Random Acts of Hope

by Julia Kent

  I looked outside. Full moon? It brought out the nutcases. Maybe even the werewolves at this rate. And, apparently, a six-foot snake.

  I grabbed my keys, ID, and phone and began the quiet march over to Boothman. That dorm was all men, all freshmen and sophomores, and tended to house the science majors. Pets other than fish were absolutely banned from campus halls, and every fall I’d always add a line in orientation sessions:

  “And just because it fits in an aquarium doesn’t mean it’s allowed.”

  Once word got out that a six-foot snake was loose in a dorm, my phone and all the RD phones in this cluster would be screaming. And then in the morning the parents could be screaming, too. Tomorrow would be one hell of a day.

  But tonight? This was just the cherry on top. What else could the night throw at me that would be harder to deal with than a six-foot snake?

  Liam

  I needed to take a bath in a giant bucket of varnish remover. So many hands on me, so many backsides rubbed up against my frontside. Too many fingers copping an extra feel around my g-string. Long, fake fingernails trailing lines down my biceps, my thigh, my chest and abs…leaving trails of spine-tingling shudders.

  Most nights I was fine with being the flesh fun. I got into it, really. I’m young, hot, and this is what I do. I entertain. On a stage I do it with a guitar in hand, and here I do it with a g-string. The difference between the two is slim. When—not if—the band breaks out, I can just make women think I want to fuck them by using my hands on a guitar and my voice at a mic.

  Here I use costumes and g-string. They eat it up, and knowing they want me makes it all the more fun.

  It had been a long night. Three bachelorette parties in a row. What was it about early September in New England and weddings? By the third party I felt like someone had drugged me. How much lipstick could my chin handle?

  My wallet was nice and fat, so I shouldn’t complain. But I would. You think stripping is easy cash, and who gives a shit about showing off your body for other people’s pleasure. It’s my body and I can do what I want with it. Dad cut me off and Mom can’t help, so I just did what seemed natural when a friend of a friend of a friend told me about the job.

  The owner of the company where we stripped, Louise, told me I was a natural, and bam—instant $300 a night most nights. Tonight I was packing $500. All three parties had been in Weston, at places with gates and butlers. You get an address in neighborhoods and towns like Weston or Wellesley or Beacon Hill and suddenly the ones become fives and tens.

  The demands go up, too. Tentative hands turn into entitled gropes. Women with tight faces, elevated breasts, and shoes that cost more than my first car go indignant when you tell them you won’t do that for an extra $200. No, not for $500, either.

  Tempting as it might be.

  The rage comes out, then. But they have to keep it in check, because life among the suburban blue bloods is all about a careful balance between what you know is true on the inside, what you have to fake on the outside, and the screaming tension of the unpredictable.

  A bachelorette party with some beefcake (that’s me) is unpredictable enough to let these women feel like they’re being wild, but some of them think that because they’re letting loose and because they have husbands who own entire towns that means they can own me, too, for a half-hour or so.

  “Name your price,” they’ve told me, and while I don’t have one, my fellow stripper Jack does. He quotes now with a sly half-smile and gives me a wink as the well-coiffed women slip past all their friends who try to act like they don’t notice that the cougars are about to roar.

  And Jack has the fattest wallet of all.

  It’s when the women won’t take no for an answer that the job gets tough. Too tough. And tonight was one of those nights.

  Obsessing about Charlotte didn’t help, either.

  Nights like this are why I pay $50 a month to belong to a twenty-four-hour gym. By the time I get there, it’s 3:44 a.m. and the place is close to dead. Only the hardcore free-weight junkies are lifting, spotting each other and doing cage squats that make you think their assholes are about to explode from lifting six hundred pounds out of a below-parallel squat.

  Somehow they get up there, high enough to count it as a rep. Maybe that’s the key to success: work so hard you nearly blow an organ. And then do it again.

  I showed up in sweats and got down to it, a set of lunges, then toe lunges, then diagonal toe lunges burning up my quads. The racks were full, and that’s how I liked it: my gym, my way, on my timeline.

  “Hey,” a voice said, interrupting my thoughts. I was bench pressing forties to get ready to move up, push myself to hundreds. You can’t start too high or you’ll shred yourself. Right now, being shredded to pulp and becoming stringy meat sounded good. Maybe then I’d stop thinking about Charlotte.

  The voice was attached to Tyler, our replacement bass player, a.k.a. Frown.

  “Hey,” I muttered back.

  “You do forties?” He wasn’t impressed. Sweat poured off his face, his hair shorter than the last time I saw him, his tats on display as he wore a nasty old wife-beater that used to have a logo on it. Like, ten years ago. That shirt was so tattered it could be one of those strings of prayer flags the Free Tibet people used to fly on their balconies in college.

  “To start.” I pushed up, elbows angled just right, and let the weights come down slowly, helping to build more muscle fiber. “Working up to hundreds.” Why I said that was a mystery. I didn’t need to impress him.

  “Need a spotter?”

  Why was he here? Fuck this. “Not yet.” Gym manners said I should offer back. It wasn’t his fault I felt like taking out a small village right now.

  But I didn’t offer.

  “When you do, let me know.” And with that he walked off slowly, like nothing bothered him. A flare of jealously filled my skin. Must be nice to be that chill.

  I worked my way up to eighties and felt my arms weaken. Nineties made my triceps scream, but I wasn’t giving up. Every rep gave me more power, even as it ripped through me, and drove thoughts of Charlotte out of my mind.

  All those women stroking and teasing me. A few licked me. And all I could think about was Charlotte and why she fucked me over five years ago.

  I got up to get a drink of water and heard someone laugh. Tuning people out at the gym was easy, because I didn’t know anyone. I kept it that way. I had enough friends.

  I went back to my bench and halted, the laughter growing.

  The blowup doll was on my bench, one arm clutching a five-pound weight. She wore a big Post-it note that said: “Can someone spot me?”

  Fucking Tyler. I looked everywhere for him. Gone.

  Three guys came out of nowhere and pointed. “She your trainer?” More laughter.

  I snatched her up and stormed off to the shower. Ten minutes under the hot spray and as much soap as I could manage washed away the ick of work. What did Charlotte call her? Esme? She sat quietly on a bench, unchanging, unmoved. Maybe a blowup girlfriend was the way to go. That Ryan Gosling movie might have been a non-fiction guide to a non-friction relationship.

  I started laughing at her perpetually surprised look as I got dressed, then threw her under my arm and took off. As I walked out the main doors, one of the gym freaks called out, “Happy elopement,” and I shot him a grin and my middle finger.

  5:09 a.m. Most people were about to get up.

  I was just getting started. At least I knew what to do next. Me and Esme were going on a road trip to see an old friend.

  Charlotte

  “You’ll probably find her sometime in the next month or two, growing in a wall or trapped in someone’s kitchen,” the animal control specialist explained. Sunrise had just started and the slow trek of Walk of Shame coeds began, their faces down, women hiding behind curtains of bedhead hair. We were on the third-floor stairwell and no one said a word as they quietly peeled off to their various floors, the snick of the doors closing like an
agreed-upon code.

  Let’s pretend this never happened.

  The stairwell reeked of sour alcohol and beer sweat, with a touch of cotton candy perfume (the current craze in this dorm, for some reason). I, however, was not on any kind of Walk of Shame. Hadn’t had one of those in, well…ever.

  Instead, I was currently dealing with an escaped snake. And no, not a one-eyed trouser snake.

  I wish.

  “You’re telling me we just have to accept the fact that a six-foot boa constrictor—” My voice sounded foreign to me, the words impossible.

  “Six foot snake of undetermined type,” she corrected. Roberta Smailes looked so much like Liam’s mother I did a double take, except this was her doppelgänger in a weird sort of way. If Sybil McCarthy had majored in animal science and worn hiking boots and old L.L. Bean flannel shirts, and never touched makeup or hair color, this could be her.

  I towered over her, just like I did with Sybil.

  “Six-foot snake is the operative phrase.” I sighed. This wasn’t her fault. “We have hundreds of students in this building. They will freak out knowing this thing is just lurking in the building, ready to strike.”

  Roberta laughed, a friendly sound of great humor. I wanted to invite her over for coffee. “The most that sucker’s going to do is find a nice spot in a wall where mice and rats run up your pipes. It’ll have a field day in there. Like a snake luxury resort with an endless supply of food.”

  “But we bait for mice and rats.”

  She scowled. “Then if the snake eats a poisoned rodent, the snake has a strong chance of dying, too. You’ll know where it is by the smell of its decomposing body.”

  “Even better,” I muttered. “Those are the scenarios?”

  She frowned, thinking for a moment, then gave me a smirk. “Or it slips out of the building one day in search of better hunting grounds. Then someone reports a giant escaped snake and you have a million news crews here.”

  “I don’t like any of these choices,” I muttered, then yawned.

  She shrugged. “I can’t find her. If I could, I’d haul her away.” She reached into the breast pocket of her flannel shirt and handed me a business card. “If you see a new bulge in a wall, or hear scuffling sounds in one, call me.”

  “A bulge in a what?”

  “The wall. If the snake gets comfortable and has a steady supply of food, it will grow. And it might start to push out the wall if it’s wedged somewhere.”

  “Oh, God.” I pictured the parent calls.

  She clapped me on the shoulder and started to leave. “I don’t envy you,” she called out as she stomped down the stairs.

  “Me either.”

  “It’s never fun when a snake just suddenly appears out of nowhere,” she said, snickering.

  I walked down the stairs a flight behind her, peeling off to my first-floor hallway as she went outside through the exit, the dull-grey light of 6 a.m. a brutal reminder of the night. No one goes into residence life for routine and predicability. That’s for sure.

  “Another morning for earplugs and a noise machine,” I muttered to myself as I keyed into my apartment, my eyes darting around on the ground. I wasn’t getting much sleep, though. Not with a fucking six-foot snake terrorist living among us.

  Someone came into my peripheral vision just as I opened my door. A brown-haired, short woman. I began speaking as I pulled the key out. “Unless it’s an emergency, I’m going to bed, so—”

  I turned to find a woman perpetually surprised.

  Esmeralda. And attached to her was a big old snake.

  More than six feet tall.

  My eyes narrowed. “You,” was all I could say. In spite of myself, my hands flew to my hair. It felt like a rat’s nest in a ponytail. My clothes were about as glamorous as you’d expect for a middle-of-the-night call about a loose snake.

  Liam looked fresh and wild, his hair slightly wet and his face so raw I couldn’t breathe.

  “Me,” was all he said.

  “And Esme.”

  “She’s a lousy conversationalist,” he said.

  My pulse raced and a deep sense of unease poured through me, quickly followed by a rush of hope. Hope that I did not welcome, want, or embrace. Once you let hope come back in you know that pain is next, and I’d spent so much time trying to be resilient, to make sure that if I couldn’t feel hope, I’d never feel pain.

  If Liam hurt me again I didn’t think I could keep breathing.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, my voice cracking.

  He frowned, his eyes uncertain, his hands in tight fists. Then he let out a small sound that was supposed to be a laugh but didn’t quite make it. “I don’t know. I practiced a hell of a lot of answers to that question on the drive here, but all of them sound stupid.”

  I leaned against the doorjamb and crossed my arms over my breasts. It made me feel infinitesimally more safe. “Try me.”

  The air between us crackled with five years of unspoken words, one dead baby, one amazing kiss and…er….one sex doll.

  I stared at her and realized I had to get her out of the hall.

  Liam followed my look and laughed, but before he could say anything, old Ernie, the retired head of campus security who still took occasional weekend shifts, lumbered down the hallway. He looked like Wilford Brimley, with a long, grey walrus mustache and gold-rimmed glasses, though he weighed about a hundred pounds less. Even his voice was similar, and he impressed the students by saying “diabeetus” over and over from an internet meme.

  Ernie looked at me and smiled, then turned to Liam with an outstretched hand for a shake. He halted as his eyes skimmed over Esme.

  “Now that’s a sight you don’t see every day,” he said drolly. Then he turned and gave Liam the once-over, tipping his chin up. Ernie was five and a half feet tall on a good day.

  “You do in res life,” I said, returning his smile.

  “Ernie Driscoll,” he said to Liam, shaking his hand. “Everyone round here just calls me Old Ernie.”

  “Hey, Ernie,” Liam said. “Liam McCarthy.”

  “That your bucket of bolts out in the main parking lot?” Ernie asked Liam, eyes slowly assessing him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The one without a visitor’s parking pass?”

  Liam gulped. Ernie had a way of making you feel like you were an errant nine-year-old kid. Liam’s eyes shifted to me, and I wordlessly went into my office and grabbed a visitor’s pass. I guess he was staying.

  My heart skipped in double time at the thought as I handed it to Liam.

  Introductions completed, Ernie turned to me and raised his bushy, overgrown eyebrows.

  “I’m assuming she’s not yours, missy,” he said, pointing to Esme. Any other campus professional called me missy and I’d be down their throats in three seconds. Ernie was the only one who could get away with it. He made me nostalgic for my grandpa, who died when I was in eighth grade.

  “Not mine.”

  “Yours?” he said to Liam, eyebrows inching even higher. His eyes took in Liam from stem to stern again. “You don’t look like you need to be finding your booty from a plastic doll.”

  Liam choked on his response. “No, sir.”

  Ernie reached out for the parking pass. “Your car’s unlocked,” he declared, pulling a flashlight out of his holster. “I checked. Not smart. But it means I’ll put this pass in there and make you legal. Lock your car for you, too.” As Ernie’s bushy eyebrows met in a disapproving frown, they looked like a squirrel’s tail.

  Liam flushed red and handed over the pass, a little too obedient. Was he as nervous as I was about seeing each other?

  Ernie picked up Esme. “Oh, don’t be so surprised, Dolly,” he muttered as he tucked her under one shoulder and began his lopsided walk down the stairs. “I’ll help you find a nice boy down by the dumpster where you can get it on. Maybe there’s a cardboard cutout of that Justin Bieber kid, like there was a few weeks ago. You two can see if it’s a love mat
ch.”

  Liam shook his head sadly as Ernie disappeared. “I’ll never meet another woman like Esme.”

  “You can buy another one.”

  He eyed me with a look so focused and determined. “Is that what I need to do to get you to come to a gig again and kiss me?”

  “I didn’t kiss you! You kissed me!”

  And then he did it again, right there in the hallway, under the security cameras my RAs were so eager to view. In that moment, though, I wasn’t aware of anything but his hands on my hips, his lips on mine, the kiss possessive and aggressive, more in tune with the five years of resentment between us than the five years of longing.

  Who could separate it all, though? The mixed emotions made a giant fireball that was erratic and dangerous, completely capable of destruction and yet so powerful it was a thing of beauty to behold.

  We didn’t make a sound, his tongue breaking through and exploring, his hip sliding against my thigh, hands riding up my back to my crazy hair. Heat filled all my pulse points, caring not one whit for the unbreachable between us but instead moving with kinetic power fueled by deep want.

  Desire. Not just sexual, but emotional. I needed to know him again, needed him to know and want me, and if I couldn’t fix what happened all those years ago at least I could take in the nectar of this one embrace, this one kiss, this one moment.

  He pulled back and held up his palms in a conciliatory gesture.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, confused. I pressed my fingertips against my burning lips.

  “Just making sure you don’t slap me again.”

  “If I did, it’s because you deserved it.”

  His eyes clouded. I’d said the wrong thing. “We both deserve a lot of things. Some good, some bad.”