Bradley Library

We agree to meet in front of the library near the bifurcating chrome statue that students have christened the Silver Vagina. I know where I am going. Our group consists of cheerleader Amy and Amy who sits next to me in Cool Joe Thomas bio class also a sophomore football player named Chase who is only in the class one semester due to some credit snafu.
 

Chase is doing a project on teen pregnancy. I remember in class the first day when I interviewed the student behind me she told me she wanted to have a baby her junior year. Chas’s project is teen pregnancy and he is arguing for abstinence even though he can’t say the word abstinence without sounding like he is collecting on an overdue loan.

“Abstinence. That’s what I’m saying yo. Fucking abstinence, G.”

   
I am familiar with the library. Last year while preparing for the Young Columbus contest to Paris I walked to the library in the chalky snow by myself and researches the cities that I would visit. Last year seems like the beginning of time. I could not have fathomed getting second in State as an 8^th grader. I could not imagine being in Music Man and following in love with Anastasia Blake and  learning the French language while wading in the chlorine scent of Andrea in the front of the class. I could not imagine dawn Michelle and out intellectual discourses nor Depeche Mode nor all the other tunes I have drowned in over the past 12 months nor the awkwardness of high school nor the dictator ship of Cool Joe Thomas and Mrs. Stalin Peabody. Can’t imagine failing in cross-country or the kindness of Coach Ricca or the scent of Renae’s body next to me on a Friday night when the sun winks out of western consciousness and the world seems brand new.

The bulk of our group seems completely clueless how to research. I’ve gone to the library by myself on numerous occasions. Sometimes I go into the side room where they house the foreign Newspaper, pick up a copy Le Figaro and pretend my French is more advanced.

"We should probably start with the Readers Guide to Periodic literature.".Amy Garman says that that sounds like some kind of books club. I tell her that its magazines and that the cool thing about the Cullom-Davis library is that the periodicals are on the shelf on the second floor so that you don’t have to wait ten hours for some crummy old Librarian to  go downstairs and fetch you a copy

I am a pro at the stacks. I know how to use the card catalogue. I know how to ask  sweet ol’ Barb behind the Circulation desk for assistance if needed. Within fifteen minutes I have gathered info. I am telling my cohorts where to look for required texts on the upstairs floor.

I am over by the thick emerald books that are the periodical table of elements. I am combing for articles on Censorship. Before I know it two girls walk in. They are doing research. One of them has blonde hair and wearing a sweat shirt availing the extremely white knob of her shoulder blade. She is seated the same way Angie Lighthouse sits in Cool Joe Thomas Bio class with one leg under her bottom.

 

 

She looks familiar. I swear I have seen her before. 

I then realize it is her.

 The hair that looks like an atrophied halo. She is seated on the same bench I am seated on.  Her friend is opening green books as to what be the epistle reading in church every Sunday morning.  She gets up walks to the drinking fountain and fills up a plastic water bottle with Greek letters in Glitter on the side before returning to our shared carrel. She sits down directly next to me. She is wearing the sweatshirt with the embroidered M stitched in the center of her bosom. I don’t want her to notice me. Since it somehow occurs to me that I am always wearing my glasses while I am precipitously balancing on the side of my bed with the light off. I keep my glasses in the side pocket He hair is held by a scrunchie in an oblique pony tail.  She is wearing cheap white sneakers and gray sweat pants with visible panty lines.

 

I have seen her touch parts of her body with other parts of her body. I have seen her bite her lip while sucking on a right pointer finger like a pacifier while massaging the interior of her thighs with the tips of the opposing limb, branches of a tree in the fresh breath of spring, the petals of her fingers tips blossoming in wet strokes. Now she is next to me. I am apprehensive. She is tilting her head like she has seen me before. The college girls seem to have crazy hours. They leave after I am at school and don’t arrive back home until dark.





She turns to me and smiles. She tilts her head. I am positive it is her. She acts like she has never seen me before.

  
She then opens her lips.

“You seem rather studious.”   She has the most beautiful voice. Mellifluous. I have seen her enter her own body.

“Yeah, I’m here with my school. We are working on a debate project. My teacher wanted us to come to the library and do research.”

She is next to a friend with what looks like dyed purple hair. They seem to know exactly what they are doing. They seem to be cross-referencing titles.  They have notecards. She bites her lip and tilts her head. I am sure I am busted. I am sure she is going to say they you are the warty little goonie who has been staying up late at night peeping through the frame of his bedroom window trying to get an unalloyed breath of flesh from 10 feet away.

 

I have see her talking with her body. I have seen her communicating with organs of flesh of unknown to me. I have seen her close her eyes and bite her lips and enter her own body with the tips of her fingers.

She is smiling at me the way Mary MacQuellen smiles at me.

 

“Are you in high school?”

 

“Yeah.” I say.

 

“What year?” She inquires.

 

“I am Junior.” I lie.

 

She is smiling.

 

“When I was a junior in high school you wouldn’t have known the first thing to do in the college library.’

 

I don’t know what to say. I want to tell; her that somehow, even though Cool Joe Thomas and Mrs. Peabody seem intent on thwarting my academic development grades are important to me.  I want to tell her that I am trying to study hard sop I can somehow leave Peoria and go somewhere like England or France for college.  I want to tell; her that I am enraptured. That I can’t stop surreptitiously staring at the aesthetic complexities of the body through a vertical ruffle of plastic blinds on a nightly basis.

 

That she comes to me in dreams where I wake up stiff, a diploma of flesh anchored between my thighs.

 

 

I have seen her naked. I have seen her take her body places I never knew existed with the tips of her fingers. I have seen her flesh become a tarp of sensuality, Mt Vesuvius, I have seen every quantum atomic pasture of her unclothed flesh. I want to confess that I have seen her naked.  I want to tell her that I think about her the way I think about Renae Holiday. That I year to be inside her. That I yearn for the locker-room white of my thighs to be buckled around the off-tan equator of her torso in a pulsing snap of flesh to kick the spurs of my ankle into her lower back and to ride her somewhere destination unknown without leaving the contours of each others proximity. 

 

 

She is grabbing my hand. In a way she could be Dawn Michelle in a couple of years.

 

Her friend keeps on talking about picking up the big ol’ bottle of Tea Kee La.

“Well you seem quite studious,” She says again.  She is grab bing my hand.

 

She is squeezing my hand.  The girl I have been spying on all semester is squeezing my hand and smiling.

 For a second I don’t think she will let go. For a second I think she knows.

 

“All the best on your research.”

She smiles at me again the way Mary MacQuellen smiles at me.

Her friend is nodding. She gets up. Through the back of her sweatpants I can make out visible panty lines. My heart feels like it is trying to hatch through the loose tectonic change of my fifteen year old chest. I gather up my notecards and head back to the group of students who are in my class, students who I don’t really know all that well.

 

“Who was that?” Chase inquires.

“It’s my neighbor.” I say, without turning around.

“Yeah, It’s all about abstinence dog. I’m not gonna be one of those Dead beat dads. I’m not gonna have a kid my junior year of high school and get forced to work some low paying job and sacrifice my future and my career for some girl I just met. I’m telling you dog, it’s all about Abstinence.

 

Abstinence.