Laura Jacqmin
Dramatic
MARGOT, 20
MARGOT is an American college student studying abroad. She is speaking to ALISTAIR, a very proper British M.A. student she met in a pub just a few hours earlier. ALISTAIR has been punched in the face by a stranger, and they have gone back to his flat to tend to his wound. Although ALISTAIR hopes to get lucky, MARGOT wants to get out of there, finding herself strangely attracted to the puncher back at the pub.
MARGOT I get all these e-mails from my friends, you know? Also doing study abroad? In Spain and Italy and France? “Met a dark, handsome man.” “A dangerous man with a dicey past.” And I believe them, because why wouldn’t I? And the sex they have is epic. They need lube where they’ve never needed lube before. They miss class. They blow off trips to museums because they’re so busy fucking in the broken-down, romantic, rust-stained flats of these dangerous men who smoke European cigarettes and have scarred knuckles, and the whites of their eyes are enormous and the pupils are dark pits. They fuck like they’ve never fucked before, and the fact that they’re fucking strangers makes it better because it’s crazy. It’s crazy to sleep with an unknown person who radiates something—worrisome. It is violent and unwholesome and half terrifying. You’re fucking someone who might murder you and it’s fantastic and amazing and something to blog home about. In France and Italy and Spain. [Beat.] And I came to England. There is tea in England. And a certain breed of cow which is pleasing to the eye when it dots the hillsides. And the bottoms of the pint glasses say they’re certified to hold a mathematically perfect pint by the Queen herself. I am not sure I was having the adventure I was meant to have.