Big Bad Twins

by Tia Siren

  My iPhone buzzed and I took my eyes off the computer long enough to glance at the screen. It was my BFF Rachel calling again. She knew I was on pins and needles about my grades and had been trying to get me to come to Lenny’s, the off-campus dive bar where the Trent State football team hung out. The night would involve lots of beer, loud partying, drunken dancing, and, if you were Rachel, sex with her boyfriend, Duke, the captain of the football team, most likely in the backseat of his car.

  “Come blow off some steam with us,” Rachel pleaded the first two times she’d called. “Stop worrying so much about your grades and come have some fucking fun!”

  That sort of thing worked for Rachel, but I wasn’t Rachel, not even close. I cared about my grades. I never drank or partied. I had two left feet, so I never danced. And I wouldn’t be having sex with anyone any time soon. In fact, I’d never had sex. I had never even come that close. I was probably the only twenty-two-year-old virgin on the Trent State campus.

  It wasn’t that I was averse to having sex or that I was saving myself for marriage or anything so noble as that. No, the truth was, I had the desire. I’d just never had the chance.

  I’d been dating the same boy since the tenth grade and he didn’t believe in sex before marriage. Danny Dickie was the son of a Baptist preacher back home in Orlando. He was a senior at Laughton College all the way on the other side of the state now, getting a degree in history (yawn). His goal in life was to teach middle school history. I’ll say it again: he wanted to teach middle school history. How incredibly boring was that?

  I had no idea why I’d stayed with Danny so long. I mean, he barely believed in making out. I probably hadn’t had his tongue in my mouth more than a dozen times in six years. And I’d never had his hands on my tits or his finger in my pussy.

  God forbid that happen! Fire and brimstone, oh my!

  The few times I got Danny alone and tried to throw myself at him, he acted like the devil himself was trying to grab hold of his cock.

  “Come on, Danny, you know you want it,” I whispered as we sat in the back of his dad’s Buick the night of our senior prom. I was rubbing his thigh and pressing my boob against his arm. “Just let me touch it. If you let me touch yours, I’ll let you touch mine.”

  “Gee, I dunno, Audrey.”

  “Just let me touch your cock and you can put a finger in my—”

  I grabbed his cock and he shot out of the car like a race horse bolting out of a racing chute. I remember squeezing my knees together as he silently drove me home and then asked me to please get out of his father’s car.

  He didn’t even walk me to the door.

  I think it was because he had a big stain on the front of his pants that I’d caused. Oops! Sorry...

  I think that was the night I learned to masturbate.

  My fingers and I had since been best friends.

  I hadn’t had much luck with guys in college, either. Of course, I still considered myself spoken for with Danny, but I was starting to think that I’d wasted six years of not getting laid for nothing.

  I’d see Danny at home during spring break. If he didn’t have the balls to break up with me, I guess I’d have to take his balls in hand and do it myself.

  I did have one hot and heavy make-out session with a boy named Victor something-or-other at the Trent State homecoming dance last year.

  Rachel introduced me to Victor. He was a friend of whichever football player she was dating, i.e. fucking, at the time.

  Victor wasn’t that good looking, but he was nice and courteous and I could feel his cock pressing against me as we slow danced to an old Madonna song.

  I liked the way his cock felt, semi-hard, rubbing against my belly. The more we danced, the more it rubbed and the harder it got.

  Rather than pulling away, I pulled Victor closer so his cock would press into me even more. I remembered him sighing into my ear. I remembered how wet my panties were, how stiff my nipples were, how determined I was to lose my virginity.

  There was a longing deep inside me that Victor was bringing to the surface. I think I kissed him first, and then he kissed me back, and then I dragged him off the dance floor and into a janitor’s closet down the hall from the gym where the dance was being held.

  We were making out like crazy. I was groping him. He was trying to grope me, but his hands kept missing their mark. Rachel told me later that Victor had never had sex either. It was a case of the blind leading the blind. Or the blind trying to fuck the blind.

  It made sense now. Because just about the time his hand found my tit under my shirt and my hand found his cock bulging in his jeans, he shot his load right then and there against my hand.

  I heard him grunt and suck air in through his teeth, and then I felt his cock pulse as it emptied its load of jizz all down his right leg.

  Victor looked at me with horrified eyes and said, “Oh shit.”

  He ran away, leaving me there with my mouth hanging open and my tits hanging out of my bra.

  It was a sad attempt at losing my virginity.

  I think it pretty much scarred me for life, because I haven’t even tried to get laid since.

  My fingers and I are now closer than ever.

  * * *

  I knew Rachel wasn’t worried about her English Lit. grade. She never worried about grades because she didn’t have to. Rachel was not only more sexually active than me and most girls at Trent. She was also probably smarter than most of us as well. Heck, she was the smartest person I knew. And she had way more sex than most girls. I thought only the dumb girls fucked around a lot. Evidently not, because Rachel regularly made the dean’s list and had had sex with most of the football team and a few professors.

  I loved her like a sister, but I must admit, I was jealous of Rachel in more ways than one.

  The only grade I was really nervous about was English Lit. 105. It was a required class my senior year as a business major, and if I failed the class I would have to take it over again in the summer and pass it, or else I would not graduate in the fall.

  Rachel sat next to me in Mr. Hollander’s English Lit. class, and even she said the class was the hardest one she’d ever had to take. She also said that Mr. Hollander was the hottest teacher at Trent, but he also had the reputation of being the biggest asshole when it came to giving students any leeway on grades.

  He didn’t give makeup work and he didn’t grade on a curve. “You get the grade you earn,” he had said at the beginning of the semester. “Period. End of story. Don’t bother whining to me because I hate whiners.”

  Well, if I didn’t get at least a B on this midterm, I would earn a D in the class. Maybe even an F. I’d never gotten an F in anything and had no desire to start now.

  The problem was that I hated English Lit. I know, crazy. It was literature, not rocket science, but the topic bored me to tears. I thought it was because of my attention deficit disorder. I had a hard time focusing on some things, and English Lit. was one of those things.

  Take this midterm for example. The assignment was to write a twenty-thousand-word essay on a fictional character from nineteenth-century literature. Sounds easy enough so far, right? Just hang on to your shorts, because here’s where it gets hard.

  Once we chose a character, we had to hypothesize what motivated the author to create that character, what motivated the character to act as he or she did in the book, what repercussions the character’s actions had on the story and other characters, what effect the character had on the reader, and did we find the character to be sympathetic in any way and if so why.

  Whew. I remembered nearly having a heart attack just reading the assignment sheet. Holy crap. I was screwed.

  I had no idea why, but I chose the character of Frankenstein’s monster from the book by Mary Shelley. I had never read the book. God knows I tried several times, but I couldn’t get through the first chapter, so I just rented the top three Frankenstein movies on Netflix and tried to write the essay based on those.


  The problem was, all the movies were different and none of them followed the book. I did the best I could with what I had. And I learned what I could about Mary Shelley on Wikipedia.

  Writing that essay was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do. I mentioned my ADD. Just try writing a twenty-thousand-word essay on what motivated fucking Frankenstein’s monster with ADD.

  Crap, I couldn’t write twenty-thousand-words on any topic, much less one that forced me to pick apart the brain of a monster and a nineteenth-century writer.

  But Mr. Hollander didn’t give a shit about my ADD or anything else as far as I was concerned. When I casually mentioned my ADD in an after-class meeting one time, he just looked at me with his deep blue eyes and his ruggedly handsome face and said, “Guess you’ll just have to work a little harder, huh?”

  Guess I’d just have to work a little harder? Seriously?

  What kind of fucking scholarly advice was that?

  Rachel was right. Mr. Hollander was an asshole. An asshole who always smelled like cigarettes and booze. And an asshole was supposed to have all the grades posted by five this afternoon.

  It was five-fifteen, and so far no grade was posted.

  I’d bet he was holding back the grades on purpose because he knew it would drive me mad.

  Asshole. Douchebag. Dick-hole.

  I couldn’t wait to be out of his class so I’d never have to see him again.

  I hit the refresh button again and held my breath.

  CHAPTER TWO: Chase Hollander

  I lit another cigarette and poured another inch of the cheap whiskey into the shot glass with the Disney World logo on one side. I was not unintelligent or without a sense of humor. I saw the irony in getting shit-faced drunk by drinking shots of whiskey from a glass with Mickey Mouse’s picture on one side.

  The irony was that it perfectly represented how shitty my life had become over the last few years. It was all about my Mickey Mouse problems and the Goofy shit I had done. I was the eighth dwarf: Loser. Whistle to that tune, motherfucker.

  There had been bright spots, like the trip to Disney with Emily and Kiley, and those weekends at the beach. Then there were the low spots, like the night Kiley died, or the night I got drunk and stumbled home to find Emily gone.

  I took a long drag of the cigarette and let the smoke trail from my nostrils. I picked up the shot glass and knocked the foul liquor back in one gulp. It burned my throat like battery acid. I could only imagine what the smoke and the whiskey were doing to my insides. Shit, who was I kidding. As I said, I was not unintelligent. I knew exactly what it was doing. The thing was, I didn’t give a shit. I was killing myself slowly, but I didn’t care and neither did anyone else.

  I licked the whiskey from my lips and stuck the cigarette between my teeth, squinting as the smoke curled into my eyes.

  I stared at the blinking cursor on the computer screen. It was waiting for something from me. What was it? Oh yeah, grades…

  I was supposed to be entering the grades from the final midterm so the students could see if they had passed or failed my class. I squinted at my watch. It was half past five. The grades were supposed to be online by five. Fuck it. The kids didn’t care. Why should I?

  The little bastards. I saw them sitting in my class every day, smiling and chatting like they didn’t have a care in the world. They had their entire lives ahead of them. I was just a fucking speedbump on the highway of life to them, just something to roll over on the way to their entitled fucking lives.

  I watched the fucking jocks trying to get the girls to notice them, and I noticed the girls trying to catch my eye, thinking they’d get a better grade if I made them the teacher’s pet.

  One of them, a Latino girl with big tits, Rachel Diaz I thought, sat in the front row wearing miniskirts and low-cut blouses. More than once she’d spread her legs to give me a quick peek at her red panties. Once she wasn’t even wearing panties. She slid her ass to the front edge of the seat and opened her legs wide. Her pussy was shaved clean, pink, moist. I just shot her a hard look rather than a hard cock, and she immediately closed her legs and looked away.

  If she thought flashing her pussy was going to get her a good grade in my class, she was dead wrong. She might have had a grade-A cunt, but her midterm essay was a grade B at best.

  The saddest thing was, she was the smartest girl in the class. She didn’t have to flash her pussy at me to get a perfect grade. She just had to show up and do the work.

  Sometimes I wondered if she flashed her pussy at me because she wanted me to touch it. Then I’d see her with the captain of the football team and realize she was just fucking with me, but not in a good way.

  That was fine. The last thing I need was to get involved with a student. That would be the final nail in my academic coffin. Would the pleasure be worth the pain? At this point, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t even remember what pleasure felt like.

  Then there was Audrey something, the dark-haired girl with the big blue eyes and timid smile who always sat next to Rachel. She almost looked like one of those cute old cat paintings from the seventies, the ones with the kittens with oversized eyes and pitiful pouts on their faces.

  I blew a cloud of smoke at the computer screen and picked up the class roster to find her name. There it was, Audrey Ross.

  She was a good student, but unlike Rachel, she had to try hard to earn her grades. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart. She had a good head on her shoulders. She just seemed so afraid of failure that she often torpedoed herself.

  Like coming to me to talk about her attention deficit disorder. Don’t give me that shit. I had ADD, OCD, ADHD, and every other letter of the alphabet you could assign to being fucked up.

  There it was.

  I admitted it to the man in the mirror every fucking day.

  I was one fucked-up son of a bitch.

  I knew it. My family knew it. The dean knew it.

  Emily certainly knew it. It took her two more years of a shitty marriage after Kiley died to realize it, that Chase Hollander was one fucked-up individual.

  * * *

  The buzzing of my phone on the desk jarred me from the drunken slumber I’d fallen into. The cigarette had burned itself out in the ashtray and my shot glass was empty.

  “Fuck” I said, blowing out a smelly breath as I picked up the phone and squinted at the screen. It was Nancy Dorfmann, the head of the English department and my immediate boss. I glanced at the clock on the computer screen before I tapped to answer the call. It was almost nine p.m., four hours after the grades should have been posted.

  I tried to clear the whiskey and smoke from my throat and said, “Hi, Nancy. What’s up?”

  “Professor Hollander, are you aware that your midterm grades have not been posted to the system?” she asked, her thick air of condescension scraping its way into my ear like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  The system she was referring to was the school’s intranet, a private website where professors posted documentation related to classes, tests, study sheets, and grades for tests and exams. Each student had a user name and password that gave them access to everything linked to their account, including their grades. If I had stayed sober long enough to enter each student’s grade into the system, those grades would have been available for students to see. I had never understood the urgency in posting the grades. Most of the little shits didn’t give a rat’s ass about their grades. They took what they got and moved on to torture the next professor. Why bother spending an hour of my time posting grades on a Friday night that nobody gave a shit about?

  “Professor Hollander, are you there?” Nancy’s voice was like a swarm of flies buzzing around my ear. “Professor Hollander, your midterm grades have not been posted.”

  I almost told Nancy to go fuck herself.

  Almost.

  Instead, I tried not to slur the words as I said, “I know, Professor Dorfmann, and I apologize. I’ve been trying to get the grades posted for five hours. The internet
keeps going down here at my house.”

  The moment of silence told me that Nancy Dorfmann knew I was full of shit. She said, “Then perhaps you should go to your office and try from there. The rule is all grades are posted by five. It’s now nine fifteen. That’s four hours and fifteen minutes after the deadline.”

  I can tell time, bitch, I thought. I just wasn’t so good at managing it these days.

  “Yes, I understand. Okay, I’ll try once more from here, and if it doesn’t work I’ll drive over to the office and post them from there.”

  “Perhaps you should call a cab to drive you,” she said. I could tell she was wrinkling her fat nose on the other end of the phone, as if she could smell the stench of the cigarettes and whiskey fuming through the phone line.

  “And Professor Hollander, I’d like to see you Monday in my office,” she said. “We need to discuss the status of your tenure.”

  I had stuck a cigarette between my teeth and was about to fire it up when the word “tenure” stuck in my ear.

  Tenure was just a fancy bullshit academic term that meant you had a job until retirement.

  For college professors like myself, tenure was the holy grail. It meant you had a job for life, unless you did something stupid to fuck it up. I had become tenured at Trent State after my fifth year of teaching there, which was ten years ago.

  Tenure meant that I could only be fired with what was called “just cause.” Not “just because” Nancy Dorfmann felt like it, but by “just case,” which in my case could be anything from telling Nancy Dorfmann to suck my fat cock on the steps of the administration building (which I was dying to do) to showing up drunk for class (which I had done repeatedly) to having a sexual relationship with a student (I’d come close a few times but had never had the balls to follow through) to being convicted of a violent crime like murder.

  I still thought about killing the drunk driver who took Kiley’s life, but only when I was really, really drunk, which was most every night now.

  “Professor Hollander, did you hear me?”

  “Um, yes, I heard you.”

  “Please call my assistant Monday morning to set up a meeting,” she said. “And I’ll expect to see all of your class grades posted within the hour.”