Page 14 of Serpentine Valentine
That gray-toned gaze haunted me for the rest of the class. I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at her even though she didn’t once seem to return the favor.
Why was I intrigued by the way she held the butt of her pen against that plush lower lip that was as pink as the edges of a lotus flower?
Why did I want to read whatever notes she scribbled in sloping, cramped cursive over the pages of her notebook? Why did I love that she still took notes in longhand like me, eschewing the modern use of computers?
She was beautiful enough, almost flagrantly sensual with all those curves and that pouty, expressive pink mouth, to catch the eye of anyone. When I looked around the room, hoping to find someone else staring,three guys sitting behind her stared at the back of her head covetously.
But I wasn’t like them. I didn’t want to sleep with her.
I wasn’t into women that way.
I just wanted…it was hard to say, but the closest I came to describing it while I sat beside her, nearly obsessing about her, was that I wanted to be in her orbit. Not close, if she wouldn’t allow it, but in the vicinity of her energy.
Being near her made me feel itchy but alive.
I looked down at my notebook, trying to wrench my attention away from her and back to the lecture only to find a square folded piece of paper on my desk. My eyes shot to Lex, but she was bent over her own work, writing furiously.
Carefully, I unfolded the note under the table and read that cramped cursive.
Take a picture. It’ll last longer.
Humiliation poured over my head like hot water. I wanted to look at her, to see if she was witnessing my shame, but I was too furious and afraid. She’d sensed my strange fascination and was belittling me for it.
It made it worse to know I wasn’t the first one to find her captivating, that I was one in a long line of gazers to make her into an object of longing.
I wanted to crumple the paper, tear it to shreds, and swallow it. A juvenile way of erasing its existence.
Instead, I listened to Professor Gibson quote fromHamlet. “‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Word without thoughts never to heaven go.’”
Lex only had the power to make me feel small if I let her.
So I wouldn’t.
I scrawled in my loose script:
Fine. Meet me in the library tonight on the second floor near the Ancient Greek section. I’ll bring my camera.
I dropped the note into her lap without looking at her, then immediately turned back to my notetaking.
She hadn’t returned it by the time class ended, and I was surprised by the bitter swell of disappointment that rose to the back of my throat. When I’d collected my things, Lex already gone in a swirl of black out the doors, I spotted the note left on her tabletop.
My fingers were damp with sweat as I unfolded it.
I’ll be the girl in black.
“The Gods have crazed you.”
––Homer,The Odyssey
Lex
I couldn’t rememberthe first time I saw Luna Pallas. She was everywhere on campus. Carving up the field hockey pitch behind Radcliffe House in a little blue pleated skirt, an orange ball glued to the end of her stick. Reading in the library amid stacks of books and discarded coffee cups like she had to match her study intake with caffeine intake. In my classes, because she was taking Classics as a minor and lit as a major and she was one of the try-hards who sat in the front row. Like me.
Only, she wasn’t like me. Luna Pallas was the “It” girl on campus and not only because her mother was the beloved president. It was because of the way she looked, her skills on the varsity team, and the way her laughter bubbled over like the softly flowing water in the river bed that cut through campus. She had presence. Not bold, not brassy like gold, but soft and alluring like moonlight catching your eye in the dark night.
She was everywhere, but I always ignored her. She was a creatureof the light and day, of sports matches and brunch dates with friends, of selfies and TikToks. And I was…not. It wasn’t that I felt inferior—quite the opposite, it was that she held no interest for me.
Until that day in the Mathieson Library.
