.........

I speak with Dawn for three hours. She is telling me about Speech. She is talking about movies and music she is into. She tells me that she is trying to quit smoking. She tells me that she also drinks too much coffee. For three days, after her parents kicked her out, she lived in her station wagon under a bridge on Big Hollow Road.

I want to ask her if she’s gone out and gotten drunk and given any more blowjobs only I refrain.

She inquires about my life. I want to tell her about how lonely I feel inside Manual all the time. I tell her about my cross-country injury. I tell her about running every day and then experiencing pain and not being able to do the one thing I felt destined to achieve. I tell her about failure. I allude to the loneliness I feel inside Mrs. Peabody’s and Cool Joe Thomas’s classroom.

I tell her about Renae. I tell her about my first official girlfriend whose lips loafed above my chin all last night. 

“She’s in speech. She was in a meet this morning at Bradley.”

Dawn says she was there. As I describe her Dawn says that she thinks she knows who I am talking about.

 Yeah, really pretty girl. Blonde hair.  Forehead the size of an imax movie screen because when she was a little girl her mom always put her hair in a pony tail so tight that it altered the formation of her skull more or less.”

Dawn is quiet.  I wonder if I should meet her again. I wonder if we could go out and it would be almost like old times last summer when we seemed to have an infinite conversation.  Next door a light a switched on. The window is a yawn, an illuminated advent calendar.  There is movement. I can feel the body next door pause.  I have successfully managed to watch the college girl who is renting the house next door with several friends undress three times.  Every time the light flicks into cognizance I am inexplicably reeled into the direction of the window. My vision all but can abstain. I balance on the side of my bed and the desk my father got me from school with eh superheroesque Z in the center. I turn the light off. Sometimes I feel like a sniper. I wait for hours. I turn the music down. The lights are off. Often I will tell my parents that I am going to sleep an hour early because of my leg and I stay up my vision pasted to the white frame, the latitudinal slashes availing paragraphs of light, her body skirting back and forth. She is  the same girl I watched coming out of the bathroom a month ago, still zipping up the jigsaw of her jeans before she rattled her torso in front of the full length mirror for more than an hour dancing to the invisible tempo to music. I turn the lights off in my room and peer through the blinds, watching the skinny girl with her hail tied up in a knob on the top of her head continue to write.

 Dawn is talking about going to a Bill Clinton rally the night he won even though she was living in her car at the time.

 The girl shuffles back and forth in front of the window. Finally I see her. Again she is writing. She is wearing glasses. Her hair is spooled into a knob on the top of her head by what looks like chopsticks.  There are several books heaped on her bed. She is writing furiously. She is attacking the pages. Even from this position of unalloyed espial I can see that she is writing with intent.  I can see that she is tattooing the page. I still have Dawn on the phone.

At one o’clock in the morning I tell Dawn I need to go

She is writing. Again I am lost inside her thoughts. Again I can feel loops of her cursive sentences, I can feel myself being welded and stung into the diary in each sentence.  It is like she is frantically pressing some button to an palace located inside her only she is not raising her finger and the button keeps jamming.

She is wearing the same Sweat pants and sweat shirt she wore with the embroidered M in the center which I can only intuit are her pajamas and the next thing I know she has ripped off her side ponty tail and flipped off her glassed. In a whisper she is yanking her sweatpants down near her ankles. Her panties are manacled around the slightly cinnamon flavored prominent caps of her knees.

She is naked from the waist down. Her legs form what looks like a Gaudi cathedral or perhaps a flower.  She licks her  three middle fingers as if she is in a commercial. She then places her fingers in a flickering bouquet staccato between her loins. It looks like she is playing the harp or trying to reach certain clefs on a vicarious stringed instrument. Her eyelids are closed the entire time. She licks the opposite hand and begins to touch the opposite nipple. I am not certain exactly what I am seeing. The entirety of her physical body is tittering. Her legs are kicked out like a field goal post. She keeps touching the center of her body, her panties manacled around the protruding bone of her left ankle like a white flag cosigning hormonal capitulation to the feeling of unknown ecstasy entering her every solitary pore.  Somehow while she is touching herself I swear every time she bats her eyes it looks like Dawn Michelle. Her legs are spread apart. Everything below my navel is an erupting obelisk. I can’t move. I am paralyzed. Whatever she is doing to her body she is voluntarily taking myself with her.

She holds up one finger little light of mine style, licking it once. The finger then performs a kamikaze swan dive into the center of her loins.

Her finger goes in only a tenth of and inch at first but somehow her entire body snaps like a venus flytrap. She wields her finger out again, removing a sword from fairytale slab of granite before plowing it back between her things. She is biting her lip. It looks like the center of her eyes have taken an elevator through  her skull. She is fucking herself. She is p-laying her own body in a time-signature known only to her. She is performing arias and sonnets. The libretto of the lonely. She bites her lips before tittering uncontrollably. Her teeth gnashed into the side of her mouth, she is ready to release something in her limbs resemble and overturned chandelier and the next second her head is clanging against the mattress, her finger pressed in deeper, she is screaming, she is levitating, she is going to somewhere where only she can take herself.

She is setting herself free.

 Her entire body seems to kick into four different directions. She is breathing hard. She is sweating.  Sweat trickles off her forehead and off the drip of her nose in quarter notes and in tears. She has taken three finger and, in an almost Boy Scout pledge, is sucking on all three of them at once, as if it is a pitch harmonica for a cappella foursome. She is sweating. She won’t calm down. She is no longer touching herself. From my periphery it appears she is whimpering.

Then she turns. She is on all fours. Although the lights are off in my bedroom. Although I am still balancing on the side of my bed certain that the cast of my shadow is not visible She is looking at me. The jam of her own body drying around the inverted elevator button of her naval. She is looking at me reclining on elbows and kneecaps. Maybe she is just staring and her own reflection. It seems that she knows I have been watching her for the last three months. It seems that she knows I can’t help but somehow be magnetically reeled into the illuminated square of her bedroom window every night, hoping that she will wriggle out of her attire.

She is smiling. Perhaps she is seeing only her translucent reflection. She is smiling and as she gropes both her breasts giving them hard squeeze. She is feral. She is naked. She looks as if she needs to be caged and tamed.

It is like she is continually sticking her finger into a jamming elevator button, pressing the button until her moist dactyl as a whole is completely swallowed. She is sucking on three fingers. She is running the center of her body with her opposed hand as if it is maligned and bruised.

She  gets up. Sweat is on her body. I am half expecting her to slip back into the white panties but instead she kicks them off as if throwing a challenge flag at a football game. She then rises and stretches.

Her body is something brand new.

                                                   ***

“We saw it last night,” Dawn Michelle states again.

I tell her that I saw the video on late night cable. I tell her that the video was weird especially the end.

“Don’t you see it. That’s when she transforms into a Vampire. That’s when she become the one entity that she has somehow sworn to herself never to become.”

I have just spent last night making out with Renae Holiday.

“You don’t thin it’s beautiful?” Dawn Michelle queries again.

“Yes” I tell her looking down, with my glasses still off, “I think it is beautiful indeed

                                                      ***

 She walks up to her desk and sits down. She takes what looks like a razor. From my asked perspective it looks like she is either carving her initials into the desk with a separated blade of a razor or about ready to commit suicide. I remove my hand out from the center of my pants. For a moment I think I am watching her kill her self. For a moment I think she is going to strike south on the whites of her wrist. I think about how it is somehow my civic duty to call 9-11, To have a suicide prevention team arrive. To say I had just woken up in the middle of the night and heard scream and when I peered out my window there was what looked like blood everywhere in the window next door.

I then wonder if the cops will ask if I was spying on her. If I knew she was naked when before or after I noted the blood.

On her dresser she appears to be playing a piano, pressing the same key over and over. It then looks like she is dicing something. She holds up something to her nose and, with the finger that was previously inside her body, hushes close the opposing nostril. I am fifteen years of age. I know nothing about cocaine and narcotics except, according the DARE pledge I signed in 5^th grade, I would never use or associated anyone associated with the drug. From my periphery it looks like she has allergies.

She then goes back to her bed. She opens up her mattress like the lid to a coffin. She then unearths something that looks sort of like a track and field relay baton.

Again she looks in the window facing my direction. Again I wonder if she sees me surreptitiously peeking through the blinds.

Before I know it she is attacking herself, she is jousting her torso, she is lancing the tip of the baton below her naval. She is screaming out again. She is rocking herself. Her lips are moving. It’s pretty clear from ten feet away that she is stammering out someone’s name.

Then I hear it.

Through the rackety trails of the late November wind, I hear her screaming. I hear the phrase she is saying. She is screaming out the name of the Lord. She is uttering the name of the only monotheistic deity I have ever known.

I walk away, in  reverse from the gnawing blinds.

I get down on both knees and pray for forgiveness.

I pray so hard my eyes squeeze into tears.