by Rachel Cohn
Bryan added, “So any flash mob organized on The Grid must be counterprogrammed by a flash mob organized by a freaking printed newsletter randomly distributed by Very and not authorized by the rest of the group?”
“Exactly!” Very said.
Bryan said, “The B-school event last month went off without a hitch. So why did you have to take it one step too far for the J-school flash mob and send out a newsletter, Very?”
Lavinia said, “It would have been nice if you’d talked to us about it first. I mean, everyone knows The Grid is ours, even if it is a private site. We did utilize university bandwidth to build it.”
Jean-Wayne said to Very, “Even if you are awesome at diverting ISPs to nonsense locations like in Kuala Lumpur and shit. You could have, like, a career in corporate espionage or something.”
Bryan said, “Or she can have a career behind bars when I testify that I had nothing to do with the newsletter and I’d like to not be expelled, thank you very much.”
Very pointed at Bryan. “It was your idea for the flash mob to convene outside the Pulitzer Prize nominations press conference on campus, Bryan.” She pointed to Lavinia. “And your idea to boost attendance by promising homemade pies afterward.” Lastly, she pointed to Jean-Wayne. “And your idea to chime the High School Musical sound track into the public-address system.”
Bryan pointed to Very. “But, alas, your idea to publicly out the group on a printed newsletter illegally photocopied in your work-study office.”
Aunt Esther stood at the entrance to her bedroom. “Who smells like smoke?”
Three fingers pointed at Very. “She does.”
Very knew all too well: Where there’s smoke, there’s often fire.
CHAPTER 6
Remembrance Songs:
“Passovers Past,” “Spring Break,” “Planet SexyTime”
The first Passover that Very experienced was also her mother’s first full-scale fire. Cat had caused minor fires before, as would any diligent pyro. But Very would always remember the Passover fire of her tenth year as the one that officially kicked off Cat’s descent.
Technically, they hadn’t been invited to the seder at the New Rochelle home of Mortimer and Felicity Steinberg. What Morty had said to Cat, allegedly, was “Hey, you, me, and your kid, we oughta go out to dinner one night Passover week. Teach the kid about religion.” What Cat had taken from this conversation was Hey, now oughta be the time for my wife to meet my girlfriend. We’ll break matzo together, have us a grand old time.
Not surprisingly, Mrs. Felicity Steinberg had been less than pleased by Cat and Very’s arrival on her doorstep. She’d said, “My parents and children are inside the house! You couldn’t possibly be serious about coming in for Passover, could you?” (There may have been stronger language involved, but Very had repressed the exact dialogue in light of the events that followed. In fact, only expletives may have been involved.)
Tugging on her mother’s skirt, Very had begged, “Please, Mommy, let’s go home.” This was when they lived in the tiny studio apartment in the East Village, pre–yuppie gentrification, paid for by Morty, an insurance appraiser for whom Cat had temped as a secretary. Very had loved that apartment. It was the first home where they’d stayed for at least a year. She had friends at school. Real ones, not the kind you didn’t get attached to because you knew you’d be moving within a month. The neighborhood was vibrant with graffiti-art-grunge; Very felt exactly at home there. She didn’t understand why she and her mother had to ride a train to New Rochelle for some event called “Passover,” surely a celebration that should have been passed over when anything they could possibly want was already within a five-block radius of their East Village studio.
At Felicity’s denial of their passage into Passover, Cat had grabbed Very’s hand and stormed away from Felicity’s doorstep. But Cat and Very didn’t go far. Cat had watched as Felicity inspected them walking away from behind her sheer-curtained window, but once Felicity returned to her guests, Cat turned back around. She led Very to Felicity and Morty’s yard. Only this time, they approached the garden shed in the back of the house rather than seek admittance again at the front door.
Inside the shed, Cat lit a joint while Very sat on the ground and opened the latest Baby-sitters Club book she kept in her backpack for occasions like this. But Cat’s agitated lighter-flicking was more persistent this time. On/off, on/off, on/off, each flick a step closer to imminent disaster, Very knew. “Stop it, Mommy,” Very whispered. Cat was not listening. Cat flicked the ember from her joint onto a piece of newspaper lying on a wooden worktable. To save the joint for a later time, she extinguished it between her two fingers, then slipped it into her pocket. Cat watched as the discarded ember, fed by the piece of newspaper underneath, turned into a small flame.
“Wait outside,” Cat told Very.
Later, back in their East Village apartment, when the police came, Cat said the fire, which had burned down Morty’s shed and seared away much of Felicity Steinberg’s adjoining rose garden, had been an accident. No charges would be filed. Arson could not be proved, or maybe Morty, who knew from arson, just did not want it proved, as he had enough trouble to deal with in the form of a very angry wife, who may have been more outraged over the loss of her rosebushes than over the desecration of her marriage on a holy day.
Very and Cat were evicted from the apartment the following month.
What Very remembered most about the Passover day was not the fire, though, but the rosebushes. How beautifully tended they were, growing on trellises outside the gingerbread house and garden shed of Morty and Felicity Steinberg. Like that family must live in a perfect dream, to be surrounded by so much pretty yum-miness. How mean it had been of Cat to destroy even one of those bushes. What had Felicity Steinberg done to her to deserve that?
Very made the sign of the cross at her chest in remembrance of Felicity Steinberg’s rosebushes as she stared out at the yellow rosebushes not yet in bloom outside the Passover dining room at Aunt Esther’s. Very wondered what Cat would have made of this scene, Very breaking matzo with “the old biddy,” as Cat had referred to Aunt Esther, rather unkindly in Very’s opinion. She quite enjoyed this matzo-ball-soup concoction that Aunt Esther had prepared. If religion could always be so dependably delicious, Very might get on board with the program.
“Did you fast today?” Lavinia asked Aunt Esther. Lavinia, a Unitarian, had indeed fasted for the day. Her widowed grandfather had recently fallen in love with a Jewish widow, and so Lavinia felt compelled to go along with the fasting in solidarity with her future bubbe.
Very was grateful to Aunt Esther not only for the delicious meal but also because her presence allowed for safe, unthreatening conversation. If the four students were alone, they’d still be bickering over whether to dismantle The Grid. Or if they were having dinner at school, they’d be accosted constantly in the dining hall with flash-mob proposals, when obviously that whole idea was so used up. Very wouldn’t have minded a silent Passover, with the only conversation to occur by text messaging. Human evolution was headed in that direction anyway—why not start at the High Holy Days?
“Oh my, no,” said Aunt Esther. “I don’t fast anymore. Too old for that. God gives exemptions to seniors.”
“What kind of exemptions?” asked Jean-Wayne.
“Coffee-nip candies. I’ve been eating them all day.” Esther smiled in satisfaction at the group assembled around her Passover table. “I rather enjoy having all you young people here!”
The weird thing about Aunt Esther, Very knew, was that as warm and gracious as she was to her guests, in private she would probably be on Very’s case, like a legal guardian or something. How are your grades, dear? Will you be able to maintain the New Haven Benevolence Society scholarship? Mrs. Lee at mah-jongg keeps asking me what your GPA is. She has her eye on that scholarship going to her grandson, let me tell you. I can only advocate the scholarship going to you so long as you do as well at Columbia as you did in high school.
Veronica, why is your hair always in your face? I can’t see you! And you were smoking? What, do you want to turn out like your mother? It’s not enough that you look just like her—you want to ruin your life with reckless behavior like her, too?
Very was about to bite into one of Aunt Esther’s amazing matzo balls when the iPhone in her pocket vibrated. She took the phone from her pocket for inspection. Just a message from her resident advisor. Please see me ASAP. Once again, not El Virus.
“You shouldn’t have your phone on at Passover dinner!” Lavinia scolded.
“How do you know, shiksa?” Very said. “We probably also shouldn’t have a post-Passover bonfire in the backyard and make s’mores for dessert, but that’s totally what I’m going to propose anyway.”
S’mores looked like her sacrilegious El Virus, Very imagined. He’d never shown her his full face in any of their many photo exchanges, but she’d seen glimpses of his skin under that monk’s hood. He was dark, but not African and probably not Latin (just a feeling, she didn’t know for sure). His skin appeared to her to be a possibly (passably?) milky South Asian, a honey-graham-cracker tone. She imagined him to have dark-chocolate eyebrows and marshmallow-white teeth, like a film star.
She’d asked him once, What is your race? His response had been Haji Jew-boy, which had made her so happy, picturing him as a turbaned bar mitzvah mensch.
They’d never exchanged Real World real names, only first-name initials. They were both Vs, which obviously solidified their true-love destiny. How many other Vs could there be in the world, ones who found one another? When they married and got their own ranch house with monogrammed towels, they’d be “the Double V.”
V., V., who could he be? Vincent? Victor? Did he wonder about her V?
“Very, your marshmallow fell into the fire,” Bryan grumbled.
She’d been so deep into her V-trance she hadn’t noticed the sacrifice of an innocent marshmallow as it crackled in the flames of the backyard campfire she and the boys had made after dinner. Very shrugged. She was more concerned about the joint Jean-Wayne was passing back her way than the loss of a sugar treat. Only a big fat one could keep her from abandoning her guests to return to full-time El Virus e-scan. The joint’s buzz helped Very stay determinedly mellow while, across the fire, Bryan stared at her accusingly, angrily. She was well aware Bryan wasn’t so much concerned with her s’more carelessness as with the fact that she’d carelessly taken his V and then tossed him back into the fire without so much as a tender hug.
Tender hugs, that’s where Very and Bryan’s problems started. Bryan came from granola stock in Portland, Oregon. He’d been raised on yoga and hugs. He was good at them. It had seemed strange to Very that a boy who was such a prize cuddle buddy had not managed to do the actual deed with an actual girl once during his high school years, but Bryan was a true geek, more concerned with academics and computing than with the horny babe-hunting one might have expected of his demographic.
That one time between them, the sex that had seemed so much less intimate and satisfying than the cuddling Very and Bryan had previously shared, had happened when El Virus first went missing. With most everyone away for Spring Break, Very had been obsessing on him hard alone in her room. His profile page(s) said only “El Virus has been a very bad boy and is being threatened with reform school if he doesn’t mend his wicked ways. Farewell for now, kids!” And that was it. No personal e-mails or IMs or naughty photos to Very, just a broad announcement that he was temporarily out of commission. Rude!
And his phone was not only not taking messages—the number was no longer even in service. What had happened to him?
Lavinia had been in Florida visiting family, and so Very, unleashed to spend all her time alone looking online for El Virus, had quickly turned to spending all her time lying in bed, pining for El Virus, playacting with him in rich sexual fantasies that Go Ask Alice!, the Columbia online health Q&A service, had assured her were a completely safe and appropriate outlet. Bryan just happened to walk into her dorm room at the peak moment of Very’s fantasy delirium.
“Whatcha up to tonight?” Bryan asked. “Want to go see a movie?”
Very opened her bed blanket to Bryan. “Don’t wanna go out,” she said. “You come in.” She needed a warm body to go along with the El Virus fantasy–induced fire raging across her loins.
Poor Bryan couldn’t have known that when Very invited him into her bed for a cuddle, she was already hot hot hot on him him Himbo. In that moment, she had been deep inside her favorite fantasy, the one where El Virus was a haji Jew-boy version of a space-age captain. “Captain Himbo,” Very called him—he was her El Virus–meets–Captain Picard from one of those Star Trek Enterprises. Very had always loved TV shows about outer space, where even the chaos seemed orderly and where, most important, everyone understood the technology.
With a quick snap close of her laptop, she could lie down in bed and bring it:
Very is the social director at a posh resort on Planet SexyTime. Captain Himbo, who commands a, like, rilly rilly superhuge intergalactic fleet, arrives for some R&R. To Very, he seems different from the other shore-leave horndogs. He knows history; while she is leading him to his guest quarters, they discuss the Microsoft-Google alliance that brought about the fall of Western civilization back on 001 (aka Earth). He knows archaeology; while she is showing him the tropical splendor of Planet SexyTime’s oceans, they discuss ancient Vulcan ruins and mystical Cylon baths. (They do not concern themselves with the unlikelihood of Vulcan/Cylon crossover mythology.)
One night, she slips into Captain Himbo’s bedroom, wearing a flimsy silk teddy under a silk robe demurely tied at the waist. Too much cleavage so suddenly, especially cleavage such as hers, might intimidate the grave, graham-cracker-colored captain.
Captain Himbo is lying in bed reading, drinking chai tea, hot. He drops his tea on the floor, startled when she enters his chambers unannounced.
“I thought you might need someone to talk to,” she says, leaning down to caress his jowled cheek. “Your job, it’s so … big. You have so many responsibilities, so many people under your … command.
So much firepower.” Soon, if she plays it cool, she’ll have her dirty way with that smooth haji-head. She sits down on the chair next to his bed. “Here,” she says, extracting a Venusian joint from the pocket of her green silk robe, “this will help you relax.”
“Really, Ms….,” he protests, but Very lights up anyway, and immediately the potent smell intoxicates him. No one can resist pure Venus weed. Captain H. acquiesces. “Just don’t tell anybody,” he says, inhaling a furtive hit.
“Computer,” Very says. “Marvin Gaye.” Her seduction playlist immediately fires up on unseen speakers.
I’ve been really tryin’, baby
Tryin’ to hold back this feelin’ for so long
“I wonder if this is a bit unprofessional, Ms.—” he starts.
“Very,” she interrupts.
“Very,” he sighs. “I just knew you’d be an awesome V.”
She climbs into bed alongside him, running her hands along his captain’s uniform, over his sturdy chest, then around his neck and ears.
“You,” he says, moving toward her, his resistance broken down by the herb and the sensual song. “You are so beautiful.” Hearing her cue to move in for the kill, she kisses his bald head, then runs her hands slowly across it. He feels so good.
“Kiss me, El Virus—I mean, Captain,” she says. “Kiss me as if it were the last time.”
The power is hers. She straddles him, then leans down to take his mouth into hers. She can taste the chai from his tongue, and it’s hot, baby, it’s hot. Their mouths disentangle, and he leans up, pulling his many-medaled uniform off his chest. Triumphant, she sits across his waist, waiting for him to take off her camisole. She leans in for another long, hot kiss, and feels his sturdy hands running through her hair. She waits, rubbing her thighs against him. His hands reach for her voluptuous hips, caressing them, movin
g upward under her silk garment, over her full, taut breasts. She thinks she might die from desire if he doesn’t remove the teddy now. She reaches for his hands and lifts them over her head, flinging the garment to the floor. Breasts exposed, she knows her power.
“Take me!” she cries out.
“Make it so!” he gasps, then heaves her onto her back, where she lies panting, waiting for him.
Bryan made it so by bursting into her dorm room. She’d held her arms out to him. She didn’t want to let go of the dream. She’d maybe pretend Bryan was her real-time Captain Himbo. Just the one time.
Bryan shut her dorm room door and crawled into bed with her like they’d done so many times. He spooned her, letting her nestle her head into his neck. His arms around her felt so comforting and tender. They’d playacted this cuddle scene so many times since the beginning of freshman year; so why did this time feel different? Was it that Bryan sensed her horniness at that moment, almost like he’d walked in on her when she was drugged with longing? Or that this time she’d decided not to ignore his boner pressing into her backside?
Perhaps emboldened that she hadn’t shoved him away, but rather had pressed closer to that thing sprung between them, Bryan had whispered in her ear: “Don’t hate me for saying this, but I think I’m in love with you.” Surely words like that were the kiss of death. Bad hippie parents, bad bad, raising their son to be so open with his emotions. Preferable to kiss him on the mouth than to let Bryan spout more of that nonsense. Very turned to him and did just that.
Very knew better than to play with the affection of someone whose heart yearned so true. It wasn’t nice. Well, certainly it had been nice for Bryan when she allowed him full access, and then when he collapsed on top of her with the biggest grin Very had ever seen on a boy’s face. His noises, however … that squeal. Not so sexy. She’d felt nothing other than relief when he finished. The sooner he got off her, the sooner she could return to fantasizing about El Virus. Bryan had not proved an adequate substitute, after all.
