The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

  Out on Frat Row, in the winter-empty cold, Jenna quietly hopes that there’s the possibility of love somewhere on this campus, in this world. Cordelia waves her hands in the air as if she hears music Jenna can’t and says, “Come on, girl. Let’s go find us some fratties.”

  They head to Deek House, home of the hot swimmers and off-season lacrosse boys. Inside, Christmas lights wink from the ceilings and green foliage wraps the banister, as if someone’s mother had visited to prep for a holiday party at which adults would mingle and chatter, instead of drunken underage college students having beer-funneling contests in the common room.

  “Watch how drunk I get tonight, Jems.” Cordelia smiles at Jenna, but it comes out sort of threatening. “You just watch me.”

  Since the events of that first weekend, when Cordelia had returned to their room with Scott’s fingerprints bruising her thigh, Jenna had lost count of how many times she’d held Cordelia’s long hair back while the remnants of binge drinking went into the toilet.

  “You should loosen up tonight.” Cordelia nudges her. “I want to see you drunk.” She says “drunk” as if she means “happy.”

  Jenna and Cordelia make the rounds in all the rooms. Since it’s an Around the World party, each room has different appetizers and drinks on offer—Red Stripe and jerk chicken, nachos and lime-tinted Coronas, pepperoni slices and jug-poured red wine. Jenna pokes into one room and the next, counting L.L. Bean blue-and-white-flecked sweaters, silly sombreros worn by broad-backed boys. One room is empty except for its host.

  “How lame,” Cordelia says. “That guy is all alone. Let’s go to a different room.” But Jenna says she wants to stay. She thinks that if she hosted a room party, if she were Ecuador or China, maybe she’d be like this guy, standing by herself in an unpeopled room; alone but for trays of egg rolls or whatever Ecuadorian food consists of.

  It’s a relief to be in a room that’s not crowded with beer slosh and Polarfleece, that doesn’t smell like perfumes wafting from various girls. Cordelia shrugs as she walks to the next room, where there’s a vat of raw cookie dough and spiked eggnog—which isn’t really any specific country but is sweet nonetheless.

  Jenna looks at the blue-lighted room in front of her—an aquarium for people. Plastic fish attached to lines hang from the ceiling. The cooler in the middle of the room is decorated like a treasure trunk.

  “What country is this?” she asks the host, whom she’s seen before—on campus somewhere or downstairs in the poolroom. She thinks his name is Glen or Jon, something with an n.

  “Yeah—I know. I couldn’t figure out what to do. And we had all these fish.” He motions to the point-nosed gar and barracudas, pushing them until they swing and smack against one another.

  “You could say it’s Atlantis,” Jenna says. “That’s kind of a country.”

  The guy smiles and says, “True. Good idea.” He sticks out his hand for her to shake it. “I’m Wren—not like the bird. It’s short for Wrentham—it’s a family name.” He says this smoothly, and Jenna realizes he’s probably explained his name a hundred times in the past, to teachers, his friends, other girls.

  He offers her an iced blue drink. Jenna hesitates and then accepts, thinking of the way Cordelia sways when she’s been drinking, how fluid life seems for her, how love lurks around every corner—in freshman lit, at the dining hall, by the abductor in the gym. Jenna sips her drink. It tastes like chlorinated Kool-Aid.

  “When you puke tonight,” he says, “it’ll be this color.” He points to the electric blue liquid and sounds proud, that Jenna’s puking is a sure bet.

  Wren is cute, though—brown hair tinged with blond, like a beach kid’s, and slim, not bulky like most of the Deeks. Jenna can just see it: she and Wren will kiss under the blue lights as if the bulbs are stars—like in that song—and Jenna will tell her parents over winter break that she’s really settled in at college. That she has a boyfriend with a name that’s cool enough for her but formal enough for them, that classes are okay, she likes her roommate, that she has put aside her thoughts of becoming a professional baker or chef. All of this would be a great relief to her parents, especially the chef part. Jenna hadn’t wanted to go to regular college—but culinary school was not acceptable according to her mother, who’d been married at twenty-two and never even had to think about what to become.

  “Hello? Did you hear what I asked you?” Wren says and uses a ladle to spoon more icy blue drink into Jenna’s cup.

  “Sorry,” Jenna says. “I was thinking about break.”

  “That’s okay,” Wren says. “I’m so totally ready for vacation. This place…” He gestures with his hands as if that says enough and takes a big swallow from his cup. From the doorway, a frat brother says, “Hey, Wren—you coming down for the costume thing?”

  Wren shrugs and makes some signal to the brother, who winks and leaves. Wearing country-specific clothing was an option at the night’s party. You could wear a kimono for the sushi-sake-Japan room, or a sarong and fake tan in one of the Caribbean rooms, and then be part of the costume contest and maybe win a gift certificate to Chili’s or a frat brother back rub.

  “Isn’t the costume part of this just an excuse to see girls in bikinis?” Jenna laughs to Wren. She can feel the alcohol swirling inside her.

  “You might just be onto something.” Wren hoists himself up on a stool, dodging the ceiling-hung fish. Jenna begins to wonder what the boy would look like in real light, in the daytime, or at least not blue. Then she wonders if blue is one of those colors—like the greenish hue of highway tunnels—that instantly reveals your flaws, pimples or flaking winter skin.

  “I’ve never seen you here before,” Wren says. Jenna stands near him. Near enough to lean on his legs, but she doesn’t, despite feeling a bit wobbly.

  “Yeah?” she says and wonders why it came out as a question. “I guess I’m not much of a party girl.”

  “I find that kind of hard to believe,” Wren says, looking at her drink. “You sure you haven’t been here before? On a regular night?”

  She had been, but Jenna shakes her head and tries for coy—like a cute movie personality, tipsy but not messy. Downstairs in the basement on other nights, the brothers played Ping-Pong, pissed in the corners of the room as if no one was there, and rated girls when they came down the stairs. “Tits, 10, ass, 8—but, dude, lose the pouch!” That was what Cordelia had gotten one Thursday night in October, but since she’d slept with two of the brothers, they’d stopped rating her and basically ignored her presence in the house. Jenna didn’t know which was worse. She didn’t even get a rating—somehow she was always unnoticed, not always in a bad way, just more as if she was a holographic image, sometimes seeable, other times gone.

  Wren slugs the last of his drink down and reaches for a gummy worm. He shows Jenna the pile of gummy things available—worms, red Swedish fish that look purple in the light, strawberries.

  “Ah—the famous berries of the sea—what do strawberries have to do with the ocean?” Jenna laughs and takes one from the tray.

  “I don’t know.” Wren smiles back. “They just looked good, so I got a bunch of them, even though they’re not exactly part of the theme.”

  Wren offers Jenna a gummy worm, dangling it in front of her, taking it away each time she reaches for it. Finally, Jenna bobs for it, grabbing at it with her mouth.

  “Look,” Wren says, “I’m fishing for you.”

  Jenna thinks about how this could be the story of how they met, how their underwater romance began at a frat party, how she’d found true love in a fish tank. Wren takes his hands and puts them on Jenna’s shoulders, moves her closer to him. He feels the back of her neck, lifting up the loose hair. He moves in and lets his lips go to her ear, then her mouth. When he kisses her, she can taste the bits of gummy worm; the fragments of chewed strawberry get caught behind her lower lip. She wonders if Wren notices.

  “Want to go upstairs?” he asks in a heavy whisper.

  “Aren’t
we already upstairs?” She pulls back and looks at his face.

  She goes to the windowsill and looks out toward the quad. The distant glow of the campus winter bonfire flickers and fades; people dance around it. They look tiny down there, students the size of rice grains, all ruddy-cheeked and flushed, looking for something or someone in the expanse of snow.

  Wren comes up behind Jenna and hugs her from behind. “You okay?” he asks.

  “I feel a little sick,” she says. She turns to look at Wren, to search him for signs of disgust or kindness.

  “Yeah, these drinks are pretty strong.”

  She wonders if he’ll walk her home, if she should find Cordelia first and tell her Wren will see that she gets home safely.

  “I think I should probably head out,” Jenna says and swallows. The blue Kool-Aid taste is right at the back of her throat.

  “Okay—if you gotta go, you gotta go,” Wren says and sounds like a poster boy for a bathroom product.

  “Yeah.” Jenna waits for him to accompany her, to hold her hand, to put an ending on her “how they met” story. She wants to be able to say to Cordelia, to future grandchildren, to herself, that then Wren walked her back to the dorm. That, hand in hand, they crunched over the snow, and though she felt a little nauseated, she smiled when Wren put her palm over his heart, just to feel how fast it pounded as they stood outside her dorm room door.

  “Well,” Wren says and hops off the stool. “I’m going to check out this costume thing. Man cannot live a whole winter without the bikini.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you around?” Jenna asks.

  “You never know.” Wren winks at her.

  Jenna feels herself floating in the blue room, feels that she is a sea creature needing hooking of some kind. She goes to the doorway and looks at the room, the vat of drinks, the plate of gummy candy, and wonders if she left something back there.

  Halfway to the dorm, Jenna pukes blue on a snow heave. She can taste it all, the whole mess—all the bits of world cuisine as they come up. She wonders where Cordelia is, if she’ll come back to the room later or sleep somewhere else. Ahead, the last trace of bonfire embers glows against the white ground. Emptied of the drink, Jenna heads across the quad.

  Near the sculpted ice princess is a towering snow castle with a Beefeater guy standing guard. Jenna stops walking to see if she is still dizzy or just cold. She tilts, the snow massing around her and she sees that someone has relieved himself on the castle, and that there’s a slash of yellow just where the guard’s mouth should have been. She thinks about that guy, Nick, from the summer, and maybe getting in touch with him. Or maybe love is summed up in moments—that day in the park, the time you had Chinese food by candlelight, when the boy you liked left a message, finally, on your machine. Maybe the telling of these moments is even better than the moments themselves. But then there is Wren—who could have been the love of her life or a stray kiss that will go unremembered later. You never knew where it would all lead.

  Jenna stares at the ice sculptures around her. She leans on that Disney mermaid, the one who wishes for legs then wants to go back to the sea, unsure which world she’s part of. Why couldn’t life be like it was in the fifties, like in the black-and-white photos that lined the fraternity walls? Boys wore sweaters and courted girls in skirts and invited them places. Or like in the movies; some hot-roller-haired blonde in a dress sat next to her suited man, and they smiled because they knew, they knew what would happen. Jenna wishes for this even though part of her suspects that it was never as simple as it looks in the black-and-white film reels. But she wants it. She wants Cordelia to stop calling her Jemma, wants to huddle with her roommate, toes touching in the dark of their tiny box room. She thinks of kissing Nick in the warmth of the bakery, and then of the sticky, sweet drink taste on Wren’s lips—those moments when love seemed highway-wide, and sure.

  Kindling

  Until she dated Justin, who had one, Kyla wanted a wood-burning stove. Justin had nine whole and one half fingers, and a yellow Lab named Polly, who barked every time a car drove by the cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee where Justin lived for free in exchange for off-season carpentry repairs. Fall evenings after class at the graduate school, Justin left the lecture hall quickly, sidestepping the rest of the students as they leaned on the wall or stood in the doorway talking and feeling much younger than their years declared. Most of the time, Kyla stood around picturing what everyone would have been like in high school. Was Erin a field hockey girl then, her blond-topped hair bright as she swatted at the ball in the short pleat of an orange skirt? Did short Gregory try out for every play, only to be cast as Man in Suit or chorus/understudy, hoping each night that someone onstage in costume would call in with strep? Kyla’s jeans needed washing, she wore her roommate’s blue sweater, and she nodded at the conversation around her, smiling at Erin so she wouldn’t think Kyla was the quiet, hidden bitch in high school who later tried to side-check her on the field.

  A gasp of wind came in when someone opened the front door, fallen leaves blew in the doorway—the crumpled, dry kind, not the bright red or syrup-colored ones from the first foliage—and Kyla followed Justin outside one night. Catalog pretty in his fleece-lined canvas coat, he had dark hair that fell over his forehead. Kyla thought about how he’d slick it back with his full-fingered hand before answering questions in statistics class.

  Her car nosed up to the back of Justin’s, and she figured she’d get a good look at him as she pulled out of her space. He’d caught everyone’s attention the first day of class, when he’d come in toting a gangly boy Kyla thought might be his brother. Justin explained that he had been a teacher at a boys’ high school in Rhode Island, one of those last-shot places Manhattan parents send their children before giving up, and the kid was a former student who’d graduated and gone on to prove he turned out okay. After that, Kyla found herself wondering who or what else Justin might bring to class, or even what she could make surface for show-and-tell, if there was such a thing in a master’s program.

  Baby pumpkins dotted the windowsills outside Grange Hall, where Justin was fishing something out from his trunk. Kyla wondered if anyone ever carved miniature pumpkins, how they’d look knifed into triangled eyes and jag-toothed mouths. Justin gave a wave as he sat behind the wheel and watched her until she stuck her arm out the window and pulled out into the blurry street light toward home.

  She was heading back to the rented house she shared with Jenna and Jenna’s boyfriend, Hull, who didn’t pay rent but planned on staying until he patched his kayak with epoxy and chopped-strand fiberglass and set back into the Connecticut River, this time southward. Hull claimed he couldn’t take on regular work because the hours would cut into his kayaking hours. Jenna baked bread at Clear Flour, the bakery and restaurant supplier in Hanover, and often came home carrying canvas bags filled with misshapen loaves of honey wheat or seven-grain maple. Her hair and skin smelled of yeast and vanilla, and the loose strands that framed her face stayed flour-dusted and seemed gray in the light. She was just the sort of friend Kyla had hoped to make after leaving the city. Jenna knew how to caulk a bathtub or hinge a door, how to knit a cable stitch and where to inject epinephrine if you suddenly found out you had an allergy to bees while hiking.

  Jenna made Kyla feel even more strongly that there was a side to herself she’d yet to understand, the one that found calm in knitting or enjoyed camping, that somewhere in her lurked a nicer, more centered person, that she just hadn’t found an environment in which that person could begin to emerge.

  Two nights a week, Jenna worked the early shift at the bakery and woke up at half past two to open the store at 3:00 A.M. and fire up the oven. Hull woke to her alarm and made hickory coffee mixed with hot soy milk for Jenna to take in her travel thermos. Kyla was sure Hull didn’t contribute to the rent or food; Jenna’s name was on the check they gave to the landlord each month.

  Lying in her basement bedroom, Kyla could hear the rush and pull of Jenna’s car as she dr
ove the length of the dirt driveway. In the wall behind her bed, squirrels and other unseen night creatures scratched at the insulation, and Kyla would lie there, silently disgusted with her living conditions, until Hull appeared in the hallway outside her room. He’d pause, rubbing the cold soles of his feet against his calves, waiting for Kyla to pull the comforter cover back the way a hotel turndown service would.

  Kyla’s flannel sheets were old, inherited from her sister after she’d gotten married the previous spring and given out her unmatched dinner plates and the linens she’d slept on with men other than her husband. Lying between the red-and-green plaid covers, Kyla would imagine she and Hull were sealed into a gift, boxed up for some treeless morning. Hull would reach over his head and pound the wall with his palm to get the scurrying to stop. The animals would scatter, and the quiet would spread out until the only sounds left were the hiss of fruit bats leftover from summer, night-slung against the pines, and Hull’s breath as he lay facing her, ready. She had formed a gulch in her mind; on one side were the times she had heard Jenna and Hull having sex—and on the other side were the slur of times she had had Hull all to herself. With stunning clarity she had divided herself into sections, so she could watch the part of her that felt kicked and discarded while the other part of her said “tsk tsk” for caring. In this way, she could make yellow split pea soup with Jenna, having had sex with Hull only an hour or so earlier, and not feel bad. Neither of them was the other woman.