You’re in America, you’re busy, you don’t have time to keep up with politics all over the world. There are a lot of parties, a lot of elections. Who can follow all of them?
“I think often about this evening, and what my friend as trying to tell me. Something about appearances, how things seldom are how they seem? But this is too banal, and she is clever.”
The first time I smoked a cigarette, I was sardined with six other middle-school aged girls in a shower of my boarding school dorm. The logic was that if Matron caught us lighting up we would hastily strip down, turn on the faucet, and pretend that we were just casually showering together in the middle of the night.
Emma and Dani were sprawled out on the bed in Dani’s room snorting cocaine with a one hundred dollar bill and a small mirror that had once belonged to Dani’s pink jewelry box. The kind with the ballerina that you had to wind; when the box opened, the ballerina would twirl around and around to The Russian Dance from The Nutcracker. Bones protruded from Dani’s hip through her translucent skin, and her gaunt face sagged. Her piercing blue eyes were dulled by thick black eyeliner, and the heavy bronzing makeup coating her face obscured her wan teenage skin. Dani took a big hit and laid back on her simple white bed, sniffling loudly and pawing at her nose.
I consider myself a functional narcoleptic. (It’s undiagnosed, no offense to all you diagnosed non-functional narcoleptics). If I have a 10:00 AM class, I wake up at 9:10, shower, dress, take a ten-minute nap, then dash out the door.
It’s mid-September, and your room is set up at last. Your chair is here, your toes are toasty in the A.M. thanks to a whimsically shagged carpet you bought at Wal-Mart, your creamy walls glow with the efflorescence of a thousand late nineteenth-century French advertisements purchased from the student poster agency.
