A Root in the Dark

I stare at the translation in front of me, wondering why the page is refusing to burst into flames. Quite ballsy, really. I’ve been giving it my best death stare for the better part of twenty minutes. It’s an award-winning death stare, too. Known to make first-years cry and grown men’s erections go instantly flaccid.

And yet.

This poem is still staring back at me, dangling my perfect GPA on a piece of fishing line. I could fuck this up for you, it taunts. If you wanna get freaky like that.

It sounds just like Professor Fernandez. His words from class earlier, as he handed back our quizzes, still sizzle. Ladies, I know you’d all rather be painting your nails, but you’ve really got to study harder next time. With that godawful leer toward the back of the room where Carrie Tilden sits, batting her thick eyelashes at him and hanging on his every word. I’d looked around the room for an ally, anyone to confirm my feeling that, no, that is not an okay thing to say to a classroom of adolescents. But with Libby sitting too far behind me for me to subtly catch her eye, I got nothing. Everyone just mooning over the young professor with the floppy dark hair and piercing blue eyes, no matter what comes out of his mouth.

What kind of thirtyish single man voluntarily cloisters himself at an all-girls boarding school in the mountains? Shouldn’t he be terrorizing twenty-two year old women with pickup lines at some dimly lit hipster bar in a college town? Impressing them with his blinding smile and Ph.D.?

If I could hex his dick into a rotting banana, I would. But as it is, magic isn’t real (item number four hundred and seven on the list of ways boarding school is Not Like Hogwarts), and I’ve still got this assignment. So, fine. Here we go. Line one.

Sucede que me cansó de ser hombre.

Dutifully, taking at least sixty percent more time than I need to form each letter into perfect cursive, I translate.

It’s happened that I grew tired of being a man.

I drop my fountain pen on the standard-issue dormitory desk, harder than necessary. What does this Neruda fucker have to be tired of being a man about? Poor baby, he’s tired of feeling safe wherever he goes? Or earning fair wages? Or having a sexual encounter end when he says it does, when he’s extracted his pleasure from it?

Fuck that. I’m tired of being a girl. No, scratch that as well. I’m tired of being a human. The capacity to think is exhausting. I want to be a goldfish.

I tilt my head forward and let my long curly hair form a private dressing room for my face. I wish my hair had my back like this all the time. Usually, all it does is get me unwanted attention. Thick, down to my butt, and raven-dark with reddish sheen, it’s always one of the first things people (mostly middle-aged women and boys who don’t know how to talk to girls like they’re human) comment on when they meet me. My mom’s friends, with their limp bleached blond, love to crow about how unique it is. Read: different; read: strange; read: making my mom feel interesting for having given birth to the offspring of a Turkish stranger she met in a pub while “touring the continent,” as she calls it, as though it were 1865.

When my mom came back from her tour pregnant with no intention of tracking down or marrying the father, it scandalized her uptight old-money family so thoroughly that it took Grandpa til I was two years old to hold me.

You’d think this might have been a turning point for Mom, that this act might have given her a taste for sticking to her guns and shown her what a monumental fascist asshole her father was. And led her to, I don’t know, move us to the States and send me to public school like the kids on TV? Stop asking me when I’m going to find a boyfriend? Something, anything, that lives up to this lone act of rebellion.

But no. It’s as if she used up all her “fuck you” by birthing me, and returned to being the nice obedient heiress she was supposed to be.

Or maybe I took all her “fuck you” with me on my way out the birth canal.

There’s a smart knock on my door and Libby pokes her head in.

“Q? You done the Spanish Lit homework yet?”

I tilt my head back over my desk chair so I’m looking at her upside down, staring at the floating head of dirty-blond frizz, unstylish wireframe glasses and sharp brown eyes in my doorway.

“If by done, you mean have I stared at it and willed it to dematerialize off this plane of existence, then yes.”

Libby snorts and shoulders her too-tall frame into my room, making herself at home on my bed. She fluffs the long pillow and arranges it just so against the white cinderblock wall. Her abandoned rowing career asserts itself in her every movement, screaming its presence from her built-up shoulders and narrow waist and long frog legs that seem always ready to strike. Don’t you want me anymore, the career shouts, desperate to be loved like it once was. We could’ve gone to the Olympics, you and I. We could’ve had something real.

Libby ignores it in favor of pulling a fruit-by-the-foot from her blazer pocket and chomping on one end with her big, square teeth. I love her for the sheer unattractiveness of the gesture. Unlike 99% of the girls here, Libby never cares about how she looks.

“So like,” she speaks out of one side of her mouth as the other continues to gnaw. “As far as I can tell, this dude is having, like, an existential moment where he wants to break down and cry but also brutally murder everyone.”

“Mmmhmm, and he’s sitting there whining about it like a small small man-baby.”

“I dunno, Q, did you read the rest? Some of this kind of reminds me of you.”

I drop my jaw in half-mock astonishment and throw the pillow I’d been hugging to my chest at her. She parries it easily with one arm and continues.

“Listen to this: ‘It would be great to go through the streets with a green knife

letting out yells until I died of the cold.’ Weren’t you just telling me last week that you wanted to walk slowly down the dorm hallway with a sharp nail file just to freak everyone out?”

I narrow one eye.

“I might have expressed interest in such an activity.”

“And this part: ‘I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark, insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep.’ and then ‘That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline.’ This dude is like, so overwhelmed with the inanity of daily life that he’s fantasizing all these wonderfuly creepy ways to fuck with people. To blow up his routine and what’s expected of him. Call me crazy, but that sounds like someone I know.”

I slide off the desk chair onto the floor, my long hair the last thing to go. My pride and joy. Your best feature, Mom always said. Never cut it. Boys prefer long hair.

“Libby?”

“Mmm?”

“What’s the point?”

“I just told you, numnuts. The dude wants to knock off a nun by smacking her in

the ear.”

“No, not of the poem. Like, what’s the point? We’re here at school, right? We’re

expected to graduate, get married in a big floofy ceremony, start a precociously successful career, raise Ivy-League children without taking a moment off work. What’s the point of it all? What if we just...didn’t? There have got to be other ways to live.”

She’s quiet for a moment, just the thoughtful chewing of her solidified corn syrup

product.

“Well. That all depends who you ask. My Dad says I’m here to study hard and practice hard and carry on the family athletic legacy.”

“You told him you quit crew yet?”

“Shh, don’t interrupt. You asked me for a monologue and damnit, you’re going to get one. And no, I haven’t. Where was I? Ah. If you ask my Mom, I’m here at this highly-ranked elite institution of classical learning so I can meet a guy to marry who’s going to make a lot of money and sire my pedigreed children.”

I snort. She continues.

“Professor Torres says we’re here to expand our minds. Gina down the hall thinks it’s to try every drug we possibly can.”

She pauses and tongues the end of her fruit-by-the-foot into her mouth.

“I think the point, my beautiful friend, is whatever the fuck you want it to be.”

I sit on that, staring at the roughly-finished ceiling, patched in a million places from generations of scholars before me trying dumb shit like putting a mirror on the ceiling.

“Libby, why’d you quit crew?”

She’s quiet for so long that I have to twist around to confirm that she hasn’t spontaneously developed adult-onset narcolepsy.

“I guess I needed to know that I could exist without it. That it wasn’t my whole being, that I have redeeming qualities other than being tall and strong and freakishly good at pulling an oar through water.”

“Yeah. How’s that going?”

She tilts her hand back and forth in front of her like a seesaw.

“Medium. Sometimes I think I made the biggest mistake of my life. I’m sure I’ll feel that way when I have to tell my Dad. And I do miss it. Being out on the water before dawn, that feeling of power, being in perfect sync with other humans.”

“So in other words, my personal hell.”

Libby chucks the pillow back at me. I dodge what would certainly have been a knockout blow.

We’re quiet for a moment. I sit up and gather my knees against my chest.

“Was it hard?” I ask.

“Yes and no. I’d been rowing since before I could walk. My whole family rows. My dad was always talking about ‘when you row in college, blah blah.’ It had really and truly never occurred to me that it was an option not to. One day, the idea just popped into my head: but what if you didn’t? You could write poetry. You could go to architecture school. You could actually do anything you wanted. It is, in fact, your life.” She takes a deep breath and looks down at me. “Once I had that idea in my head, I couldn’t get it out. I had to see what it would be like.”

I roll that around in my head.

“I guess when you think about it, how much stuff are we doing every day because we’ve just always done it, without ever thinking about why?” I ask the pockmarked ceiling.

“Homework.”

“Saying the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“Listening to teachers.”

“Doing stuff that looks good on college applications.”

“Studying for the SAT.”

“Eating.”

“Whoaaaaa, don’t get crazy there, Q. Food is amazing. We don’t need to know why.”

“You’re absolutely right. Mmmm, think about all the amazing food that’s out there that we don’t know exists?”

“Probably cool shit like peanut butter with sardines and chocolate covered ants.”

I snort, rolling over onto my belly so I can grin up at her. A thought hits me, still half-formed when it comes out my mouth.

“Hey, Libby?”

“Yes, buddy?”

“Will you cut my hair? Short?”

“You serious?”

“I think so. It’s never seemed like an option. Everyone always tells me it’s so pretty, and I’m supposed to want to be pretty. But like...I could just cut it.” My mom’s words to me before the first day of my first year here flash through my head. Take your hair down, there’s lots of cute boys here. You want to make an impression. “Do you think it’ll repel potential husbands?”

“Probably not. But it’ll look badass. We’re talking like, short short?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Let’s fucking do it. Get me scissors and a towel, STAT.”

I gather the supplies and settle in my desk chair with a towel around my shoulders before I can think about it too hard. I’ve had hair to my butt as long as I can remember. Since I was physically capable of growing it that long. Since boys tried to kiss me on the playground and grown men told my mom I was jailbait and she giggled. Since the old man in the park came too close and told me he wanted to take me back to his apartment and fuck me, because it’s right there on that next block, and he’s a war veteran, and doesn’t he deserve it?

I rub the ends of my hair between my fingers, crack a smile at the thought of it being gone. Libby’s low, excited voice booms above my head.

“Ready, chick?”

I make eye contact with her in the mirror, deep brown irises made of molten lava. I nod.

She makes the first snip.