“So you like poetry?” Simon asks, and Lenore, 20, switches knees her elbow is leaning on in a half-turn away, without looking up from her book.
“I find it repulsive,” she says. If the book could see, it would only glimpse one perfectly shaped but wrinkled brow over an eye almost glittering with the shifting colors of aging verdigris. Grey-green and blue-green, struck with bronze and copper, an unknown oil painter’s secret recipe—a bit of lead white, a hint of tin-yellow mixed in—peeking through a long stroke of hair painted with vine black. How Simon envies that book!
“Poetry?”
“Your continued interest in someone who has none for you.”
“What about poetry?” he presses, well-versed in her dismissals. “I don’t know that poet,” he motions to her book. “Maybe I’ll check that out when you return it.”
“This is not a conversation,” she says, closing Breaking Open and cradling it to her black-on-black layers of autumn warmth as she walks away. He turns to watch her leave, focusing on her back as their distance increases at her usual pace. She never hurries, he muses as her silhouette shrinks. She’s probably already forgotten this exchange. He commits ‘Muriel Rukeyser’ to memory before following her to Ms. Blake’s Biology lab. Unable to avoid having the same destination, he stops to retie his boots, propping them up one at a time on the low stone wall along the path to “Izay Cortazay” as the Isabella Cortese Science Building was known on campus. I guess I’ll take the long way around, he thinks, changing his trajectory towards a side entrance.
“Lenore, why dontcha like Simon?” asks Ellie, popping into view at the bottom of the stairwell— quite literally with a pop and a gentle flow and ebb of light, almost making her miss the last step. The scent of sugary syrup, like someone had opened a can of fruit cocktail, surrounds her.
Lenore scoops her close and ducks into the shadows of the spandrel, looking around to ensure Ellie was careful. “I don’t dislike or like him. I just don’t have any reason to talk to him.”
“But you don’t have any reason to not talk to him either, yeah?” says Ellie, pulling a pen out of the pocket of her overalls. She takes Lenore’s hand and, flipping it over, writes, “make some friends” in her palm. “There. Now you won’t forget. I’ll do it again in the morning after you wash up, don’t worry.”
“Thanks,” said the older girl, shooing her away as the sounds of classmates fill the stairwell. Ellie salutes and vanishes with another pop. Before the door closes on the level above her, Lenore hears someone ask, “Do you guys smell fruit?” Someone else’s “Dang girl, you are always hungry!” follows, and finally, the diminishing sounds of laughter let her relax.
Friends, huh? She’d never had any, even before Ellie and Noni showed up. Kids had always ignored her; rather, it was more like they would forget she was there. She was pretty sure even the teachers would’ve forgotten her name if not for attendance sheets. Blending into the background was, honestly, preferable to attention. That’s why Simon was so frustrating. Why was he so intent on including her in group projects and extracurricular activities in their younger years and now social gatherings and equally troubling: chit chat? She’s been avoiding him, but he always manages to notice when she’s near, even when others are startled to realize she’s around. If only it were his sister Amira’s notice instead. Not that it matters, she huffed. I do have a reason, Ellie. No one can ever know us.
“You ok, Lenore?” her troubling childhood acquaintance asks, leaning over the rail and looking down at her. “Drop something? Need help?”
Brows furrowed, she makes what Ellie calls her mean face but keeps it directed at the floor tiles. Think of the devil, huh? If only she could do one of Ellie’s tricks, invisibility would be the one she’d choose, for sure.
“No, I’m fine,” she straightened up and pushed through the door before he made it down the last flight.
“You never seem fine,” Simon said softly to no one in particular. The only response was an improbable bloom of sugary fragrances, candy apples, funnel cakes, and toasted marshmallows, and… he couldn’t place them all before the air returned to the industrial floor cleaner and stale cigarettes combination reinforced by decades of janitorial service workers and professors alike.
On the other side of town, a glossy black paw pushes out a window screen onto the portico roof over the Spin Cycle laundromat and bike repair shop’s rear door, followed by the rest of the cat known as Philip.
“Um, where ya headed?” asks Noni, suddenly next to him.
“Oh good, you’re here. Pop that back in for me? I don’t want to leave the joint open while I’m out.”
“Sure, but where is ‘out’?” she said, clicking the screen back into place, and testing it with a good nudge.
“Ask Ellie,” he said, dropping down to the sidewalk.
“Wait!”
“Later kid!” Once in the alley, Philip blended into the darkness and was gone.
“I thought we were friends, man,” Noni grumbles