Sex Positive

4.15......My roommate has been gone for days on end. Not that I saw her all that much before — I’d be lucky if I heard her close her door, use the bathroom, walk to the fridge at night. Now she is gone for real. I know this because her door has been the same two inches of ajar for eleven days.

4.16......Lauren from Italian Lit says she shaves every day, even on her period. I’ve never shaved before. There must be a whole civilization down there.

4.17......I can hear my other roommates talking from inside my room. They are discussing the phrase “pork butt.” “It literally just says pork butt.” “Probably the cheapest part of the pig.” “It doesn’t sound very appetizing when you say pork butt.” On and on.

4.18......I felt really, deeply unseated today. Lauren lives just a floor above me. She gives me lots of tips. She likes to look out for people’s sexual health. Here is a list of things she told me today:

- When he comes in, say, “Close the door,” then push him up against the wall.

- Don’t use any product with a fragrance.

- Have a towel ready.

My roommate is still gone.

4.19......You never really think about it until you get up and there’s a light vagina-shaped stain on the divot of your desk chair. It goes so far back. I thought it was the size of a toenail.

One roommate said that the roommate who has gone away asked us to take care of her hamster while she is gone. Clearly no one else is going to do it.

4.20......Went to work. To the Greek professor who owes the library $12,485 and who only checks out so many books in order to deny them from his female colleagues, I said: “Yes, I’m reading Kerouac. Yes, he’s a titan of the genre. However, it is amusing how much he seems to want to be black. Oh, you have a book. Oh, you have a daughter my age. No, I haven’t heard of you.” I am aware of looking young, soft, and understanding. Afterward, my boss told me about his father, who is in prison for assassinating a politician in Finland. And Paul—I have Wednesdays with Paul—invited me to his birthday party.

4.21......Lauren called me a “femcel” today. I’m just from a conservative household. They didn’t let me eat M&Ms until I was ten.

I went into my absent roommate’s room. It was untouched, done up, blankets folded up on the edge of the bed like she was never coming back. The hamster cage was on the desk. I fed the hamster an M&M from the dining hall. I don’t know if you’re supposed to do that. I also fed him a slice of red onion from the salad bar. He holds his paws under his face like a little gentleman.

4.22......I got drunk for the first time at Paul’s party, and the crazy thing is, I don’t even remember it.

What I remember is this morning when I wiped and bent to pull up my pants: my period. A scrap of toilet paper floating in a pool of what looked like Paul’s mouthful of vodka cranberry. So hot, red, and sweet. When I spit up in the sink I smelled hot Sierra Mist hissing down the drain.

I forget that there is ingestible liquid in everyone, everywhere.

I take casual sips from the biodiverse water fountain.

4.23......I feel quite sensible today. I went on a walk with Lauren and didn’t bring up sex even once.

It is obvious to anyone reading this that I am a virgin.

Lauren forages. She picked wineberries, wild garlic, and the very invasive lesser celandine. The lesser celandine, according to Lauren, carpets the floor and suffocates native plants. She says you can remove the roots and tubers and cook off its mild toxins. I had never had a wineberry. It was juicy and tart. I saved a wineberry for the hamster. He seemed to enjoy it.

Lauren told me a little story: according to her parents, when she was born, she tried to get back in. “Turned right back around,” her father likes to say, apparently. I liked this story. I can sense exactly what sort of father Lauren had growing up—a gusher. A funny man, a joker, the kind of guy who’ll flirt with you and then embarrass you with how much he loves his wife.

Why do I think it’s sensible of me that I didn’t bring up sex? If I asked Lauren this, she would probably say I need to learn sex positivity.

Sex positivity, according to Lauren, is the idea that sex is a natural and healthy part of life. She says if she had kids she would make sure they lost their virginity by the time they were twelve. I didn’t want to let on how much this shocked me. I kept really cool about it.

4.24......I don’t want this to become all about Lauren.

Felt interested in being pretty today. Not enough to put on makeup. Just enough to pocket an eyeliner in my coat before work. I’d use it in the bathroom on my break. But my morning interest in being pretty left me as soon as I logged into the library database on the ancient computer. There’s dead skin in the cracks of the keyboard from years of employees past.

4.25......Lauren told me she met someone. The someone is a thirty-five-year-old woman. “Like Jesus!” She goes by her last name, Hunter.

Lauren says I have to lose my virginity as soon as possible, “or I’ll lose it for you.” She says it’s so I can start narrowing down my likes and dislikes and be better able to articulate to people what kind of sex I enjoy.

I am seriously unaware of my roommate’s whereabouts but growing fond of her hamster. I’m spending more time with him, leaning back on my roommate’s chair, dangling berries into his mouth.

4.26......Lauren has told Hunter all about me.

Hunter, according to Lauren, said in reference to a photo of me: “A girl like that, cool, slackfaced, easy looking, no sick boy puppies hanging around?”

I don’t know what she meant by this. I appreciate cool and slackfaced. I don’t know about easy looking. I guess Paul is a sick boy puppy. I’ll try to come up with something like this to say about Hunter. This manual driving, barrel-armed woman who looks as though she has distanced herself completely from the attentions of the male species—the type to look down her nose at those of us who haven’t—dating my best friend?

I’m being unfair, but if she could sweep me up in a sentence like that, I could her.

It tickles me to write that Lauren is my best friend.

Meanwhile, there is a log of meat that has been in the freezer for three months.

Whose is it?

4.27......Items in order of which they were touched by me today:

Body, bed, chair, hamster, bed, chair, hamster, bed, chair, hamster, bed, chair, hamster, bed, chair, laundry, body

4.28......Lauren has come to me with a plan. The plan was developed in collaboration with Hunter. The plan is to lose my virginity to Paul. The plan is to encourage drinks into each other. Hunter, being thirty-five, will supply our drink. I wonder if Paul likes me. I know and feel deeply all over my skin that if I so much as touched his knee he would go rabid. But this doesn’t mean he likes me. Meanwhile, Lauren and Hunter like each other so much. They go rabid for each other. Lauren tells me as much.

Lauren has started wearing loose linen button-downs. According to Lauren, Hunter enjoys this. In the middle of what I imagine to be Hunter’s small, well-furnished apartment, they embrace. Lauren draws one leg up Hunter’s side as Hunter makes a cavity in her shirt. Their wet toenails touch.

4.29......At the library desk, every action is recorded under your account. This way, mistakes are attributed to those who make them.

I don’t understand how some people at the desk, rather than work with the cart, will take all the books off the cart, abandon the cart altogether (Paul). It’s completely senseless. It only leads to more trouble when it comes time to alphabetize.

Paul has these alert, softly nervous eyes, so nervous they’re almost fizzing whenever he senses my disapproval.

I do think it's cute.

I’ve never been sleeping well recently.

4.30......A good meal to walk off is a meat flower.

5.1......If I get my period tomorrow I will actually kill myself.

5.2......No period.

Hunter brought me a gift of meat flowers in the morning. She was all like “You’ll get hungry after.”

Sticky, cochlear, marbled strips of meat curled into roses. She also brought two bottles of wine.

For the sake of—for its own sake, I will record how it went.

We started standing face to face, like we were getting married, or about to high five. He had an intrusive knowledge of my mouth. He placed his fingers and hands where he expected my body to be. My body was there at those places, without my knowledge. He dug one hand into my back and slung the other around my legs and threw me onto the mattress. He was not a virgin. He inserted two fingers into me.

I was supposed to be loud, I knew, and I knew what moans were supposed to sound like, and how easily they filled up what was otherwise just him snuffing. His sounds reminded me of that movie where the parents turn into pigs and can’t stop eating. As a kid, that scene held all my fears: being abandoned, getting fat.

He didn’t take long to finish. That means he must’ve liked it, I hope. He asked for some tissues. I didn’t have tissues so I gave him a roll of toilet paper. Bits of it got stuck on his penis because it was so thin and cheap. He asked if I’d had a good time. I said I did. Did you? He said: yeah, us guys are simple. He pecked me on the lip and left.

I ran to Lauren’s dorm, where she was waiting anxiously for me. I announced that Paul took my virginity. Lauren said, no, I took it! I said, what, you stole it from Paul? And she said, no, I had it all along! And we fell over laughing and my face was numb.

The other thing is I told Lauren about how he got some hairs in his mouth and how he had to peel long wet hairs one by one off his tongue and Lauren went, “You didn’t shave?”

5.3......I’m perusing the fruit aisle when I see the Greek professor from the library. He is eating an apple out of his grocery basket. He has long baby brown hair that swaddles into a sumptuous scarf. He gazes sadly at his apple as if the apple has just rejected his confession of love. I’m surprised to be endeared to him. He comes up to me. One hand clenching the apple, other hand outstretched. I pretend not to recognize him, shaking my head in a friendly way.

He says: “What, I can’t even talk to you?”

I walk away from him to the green onions.

He says, “I’m a teacher!”

I say, “Are you enjoying your apple?”

He says, “Are you a student? I’ve seen you at the library.”

I say, “Yes, I recognize you because you owe us so much money.”

He says, “What do I have to do to get into your good graces?”I say, “Buy me some green onions.”

His eyes light up. He’s ready to play. His coat shoulders past me to sweep up two bunches of green onions.

I say, “Buy me some soy sauce.”

I see his whole body perk up at the thought of following me around the store. I don’t even have any makeup on. I’m on my period. I’m in my man sweatpants and man jacket with all the zippers. I’m feeling a little like in the movies when the shitbag loser is dumped and goes to the corner store half-naked in his bathrobe. Pointing at the groceries I want with my limp loser dick.

I pick out blueberries and figs. I pick out a bottle of wine. His eyes are whining with a dog-like love. I wonder if he looks at his female colleagues this way. No, they’re all probably elderly and ugly and fiercely intelligent. He checks out for me at the counter. He writes his number on the receipt. He eyes me darkly, his hand on my shoulder, “I’ll look forward to hearing from you,” and sweeps down the street. I feel as though I will pitch over at any moment. I text him then and there: Hi, I’m your librarian. A few moments later, he replies: You are the only librarian I’d buy groceries for. I say: haha because you owe us so much money? I practically skip home.

5.4......Lauren came over today. I was all ready to tell her about Greek professor, but then she announced that Hunter was an escort. Hunter went with men and the occasional woman for money.

Then Lauren said that yesterday she went with Hunter and another man for money for the first time.

Three grand for three hours, and the most tense, erotic foreplay she’d ever had, she said. They touched her in all the ways she wanted to be touched, she said. Their hands moved with an authority that surprised her, along her back, her shoulders, her neck. Their hands wrapped around her neck and pressed, so lightly, along the sides. No one had ever choked her like this. She had thought choking was stupid and horrible before this. She said she was gasping as she tried to register where their hands and forearms would hold her next. She said she was trying not to lose it because the man’s roommate was in the other room. She talked at length about everyone’s hands. She made it sound like there were twenty hands in the room.

She said: it’s only been a night but word’s already out about me, the new girl in town, which means I did a good job. She is so proud of herself. I can see her getting ready in the bathroom, pressing her skin to get the Bic razor in the creases.

How much bad sex do I need to have before it starts being like Lauren’s? I keep thinking back to how easy it was to filter the moans of discomfort into those of pleasure.

5.5......The box of figs, courtesy of Greek professor, is open on my desk. The hamster seems wary of the figs. He keeps cutting his eyes at them.

I just moved the plate of figs to the edge of his cage. He’s clawing at the cage trying to lick at them. I wonder if figs kill hamsters. I just slipped a slice inside his cage. He’s mutilating it.

5.6......I dream that Paul comes to my dorm. He says, “Hi, I’m Paul. I’m your boyfriend.” He pretends to hang himself. He sticks his tongue out. He goes to Lauren, who sits on my bed. He says, “Hi, I’m Paul. I’m that one’s boyfriend.” He pretends to hang himself again. He goes to Hunter, who is halfway down Lauren’s pants. He says, “Hi, I’m Paul. I’m her boyfriend.” He hangs himself a final time. He comes back to me. He puts his hand around my neck. I am all ready for him. I lean in. I put my hand on his hand around my neck, choking myself a little.

I wake up and the hamster is spitting up inside his cage.

5.7......With her new escort money, Lauren bought the hamster a fancy pellet feed. She also had a special, enormous variety of fig delivered to me because she knows I love figs. If I’d known she was doing this, I wouldn’t have made Greek professor get me figs. Now I have so many figs. Lauren’s taste especially sweet because they were bought with illegal money.

Hamster’s not doing well. His shoulders are up to his ears, his knees are knocking, he’s lying like a turd inside his mound of straw. He is completely at my mercy.

To keep an eye on the poor guy, I will be sleeping in my roommate’s bed. If she comes back, I’ll fold everything up, make it like I never came in.

5.8......Paul wanted me so nicely, earnestly. He made me happen for him. He could throw me in the air and I would just hang there.

So why do I hate it when he texts me? He texts like he’s getting the nerve up to text. The other day he put “babe” at the end of a text and the word hung off the nervously casual sentence’s rear ass and I almost threw my phone across the room.

5.9......I texted Lauren to ask if she had any more wineberries. I wanted to get the hamster some more because he liked them so much. She texted back: LOL im in a session sry but theyre not hard to find in the woods. this guy has biggest balls ive ever seen. like a horse. can u get me some berries too.

I’m annoyed by how much good sex she’s having, or how good she’s making it out to be. I want to believe it’s not possible to have good sex with a man with horse balls. I haven’t told her yet about Greek professor, even though she’d enjoy it a lot.

5.10......Last night I went to get wineberries from the woods, feeling a little ridiculous, but I was in my roommate’s bed and the hamster kept opening his mouth at me from his cage like he was about to say something and closing it like he’d changed his mind. There’s a brick path behind the dorms that slopes down into a forest of dead leaves and narrow trees that move like sea plants. The lesser celandine seemed to have spread since I last went with Lauren. A train sounded low in the distance, which made me feel a little lonely, like a person on a train.

I wanted to find the wineberries before dark. The dirt path kept disappearing under the lesser celandine. The stuff was everywhere, creeping up onto trees, glossy yellow flowers.

Three times circling before I finally saw the bush.

Walking back, two damp paper towels wrapped around my harvest in each pocket. I started running. I put my hands in my pockets so the berries wouldn’t come loose from their paper towel pouches, ran like that with my shoulders swaying dumbly. I went inside and it was like I’d never been outside my whole life, it was so closed and superheated, everyone’s hot mouth air. The elevator opened and I stepped inside. I go to press the fifth floor. It’s already lit up. Wouldn’t you know, my two roommates, the pork butt roommates, are standing inside the elevator already. They are lanky, loping girls. I want to die because I have to talk to them. I go to close the elevator. And wouldn’t you know. Greek professor’s standing there, giving me a little eye.

I’m not sure why I was scared. Something just shoots up in me and I press the close button. The doors close on Greek professor’s foot. His black loafer makes a slit in the gunmetal door. He rubs his eyes and smiles.

One of my roommates is figuring out how to lean against the rail. The other looks benignly at the professor, then at me. I wonder about Greek professor’s daughter my age. What she would think if she knew her father was kicking his foot in my door with that expression like nearing a sneeze or orgasm.

I kick his foot out the elevator and the doors close in his face.

One of my roommates says, “Wow, who’s he?”

The other one says, “He’s cute, why’d you have to kick him? Have you been taking care of the hamster by the way?”

“Poor thing. Looks like he hasn’t been fed in days.”

When I ask if they’ve been in the missing roommate’s room, they look at each other blankly.

We file in between the nervous blue walls into our suite. We slot into our respective rooms like cars into parking spots.

The hamster is near death, it seems. His eyes are wise and sad. I’ve laid out the paper towels, which the berries have long dyed red. The hamster is freaking out and putting his little mouth on the berries.

I was feeling a little sorry about kicking the professor—and sort of excited to be associated with him, now that my roommates thought he was hot. I texted him: sorry about that, I was nervous. A moment later, he wrote: I saw you out there in the woods. You were alone, it was dark. Are you alright?

Paul texted too. He said: When can I see you again? You said you were going to text me when you’re off your period. Did I do something wrong babe?

Instead of sending a long frustrated but apologetic paragraph to Paul, I texted Greek professor: haha. What are u doing right now? I closed my phone and went to my desk drawer, where I kept Lauren’s small sexual gifts: a razor, a box of condoms, a shaving cream, and a water-based lube. The last two she had squeezed out of her own containers into travel bottles for me. I took out the shaving cream and slathered some on my pubic hair. I went to work with the razor. I slathered some shaving cream on the hamster, whose cheeks were fat from wineberries. I shaved him a bald patch on his back. A roly poly rawness. We are soul-bonded now, I said to the hamster. My vulva stung. By the end it was all shaved down to black sesame seeds in pink skin.

5.11......Hunter brought me another gift of meat flowers this morning even though I had no sex plans. “I don’t have sex plans,” I told her, but she came in and started petting the hamster as I strip-sucked a meat curlicue off a rose. After forlornly feeding the hamster some torn meat, Hunter sat on my roommate’s chair and started telling me about how Lauren was acting strange and if I knew anything about it. It was interesting and in a way pitiful that she would come to me for help. I told her I didn’t know anything about it.

Hunter began to monologue. Lauren had a lot of “unseatednesses.” The only reason Hunter thought Lauren would be good at sex work was that Lauren was a lesbian. Whether Lauren was into men or into being loved by men, two “emotionally and intellectually separate concepts,” male validation was not a good reason to do sex work.

I had no idea what she was talking about. I said, “Lauren is a loving slut.”

I mean, could we blame her? All I knew was, I loved being loved by men. Lauren helped me be loved by men. And I loved Lauren. The other day, she’d taken blue, pockmarked gum out of her mouth with her red fingernails and dropped it in my cup of vodka.

“That’s exactly what she is,” Hunter said, “a slut who loves and loves.”

Maybe I love Lauren more than Hunter loves Lauren.

5.12......My boss at the library had somehow heard of Paul’s advances. He said he was going to have a sit down with Paul. Maybe schedule us apart. Paul was literally at the front desk within earshot. I crinkled with embarrassment.

I don’t want him to have a sit down with Paul. Sure Paul is odd. There he is purpling as he strains to hear. But now that he might not be there to tug my hair as I put up books on the shelf, I want him around. But as we talked, Greek professor came swaying in in his long dark coat!

“That guy,” my boss said.

“He’s all right,” I said.

My boss seemed disturbed.

“Well, don’t go having a sit down with every guy that talks to me,” I jested.

My boss said he was, in fact, considering scheduling me around Greek professor’s comings. My boss is sweet. He’s worried about turning thirty. He says “Listen,” and says nothing. He’s started to get into baking. He looks at me gently, wondering what I’m getting into. I am growing in his estimation. I enjoy this. He says, “What with all these men, May, you’re a scheduling nightmare.” How he cares for me, and also wants me, probably.

At the front desk, professor and I discuss Kerouac once more, his skin tanned and slumped over his eyes: “People love to disparage male cool of the Kerouacian Euro-American variety, but your generation suffers from the lack of style in the face of existential despair. You’re In the House, not On the Road.”

“I did kick you,” I say. “Was that cool? Was that male cool?”

He spreads his fingers over my open book. “Sure, I’ll give you that.”

I look down at his hand and feel warm. On the page, drugged, drunk Kerouac rocks back and forth, losing his mind over a pianist. The chords roll and thunder as Greek professor thrums his low bass mouth. Paul looks on with his tensed face. My balding, observant boss lurks in the back. All these men protecting me from each other. Me in a skirt on a cold stool. I’m learning how these things work, now.

5.13......Lauren taught me to train my gag reflex today. I still haven’t told her about Greek professor. We’re in the woods to harvest lesser celandine. It’s a bright, cold day with no wind, I’m wearing a long skirt over my bare legs with nothing but tiny underwear, and we’re pushing metal spoons up our mouths. “Take it slow,” she says. “Your throat needs to get used to it.” Lauren can take it much deeper than me. “It’s more mental than physical.” She puts her other hand around my spoon and pushes. Her tongue flattens for her own silver spoon. I want to do better. I push deeper. I’m dying to tell Lauren about Hunter’s little visit, but when she talks about Hunter, she looks off and her eyes start to love something far away. It’s nice to see her like this.

She tells me about the man with the horse balls with a delicious devilish smile. An older, moody, red-eyed guy with horse balls full of cum and nowhere to put it. Who is actually really nice, she says. He’s a professor, feels really bad about banging undergrads, which is why he pays so good . . . super guilty about it, he checks up on me to make sure he hasn’t traumatized me too much, or to ask if I need more money, it’s kind of endearing . . . .

A certain long-coated man comes to mind. I ask if the professor is Greek.

Wouldn’t you know. Lauren says he teaches Greek classics, then starts taking the spoon like a champ. I realized I’d never bothered to find out if the professor taught Greek or was from Greece. Is his name . . . yeah, you know him? Yeah, I know him. Isn’t he cute? He kind of sits here while I use him and he makes these weird sounds......

It seems, in fucking Lauren, the professor feels he has incurred a debt to all undergraduate women, and buys them groceries sometimes.

I ask how much she charges for the professor. A grand an hour like always, but he tips reaaaaaally well.

And this whole time I’ve been doing it with Paul for free.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

I don’t say anything.

She presses me. “You can tell me. Anything. You know that.”

Under the coat buttoned over the sweater zipped over the shirt is a body that Lauren can exchange for money. I want to feel happy for her, but my legs are cold. I’m getting a wedgie. And her endless sex monologuing is starting to annoy me.

I decide to drop it on her: “Hunter thinks you’re only doing sex work to chase male validation.”

Her mouth freezes in a void around her spoon. She’s wondering if I think she’s chasing male validation. I tell her I gotta go. Date with Paul.

“You hate that guy.”

“Chasing male validation, I guess.”

I leave her holding celandine tubers in her mittens. I feel a twinge of guilt but smother it with a text to Greek professor: when are your office hours?

5.14......I was playing with the hamster when I thought I heard something outside the door. When I went to investigate, it was my two roommates. They were just standing there, right outside the door. I asked if they needed something.

“That hamster does not look right,” one of them said.

“It looks seriously off,” the other said, looking past me to the hamster, to my clothes on the unmade bed, the cafeteria to-go boxes.

“Have you been coming in here to look at my hamster?”

They looked at one another. “It’s not your hamster,” one said.

“It’s not your room,” the other said.

“I have to be in here for the hamster,” I said. I closed the door on them. They do not understand my responsibility.

I think they are still out there.

5.15......All these days Lauren had been so proud, flush. I’d spent so long imagining her having good sex. I’d gone through pretty much every position imaginable.

So now she was at my door, her hair a mess, eyes prettily crying, and she came into my room—my roommate’s room—the hamster running his hands over his fur and sending us looks as Lauren fell onto the bed and started talking about how Hunter hated her, Hunter thought she was worthless, Lauren wasn’t getting as many inquiries as Hunter, or as many inquiries as she should be getting as a new girl on the scene, and how she knew it was a dry season for everyone, but she was anxious still because what if she wasn’t doing something right, should she reveal more in photos, was her tone wrong in emails, was she hot enough, loud enough, hot enough—she curdled on the bed as I watched from the chair and all I could think about was 1) her legs curling under her looked much like the position I’d imagined her in just before she burst in the door and 2) what a sobbing, throbbing, delusional mess my friend was becoming. At this point she righted herself and said, “The worst part is I’m getting inquiries. I am receiving lots of inquiries. I’m losing it. I am losing it.”

Through all this I was reaching my index finger into the cage and absently stroking the hamster’s tiny back. I said, “I’m not receiving any inquiries.”

I meant it as a joke, but it came off flat and petty. “Men are paying to have sex with you, Lauren.”

“Men would pay to have sex with a fucking hamster.”

“Oh, well, then you have nothing to worry about.”

Why was I so disgusted?

No doubt I was intensely jealous. Not of Lauren, but of the access these men had to Lauren. Something disgusting and also pleasurable about being a shitbag loser man. Pointing my limp loser dick.

There was Lauren, blank and hurt, not understanding, and I just kept on stroking the hamster.

5.16 Eating the last of Lauren’s enormous figs on the way to Greek professor’s office. Thinking about the soft click of Lauren’s hands unbuckling his pants. Thinking about that face men make: the grimace of holding back pleasure. His fingers fanned over books. A cash envelope slipped into her back pocket after.

“I wanted to see if there was space in your class next semester,” I say, wrapping my hand in my skirt.

The professor runs his hand through his greasy black hair and falls red-eyed smiling dumbly into his chaise. “You’re asking well after registration, there’s a long waitlist, it’s a popular seminar course . . . .”

“Please,” I say. “Can I?”

He mumbles on like that some more.

When he falls silent, I show him a picture of omurice. He takes my phone and stares numbly at it. “I made this with your groceries.”

“My groceries, no, those were your groceries.”

“I want to take your class.”

“There’s a process, you have to submit a case.” “I know about Lauren,” I say.

Oh, his blue glass eyes, like you can see all the way to the back of his head, her body turning in his head.

“She’s a really close friend. She told me all about you. I don’t know, I think it’s pretty cool. But like, I know all about it.”

“This is completely unacceptable.”

“If I take your class, I won’t tell anyone.”

He rubs his eyes and grimaces. We are probably imagining Lauren in all the same positions. “I’m sorry. I was being a pedant. You have a cancerous excess of style in the face of despair.” He rubs a sweaty palm over his mouth. He is still holding my phone with the omurice on it.

I lean over his desk. He has an open-mouthed, caffeinated breathing style. Looking into his crinkled, dead glass eyes, I reach down and swipe to the next picture on my phone. It’s a topless mirror selfie. It has the intended effect. He looks down and chuckles in horror and looks straight at the ceiling and swipes his hand over his mouth, then looks down at the picture again.

“If Lauren, why not me?” I say. “You don’t even have to pay me. Or, you know, you can pay me. If you want.”

I am so warm. I am close to him.

And then this guy just doesn’t do anything.

He blinks. He turns his head this way, then that.

When he raises his hand to my face, I lean to receive it.

In a sickly, gentle, paternal whisper, he says: “I am so sorry for you and Lauren. I’ve been careless. I’m very sorry for what you girls have to go through. You’re a very smart and attractive girl. But I won’t bother you at the library anymore. And I won’t be seeing Lauren again.” He presses the phone into my hand and stands. “I have a class now, but stay as long as you like.”

My eyes follow him up. The warmth in my body is turning into something like disease.

Here’s the killer: before he leaves his own office, he looks back at me and, with earnest, wholesome, nauseating care in his voice, says: “Let me know if you need anything at all.”

I stare at where he used to be. I feel hollowed out like after sex. Doesn’t make any sense.

But that’s all okay, because Lauren is coming over soon, and I’ll tell her about it, and it’ll be okay.

5.16......Lauren, shivering on my roommate’s bed. Hamster shivering in his cage. I walked the veins down her forearms into her hands. I told her everything that had happened in the professor’s office. I told her he had a change of heart. I added that he fucked me, tenderly, over his desk, and after he swore off undergrads. I was his last.

I didn’t have to lie, but I don’t know, the whole thing was sickening enough.

By now the hamster’s illness had spread to each blood cell, but he feasted happily on the last of the wineberries. Now Greek professor is gone, and Hunter will be gone I’m sure, and it’ll be how it used to be. Lauren and me. And for a while, the hamster too.