SIX

Theater 309: Contact Improvisation

Class Journal #8

Winnie Frederickson

I’m a senior, and I have a 3.98 GPA, which means I have exactly one class that I did not get an A in, Business Calculus, in which I received an A-. At the time, I was angry about that A-, even though Dr. Salter actually rounded it up from an 88. It was the semester I got a peritonsillar abscess and was in the hospital for a week, having surgery and IV antibiotics, and then out of class for another week, recovering from being in the hospital.

I missed a whole unit’s worth of instruction, and even though Dr. Salter gave me the chance to consider an Incomplete, so I could take my time with that unit and take the test I missed during break, I insisted three days was enough time to do it and I could take the test with the class.

I was about halfway through the slides she posted online when I knew I would fail that test, but I kept pushing myself, writing out all the lecture notes from the slides by hand, highlighting them, Googling stuff I didn’t get and printing it out, highlighting that, outlining the book’s chapters, highlighting those, doing all the practice problems in the back of the text.

What I never did was ask for help, even though at one point I had a dream where I was sobbing in Dr. Salter’s office, and then Jared Washington interrupted us and said he would explain everything to me, and in the dream I told him no, absolutely not, my sobs turning into screaming, screaming at him, so out of control that I woke myself up yelling. Jared Washington got 100s on all the tests and only went to class once a week.

When I went to class to take the test, I brought in all the materials I had used to study and stared and stared at them, flipping through them at my desk while everyone else talked and joked before Dr. Salter arrived. When I stared at the problems I had copied out and highlighted, they seemed to make sense, but I didn’t dare to imagine what the problem looked like without the answer beneath it.

Like how it would look on the test.

There were always two versions of Dr. Salter’s tests. She’d pass one row one version, and the next row another, I guess to guard against looking at our neighbor’s and cheating, though I could never imagine doing that. She would always copy each version onto two different pastel colors of paper. That day, I got the yellow test. The two rows on either side of me had baby blue tests.

I kept fooling myself. Before I could forget, I paged through the entire test and I wrote down the formula I was supposed to use under each problem. Then I counted up the points I would get for that and made tally marks at the top of the test. Some problems didn’t give any points for including the formula and this made me feel this incredible rage and frustration.

I knew exactly what score I needed to maintain the A I had going into the class that day.

Dr. Salter always included a problem from the previous test as the last question on the new exam. I did that next. Made my tallies.

Then I started with the first, easiest problem.

I had no idea.

I neatly tried to use the formula to plug in as much as I could. I copied out what I entered into my graphing calculator actually onto the test — made a drawing of my output screens like this meant anything at all. I convinced myself that if my test looked like a completed test, I would get my A, but I couldn’t bring myself to add tally marks either.

For the first time in my life, I attempted to look at someone else’s test, and when it was blue, like I knew it would be, I still wanted to scream.

I covered the test with writing. All of it meaningless. Walked it to the front table where Dr. Salter was waiting. I was one of the last students to turn the test in. She looked at me, smiled at me, and I remembered I hated her because she had the ability to smile easily, because she didn’t have to take this test, because she didn’t have two make-up papers to write and three hundred pages of reading and a presentation poster to put together and didn’t have a suitemate who watched reality TV all fucking night.

I got a 53 percent. Previous to this, the lowest grade I had ever received on anything else was an 82 percent on a computer science programming project my junior year of high school. When I got the test back, I sweat through my shirt, all the way through. I had never flop sweat like that, and my limbs felt disconnected from my body. I got a headache.

That night, I took two Percocets left over from my surgery so that I could sleep. When I woke up, I took two more and went back to bed.

I probably should have gone to one of the schools I looked at that don’t have grades. I remember how completely seductive that seemed — so decadent, in fact, that I actually believed I couldn’t, because it was a luxury reserved for students who required additional luxuries on top of the unimaginable-to-me luxury of going to college on a small, leafy campus with its own coffee shop.

But I should have listened to that visceral interest. I know that now. Maybe I would have done other things at a college like that that I understand now, too late, aren’t luxuries, but are just what you’re supposed to do. Done a semester abroad. Taken a J-term doing a vaccine clinic in Haiti. Picked a major where every class under its heading in the course catalog made me think, I can’t wait to take that, instead of some kind of smug satisfaction that all my classes lined up on my transcript will look good to the graduate school admissions board.

I printed a copy of my major’s course catalog section out, the first day I declared, and I pinned it to my bulletin board. When I got a class completed, I made an X through it, and making that X made me happier than anything I did all semester long.

Now I’m a senior. I have eight weeks left. One of them will be stolen by Spring Break. I’m finally in a class that I wish I had every day, that I wish was twice as long, that I wish was just one of twenty others like it that I had taken as a part of a major that made me happy, made a place for me in the lobby of the building of my major where I would have spent endless afternoons just hanging out.

The biggest struggle I’ve had in this class, this semester, has been doing the rest of my homework for my other classes. Did you know that in 10 weeks I’m scheduled to take the CPA exam? A year ago, I heard some random person in my building say that it looked better to graduate schools if you had a theoretical major, like econ, and an applied finance credential, like a CPA. So I killed myself getting an accounting minor and scheduled myself for the exam. I’ve paid my $750.00 to take it, signed up and paid for a $1,500.00 prep class that’s supposed to start after break. I haven’t even cracked the study book, and the old me would have had it color-coded and each part sectioned for study by now.

I don’t think I’m going to take that exam.

I’ve done the initial web applications for all the graduate schools I planned on applying to, but I’ve let the essay deadlines lapse for two of them, and I skipped the meeting this week about requesting GRE scores that’s required to finish the apps on all the rest.

Here’s what I don’t know, and I don’t know who to ask:

Will I graduate and regret that I’ve let every single one of my plans decompose from neglect and have no way of recouping the loss?

Now that I’ve found the people in this class, I’m never going to talk to any of them ever again, am I? After I graduate, I mean. After I go through the ceremony and keep going to whatever unimaginable new place my dad lives and . . . what? Look for some job I can get with a BS in Economics? After that, after it takes me six months to get an assistant manager’s job at a marketing company, everybody will just be some status update on Facebook, right?

If there is a part of me that wishes I had taken Art History instead of this class, just because I’d almost rather never have had this happen to me than grieve it when I’ve lost it, what should I do?

Tell me something more than the checkmark you always write on these journals.

I need more than a fucking checkmark.

A checkmark just means I was here.

Cal

On the first day of our three kissing labs, Winnie was absent.

I kept scanning the room as though I could make her appear just by wanting her to. Part of me still felt like I did on the first day of class — like Winnie didn’t exist until I saw her, folded up in her chair, saw her pointy knees and her slept-on hair and brought her into existence.

Most of me knew this was bullshit, though, and that I was just too full of myself to ever notice her before.

That day, her absence was an ache in my molars, and I couldn’t give a fuck about Jason and Finn, Beth, Sarah, any of them. I wanted to kiss Winnie. I deserved to kiss Winnie.

I knew this was bullshit, but feelings. What are you gonna do?

I saluted Mags on my way out the door, fingers flying on my phone’s screen before I was all the way out of the building. Where are you, Winnie-girl?

I didn’t hear from her right away, so I pounded on the door to her room. I checked the lounge, the library, the student center. No Winnie. I checked the places I liked to go when I wanted to be left alone — down by the river, the quiet upper deck of the nondenominational chapel building, the dugouts at the baseball diamond, the clearing underneath the huge pine tree behind the library — but it was fucking cold, and I was grasping at straws. And being a dick, actually, because if I’d found her at any of those places she’d sure as fuck have been there in part to avoid me, and I knew it.

But all I was thinking, combing over this campus I knew like the constellation of freckles on my knee, was No Winnie. Where’s Winnie? Gotta find Winnie. Something wrong with Winnie. Like a dog that knows something’s wrong with its owner.

Fucking Lassie, right? Danger! Winnie danger! Find now.

I couldn’t find her.

I curled up in the warm space next to the dryer in one of the laundry rooms and rocked back and forth. I felt then like I was losing my mind — or not my mind, but like I’d lost some part of myself, given it to her when I was supposed to keep it . . . It’s hard to describe. We’d been so tight up in our business for weeks, hands in each other’s back pockets, her eating dinner with me and my parents three or four nights a week, me sleeping over in her room — I felt like she’d been ripped forcibly away from me, and it was only with her gone that I could see how big a hole she left.

Things had been so amazing, my whole semester sprinkled in fairy dust — hanging out with my mom, holding my dad’s hand, throwing out the box in my head with “LA” stamped on it — I didn’t want to believe it was all meaningless separate from Winnie.

Can a crush have a corona? Where you feel so much, everything shifts and realigns around this person, but when you lose the girl you lose the entire substance of your so-called transformation?

That’s what I was worrying about when she called me. If I was just that fucked, when I’d thought a few hours ago I was at the top of my game.

It was so loud wherever she was, I could barely hear her voice. “Calvin!” she shouted. “Calvin Darling!”

She said my name like I was someone she’d known in her youth, and we’d just bumped into each other on a transatlantic voyage.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m at the Longhorn!”

The Longhorn is a bar over in Grimes. Occasionally a group of students will head over there in a scrum to line-dance and drink dollar beers on a Wednesday night.

“Who are you with?”

“Nobody! But I want to be with you. Come over here, Calvin Darling! I’m lonely.”

She was drunk, is what she was.

Winnie doesn’t drink.

“Tell me where to find you.”

“It’s not big, Calvin Darling,” she said. “I’m on a stool at the bar. I’m not difficult to locate.”

I didn’t tell her I’d spent the past four hours trying to locate her. I just said, “Don’t move. Twenty minutes.”

“Do you have a cowboy hat, Calvin Darling?” she crooned. “Can you pretend to be a cowboy?”

“Do not move off that stool,” I repeated, and by that time I was at my car, keys in the ignition, yanking at the parking break. “I’ll be there before you know it.”

Maybe for her, time buckled. For me, twenty minutes was twenty minutes, and I kept hearing the way she’d said my name. Like it was the punch line to a joke. Calvin Darling. Do you have a cowboy hat?

I was pissed at her.

It surprised me.

She’d never made me feel like a joke before, never made me feel as ordinary as I did driving down the back road to Grimes to pick up my drunk girlfriend from a local dive.

But god damn was I ever relieved to see her intact, sitting at that bar. She had a half-empty pint glass in front of her, a cowboy shirt on and this fringed buckskin skirt that was at least three sizes too big and looked like it’d come out of the props room.

It made me want to look around for the mechanical bull, that skirt. It should’ve made her ridiculous, because she’s no cowgirl. She’s tiny, and she’s got a butch haircut and no boobs to speak of.

It did make her ridiculous. She had no magic whatsoever in the Longhorn.

I told my mom once that I thought Winnie was gorgeous, the hottest woman I’d ever met, and she did this slow blink thing she does when she’s running through four or five possible responses and rejecting them all.

Her slow blink was the first thing to clue me in that most people don’t see Winnie like I do.

But that night, walking up to Winnie at the Longhorn — it was the first time I ever saw what she looked like to people who weren’t me. When she lifted her eyes and saw me, said, “Calvin Darling,” beckoned me closer with one drunk, lazy motion of her arm, she looked like the saddest buckle bunny in the world. Like a third-string bimbo who’d been riding rodeo boys for too many long and dusty years.

She looked like the same woman, a different woman, every possible woman in the world.

That’s when I figured out I didn’t have a crush on Winnie Frederickson.

I was fucked-over-stupid in love with her.

She patted the red leatherette stool next to her, and when I slid onto it she grabbed my thigh, gripped it up high, leaned into me. Her beery breath warmed my neck. “I am so glad to see you, Calvin Darling.”

“I’m glad to see you, too, Winnie-girl.” I picked up her pint and finished it off. “How many of these have you got in you?”

She drew a circle in the sweat-ring the glass had left on the bar. “Two?” she said. “No, three. Definitely three.”

Three wasn’t so bad. I didn’t think even a wee, elfin teetotaler was likely to suffer much from three pints of beer.

“You didn’t come to class.”

“I know,” she said. “I had to do this instead.”

“What’s this?”

She spun the barstool toward me and grabbed my other thigh, so she had me pinned in her hands, her face right up next to mine. “It was an experiment. My own kissing lab.”

“Who’ve you been kissing?”

I tried not to sound as alarmed as I felt, but I sucked at it. She stroked my cheek. “Nobody, Cal, baby. I had a hypothesis, you know? But my hypothesis was dis-proven.” She leaned on the dis with the heel of her hand on my leg, pressing into the bone. It didn’t feel good.

I didn’t want her to stop.

“What was the hypothesis?”

“The hypothesis was that Contact Improv is a class, not life. Therefore, everything that happens in Contact Improv is a phenomenon of the class. Who I am in that class isn’t who I am. Everything that happens associated with Contact Improv — that includes you, Cal-baby, and all our other friends from the class — are also a phenomenon of the class, not life.”

“That’s a shitty hypothesis.”

She frowned at me. “Maybe I should’ve talked to you about this first. But I thought, Okay, you know, that’s the hypothesis. So prove it or disprove it. Because if everything that’s come to me because of Contact Improv is going to be gone the day I graduate — if the rest of my life is the rest of my life is the rest of my fucking life, as dry and dusty as it was in December, if I’m going to end up in fucking Fayetteville working at a branch office of H&R Block, I want to know. I don’t want to be surprised.”

“H&R Block?”

“I’m trying to be realistic. The economy isn’t good.”

“You really should have talked to me about this.”

“I’m starting to get that. But what I did instead was figure, Hey, if Contact Improv is a role, the experiment has to be whether a role can be your life. Whether I can take who I am in Contact Improv and just be that person in the real world. Because if I can do it once, I can do it forever, right?”

“Who are you trying to be?”

I was baffled. Obscurely hurt. But I felt so tender toward my Winnie, too, for being more confused than she’d let on, and for that crazy fringed buckskin skirt she was swimming in.

“I’m not trying to be anyone now. The experiment was to see if I could go to a bar and kiss a man. Any man.”

“You were trying to pick up some stranger?”

“You’re looking at me like I’m crazy.”

“It’s a weekday afternoon. There’s hardly even anyone here, so yeah. You seem a little crazy, baby.”

“I needed to know.”

“What’s it prove if you kiss a strange man at a bar?”

“It would’ve proved that Contact Improv is life, not just class. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. So it’s not.”

Her explanation — it didn’t make any fucking sense to me.

It didn’t matter, though, because she made sense to me. The bones of her ribcage under my hands when I reached across the space between us and pulled her onto my lap.

The knob of her knee bumping into my sternum.

The smell of her dandruff shampoo, tar and lye, the goldenrod color of it in its clear plastic bottle the same as her hair when the sun hit it just right.

She made sense to me, because I was afraid of all the same shit she was afraid of. That none of this was real. That the future was bearing down on us and we weren’t strong enough to take it.

That I would wake up in ten years in a generic apartment in some generic place with a boner for Winnie Frederickson, and I’d think, What ever happened to that girl? and That was a wild time, but I would no longer believe in anything I’d felt for her. I’d no longer believe in anything that happened to us in Contact Improv.

We were both afraid that days aren’t pearls. That the conversations we were stopping to have in the dining hall — three-hour gab sessions about politics, about semantics, about the meaning of life itself — were so much bullshit, naïve-kid nonsense that we’d feel ashamed of when we were running off manuscripts for the postgrad unpaid internship whose shape was, in fact, the shape of adulthood.

But how does that happen?

It happens because you let it happen. It happens because you choose it.

I chose Winnie instead.

I’d skipped the kissing lab that day, but Maggie had described to us how it was supposed to go. She would bring two people in front of the group and hand them a slip of paper. On the paper would be the barest sketch of a scene.

A first kiss at the end of a bad date.

A kiss in the bathroom of a crowded club, people pounding on the door outside.

A kiss after the first time one of you has cheated on the other.

The audience wouldn’t know the scene. It would be you and your partner’s job to broadcast the emotion, the feel, the reality of that scene to the audience with your kiss.

When you ended the scene, the audience would tell you what they had felt, what they had seen. If what you had done was real.

I pulled Winnie against me, my dick hard, my heart pounding, my hands all over that skirt, sliding up against her bra strap, clamping down on her neck. “This is real,” I told her.

“It’s not, though,” she said. “The experiment failed.”

“Fuck the experiment.” I stood, wobbling because, Christ, I’m a skinny fuck, I shouldn’t be carrying anything bigger than a dachshund. “We’re going home.”

I carried her to my car.

I probably would have given up halfway there, but Winnie said, “You’re carrying me to the car?!” about a hundred times, which made me feel like fucking Ajax, so I kept going. Striding.

Okay, staggering.

The next morning I couldn’t move my arms, but it was worth it just for how she kissed me when I finally put her on the ground.

It was worth it for the slide of her body down mine, the hitch of her hip against my hard dick, for my hands on her ass in that buckskin skirt, for the way she went after me like I had all the oxygen and she needed it back.

We kissed against the door of my car for ten fucking years, and it was magic. It was. Real magic.

As far as I’m concerned, all the magic that came after was just a bonus.

Winnie

“It isn’t.” Sarah was angry.

Cal was uneasy, shut down.

Marvin kept spinning a heavy black fountain pen on the bone of his thumb, his other arm across his body.

Beth was angry, too, her chest completely broken out in red splotches. Cal had invited her. For the first time, I’d pretended with Cal. I pretended I was glad he wanted to include Beth in our circle. I said, That would be perfect, but I made myself inaccessible to him when I said that, and he knew I did, and I told myself I was just feeling the uncomfortable stretch of our ever-larger reaches of intimacy and that this was what I wanted.

Funny how pretending is almost exactly like lying.

Jason and Finn were texting. Probably each other. Their hipbones and thighs touching where they sat side by side on the sofa in Cal’s parents’ living room.

“It’s not art,” Beth insisted. “No one at all is remotely deluded that it is except those of you pretending to be artists so that you can produce fucking porn.”

Beth said pretending like she was spitting poison out of her mouth.

That’s when Cal reached over and put his hand on Beth’s shoulder.

She looked at him and put her hand over his.

You could hear the ocean, like the leafy street outside the windows had been replaced by the shore.

“I have homework,” I said.

Cal looked at me, all of him reaching out to me, the new light in him that I hadn’t figured out yet, in his chest, his throat, reaching out steadily.

“I have homework,” I said, again.

In bed, staring up at my ceiling, the smell of Cal’s hair in the pillow, I realized how easy it had been to leave.

Cal

“I’m suspending part two of the physical intimacy lab today. Stand up.” Maggie gestured us up. There were only a couple people in the class grumbling about missing a stage kissing day.

The rest of us stood up and looked everywhere but each other, the relief palpable.

“I’m not going to bother wasting time about why. You can feel it for yourselves. It could be my fault — I was pushing you up against the edges of what you were accomplishing. I might have pushed too far.”

Maggie said that, and it sank hard in my belly.

Next to me, I felt Beth yearn. Her yearning was a solid thing. It was making me sick, and it was so big I knew everyone could feel it. Because I was carrying part of it for her, trying to keep her together like she was dry sand in my palms, everyone also assumed that yearning was for me.

Meanwhile, directly across the circle from Beth, Sarah had such a big fucking wall around her, not even the sound of the ocean could get through.

The door backstage banged open.

Winnie.

She came around the scrim.

Her hair was purple.

Actually, part of her forehead and the tops of her ears were purple, too — that head shop Technicolor rainbow hair dye is fucking messy shit — but her hair had taken the dye like she had been meant to have hair the color of a grape Popsicle since birth.

I watched her go to her place in the circle and thought of blackberries, jam, Kool-Aid, lip gloss. I thought of getting her naked and laying her out on white sheets, dumping overripe raspberries all over her body and rubbing them in, the juice staining her, the mashed fruit getting hot. I thought of tying her to a chair, naked, her legs spread wide open, and painting that dye all over her pubic hair, saturating every hair in violet, then fucking into all that pink and purple, and then the berries were back and we were licking raspberry juice off of each other’s necks.

She snapped a look at me — really looked at me, for the first time in two days — and burst out laughing.

Oh God, it was so fucking good.

“The pushing isn’t the problem, is the thing. I will push you and push you,” Maggie continued. “It’s that we’ve lost the thread of the most serious thing that we do, which is play.”

She turned around and picked up a box behind her. She walked around the circle, putting a jar of something from the box in front of each of us. I picked it up and unscrewed the wide-mouth lid. It was pale green, viscous. Next to me, Finn’s was pale orange. Beth’s was pale pink. Paint?

“This is a nude exercise.”

We all stopped smelling our jars. I’m surprised Maggie didn’t fall on her ass from the collective whoosh of energy that whipped in her direction.

“You’ll remember that the syllabus speaks to intimate contact and full and/or partial nudity. You’ll also remember those activities are not required for participation in the course. If you’d like to opt out today, I’ve posted some alternative work on the class site.”

Hearing her say it, hearing her say it in that moment, when the class had already done so many things that a lot of us had no clue how to pull out of — it felt bald. Raw. It felt like we had messed something up.

It felt like we’d failed, really, because I’d always thought by the time we were at full and partial nudity none of us would remember the line, the gate, the pass-through, the moment. Hearing her say that, the paint or whatever it was didn’t seem mysterious. It seemed like some dumb prop.

“It’s okay,” is what she said then. “All of it.”

She sent us to the dressing rooms, the first time in weeks we’d been so separated as boy/girl. On the counter, there were thin cotton robes, folded up, some with old make-up stains on the collars. We all shucked out of our clothes, quiet, our heads down.

We walked back on the stage, and I felt naked. My testicles crawled up inside my body, my sac cold, my dick flopping around like the piss-tube that it was.

We all looked naked. Even with the robes on. We didn’t look nude, which somehow implied warmth and purpose and acceptance. Beauty. We had our own arms wrapped around ourselves, our feet together, our eyes darting. It was dry and uncomfortable and naked. Ugly.

Maggie told us to open our jars.

Then she told us to dip our hands into the jars to the wrist. Both hands.

It was cool and thick and naughty. Messy and sensuous. I was making a mess. We were making a mess. This was a mess. We’ll never clean up this mess. We were a conjugation of mess, messy, messing, messed fucking up.

When I was dripping paint on the stage floor, on my feet, on my robe from one hand trying to dip the other, I felt it.

Joy.

It was trailing, it was a glint, but it made me smile.

Then Maggie told us the paint was glow-in-the-dark, and we laughed. We sounded like a third-grade classroom of kids halfway through Superfudge. There were dudes fucking giggling, and one of the girls squealed, and the stage was already a mess. She told us to hold our hands up to the stage lights, to charge the paint and focus our energy, and I tossed my head back and held up my hands, felt the paint warm and drip down my wrists, imagined it charging, particle by particle, with the joy that I could feel exponentially multiplying — like a virus. Something infectious.

She said that she would turn off the lights and start music. We were to drop our robes and move toward each other, touch skin and bodies, dance and move, experience the dark and focus on the spreading glow of the paint. When the music stopped, we were to find a robe, and the lights would go back on.

Winnie met my eyes, and watching her throat hollow with a laugh, seeing a white-green glob of paint already clumped in the electric-Concord-madness of her hair, I laughed right with her.

I’m coming for you, Winnie-girl.

She snorted. Catch me if you can.

The lights snapped off, the darkness total except for a fairy ring of lights from our hands. The music started, and we all laughed again when House of Pain’s “Jump Around” blasted through the house speakers.

I ripped off my robe like it was burning my body. Before I could step into the void, a big hand was gripping the jutting bone of my hip like it was a handle. Then it was gone. I turned after it, and another hand smeared paint through the hair on my belly. Then there were two hands gripping my ass so deep I was almost lifted off the floor.

I reached my arms out, and there were shoulders, I think, a belly, a back. Nothing I could discern.

So I started to dance.

I started to jump around.

Everyone started jumping around. We were in a scrum of asses and boobs, arms and legs. We were rubbing, our hands touching and moving away. We laughed, we screamed, I felt bodies crouch down, I felt them leap up, I started spinning and found someone else who was spinning, too.

The more we danced and touched, the more we came into focus — darting, pixelated bodies made up of neon lights. Half a face, a set of tits, a floating arm, a curve of thigh. Our bodies melted away, and we were just — nude. Painted nudes, layers of light. We existed in the imagination of our creator. We existed for each other.

We were wet and warm, curved and bone, barbaric fucking yawps.

When the music stopped, I watched our lighted spines curve to the floor, our bright hands shuffle against it. The lights came up. The robes were hastily wrapped around us, barely wrapped around us, we hardly needed them. We were breathing hard, laughing harder, smeared with white.

Beth, clutching her robe together with one hand, her long leg all the way to her naked crotch exposed, yelled at Sarah across the circle, “I want to do it. I want to do the book. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I want to do it.”

And Sarah grinned at her, her dark curls wet with paint, and yelled back, “I want you to do it, too, baby.”

I looked at Winnie, her robe off her shoulder, her breast covered in paint, and I stopped laughing. Her eyes were right in mine, and I got warm, hot, hotter. I realized everyone was yelling Again! Again!

The music started.

The lights went out.

I let my robe drop and walked straight ahead to the harlequin-painted neon elf in front of me.

I grabbed a handful of that candy-colored hair and yanked her head back. I slid my other hand down her breast all the way to her pussy where paint was spattered in the fuzz like glitter.

I kissed her, open-mouthed, tongue-first, my fingers working her clit through the paint, through her wetness, her hands pumping paint over my cock, between my legs, into the crack of my ass, our bodies dancing, dancing, dancing, the pleasure of it like we’d learned nothing but pleasure for a hundred years, like we had done nothing but get our hands all over each other’s asses and cocks and pussies for centuries, and while we bucked and tongued and slicked and came, bodies framed around us, touched over us, spun and circled and laughed and groped.

Again, again, again, again.

Winnie

Imagine you’re in a bright space.

The world outside your circle of light is dark and unimportant.

Imagine there are four of you. Two men — we’ll call them Jason and Finn — on a couch.

A man and a woman on the floor.

The woman is you.

The man on the floor is Marvin, his hair oiled and shining. He’s wearing an orange jumpsuit that would make him look like a prison escapee if it didn’t have silver-spangled racing stripes and a giant silver butterfly collar that frames a deep V filled with brown skin and black curls.

Those curls on Marvin’s chest keep snagging your attention. Teasing it. Turning you on.

You’re not sure if you’re supposed to be turned on.

Calvin Darling isn’t in the circle of light on this particular day. He has class, maybe, or a group project at the library.

He’s elsewhere.

You are here.

Now imagine there’s a television, and it’s turned on, and all of you are facing it.

No one is watching.

Imagine that Finn and Jason began the evening side by side, but at some point Jason started to lean in, his shoulder overlapping Finn’s, and they began a slow-motion tumble spaced out over five-minute increments. It took them three episodes of Game of Thrones to get where they are, with Jason basically reclining between Finn’s spread thighs and Finn bumping up his hips now and then, as though he’s adjusting his position or resettling himself.

Imagine you’re pretty sure Finn is hard, and you’re pretty sure he’s grinding into Jason’s ass, and you’re pretty sure that turns you on, too.

Find your truth in these imaginary circumstances.

It’s not easy.

No one ever said it would be easy.

Imagine that Marvin turns to you and asks, “So are you still a virgin?”

You thought he meant cards, that first time. You were sure he meant you were a virgin at cards.

But imagine he didn’t.

Imagine you tell him yes, because technically you are. You and Cal have kissed and groped, masturbated in front of each other, made each other come, but that’s it.

“No oral?” he says, and you say, “I don’t know how.”

Imagine that Jason guffaws and Finn smacks his arm, and then they’re all talking too fast, nervous guy banter that sputters around what they’re really thinking.

Everyone knows how.

Sure, the basic mechanics, but technique?

No such thing as a bad blow job.

Bullshit. Giving head is a fine art.

How would you know?

Some reason I shouldn’t?

It’s all in the tongue, what you’re doing with the tip.

Naw, it’s the suction. Suck right, she can make him come hard enough to blow the back of her head off.

Dude, like she’d want that.

Why wouldn’t she want that?

But you have to swallow.

I could give a fuck if she swallows, as long as she knows what to do with her hands.

That’s true, most chicks got no clue what to do with their hands.

It’s something you learn from experience.

You can figure it out watching porn online.

You never see the hands clear enough in porn.

There’s some movies where you do. I’ll send her links.

You should show her.

Fucking what did you say?

I said you should show her.

Imagine there’s a long silence.

Imagine your ears ring, and your cunt burns, and then Finn kind of laughs and says, “Dude.”

And Marvin says, “He wants to.”

And Jason says, “Fuck, why not?”

Locate your impulse in this scenario. Find your meaning.

Dig into the dark space and perform what your heart wants.

Do it.

Turn around. Crawl closer to the couch, where Finn’s perched on the lip of it, staring at the top of Jason’s head, and Jason is peeling the denim off Finn’s hips with both hands, so eager he’s lost all self-consciousness.

Watch the pretense fall from him. Fall away.

Watch it roll off both of them and right out of the light, like a set piece on invisible wheels.

Scoot up until you can feel the velour nap against your bare arm, until you can smell the warmth of Finn’s crotch, until you can feel Marvin’s breath behind you and see the muscles in his orange thighs, his knees planted to either side of yours.

Study Finn’s penis, longer and skinnier than Cal’s. Darker, the head purple-brown and swollen where Cal’s is so pink, so wet.

Watch the way Jason grips it, the way he strokes down the foreskin that Finn’s cockhead has already pushed aside.

File that away, because you’ve wondered how that worked. What to do with foreskin if you ever encounter it.

Watch Jason’s tongue lick a stripe of saliva up from base to tip.

Watch him flick it over the head and listen to the hiss of Finn’s inhale as Marvin bumps against your lower back, a deliberate slow circling of his hips, his hands landing on your upper thighs to hold you still against him.

Jason’s lips purse into an angelic O when he covers the head of Finn’s cock.

His cheeks hollow when he starts to suck.

His head bobs, and his hand works, and his fingers find Finn’s balls and play with them, weigh them, tug at them gently while Finn rucks up his shirt and slides his hand over his stomach, claws his chest, scratches up his neck with his fingers protruding through the ring of the collar of his T-shirt like the hand of an alien whose urgent needs are outside his control.

Listen to Finn’s broken, panting breath when Marvin puts one palm on your stomach, slides it under your shirt, beneath your waistband, his fingers sinking right into the deep syrupy pulse between your legs as though they belong there.

This is Finn’s smile, wide and darkly radiant. Stoned on ecstasy.

This is the light spinning over his shoulders, Marvin’s disco-ball collar scratching your neck, Finn’s lips saying, “Baby, sweetheart, god, baby, yes,” while he’s pumping and groaning and coming in Jason’s mouth.

These are your breasts, your boobs, your tits, yours, with Marvin’s dark fingers plucking at your nipple, baring you to Finn’s sleepy eyes, his happy mouth, to Jason’s slow turn and his tongue licking over his lip and the placid perfection of his expression.

This is your orgasm, your red-gold-perfect sloppy heat that spreads from Marvin’s hand through your belly, over your breasts, spilling out over the room, making them sigh, making Marvin rub himself in fast hard jerks against your ass until he bites your neck and you feel his grip on you tighten, his hand grabbing at your pussy so hard it hurts, it hurts just right.

This is not a drill.

This is not an exercise.

Nobody’s going to give you a grade.

This is your life, baby-girl.

Find your truth and take it.