Homecoming Queen, page 11
Delicate bubbles surfaced and she and her fish friends followed, spiraling upward, her face streaked in sunlight, the outer rays illuminating her followers. Together they formed a giant, dangling bangle with her turquoise spandex swimsuit at the center, surrounded by bright fish baubles, all shimmering with movement.
She reached the surface and took another deep breath. Her aquatic friends fanned patiently below the surface. The other women still stood on the dock looking despairingly at her. Did they think she was crazy? It didn’t matter anymore. They were insane for not enjoying this wonderland of water.
But wait. She twirled while still treading water, jerking toward the horizon, and all eyes turned, including the bulging fish eyes below the wet glaze. What was that noise? That horrible noise intruding from - screeching, screaming from - the ship, Lorna Doona. The piercing siren wouldn’t stop. Her fish friends scampered away to the safety and silence of subaqueousness.
BUZZ! stop. BUZZ! stop. BUZZ! stop. BUZZ!
Who in hell was at her apartment door at ... seven a.m.? Yes, her swollen, squinting eyes could see that the little hand of the clock on the box beside her bed was on the seven and the big hand was near the twelve. Her brain rummaged through its mangled cells to put meaning to that and came up with seven in the morning. Someone was ringing the buzzer at their door.
She and Priscilla hadn’t come home from Falsetta’s until after one in the morning. She was exhausted and still had a knot in her stomach from eating so much gooey pizza.
Stumbling as she got up, her nude body shivered against the chill. She didn’t usually sleep naked but hadn’t done laundry in so long she hadn’t been able to find anything clean to wear to bed, nor had she been able to conjure up enough energy to care. She went in search of her bathrobe.
“Where is that darned thing?” She raked through the pile of clothes at the foot of her twin bed. Priscilla flopped over on her own little bed and realized that Llayne was already up to stop the awful clamor that interrupted her sleep. Waving her hand in a “go, stop it” gesture, she rolled over and pulled the covers over her head. Her eyes never opened beyond a minuscule slit.
Llayne shuffled out of the bedroom. Finding her robe under two towels hanging on the hook on the back of the bathroom door, she covered her body, fumbling with the tie belt as she went into the living room.
A relentless finger continued to push the shrill buzzer.
It was incredible how many bits and pieces of rational and irrational thoughts tumbled around, colliding in her mushy gray matter as she staggered toward the door. Maybe their neighbor, Sally, hadn’t come home last night, forgot her key, and couldn’t rouse her roommate.
The fish dream. She wondered what that Dr. Leibowitz, that man so stuck on analysis, would think of it. The other women: the other contestants in the homecoming election, no doubt. The water: the unknown. Or was that too simple? Not Freudian enough? Well, that’s what it seemed like. The women insinuating she was crazy. Was she? Diving in, being scared, then learning that sharks and monsters weren’t there, only friendly little fish. Were they the vets and the hippies? Men in general? Was her dream trying to tell her that not all men are scary like Walton, that she didn’t have to be afraid of them all? Who knew?
And the siren from the ship on the horizon, the buzzer still blasting: BUZZ! Stop. BU....
The last thought to flash through her mind as she grabbed the doorknob was that this would be him, that Lex, come to apologize for being such a jerk last night. Well, to hell with him. No apologies accepted. She threw open the door.
There he was. Harold Hackleberry? Harold Hackleberry!
Had she been more alert, her defenses wouldn’t have been down. But as it was, she let him trample right past her into the apartment. Standing once again in the middle of her living room, hands on thin hips, he glared at her in disgust.
“Well!” he snapped. “Wouldn’t all the guys on campus who are so in love with you like to see you now? Hardly sexy, I’d say. Not even decent, for that matter. You look like shit.”
“You always look like shit, Harold. What do you want?” She was too tired to muster up too much ire, but he encouraged her mightily.
“You have something that doesn’t belong to you,” he announced.
“I’m sure, Harold, you’ve never had anything that doesn’t belong to you.” She felt smug with what seemed at that hour like great wit.
His hair bristled. His eyes bugged. His head bolted. “I want the crown. You! You don’t deserve to keep that crown. Last night I did a little digging and found out all about you, you disgusting slut.”
She panicked. Somehow he’d found out about her baby.
“You dated a professor last year,” he declared. “Students aren’t supposed to date faculty members. Oh, you thought you were so secretive, but lots of people knew. You slept with a professor.”
Her exhausted brain relaxed. He only thought she’d been a stripper, was a whore, and boffed a prof. He didn’t know about her pregnancy. It would have destroyed her to have this degenerate jerk degrade something as sacred as her child.
He bellowed, “You’re a slut, not worthy of our crown. I want it back. Where is it?”
“What in hell are you talking about? It’s mine.” Her shaken senses told her she needed to wake up to handle this. She blinked and shook her head. “You know good and well they buy a new crown every year and the queen always keeps it. It’s mine.”
That quasi-expensive rhinestone crown had never occupied a moment of serious thought in her mind, but now it was important to possess it because this dork didn’t want her to have it.
But, as if given directions by satellite telecommunication from above, Harold turned his waxy little head and looked straight at the morbid candle skull on the shelf over the TV, upon which sat askew the infamous crown. His crooked glasses almost popped off his head when he spied it, up there above them on flagrant display. For the first time that she’d ever seen, he ripped his spectacles from his face, causing one wire temple to bend, and he marched to the shelves for closer inspection with popping bare eyes. The empty, paraffin eye sockets gawked back.
It struck Llayne that the shape of Harold’s head and that of the skull were the same. Even the shade of dull gray matched.
With a gasp, he grabbed the shiny royal token and clutched it, along with his glasses, to his skinny, concave chest.
“How dare you?” he hissed. “You heathen!”
Llayne reached in and grappled for the crown. She almost got it away, too, but he wrestled it away. Back and forth it went from his chest to hers as both held on like children fighting for a toy, shouting, “mine!,” “no, mine!” First he pulled harder, then she did, their bramble of words indecipherable in the maelstrom.
But suddenly Harold stopped and stood stock still. His jaw dropped open and his hands, though gripping, stopped yanking. His dilated eyes moved down from Llayne’s face to her body. She followed his gaze and looked down at herself.
Nude. The hastily tied belt had fallen away and her robe was open, a pink frame displaying a slit of the incarnadine, buck-naked body beneath. His eyes skimmed down to the light brown patch of hair that shone, begging, he imagined, to be touched.
“Oh!” she screamed, letting go of the crown.
She grabbed clumsily for cloth, any cloth, to cover herself. Snatching up the belt from the floor, she wrapped it desperately around her waist, tying it tight over a crooked, mashed-up robe. She clutched one hand to the collar, securing its closure, the other hand reflexively held closed the area over her crotch. It was so humiliating. Having this little twerp lay his seedy eyes on her bare body suddenly felt symbolic of her entire life - raw, exposed, unprotected. She felt lightheaded as a red hot flush of embarrassment assaulted every inch of her skin.
When she looked back up, a dribble of drool ran down Harold’s chin. He blinked his unbelieving eyes and his head shook with a nervous twitch, as if waking from a sinful fantasy - the kind respectable men didn’t have.
If Llayne would’ve had enough presence of mind to guess that Harold had never before been that close to a female’s exposed body, she would’ve been right.
He sought escape. He couldn’t let her, this savage, wanton creature, see the messy little bulge in his nicely pressed slacks. Reflexively, he held the crown over his groin, dropping his glasses in the process. A confused step to the side placed his foot directly over the spectacles and a hundred pieces of glass ground into the carpet.
“Oh.” He looked down at the litter. “Oooh!” He looked back at Llayne. “You disgusting whore.” He stumbled backward over the arm of the chair and finally made his way out the door, the rhinestone crown framing his little hard-on.
In his haste he left the door open. Llayne shut the door, took a whisk broom and dust pan out of the kitchenette closet, and cleaned up the broken glass.
Priscilla came out of the bedroom, yawning as she scratched her hinder through her flannel nightgown. “What was all the racket? It woke me up.”
“Harold was here.”
“Harold? That dinky little a-hole? What’d he want?”
“Oh, nothing. Well, yes, it was. He took my crown back. Men. They’re always taking, taking, taking.”
“What? No! We have to get it back.”
Llayne threw the broom down in the middle of the floor, bolstered by her friend’s support. “Yes, we do. But how?”
Priscilla’s face scrunched up as she stared at the skull candle, considering “how.” “I know!” she yelped, as if an idea had just zapped from the skull into her brain.
“What?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly what, but Mack and the guys will.”
“Mack? Oh no, we can’t bother him. Not this morning.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you know, he had a date last night and will probably still be busy, or something.”
“You mean we might catch him in the rack with a dame? From what I’ve seen of Mack, he won’t care. He hates Harold enough to leave his libido behind long enough to get even. Come on. Let’s get dressed.”
Llayne wasn’t convinced this was the best way to go about recapturing her kidnapped crown, but she didn’t want to let Harold’s trail get too cold. Hurriedly they dressed, dashed out to the Beetle, and sped to Mack’s and Neckbreaker’s apartment building. They weren’t sure which apartment it was, but names were listed on the mailboxes in the foyer, so they ran up the stairs and quickly found the right one. Priscilla knocked on the door.
Neckbreaker hollered from inside, “It’s open. Come on in.”
The smell of strong coffee stroked their nostrils the moment they opened the door. Neckbreaker, fully clothed, sat at a table reading a newspaper and sipping coffee. The scene was so ordinary that both women stopped and stared. In turn, he was clearly flabbergasted and genuinely delighted by the unexpected visitors.
When they relayed their tale of woe he went down a short hallway and knocked on a bedroom door, giving Llayne time to study the place. It was a typical apartment with one living area but unlike most college kids’ residences, this one had decent furniture and lots of electronic equipment - a television, a stereo, a tape deck. Masculine and uncluttered, it was the home of grown-ups. Llayne was surprised at how neat it was.
When Neckbreaker hollered through the bedroom door, telling Mack what was going on, the door flew open and Mack, in khaki shorts, barreled out into the living room. The sight of his muscular, lean, half-bare body, and tantalizing, helter-skelter hair caused Llayne to falter and step backward. She grabbed the edge of the table for support.
That was when the woman, wrapped in a sheet, stepped part-way out of the bedroom into the hall. Llayne had to cock her head to get a gander and was pretty sure it was a nurse from the student health center. Her long, black hair cascaded over her exposed shoulders and her leg stuck out of the sheet. “Mack,” she cooed, “where’re you going? Oh, hi,” she said sweetly to the intruders.
“Hi,” Llayne and Priscilla both managed to mumble, embarrassed.
“I’ll be a minute,” Mack told her, running his fingers through his hair as he smiled at his visitors.
The woman disappeared and Llayne’s stomach roiled at the thought of what had been going on behind that door.
“So,” Mack said after they relayed their story, “we have to get your crown back. Neckbreaker, call a couple of the guys. We’ll need four of us for this mission. The girls here will make six. That’ll be just right.”
Neckbreaker obeyed the command and started dialing the phone. Llayne and Priscilla sat politely on the couch while Mack went back to the bedroom to dress. Llayne pictured that woman trying to make him stay, nibbling at his mouth and oh so much more.
Mack came right back out, dressed, and they were on their way. After picking up two other veterans, who rode with Neckbreaker in the bed of Mack’s red Chevy truck, they easily found Harold Hackleberry sitting on the steps of his fraternity house. Lost in deep thought, casually twirling the crown in his hand, he didn’t notice the truck stop in front of the house next door. That was his downfall.
By the time the men got to him, he had no escape. Neckbreaker easily picked him up and carried him, kicking and screaming, to the back of the truck. Mack grabbed the crown and tossed it to Llayne, who tucked it into her arms protectively. A few of Harold’s fraternity brothers looked out of their windows to check out the commotion but upon realizing it was Harold, they looked away. Nobody cared.
The military men had no intention of doing permanent physical damage to their opponent. It would’ve been easy, if they wanted to, but they just wanted to embarrass him. And that they did. Driving to a wooded area less than a mile away, the men stripped him except for his black socks, and simply drove away with his clothes as Harold hysterically, hopelessly, screamed obscenities.
Llayne and Priscilla looked back as Mack drove them out of the woods and caught a glimpse of a naked Harold as he darted behind a tree.
“Huh,” Priscilla harrumphed. “That looked like a penis, only smaller.”
Two hours later when he gave up and admitted to himself that no one was coming to rescue him, Harold hid behind garages and bushes to get home. He cursed the fall weather all the way, because it caused every clothesline to be bare. He never would’ve guessed that Mack had considered the wooded spot carefully, surmising that if Harold had any survivalist skills at all, which was questionable, he would be able figure out how to get home undetected.
Harold did make it home okay, with only a few girls catching a glance at his scrawny butt as he dashed into bushes, but they dismissed him as another stupid streaker. Men running - streaking - naked across campus had become a thing, so common nobody paid much attention anymore.
But for Harold, it was arriving home that added insult to injury. When he went slinking through the back door of his fraternity house and grabbed a kitchen towel to wrap around his waist, a fraternity brother sauntered into the kitchen and, totally nonplussed at finding his brother nude except for a tiny piece of terry cloth, said, “Hey, Hackleberry. You don’t need a towel that big, do you?” The insult scalded Harold’s ears and chapped his bare little ass.
His humiliation complete, he holed up in his room for hours while deciding that after graduation the coming spring, he’d do his grad work at the University of Michigan where cultured, respectable people got their degrees. He couldn’t take this heathen tribal camp any longer.
The next day no one took credit for the blue boxer shorts with the white polka dots that appeared at the top of the campus flagpole.
CHAPTER 14
Restlessly, Llayne tried to watch television. The tin foil kept falling off the rabbit-ear antennas, though, causing Mary Tyler Moore, playing single career woman Mary Richards who was “going to make it after all,” to skitter across the tiny black-and-white screen. The real-life, single, non-career woman gave up and turned it off, picked up her book, and stretched out on the couch to read. But after a few pages of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, she put it down. What was the point? She hadn’t had sex in almost two years and apparently would never have it again.
In the couple of months since homecoming, her life had become dull, dull, dull. She glared off into space as the tune Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head inexplicably repeated itself over and over in her head. Unfortunately, she heard it in her own untrained voice and not the deep, mellow one of B.J. Thomas, who sang the movie theme song for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. She supposed she connected the song to Mack because he reminded her of Butch in the movie.
Looking out the double glass doors didn’t help, with its nighttime panoramic view of the tires of the cars in the parking lot. She wondered if she’d spend the rest of her life looking at tires, going nowhere.
Priscilla blew through the front door and dumped her books on the kitchenette counter. “That geology class is the pits.” She shucked her jacket, lit a cigarette, and fell into the chair. “What a drag. Never should’ve taken an evening class. I fall asleep every time. And we’ve got a research paper due by Christmas break next week. I’ve got so much homework I don’t know if I should spit or wind my watch. Have to finish that painting, too.” She pointed to a canvas sitting on the kitchenette counter, with an outline of an embracing nude couple.
“What you doin’?” she changed the subject.
“Oh, just getting ready for my exciting date with that millionaire I met at the country club,” Llayne chided.
“Hey, I thought you did have a date tonight. With that Johnny or Donny. What’s his name?”
“Don’t remember. That’s how much he impressed me when we went out last week.That’s why I called and canceled for tonight. Told him I have the flu.”
“That’s about the twelfth time the past couple of months you’ve had the flu.” Priscilla squinted and pointed at her with her cigarette.
“Better than you. Can’t believe you told that guy last week you couldn’t kiss him because you have ‘hoof and mouth disease.’ Didn’t you pay attention in biology? People get trench mouth; cattle get hoof and mouth.”
