Sheldon liked being pushed into the janitorial closet. He pretended he didn’t. He looked around nervously, to see if anyone noticed. He claimed he wanted the light on. He tried to pull at her clothes, to bite her lip, to be stronger than her.
But he wasn’t. Shiels was the one who said yes and no, whose glance fried his nerve ends, who directed where his hands might or might not stray and decided whether today was cold or hot or broiling or frigid.
She said whether there was time or not.
She knew what wind might blow where and how and if and whether.
She did not say why.
She was not sleeping much—she never did close to an event—but the dreams she had were vivid. In all of them her clothes seemed to fall away and her body yearned for wilderness—for the cover of trees, or tall grasses, the slap of broken ground on resilient soles (sometimes her feet were yellow, or she was wearing yellow shoes), or for fresh air gulped into deliriously freed lungs. In one, she was crawling out of a hole in the ground, her usual spot, close and warm and smelling of earthworms and black soil. She knew where the surface was, but it took a while to stretch herself, snakelike, far enough, and to pull up her hind body (slither, slide, sneak along). Her skin was . . . skintight, sexy. She liked the luster of it, its tautness, how silkily she moved.
Up finally into the air, out of the gap between two gnarled roots of a rain-soaked giant tree that stretched skyward beyond imagining. That little snatch of blue between the branches impossibly high . . . that was some other world she would never truly see. Unless she climbed it, slithered up its moss-soaked slippery sides.
Ooze-covered sides, dark with warm slime she did not mind touching. The bark was tough and soft at the same time, as warm as pungent sweat that seeped out of the tropical air. Higher and higher, but what was the rush?
The bark soothed her skin, and the higher she got, the slower she . . .
What did it matter where the sky was?
It was as if, in climbing the giant swaying tree, crowded in amongst its towering branches, she was also burrowing deep, deep again into the earth. Both at once, just as she was thinking of her dream yet also standing with Sheldon in their dark closet, all at the same time.
“Shiels,” Sheldon said, when a heavy roll of brown paper toweling fell off the shelf in the dark and clunked him in the shoulder.
“What?” she breathed.
“Do you think . . .”
She was like that snake in her dream, oozing deliciously with every slight movement.
“Do you think we should . . . find a room somewhere? Maybe . . . with a bed?”
She clamped her teeth on him, and he yelped in his adorable way and a second roll clunked down, on his head perhaps, although she couldn’t really tell in the darkness.
“Don’t be silly,” she murmured, and slithered her tongue along him.
• • •
How to explain what was happening, especially explain it to Lorraine Miens. (If Shiels ever got to the personal interview stage. But she felt she would—surely, now, with all that she was achieving?) It wasn’t just that Shiels had instinctively followed Manniberg’s suggestion about keeping news of Pyke on Vhub, or had sensed a moment of crisis in the cafeteria and acted upon it, perfectly defusing a potential disaster. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that the larger feat had been simply when she had changed her mind. It was how, by being wrong, but firm, and leader-like in the beginning—immovable, really, and completely in control—she could then overcome her own constructed mental garrison (to use a Lorraine Miens term, first coined, Shiels believed, in Motherlode, although she would have to look it up). She’d constructed barricades against the best idea, she could see that now. But that was only natural. All humans do it. We are creatures of habit; the world is too complex and too much in constant metamorphosis for any of us to ever be able to keep up. Better to think with your gut and your brain. (With both your brains; science had found the gut brain. Shiels knew that too from her explorations in the further reaches of the Internet.) Think fast, know, act, be firm—that’s what any good leader will do. Followers need to know that they are being led with energy. (She had followers, and she was just beginning to realize the implications of this. When she had stood before the multitudes about to announce what was already known—and so highly anticipated—she’d felt the quivering of the followers in the room. And then in that moment in the cafeteria, too—the vibration, the tremors . . . were for her, not just for Pyke.)
She’d changed her mind, and later in the cafeteria had even channeled power to Manniberg. A leader’s prerogative. To be firm and absolute and set on a course, and then to reverse . . . It’s the leader who can do that, straight-faced, without an eye-bat of embarrassment or apology (she imagined herself saying this to Lorraine Miens, who had written in Abandonment about how confused and apologetic and embarrassed almost on the cellular level most women were raised to be) . . . it’s those armor-plated leaders who whirled the tank around because of better data, a stronger hunch (both together) . . . those leaders whom people adore and follow anywhere. Off the cliff.
Into the next valley.
They adore the commander who changes course.
(Because she didn’t have to. She could have staged Autumn Whirl to a half-filled gym of socially damp types who hadn’t gotten the message that Pyke’s band wasn’t playing after all.)
“I felt the will of the student body,” she imagined herself saying to Lorraine Miens. “It’s hard to describe. It was like a gravitational pull. As a leader I have become intensely interested in tuning into the social, psychological, emotional, and intellectual pull of the mass of people around me.”
Would that be too insane a thing to say? Maybe not to Lorraine Miens.
Should Shiels write it in her application essay?
Better if Miens could see her as she said it—her shoulders set, her lips pulled down in a thoughtful frown (like Miens in most of her portraits), her eyes frank and humble.
She wasn’t congratulating herself. She had almost steered her student-body chair year into the ditch on the very first social of the season.
By fate or by luck, this was the year of the pterodactyl. She’d better use it, she realized, or else she’d be buried.