Page 50 of Serpentine Valentine
—Jean-Paul Sartre,Nausea
Luna
Flora livedin a big house a few blocks away from campus with a few other girls from the field hockey team and two from the university soccer team. All this meant their Saturday night party to celebrate our team’s sixthundefeated game of the season was an absolute blowout.
The truth was, I didn’t really like parties. I much preferred to curl up at home with a good book, a mug of decaf coffee, and one of my sad girl playlists. But I was the captain of the field hockey team, and certain social obligations went along with that. Attending team parties was one of them.
My usual trick was to show up, stay for the early hours when people were too preoccupied with getting drunk themselves to question the clear liquid in my red Solo cup (water usually, or soda water with lime if I was feeling fancy), and then slip out the back when everyone was too busy reveling to notice my absence.
But tonight was different.
It’d been officially over a week since I’d last spoken to Lex.
It shouldn’t have mattered, really.
Breaking up with Pierce should have meant more, maybe the undefeated streak the team was on and the pressure I felt to keep that going, or the fact that my mom had called to grill me about my dating life before tonight’s game.
“How are things going with Pierce?” she’d asked in that cloyingly sweet voice that meant there was a wrong answer to her question.
“We broke up,” I’d said calmly, even knowing it was the wrong answer.
It was the truth, though. Pierce and I would always be friends, but even if nothing more happened with Lex, I felt better, more myself than I had in ages now that I wasn’t his girlfriend.
The pause that followed was so long I almost hung up just to avoid the drama.
But that was the funny thing about being a daughter. Even when you read all the signs correctly and know you’re in for a telling-off, you stick around to take it. Some kind of biological and emotional manipulation we’re all helpless to resist.
After she finished laying into me about how I could have let such a wonderful catch slip through my fingers, she asked the one question that had actually chilled me.
“Luna,” she said, soft and slow. “Do you have any classes with a girl named Alexandra Gorgon? Maybe you know her as Lex.”
“Yes,” I’d said, trying not to panic. “I thinkshe’s in my Tragedies class.”
“Avoid her, please,” Mom said, a simple order she expected me to obey. “She’s a bad apple.”
A bad apple.
It was such a stupid expression, almost archaic and juvenile.
The only way that Lex Gorgon resembled a bad fucking apple was that she was as tempting and taboo as forbidden fruit. My mother expected me, as God had done with Eve, to follow logic and avoid the obvious temptation.
She didn’t know how much I yearned to claim her sweet flesh for myself against all rationale. And how could she? I’d never in my life disobeyed her will, and I was twenty-one years old.
After I hung up, I moved through the motions of making my dinner before my game on autopilot. It was a state of mental numbness like meditation while I let my emotions germinate and grow in my gut.
So it wasn’t until I sat down at my lonely little table in the basement apartment I rented in my mom’s house eating butter chicken curry that it really hit me. I was eating butter chicken curry because it was what my mom made me every Saturday night growing up. In truth, I didn’t even reallylikeit, at least not as much as I enjoyed Vindaloo or Thai Panang.
I only made it because it was my routine and it was only my routine because it had been my mother’s.
I shoved the curry away so viciously, the bowl tipped over my placemat and spilled out onto some of the photographs I’d developed of Lex from the library. After I lost the curry in my stomach in the trash beneath the sink, I’d carefully cleaned up and sat heavily in my chair. My eyes fixed on one of the photos of Lex, her legs against the wall, skirt folded over like the peel of a banana to reveal the gold flesh of her legs, the snakes slithering the length of her left thigh.
I played field hockey because my mother had growing up. I went toAcheron because, of course, I would attend the school my mother was president of even if I’d always dreamt of going to Cambridge instead. I still lived in her damn basement because she’d convinced me it would be easiest, best. She could pop by whenever she had a moment, which wasn’t often because she was always working, but still.
She presided over my life like the gods on Mt. Olympus, ruling and interfering as she saw fit without any qualms about how it might affect me.
Get back together with Pierce if you know what’s good for you.
Avoid Lex.
