Lunatic Fringe

by Allison Moon

Blythe smiled and looked down at Renee. “Either way, the answer is yes. Sex is something we share . . . have shared.” Blythe stroked Renee’s freckled cheek, and Renee purred. “It’s something we all share. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Women giving pleasure to one another is the most subversive and beautiful thing we can do together. No one can please a woman like another woman. And women feeling joy, pleasure, and love without male aggression, oppression, or their ridiculous organs--it’s downright revolutionary.”

  “And a hell of a lot of fun,” Renee interjected. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and shook one out, bringing it to her lips to light it.

  “Sisterhood is powerful,” said Blythe. The two girls snickered at her joke.

  “So, is this a sorority?” Lexie asked.

  Renee snorted, the first plume of smoke swirling out of her mouth as though she were a disgruntled dragon. “Hardly.”

  “A sorority is based on a hierarchy, just like any other political organization,” Blythe said. “And we reject all hierarchy out of hand as one of the more pernicious aspects of the patriarchy.”

  “But aren’t you in charge?”

  At that, Renee smirked, but she kept her eyes trained on the mouth of her beer bottle and massaged away the moist particles of the disintegrating label.

  Blythe answered. “No leaders. No proletariat. No chairwomen or pledges. Equal footing all around.”

  It sounded good, but Lexie had a hard time believing it. Sure, Renee was captivating, Hazel was fun, and Jenna was sweet. Each of the other girls had their own vibe, but Blythe was clearly the leader. Lexie recognized that her first day on campus when Blythe commandeered her moving boxes. Whether it fit their ideals or not, the women of the Pack looked to Blythe as their leader, and she did nothing to reject that role.

  “Okay,” Lexie conceded. “So, you live here together in. . ?”

  “We call it The Den,” Blythe said.

  “The Den of Iniquity,” Renee joked.

  “The Den of Ubiquity!” Blythe countered.

  “The Den of Inequity!” Renee lobbed back.

  “What? More like the Den of True Equity! We role-model equality.” Blythe’s feigned offense earned her another sympathetic kiss from Renee.

  Lexie struggled to follow the women as they lobbed jokes back and forth. Even if her own powers of discourse flailed in comparison, the women seemed to like her, and that was enough for now.

  The way Blythe touched Renee made Lexie think of her mother, who had left to pursue a man who offered her nothing but the chase and some pain. She had followed him first across the country, then further still. She might still be following him; there was no way of telling. Years ago, Lexie stopped wondering if she’d ever hear from her mother again; it had become clear that she wouldn’t. So she buried her mother in her mind, while holding on to a few select memories. Like her voice, which occasionally drifted through her dreams, sometimes in song, sometimes in dream-language gibberish.The day her mother left, taking nothing more than a backpack, Lexie’s tiny family had been sundered. Summer Pace had left nothing more than a fleeting kiss on Lexie’s forehead and a squeeze of her husband’s hand before walking out the door. With the wisdom of time and distance, Lexie now saw the weakness, the fear, and the pain that drove her mother’s life. Summer Pace was constantly pursuing a dream that never could be, a dream based on her own incompletion. Lexie had vowed never to become like her mother; she would never follow love anywhere. She thought instead of the peace and simplicity of living with Blythe and the women of the Pack. What a relief it would be to finally have a home where she felt like she belonged.

  As though Blythe could read her thoughts, she interrupted Lexie’s reverie. “You from around here, Lexie?” Blythe said, her fingers still tangled in Renee’s hair. “You seem like it.”

  Lexie fidgeted, hating that her cover was blown so soon. “How’d you know?”

  Blythe shrugged.

  “Spent my whole life in Wolf Creek,” Lexie replied.

  “Your parents still there?”

  “My dad is. My mom’s gone.”

  Blythe nodded as though this made sense of everything.

  “Mine too,” Renee said, exhaling another plume of smoke. “What happened to yours?”

  Lexie looked away, afraid that her mother would seem cruel, or worse, that the truth would expose Lexie as undesirable, disposable.

  “Mine died,” Renee offered. “Four years ago.”

  “Mine left. Walked out. I was eight,” Lexie replied.

  “Your dad a tyrant, too?”

  Lexie laughed. “Hardly.”

  “Mine was,” Renee said, her eyes fixed in the space before her, dragging her cigarette, casting great chasms of shadow along her cheeks as she sucked.

  “They all are,” Blythe said. She delved her fingers deeper into Renee’s mass of hair and massaged her scalp. “Your mama sounds like a smart woman.” Lexie looked at her, confused.

  “Not for abandoning you, of course,” Blythe hurried.

  “Why did she leave, Lexie?” Renee asked.

  “I don’t really know. Never got the real story, if there even is one. It was so long ago. All I remember is a kiss on the forehead in the middle of the night. When she left, my father stood stock still in the kitchen, looking at his feet. Didn’t say a word. He was so . . . restrained.”

  Lexie had replayed the scene innumerable times. Each time it was the same: the kiss on the forehead, her mother’s long, black braid grazing Lexie’s cheek, then Lexie standing at the door as she watched her mother walk away. She had watched her for as long as she could, the cold air rushing into the house as tiny flakes of snow drifted down, covering the ground in a diaphanous veil of white.

  Beneath the night sky, her mother had looked radiant, as though glowing with an inner moonlight. She took that radiance with her as she walked away, heading west toward the bus station, leaving tracks in the new snow. She never turned to look back, though Lexie had tried to will it so. Instead Summer Pace walked straight down the street until the night enveloped her. After a long while, Lexie’s father walked wordlessly to the door and pulled it shut, locking it before climbing the stairs to his bedroom, where he promptly shut that door behind him. Not six months later, the tree stand Ray had been working in collapsed, and that was that. Recovery, unemployment, and a new life of tending to one another in odd bursts: Lexie as she grew older, her father as he healed. Lexie didn’t tell the girls that part.

  The three women watched the rest of the Pack work at the house, stacking cups, washing dishes, and picking up trash from the dying party. Through the back door, Lexie spotted Sharmlaee holding Hazel by the arm as she jumped up and down in the trash bag, mashing the soiled cups and plates like a tiny, hyperactive trash-compacter.

  “Why is she doing that?” Lexie asked, squinting through the glass door at the scene.

  “The trash men give us shit if we leave too many bags out,” Renee said. “Lazy sons-of-pricks.”

  Blythe stood and brushed off her jeans. “I’d best go help. Wanna make sure they take care of everything.”

  Renee smirked. “Yep, because we can’t even take out the trash without your approval.”

  A chill entered the air as the sun disappeared behind the tree line, casting half of Blythe’s face in shadow. She narrowed her eyes at Renee but said nothing as she looked back to Lexie and reapplied her bright smile.

  “Lexie, stick around, okay?” she said with a wink. Thunder rolled in the distance. “See you, ladies.”

  Blythe squeezed Renee’s hand in goodbye. Lexie looked at their hands together and wondered what it would feel like to hold Renee’s hand like that. Her eyes drifted along Renee’s reed-like forearms to the gently curved muscles that glided into her torso and up her neck, a series of perfectly calibrated joints and pulleys. Blythe squeezed Renee’s hand so tight, shadowed indentations haloed each finger. They smiled at one another with their mouths, though not with their eyes. As Blythe dropped her h
and and turned to leave, Renee tapped her ashes into the grass.

  The day had escaped into evening as the red coals in the barbecue faded into black chunks of soot. The animated conversation of the women in the house carried out to where Lexie and Renee sat and, for once, Lexie was pleased to have something to fill the silence. She shifted on her chair.“Did you ever try to track her down?” Renee asked.

  “Who? My mom?”

  Renee nodded.

  “I googled her a couple years ago,” Lexie said, fiddling with the frayed edge of her sleeve. “You’d think a name like ‘Summer Pace’ would turn up something, but nope.”

  Lexie thought she saw a flicker of surprise cross Renee’s face, but she only tapped her dwindling cigarette before looking over at Lexie.

  “But your last name is . . .” Renee said.

  “Clarion,” Lexie said. “Yeah. My dad’s name. My mom never took it.”

  “Good on her,” she said, looking out into the twilight.

  “Summer Pace,” Renee repeated. “That’s a pretty name.”

  “She was half Cree. I guess that’s where it comes from. Doesn’t really mean much to me, except I have hair that doesn’t do what I want it to, ever.”

  Renee raised her hand for a high-five of solidarity. Lexie laughed and slapped it.

  “Check out that sunset,” Renee said, gesturing to the west. “That’s what I call a Bajan sunset. Hot pink, neon orange and purple-gray storm clouds. Love that.”

  Bajan?

  Renee continued before Lexie could ask.

  “Barbados. It’s where I’m from.”

  Lexie looked at her apologetically.

  “The Caribbean,” Renee replied, over her shoulder, in an offhanded way that didn’t make Lexie feel so stupid. “In the rainy season, the sky would look like this almost every night.”

  “Do you miss it?” Lexie asked.

  “Nah. I don’t remember it much, to be honest. Moved to the States with my mom when I was ten.”

  “Is she the white one? Er, the American parent?” Lexie cringed, but Renee just chuckled.

  “No, ma’am. My dad is the Jewish-slash-Uruguayan one. Hence, the last name ‘Krauss.’ When my folks got divorced, my mom--the black one--” she said, smiling askance, “decided it’d be a better life here.”

  “Why?”

  “Any life away from my father was a better life.”

  “Where’d you end up?” Lexie said.

  “Sahn Frahn Cees Co.” Renee had a penchant for funny voices, Lexie was learning. She found it disconcerting. She couldn’t tell if Renee was making fun of her or just playing. Either way, Lexie had yet to make eye contact with her, and she was growing nervous.

  “Wow. You’ve been all over,” Lexie said.

  “I wouldn’t consider an island, an American city, and a couple of trips to Uruguay and Europe to be ‘all over.’”

  “Compared to my life it is,” Lexie sighed.

  “You’ve never been anywhere?” Renee asked between cigarette drags.

  “Well, Milton, if that counts. And Wolf Creek, where I’m from, about fifty miles down the road. That makes two. And I went to the Oregon Zoo with my mom once, when I was kid. So there’s three.” She nodded once, more self-mockery than self-satisfaction.

  Renee exhaled a gray cloud of smoke. “Seriously?”

  Lexie nodded.

  “Is it a good zoo?” Renee asked.

  “Meh,” Lexie replied, shrugging.

  They stared at the sky, squinting at the sun’s curtain call. The fierce orange light set Renee’s face aglow.

  “Would you mind rubbing my head?” Renee asked, scooting over and dropping her head onto Lexie’s lap.

  “Uh . . .” Lexie drew her hands up to her shoulders, then relented and lowered them into the soft suds of Renee’s hair.

  “Wow,” Lexie said.

  “‘Wow’ what?”

  “Your hair. It looks soft but it’s so . . .” Lexie flinched before she even finished the sentence.

  Renee raised an eyebrow. “‘So,’ what?”

  “Um . . . oily.”

  Renee chuckled. “That, my dear, is because I put oil in it.”

  “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “You put in your hair what I wash out.”

  Renee snorted. “That’s us black girls for you. Always scrambling for what the white girls are throwing away.”

  “I didn’t mean--”

  Renee waved away her protests. “It’s cool.”

  Lexie bit her lip, her heart leaping against her throat. If Renee’s head weren’t in her lap, she’d be inclined to run.

  “That Bajan sunset is making me a little nervous. I should probably head home before the weather hits.” Lexie cringed, realizing how much she sounded like her father. She wanted to shake the voice out of her head like water stuck in her ears.

  “Screw that. You’re staying here. Why be cooped up in a dorm room when you can be chilling with some of the finest ladies on campus, storms be damned?” Renee flicked her cigarette onto the grass and rose to her feet. She smiled as Lexie watched the cherry of the cigarette fade to black. “I’ll get it later,” Renee said.

  “No. I should go,” Lexie mumbled.

  “Girl, relax. Have a beer with me. If we’re lucky, Blythe will tell us more about the patriarchy.” Like everything, she said it with a knowing grin. To Lexie’s naive eyes, it looked like Renee was flirting with her. Lexie’s heart seized. Was she?Renee presented her arm for Lexie to grasp. “Madame,” she said, drawing out the word between her lips. Her arm was so long the negative space formed at its crux could have circled Lexie’s torso. Yes, Lexie decided, taking her arm, Renee was definitely flirting with her. And to Lexie’s surprise, she liked it.

  Chapter 5

  Outside the Den, rain clattered on the roof and leaves fell like early sacrifices to the impending winter. Branches like witch fingers clawed at the windows, drawing tiny squeals with each gust. The night sky was on a rampage, but inside the Den, it was cozy and calm. When the storm broke an hour before, Jenna and Mitch made a noble dash to cover the hot tub and rescue the rest of the beer. Now Jenna lay on the living room carpet in a bra and panties, her dress drying by the fireplace. Mitch had changed into a fresh pair of khakis and a plain white t-shirt, and he rubbed his hair with a dry towel while the rest of the girls sprawled out around the living room in a loose circle. Candlelight reflected off their faces in the otherwise darkened room.

  As was the norm in small Oregon towns like Milton, the late summer storm had managed to knock out the power. A half-hour into the tempest, the whole west side of town was blacked out.

  Blythe reclined on a pile of pillows. Mitch finished with his towel and stretched out to rest his head on her lap. She caressed his face with the back of her hand, staring into the candle flames. Her glasses reflected the flames in each lens, her irises like two uninhabited blue planets orbited by four burning moons. The candles, already devoured nearly to their limits when Sharmalee snatched them from the pantry in the darkness, had melted to the tabletop. The flames shrank in their puddles of wax, conserving their remaining fuel, holding out.

  Corwin’s round face was aglow in the blue light of her laptop. “It’s a storm,” she announced, to no one in particular.

  “No shit, Corwin,” Renee said from the kitchen. “Look outside.”

  “Well,” said Corwin, snapping her computer closed. “Now we know for sure.”

  “I’m killing the wine,” Renee called to the living room. Lexie frowned, wishing for the taste of something juicy. Renee walked back to the living room, barefoot and wearing a fresh pair of denim shorts. Lexie couldn’t imagine how Renee wasn’t cold. The night had brought with it the first chill of the season, and Lexie shivered inside her hoodie, wishing the meager fireplace would cast more heat through the room. Lexie stared longingly at a pile of throw blankets shuffled into the corner.

  “Here,” Renee said, snatching a blanket and two floor pil
lows. “Share with me.” She eased herself cross-legged onto the carpet beside Lexie as she poured the wine. “I don’t want a whole glass, anyway.”

  Lexie took the proffered blanket and curled up inside it resting her chin on her knee.

  “Cheers, then,” Renee said, lifting the glass to her lips.

  Renee tipped her head back to let the wine run down her throat. She offered the glass to Lexie, who took a sip for herself. The wine tasted tart and brazen, as though it had been sitting out all day. In all likelihood, it had.

  A blanket of quiet descended on the room. Blythe and Mitch engaged in a grooming ritual of mutual caresses and eye-gazing. Hazel and Sharmalee had taken a break from their earlier hushed exchange about the ambiguous sexual orientation of a cute underclassmen in attendance earlier that day, mulling over each other’s points as they both rested on Corwin’s chest, their heads buoyed with the even rise and fall of her rib cage. Jenna added two logs to the cramped hearth, though Lexie still shivered in her hoodie and blanket.

  Renee whispered, “I can hear your brain working.”

  Lexie shrugged.

  Renee laughed aloud, the sound rising above the valley of low voices in the room. “What are you thinking?”

  Lexie hesitated. She hated to dispel the quiet. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much of anything to say.”

  “There’s always something that needs to be said,” Renee said, taking another sip of wine. “This world conspires to take away women’s voices at every turn. May as well use your voice when you can.”

  “I’ve never had a hard time speaking up.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Renee challenged. “When was the last time you did?”

  Lexie bit her lip, thinking hard but coming up empty.

  Renee set her wineglass on the table. “May I kiss you?” she asked.

  Lexie gaped. The question sounded foreign, absurd. She wanted to laugh at the improbability at hearing it, ever. She furrowed her brow even as she fought off a timid smile.

  “What?” Lexie asked.

  “Can I kiss you?”

  “Uh . . . I mean, it’s just that--” Lexie struggled to right her brain.