Why do you love him?”
“Are you my therapist?”
“Are you still my adviser?”
“Expelled students don’t have advisers.”
“Are you?”
“Do something. Then I’ll decide.”
“I’m doing, I’m doing, but it’s super scary stuff that could kill me so I’d like a little supervision.”
“Oak trees are safe.”
You rolled up your window shade, even though you were leaving the office and had somewhere to be, only to remind me how safe trees are. I saw you, for the first time, not as your individual self but as an accessory to the throne. I knew you would one day ascend to full power and that I would one day be hanged.
“Thank you for advising an expelled student who scares herself,” I said robotically even though it was the deepest feeling in my body. I thought of Tom and Mishti, loyal subjects whom Barry had spared. “I hear you love all of my friends.”
“You have friends?”
“I’m salty and plain so the pretty ones chew on me.”
“Oh, Mishti.”
“You think she’s pretty!”
“She thinks she’s pretty.”
“She is. She does. And Tom.”
“Who’s Tom?”
“Ringlets.”
“He couldn’t bear to look up at me. He covered his face with his hair.”
“I’d just broken up with him, he’ll recover.”
You looked a little alarmed and you moved Deren Eaton’s book from your desk to a shelf for no reason. I took this as unbelievable flattery.
“I didn’t realize you dated.”
“I can have secrets.”
“He has very nice hair.”
“You have very nice hair.”
The three snakes in your braid thanked me.
“Leave my office.”
“Very well.”
“Nell—” you said, almost kindly, as I turned your knob. “Get anything done.”
I closed the door. Joan, my nose, Kallas. The line of your name looked like a horizon I’d approached, a threatening and unnatural arrival that meant I’d soon fall off the edge of the earth. I blew a little dust out from the lower curve of your J. I got that good and done.
BOOGERS
These days what I really like to do is to lie on the floor shirted and pantsless and relieve one or other nostril of a really good boog. I leave all boogers on the windowsill. In the morning I wipe them up. They look so different dry—less lovable, easier to discard. My little trash can is full of them. Mishti says Nell is forgetting herself but I say I’ve got world-class boogs.
Don’t worry Joan I check myself. I check myself and I wreck myself. Sometimes I make tortellini and even if I make only half the bag, call it 1.5 portions, I pour it steaming into my bowl and I look at it and think: nobody in the whole world deserves this much tortellini. I love it so much, it doesn’t need any topping, each tortellinus is a self-sufficient packet of perfect food. I love best the unforgivably dank tricolor frozen kind, manufactured by mass brands that put ammonium bicarbonate and cracker meal into the ricotta stuffing, tortellini that is probably unhygienic even while it is frozen. I can’t believe I get to eat it.
Same trouble with a box of Kraft spirals and cheese. A whole box feels like the ideal portion size to my body but my mind knows it’s supposed to feed five or whatever children and to hog it is unconscionable sin. It’s okay, I use the empty box as one brick in my temple wall. I don’t mean my body as temple, we know my body to be a rectangle with rounded corners, I mean the temple I am building to worship life.
One time in the cafeteria I heard you telling Barry to stop eating and even though Barry is fat and even though I understand your point and even though I have eaten as I’ve said more tortellini in my thirty-one years than any creature has ever merited in the history of the universe it was almost enough to cure me of loving you. Unfortunately, only almost.
I’m sorry I’ve become such a laziness, Joan. Your husband got me in big trouble and now I feel cosmically shy. But if I can just speed up this binding