Trapper and Emmeline (2 page)

What was wrong with me today?

My brain wanted to tie up my mouth and leave it as an offering for the Russian girl as she stalked closer through the forest. Maybe if she had the mouthpart, she wouldn’t chase the brain part through Siberia and kil it too.

But her arctic eyes had my brain frozen. Lacking any other ideas, it decided I should explain myself again.

“Not devour in a cannibal way.” My laugh sounded forced and desperate, reasonably so. I was tanking the pick-up so badly that half my brain started cursing the other half. We’re talking ful -on Tourette’s: “Cannibal—imagine that! Munch, munch—look, a hand! Yummy! High five, amiright?
Dammit, Trapper!
For the record, if your breasts were smal er, we’d be having drinks by now.
Fuck!
Usual y the ‘built for speed’ thing is funny for a woman to hear. A girl who was referencing a different girl told it to me—so it’s not insensitive in any way. Long story short,
that’s
how generous I am about going out for drinks.
Shit!
Not in a charity way. I date girls with every size of breast.
Fuck!
And I don’t eat them, either. Just the souls—

just kidding.
Shoot me now, please.
”

Arctic Blue didn’t even try to parse this out.

She tilted her head sideways and machine-gunned a series of Russian syl ables that could have expressed any of the emotions she was successful y keeping off her face. Her friend answered from the other side of the hal . Arctic Blue replied with another string of words that contained ‘cannibal.’ If she was anything like Google Translate, it didn’t look good for me.

“Look,” I put my hands up. “Let me tel you something. These words I’m saying aren’t English, either.”

Because I had the sudden belief that I could undo the last five minutes of my life, and never know humiliation on this scale again, if I gave up something important to me. Like my knowledge of language.

“My friend says this is a pick-up, and that you are an idiot,” she said.

“What matters is what you think, not your friends.”

“I think you’re worse than the men in Russia, and look how far I moved to get away from them.”

“To me that says, ‘I came al the way from Russia to meet an American man.’”

“And someday I wil .”

She edged around me and skipped over to her friend, her composure final y cracking into a bright smile. When she laughed it was a delightful sound that almost made my disgrace worthwhile.

“See how fast you can move?” I cal ed after her. “You’re built for speed.”

“Wow, just wow.” It was a female voice behind my shoulder. “I was here today, and I
saw
that. It wil echo through history.

It was over too soon.”

“It felt like it lasted hours,” I said.

“Nope. You insulted her chest in fifteen seconds, and were eating her soul at the two-minute mark.”

The Russians were giggling to each other and watching me.

“It’s hard to get back in the saddle,” I said. “Especial y when you approach it ass-first.”

“So that was a serious attempt? Do women make you angry?”

I became aware of a scent in the air. A gentle perfume. It came from the girl next to me. Why don’t more women wear perfume?

“Ha-ha. And before you ask, I’m not gay.”

“But you experimented to make sure?”

I final y broke into a smile and turned to her.

Thank you, Universe!

I relaxed and met her eyes. She was as tal as me, with a slim build but large breasts—I would check those first from now on. Her hair was a mass of brown curls. Her face was a
sparkling home run
—obviously my mind was stil struggling with a stunted command of English. Either that or a minor stroke had decimated my speech center. But I was essential y right. Her face was perfect beyond reason in the Mediterranean set: olive-skinned, smooth, with bright eyes and a knowing curve on her mouth. New York is ful of models and could-be models, but her face had al those model-faces beat simply by its expressiveness. Her crinkled eyebrows, a squinted eye, and a tilted head—al told me she was amused, interested, and waiting for a response.

So yes,
thank you, Universe!
I didn’t have to waste one erg of brainpower to decide that I would never,
ever
have a chance with her. I could relax.

“Of course I’ve experimented,” I said smoothly. “It’s col ege.”

“We use the scientific method here,” she grinned.

“Hypothesis: everything is awesome until proven otherwise.”

Her eyes flicked to the ceiling. I would come to learn this indicated a thought that was novel to her. “That’s a nice way to put it. Everything I don’t know about existence is now awesome, and only a very thin slice has been proven boring or bad.”

“Let’s put that Russian girl over on the slice, shal we?”

“What’s your next step with her? Did you bring your knives and your book of Mongolian horse poetry?”

A face, breasts, and funny too. I smiled widely at her, and she leaned against the wal smiling back. She was slim, I was right about that, but something about her was also solid. She was
present
in the hal way. Planted to the floor, giving the impression of weight, like a metal desk you have to walk around in a smal room. She was anchored, and next to her I felt anchored too. Nothing inward, everything outward. I ceased caring what bystanders thought about my utter failure with the Russian, and my anxiety inverted into amusement.

Arctic Blue was pretty, but she was only a pencil sketch compared to the girl now in front of me.

I said, “Wel , seeing as how she’s Russian and I’m humiliated, I’m thinking about constructing a giant impenetrable wal so I never have to interact with her again. Like a giant curtain.”

“An iron curtain?” She grinned. “Fitting, because this class is Cold War History.”

“Obviously some Russian girls stil have some hard feelings about how that turned out.”

She laughed. “I bet that was fifteen years before she was born.”

“Russians have long memories that start in the womb. My name is Trapper. What’s yours?”

“Emmeline.”

“Emmeline?”

“Emmeline. I can’t wait to see how you fuck that up.” She glanced at the Russian girls, who were watching our conversation with growing interest. Emmeline’s voice changed. It went higher, with a trace of tension. “Maybe we could make her jealous, Trapper. You and me, practicing our pick-up skil s. I can make Russia wonder what she’s missing.”

“I bet you could!” I laughed. “Look—the door’s final y open. Let’s get good seats.”

I snagged her wrist and pul ed her into the classroom. I wouldn’t remember the baffled, nonplussed expression on her face until a few weeks later. Whereon I found an empty stal in the bathroom and pounded my head against the wal to teach my brain a lesson.
Emmeline had made a play for me on day one!
I had laughed and dropped us both into the friend-zone. And then, with her safely wal ed off, I lusted after her in secret, like I was twelve years old and NYU was Summer camp.

Within a week, Emmeline and I were meeting before class at the coffee shop. She was ridiculously easy and entertaining to talk to. I was never tongue-tied; I always needed her to know something I had just thought of. Her feeling of presence, the solidness I’d noticed during our first conversation, continued to grow on me. I soon carried a bit of it with me even when she wasn’t around.

Having Emmeline as a friend was like being smart-drunk, that brief window at the party when you’re buzzing heavily but stil functional. I imagine it’s how superheroes feel al the time. Men stopped in the street when she walked past—but
I
was the guy next to her. I was the guy who picked fuzz off her sweater. I let her re-button my shirt, which I intentional y screwed up in the first place.
I
made her laugh.

As great as we were, I was worried. I didn’t want to lose our privileged routine, but I didn’t want to be just a friend either.
What were we?
Not a couple. Was I her gay friend?
Oh God
—did she think I was gay? What did I say in that first conversation? Did I make a joke—or did I emphatical y say I liked women,
over and over?
Maybe she felt relaxed with me because I was gay. I wasn’t gay! Being gay would be awesome, because it looked so easy from the outside for a progressive NYU student. Maybe…?
No.
Were my signals hetero enough? Emmeline worked out more than me and could bench press heavier weights. No wonder she seemed so solid, her body was ripped. Did
that
mean something?

In this fashion, my mind fragmented into unappealing, inter-looping thoughts every fifteen minutes, like a bucket of eels. It was no help in producing ideas to make Emmeline see me in a romantic light. Because as inept and ineffectual as I was, I stil had hopes for us. I got in the way of every man with enough nerve to approach her. I developed ninja cock-blocking skil s.

Then one morning before class I was late to the coffee shop, and I saw her scanning the crowd for me. She looked concerned and alone, isolated somehow from the rest of the crowd—as isolated as I felt when we split paths after class.

My heart gave a little lurch to realize that I might
already
be preferred in her life. Then my heart gave a
huge
lurch when she saw me, and her face bloomed into a smile. I walked up to her and took her hand, and she let me. My pulse roared in my ears, momentarily blotting out everything else.

Holding hands with Emmeline was like a Boeing 747 engine test in my skul .

Emmeline was wearing jeans and a tight button-up shirt. The shirt was so tight that the last few dispirited buttons were unequal to the task of keeping her cleavage hidden. They only remained buttoned for a few minutes, and then sprang open like a parlor trick, to her constant great amusement. Emmeline found the strangest things funny.

In the coffee shop Emmeline leaned forward to give her coffee order to the guy at the coffee shop. When her top exploded, his pen skittered across the counter and they lost the thread of the transaction.

She flubbed her order.
Half-caff double latte blah-blah.

She broke down in the middle, and nearly died of embarrassment.

“Shit!” She leaned toward him entreatingly. Her breasts swel ed forward, framed by a low-cut bra and the traitorous blouse. The bottom of the blouse slid up her ribs. “I’m sorry! Don’t take me to coffee jail! They over-roast the beans there.”

I had perfected the look-but-not-look thing. I leaned back so I could take her al in. Strong runner’s legs capped by a nice ass. Tight tummy stretched thin as she craned across the counter toward him. Breasts pushing forward as she shrugged her shoulders.

“No big deal,” the guy said, struggling to maintain his barista cool. His half of the conversation was directed towards her breasts.

For the rest of the morning, I had to hear about Emmeline’s mortification. She’d ordered her
latte
inefficiently, and now she felt like crawling into a hole.

“It real y bothers me when I make a dumb mistake like that,” she whispered to me. For once, she was serious. She had a strong perfectionist streak. “I’m fucking mortified. He must think I’m an idiot.”

Another girl would have been mortified by how he stood on his tippy-toes to look down her top. About how he purposeful y dropped her change on the floor, so she’d have to bend over and get it. About how he’d never once met her eyes.

But another girl wasn’t Emmeline. Emmeline thought men were hilarious when they acted that way, and I wasn’t about to complain. It had been my humiliation by the cute Russian girl on the first day of class that had drawn Emmeline to me.

To her, it was obvious we would have a lot to laugh about. So she swooped in and snagged me with nauseating ease, as she put it.

To get her mind off the coffee debacle, I reminded her to close her shirt. This made her giggle. We didn’t think she was showing too much, and we definitely weren’t prudes. We simply liked seeing the men around us convulse when her shirt flew open. Maybe they even thought they had telekinetic superpowers after staring so hard. That’s certainly how I would use mine.