Lunatic Fringe Read online

  From the shadow of the dormitory, the couple emerged holding hands. They were too far away for Lexie to make out their faces, but already she felt foolish for having panicked. The woman was tall, thin, and improbably blond. She was so pale she could pass for another street lamp, her hair a spiky nimbus about her head. The boy was smaller, squarish, with brown hair cropped close to his scalp. He wore the cuffs of his shirt buttoned, but the collar was open revealing the v-neck of the white t-shirt he wore beneath it. Despite the rain, they were barely wet, as though they had just emerged from shelter.

  The pair clearly didn’t notice Lexie, who stood frozen in uncertainty beside her truck, as though she had interrupted them rather than the other way around. The luminous girl leaned against her date, pushing him up against the brick wall of the dormitory. She pressed her mouth to the boy’s, while his hands wandered up and down her body. This was about to get awkward. Lexie wouldn’t be able to get into the building without disturbing them, but hiding in her truck seemed childish and absurd. What would the new Lexie do in this situation?

  Setting the box back in the truck bed, she tiptoed to the driver’s side door, opened it, and slammed it shut. The boy whipped his head toward the origin of the noise, but the girl merely chuckled. They walked toward her, the blonde girl leading the way.

  The girl stuck out her hand, white in the mottled street lights. With unflinching eye contact and a friendly, robust voice, she introduced herself as Blythe and her friend as Mitch. Mitch thrust his hand forward in greeting, and it was then that Lexie noticed his smallish hands and smooth cheeks, and realized that Mitch was not a boy, but a short, boyish-looking woman. It was a lot for her to handle right away. But Mitch didn’t comment on Lexie’s hesitation, and, after making brief and cordial eye contact as they shook hands, he left the talking to Blythe, who seemed determined to create a conversation.

  “Moving in?” Blythe asked. Her pink lips parted to reveal a row of straight, white teeth. The silver frames of her glasses complimented her skin, which was nearly translucent in its paleness.

  Lexie shoved her hands into her pockets and shrugged, swinging her head to indicate the remaining boxes in the truck. Her facility with speech evaded her, and she struggled with her options before nodding. Her ears grew hot as she realized that this was her first chance to make friends, and she was blowing it with her awkward non-conversation. Blythe chugged onward, happy to fill in the blanks.

  “Here,” Blythe said, stepping toward the bed and lifting two boxes filled with books. She foisted them onto Mitch and grabbed another two for herself. Despite her thin arms and overall pallor, Blythe carried the heavy boxes with ease. There were plenty of thin, sweet-faced women in Lexie’s hometown, but most of them were content with letting their men do all the heavy lifting. Blythe didn’t seem to subscribe to this philosophy of deferral. With a soft grunt, she stepped towards the propped-open door. The streetlight haze drew shadows along Blythe’s face as she walked, her cheekbones slicing into the night air around her face. Her eyes were eerily pale, the color one might associate with ice water, but her lips looked naturally rosy. She could have passed for a fairytale princess, all fair and bright, if it weren’t for that short, spiky hair. Though it seemed unnaturally blond, Blythe’s hair didn’t carry even a hint of root color, as if its hue relied on a recessive albinism rather than a debt to a bottle of bleach.

  Only three trips between Lexie’s room and her truck and they were done. It was a painless endeavor, save for the moments they passed each other en route when Blythe would wink, smirk, or stick out her tongue, making Lexie wonder how many faces she had in her repertoire. Each theatrical expression left Lexie feeling plain in comparison. She didn’t have the facility with her body and face that Blythe seemed to possess without thought. Mitch, on the other hand, seemed content with her role as the affable lunk attached to the beautiful heroine. She simply smiled, presenting deep dimples in response to her girlfriend’s ebullience.

  Mitch reminded Lexie of her father’s old colleague in the forestry service, a massive, be-flanneled woman named Leslie, whom everyone called “Wes.” Wes was unlike any woman Lexie had met before. Wes was unlike most women in general. She was taller than Lexie’s father and roughly the same width. Her shoulders were like a linebacker’s, and her breasts were perpetually glued to her chest in round, solid mounds, looking more like vestigial organs than reproductive or sexual attributes. Lexie liked watching Wes, the way she seemed so solid, so heavy, like all the men Lexie had grown up around. She hadn’t known until meeting Wes that women were made like this, that they wore rough work pants and kept their hair buzzed and carried oil and grit under the short fingernails on their rough, calloused hands. The first time Lexie had met her, as a child on one of her father’s surveys, Lexie had referred to Wes as “him.” It was her father who corrected her, while Wes just leaned on the open passenger door of the pickup, smiling a broad, gap-toothed grin. It wasn’t that Lexie thought Wes was a man; to her six-year-old mind, it just seemed like the better word to use. Thinking of Wes as a “woman” felt odd, but so did thinking of her as a “man.” Wes was just Wes. That seemed to be the consensus of all the guys working in the Department, including her dad, so she didn’t give it too much thought. Now Mitch was the second of such women that Lexie had ever met. She wondered if Mitch was going to go into forestry, too, but then backpedaled when she realized how bigoted that sounded in her head.

  Inside Lexie’s new room, amid stacks of boxes and bags, the three girls sighed with relief, but none more than Lexie, who was eager to be rid of her unsettling new friends.

  “Thanks, baby,” Blythe said, resting on one of the larger boxes. Mitch smiled, her doughboy cheeks growing rosy.

  Lexie offered them a ride home out of simple courtesy, though the thought of huddling in her cab with them intimidated her. Blythe mercifully refused, choosing instead to bestow some upperclassman wisdom on Lexie

  “Stay away from Phi Kappa Phi,” Blythe said. “They’re a bunch of vile misogynists who hide behind the safety of their little club.” Lexie looked at Mitch, who shrugged and nodded. “Oh, and the professors in the philosophy department aren’t much better,” Blythe added, rolling her eyes.

  “Like they give girls worse grades?”

  “Not so much. Don’t worry about it.” Blythe grinned. “Listen,” she continued, oblivious to Lexie’s meandering focus as she scanned the boxes and bags of her room with increasing anxiety. “Every month, my sisters and I throw a little brunch at our place.”

  Lexie had never heard anyone refer to women as their sisters unless it was a literal reference. Coming from Blythe, the term sounded rich with subtlety. Lexie envisioned a harem of sorts, with fountains and silks, where women brushed one another’s hair while others serenaded with harps. As quickly as the vision entered her head, Lexie shooed it out, rolling her eyes at her ridiculous naivet√©. Were women so foreign to her that she couldn’t even imagine what a group of them spent time doing together? Lexie felt as though she had stumbled upon a lost tribe and didn’t realize it until she was sharing their campfire.

  “What?” Blythe asked.

  “Nothing,” Lexie hurried, waving her hand in front of her face to dispel her ridiculous imaginings. “I just thought you were going to warn me about the rare wolves.”

  “Oh please. You don’t have to worry about the rares anymore,” said Blythe, wiping her hands on her jeans as she stood. “You’ve got the Pack on your side now.” Blythe moved to the hallway, and Mitch followed.

  “Anyway, you should come,” said Blythe. “I think we’d have a lot to offer each other.” She squeezed Lexie’s shoulder with a wink, and in a moment, she and Mitch were gone.

  Lexie shut the door behind her with a hollow thud. She stooped to rifle through a box, pulling out a candle and lighter. Her laptop sat on her desk, ready to play a song to help remind her where she was and where she came from. The air, so similar to the air she breathed at home, tasted unfamiliar and rare.
She knew she was not home. Whether this could be a home to her, she had yet to find out.

  Chapter 2

  The crescent moon lay on its back, striking a menacing gash in the otherwise unblemished sky. Its creamy grin mocked Lexie, whose red, raw eyes passed between the sky and the clock. Four-fifteen. It was the point of no return, one that Lexie knew all too well.

  She wasn’t surprised that her insomnia resurfaced the night before classes started. She had hoped for a respite, but the gods decreed otherwise, yanking her strings just as the warm blanket of slumber wrapped itself around her body. Each time she drifted off, they jolted her from the downy sanctuary of rest and back into the lonesome reality of the deepest part of the night.

  She imagined each brain cell fizzling like a water droplet on a hot skillet. Tomorrow would tell the same story of burst blood vessels, flaccid skin, bad breath, and sunken eyes. She’d move through the world at a fumble.

  That was what she had to look forward to in three hours, a self-perpetuating cycle of foolishness and alienation. Lexie had a hard enough time fitting in without the motor skills of a drunkard to seal the deal.

  Yet it was also in these thick, invisible hours where Lexie felt the most at home. She could wade through time like walking on the floor of a warm, dark sea. The night wasn’t the menacing part; it was the threat of dawn that caused her grief, when the still and fecund air receded to give way to the glaring and the loud. When the fear of day didn’t trouble her, Lexie felt perfectly comfortable crossing the night like a raft down a wide, lazy river. But tomorrow held plenty to undo her. New people to meet, to impress, to befriend. Schedules, buildings and texts to commit to memory, and the same befuddling questions that followed her every day, now upgraded to include majors, minors, relationship status, and political identity. The mere thought of it made her stomach roll over itself.

  She crumpled in her chair, elbows planted atop her desk next to a stack of books. Her laptop cast a cold, impassive glow into the darkness of the room. She leaned to the window, struggling to open it with clumsy hands. As the window slid in its casing, tiny branches from the great oak tree outside screeched against the glass. A flood of cool, moist air swirled into her stale room, as clear and blue as Van Gogh’s night sky. Her laptop threw its blue light out the window, making the great tree’s bark look as craggy as a relief map. Leaves mottled green and red clung to the branches, steeling themselves for slow death. They rustled in a faint breeze. Otherwise, everything was silent.

  Lexie folded her computer shut, casting the darkness over her body. She lowered her chin to rest on crossed arms, wondering what mindless task could distract her enough to feel a sense of minor accomplishment despite the hours of nothingness extending into the distance in all directions.

  Her eyelids grew heavy, and she turned her cheek to rest on her cool forearms. The outside air teased across her forehead, lulling her into sleep. The tension along her temples and jaw relaxed. Her consciousness was the last to go, as her body relaxed into the depths. As the mechanics of her brain whirred to sleep, her ears picked up a bold, faraway sound. The pitch slid from low to high to low, with a gentle warble at the end. The howl repeated with subtle variations, stitching together a story from the rolled pitches of a melancholic tune. It was a curious, perverse lullaby, and as the final tone echoed into silence, Lexie drifted off.

  In the woods again. Moonlight dripping down tree trunks like liquid mercury, leaden and poisonous. The woods are made of words, and the words made of lines and curves that mean nothing to her, yet endlessly stretch and curl and bend around one another. The trunks are Braille; the branches, runes; the wind through the leaves: the tonal speech of distant cultures. The meanings of the words, fleeting and skittish, are lost in the endless shadows cast by the moon through the trees; they run away like small, spooked creatures. The bark scratches at her skin as she tries to divine those meanings. The branches reconfigure as she sets her eyes on them. The wind dies to stillness when she trains her ears on it; it remains unwilling to give up its secrets. She pats her hips, seeking her mother’s knife, but it is not near her. She stumbles, blind and weaponless. Her ears strain for the delicate crunch of leaves beneath a furry foot, for the wild heartbeat of prey pursued. The ciphers reassemble upon one another, never repeating, offering no code to break. She runs further, pursuing an unknown beast that seems always at her back and in her head, but never trained in her eyes. The trees speak: Divine the answer and find peace.

  Another dream, another diatribe in gibberish. No matter how many times and how many spellings she offered the Web search box, the results were always the same: a page or two of nonsense, meaningless code, or most often a big fat zero. It seemed impossible to Lexie that these words would be a stream of nonsense; there was such clarity in the voices, messages conveyed in a language that meant nothing to anyone except those who spoke it. The voice was most often the memory she held of her mother’s, speaking those gentle yet insistent words. They would drone on for hours, sometimes all night, filling her head with unchartable sentences.

  Her groggy morning reverie was interrupted by one sound she knew well, telling her a tale she could decipher: the mechanical beep screamed at her in no uncertain terms to wake up, get her act together, and get her ass to class. The sun streamed through the window, clearing the treetops to stab directly into her crusty, bloodshot eyes. An ache throbbed through the muscles connecting her eyes to her brain, and she wished for tiny fingers to reach back there and massage them to release.

  Seven-fifteen. Time to face the firing squad.

  Chapter 3

  Lexie wasn’t sure what she was doing in this class. It had seemed like a good option last Tuesday, sitting in her dorm room with a yellow highlighter and the thick course catalogue. “Intro to Women’s Studies: Gender, Conflict, and Context” had a long description, four credit hours, a discussion group, and a required reading list longer than all her other classes combined. Lexie hoped it would illuminate her consideration of anthropology as a major, and perhaps, as a side bonus, illuminate women, too.

  Now she sat trapped in the first meeting of the class, the post-lunch slump pulling her head down toward the desk like the ghost of a drowning victim seducing her to follow it below black waves. Lexie wondered what she had signed herself up for. Scanning the room, she counted thirty students in all, twenty-five of whom were girls and one who looked like a boy but was likely a variation in the key of Mitch. Of the remaining four students, one looked gay, one was yawning, one was trying to chat up every girl around him, and one was Duane Ward. It was as if the sonofabitch was trying to make her look bad.

  At Wolf Creek High, Duane had graduated second in their class, played baritone horn in the marching band, and was the goalie on the varsity soccer team. He aspired to be a cardiologist, which he announced throughout senior year whenever an ear was bent in his direction. It was the same way she had learned that though he had been accepted to a number of the Ivys, none offered him enough money to make it worthwhile.

  Duane had been one of seven black students at their high school, and four of those were his younger sisters. His family was gregarious, well-heeled, and good-looking, not one trait which Lexie could claim for herself. More infuriating than all that, though, was how well he seemed to know himself. She couldn’t even decide what intro classes to take, and here Duane was, ready to apply to medical school at eighteen. Lexie had assumed it was part of adolescence, to waffle on every aspect of one’s identity. She did it with aplomb nearly twice a day. Yet here was Duane, handsome, smart, and seemingly in harmony with his race, achievements, gender, sexuality, and even his damn life’s calling. It wasn’t fair.

  At their graduation ceremony, Lexie couldn’t help but feel childish and small standing alongside him on stage as they were announced as the two winners of the Milton Residential Scholarship Program. She had never been called “white trash” to her face, mostly because she was no worse off than over half of her school, whose fathers were mostly lumb
erjacks, miners, or utility workers, but that’s how she felt. No mother, no money, no real ambition. She did what she was supposed to do: she studied, got a scholarship, and now she was leaving home to start college as one of only a handful of her classmates to even plan on a degree--a minor victory that paled in comparison to Duane’s achievements.

  The pretty blonde sitting next to him monopolized his attention with her chatter. Without even speaking, he was winning her affection. Lexie slumped in her chair.

  She tried to stay alert as the professor led the class through the course syllabus. Ms. Whitmeyer, a silver-haired woman in ill-fitting tweed pants, read the names of the texts as though she were auditioning for a summer stock production of Macbeth. Each word was so well annunciated that even if Lexie were to drift off at some point, she imagined the information would still drill itself into her brain. Whitmeyer continued through page after page of text, listing the tomes her pupils would have to slog through. Lexie pressed her fingers to her temples, trying to push back a developing headache. Maybe a music class would have been a better idea. Her unease was driven to a point when the professor dropped the syllabus on the lectern.

  “How many of you are feminists?” Whitmeyer asked.

  Snickers echoed through the room as half the students raised their hands. Duane’s was among them; Lexie’s was not. A tiny brunette sitting in front of Duane, wearing a lime-green polka dot dress and heels, her hand held high, shouted “What?!” when she saw the showing.