The Grammatitarian, Part II

Isabelle and I came here together from High School. While I smoked joints in the parking lot before school, she eagerly studied her algebra book, trying to hammer down isosceles triangles, as if she had nails made out of X’s and Y’s.

She was gorgeous and came from the wealthy family with a house on a hill. All the ways in which a high school girl can be perfect, all the numerous things you can imagine, she was. Skirts not so short so a guy can only picture dirty things, but skirts just short enough for him to imagine laying on a blanket in a wheat field somewhere, sunlight on her cheekbones, butterflies grazing her knee caps. Hair she twisted with her right index finger when she thought hard, and then upon realizing the answer she sought, was released into a spiraling curl down her freckle dotted shoulder. Wire frame glasses, a bit too large for her face, a bit too librarian for her looks, so that when she removed them, people tended to gasp silently in satisfaction, as if they were opening a present which had been placed before them at the beginning of December, and could only now open on Christmas Eve.

She let me lay with her in the wheat fields. I ran my fingers over her naked freckled shoulder. Someone had given her to me as a gift. But it was all under false pretenses. As all beautiful teenage girls must do, (all teenage girls who’ve never had a care or a worry in their entire lives) she invented a problem and had decided it was absolutely necessary for her survival to rebel from the tight grip her mommy and daddy clamped down on her with. Upon seeing me, smoking joints in the parking lot junior year, Isabelle knew I was the man of her dreams. The man of her dreams for a year or two, at least.

She could have done worse. She could have picked any other guy at the school. And he would have fallen so quick and so hard that he would have simply become her father incarnate. Any other guy would be clamping down within a week or two. Grasping for any extra Isabelle tidbit he could get. At least I knew she would never belong to me. At least I loved being alone too much to ever love her too much. And that fact, the fact that both Isabelle and I loved one another under certain unspoken parameters and borders, is the fact that made our love more true and more real than most other stories of teenage love I’ve seen in the movies or read in books.

While the rest of the kids only paid attention in physics class on paper airplane day and the rest of the time simply doodled phallic sketches on their desks, Isabelle and I were apt pupils when Mr. Moose described the laws of gravity. I underlined it in my notebook. She highlighted it in neon pink. All things that go up must come down.

The Grammatitarian, Part I

I really can’t stand this guy. This guy, I really can’t stand.

Me, I was jeans and t-shirts. Him, he was cardigans and khakis. Me, I was feet up on the chair. Him, he was perfect posture. Me, I was ivy league for four years. Him, he was ivy league born and bred. Me, I was unpopular. Him, he was the shit.

You could find him walking the quad in between classes. While everyone else crossed the lawn, arms furiously pumping at their sides, hurridly tromping down the blades of grass in a rush to make it to class on time, he stayed on the sidewalk. Somehow his path was always straight ahead. Somehow he’d never once been in a hurry.

My first week there, the whispering willows dangled down like witches fingers, inviting me into a cocoon of relaxation under their shade. Moving on, I ignored the trees and instead searched out the campus for a code of names and numbers. The buildings loomed about everywhere, all of them dressed in identical red brick and tiled roofs; materials mandated by the University a hundred years ago in order to maintain the prestigeousity, inside and out.

I followed no path on my quest. I was off-roading, moving forward, moving sideways, backtracking, possibly even levitating at times, in order to find Hamilton Hall 109. Halfway through the class, a class I had yet to track down, I gave into the willows and laid down, assuming the wind and the leaves were as good a guide as any, trying to utilize some transcendental tricks, and fell asleep there, two yards from Hamilton Hall, the most gorgeous building on the entire campus some would say, because it was camouflaged in ivy and tucked behind a veritable forest of healthy arbors.

I awoke to a tickling sunlight slipping down through the split seams of foliage. As I crawled out from beneath my willow’s fortress of branches, I was introduced to an unwelcomed number of curious glances, disapproving brow furrows, and even a few ivy-league-level scowls.

And there he was, as the crowd broke and the waves of legs pleated aside; him, like the sun, with student bodies acting as planets and moons and stars and invisible gasses and mysterious blackholes, rotating about him, scared of being burned. None of them ever dreaming there was unchartered territory. None of them having the foggiest idea there was perhaps even galaxies beyond their own…

The goal at Saint Eclaine’s was to never be diverted. No matter how many times your thoughts deviated in the direction of smacking that cute girl’s ass as she sashayed past you down the hall in her robe, fresh out of the shower, or taking a flask into your art history class because it would guarantee a better understanding and interpretation of the pieces being presented, or attempting to climb up the brick wall of the Dean’s office simply because it sounded like a good time and a good climb, the goal at this college, unlike so many others, was to resist the temptation and stay on the straight and narrow. What may have passed for bad-ass in my hometown would immediately become passé. Everyone seemed to recognize and accept it but me.