The Rules of Attraction (Page 16)

“No, I don’t, Sean,” she says. “I have to pick up Rupert anyway.” She’s still smiling.

The bitch. There’s a bug, a moth in her beer. She doesn’t see it. I don’t say anything.

“Lend me a couple bucks,” I ask her.

“I don’t have my purse with me,” she says.

“Right,” I say.

“Oh, Sean. You’re still the same,” she says, not being mean, but it makes me want to hit her (no, f**k her, then hit her). “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

I want her to drink that bug. Where did Candice go, damnit? I look back at Roxanne, who’s still got that goddamned smile, thinking to herself, happy that I asked her, happier that she has the power to say no. I look at her and am genuinely repulsed.

“Do you have any morphine?” I ask her.

“Why?” she asks, spotting the bug, pouring the beer out onto the lawn.

“Take some. You look like you could use it,” I tell her, walking away.

“I have something for you to pick up, sweetheart,” is the last clear thing I hear.

My line was neither quick or effective and I cannot believe I actually saw that girl for a while. It was when she started dealing coke so she could lose weight. It had worked, sort of. I think she still has a fat ass, and can look dumpy, and has dried-out black hair and writes awful poetry and I’m pissed off that I let her get into that position of denying me. I go back to my room and slam the door a couple of times. Rommate’s gone, snap on the radio. I pace. “Wild Horses” comes on the local station. I flick the tuner. “Let It Be” is on the next station. On the next is “Ashes to Ashes,” then some Springsteen dirge, then Sting crooning “Every Breath You Take,” and then when I turn it back to the local station, ass**le D.J. announces he’s going to play all four sides of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” I don’t know what comes over me but I pick the receiver up and hurl it against the closet door, but it doesn’t break and I’m grateful even if it is a cheap stereo. I kick it, then grab a box of tapes, unwind one I don’t like and smash it with my boot heel. Then I take a crate of singles I own and make sure I have them on tape before I snap them all into two, then, if possible, into four. I kick at the walls on roommate’s side and then break a doorknob on the closet door. Then I go back to the party.

LAUREN Me and Judy. Stretching canvas. My studio. Judy just did her nails so she is not really, as one says, into it. So we stop. Another Friday night. She brought two Beck’s over and some pot. I like Judy. I do not like mother. Mother called earlier. After dinner. It depressed me so completely that I could only walk around in a stupor and smoke cigarettes until I came down to the studio. My mother had nothing to say to me. My mother had no pressing information to pass on to me. My mother was watching movies on the VCR. My mother is crazy. I asked her about the magazine (she runs it), about my sister at R.I.S.D., about finally (big mistake) my father. She said she didn’t hear me. I did not ask her again. Then she mentioned that Joana (father’s new girlfriend) is only twenty-five. And since I didn’t groan or throw up or try to kill myself, she said that if I approve of what he’s doing why don’t I just stay with him over Christmas. By that time the call had already degenerated so completely I told her that I had a class to go to at midnight and hung up and went to the studio and looked at all the shit, the completely shitty shit I’d been doing all term. I was supposed to be doing the posters for the Shepard play but the dyke who was directing it really bothers me, so maybe I’ll give her one of these unfinished pieces of shit. I cry out, “It’s all shit! Judy look at this. It’s shit!”

“No, it’s not.” But she’s not looking.

“You’re not looking. Oh god.” I open my second pack of the day and it’s not even eleven. Last thing I have to worry about is lung or breast cancer. Thank god I’m not on the Pill.

“I’m changing majors,” I say. Look at what I’ve done. Jackson Pollock freed the line, remember that, someone told me in Advanced Painting yesterday. How can I free this shit? I wonder. I stand back from the unfinished canvas. I realize that I would rather spend my money on drugs than on art supplies. “I’m changing my major. Are you listening?”

“Again?” Judy says, all concentration on rolling another joint. She laughs.

“Again? Did you have to say that?”

“Don’t make me laugh or else I can’t do this.”

“This is ridiculous,” I say.