If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

LIFE AT SAINT ALBAN'S

CONTINUED

Despite being aware that he smelled like a carton of Marlboros and hadn’t bathed since yesterday, laziness fought with Russell before he finally found his shampoo, soap and housecoat and headed for the shower room. He was shocked from scalp to navel to see Flip Sanders naked in the middle of the room, drying his face and hair and Russell took in his whole body, the long limbs and trim buttocks that look like poured milk, his nipples and his sex like coral colored berries and the black hair under his bits and over his thighs. He was tall and slender and apparently unaware of Russell, but Russell felt the way he did about Cody who was darker and thicker another man grown into his fullness and beautiful. It actually hurt between his eyes to look at Flipper, and it ached to look away.

When Ross walked in and said, “You’re shocking the kid, Richard,” the moment broke and Flipper, grinning, wrapped the towel around his waist.

“’Scuse me, Russell, I’m used to locker rooms,” he said, and went to the sink to shave. Russell was standing hot and flushed and feeling like an idiot, but Ross had entered a large stall and closed the curtain, and thrust out his housecoat, hanging it on the hook. For a moment more Russell observed Flipper, tooth brush, deodorant and cologne laid out on the large counter with the basins in it. He thought of being bold and naked like an athlete, but the running shower water in the next tall reminded him he was actually more like Ross. So he went to the stall that had been Flipper’s, and took off his housecoat behind the curtain, hanging it and the towel on the hook outside.

“Russ,” Flipper had said, the razor to his cheek.

“Yeah?” Russell, aware of how naked he was, pushed the curtain back to see Flipper with the razor at his lathered cheek.

“I’m glad you all came.”

“Is this a baggy jeans party or a short dress party?” Anigel asked. And then she said, “It’s the middle of the goddamn week in winter. It’s a baggy jeans party, and aren’t I cute no matter what?”

“If you put on these earrings and this Scrunchee,” Money said, you’ll look like a fucking princess.”

Susan, who was not going to any sort of party, sat on her beanbag in the middle of her large room and said, “Anigel, you are so beautiful. You really could wear a sack.”

On impulse Anigel bent down and kissed the girl on the cheek.

“Everyone needs to hear that,” she said.

Flipper arrived in white shirt and khakis and had got out his pea coat and good gloves.

“Wow!” Anigel assessed.

“I just wanna look nice.”

When Flipper looked to Russell, for some stupid reason, Russell quickly looked away. It was better to see Flip from the side, to feel him walking beside him and smell that good cologne, a real scent and not the shitty stuff that most teenage boys wore.

Ross was casually good looking, Russell observed. He threw on nice pants and shirt, a pea coat over a red sweatshirt all the time, grabbed his cigarettes and sprayed on his cologne and no one thought anything of it. He seemed, in some ways, a bit above people’s thoughts.

“Are we ready now?” he asked.

And when it was agreed they were, he hooked his arm through Anigel’s and said, “Then let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“So,” Coral was saying, “I’m basically a fucking basket case because my parents were going to be psychologist.”

The music was a lot more mellow than Russell thought it would be, and the general color of the room from the black light was purple.

“My mother never finished her PhD, but she had all of these crazy pictures all over the house. Like, where the perspective was fucked up and you’d see this room with a pillar in each corner, but the pillar across from you didn’t come down on the floor, it came down in the middle of the room in the center of a fucking bed.”

“And I think the bed had needles in it,” Flipper said, handing Russell a sip of what was in his cup. Vodka, that burned his mouth. Flipper grinned.

“Yeah,” Coral said.

All of the second floor of Halleck Hall was given up to the party. The boys of Hally Deuce were a community of partiers. If you belonged to it, you planned to live on Hally Deuce. If you were there by accident, you resituated rooms or roommates as quickly as possible. Some slept four to a room so that one room could be cleared out for couches and refrigerators. What should have been a regular floor became a—by college standards—regular old club.

“And there was that staircase,” Coral said.

“The staircase,” Shawn Hannon agreed, “and the fucked up waterfall.”

“The waterfall,” Coral and Flipper said together.

“Though I can’t remember why the waterfall was fucked up.”

“Are yawl high?” Anigel demanded, and Russell wondered as well.

“I am,” Coral confessed, “but that’s not the point. What did they call those things?”

“Escher drawings,” Andy Lagger said, entering the room.

He sounded completely sober, and when Flipper sat up, looking and smelling good, Andy seemed to barely notice him. He was in a track suit, looking out of place, and there was a girl on his shoulder.

“The fuck?” Anigel said.

“Well, they are bi and everything,” Ross murmured, but added, looking at Flipper’s face, “I don’t think he was expecting that shit.”

The party, or at least the section of it they sat in, became strange then as Andy sat down and began making out with this girl.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Yeager said in a voice that wasn’t entirely mean but wasn’t welcoming either. “Isn’t Wacker Hall more his speed? We’re doing shrooms by the way.”

“I’m loaded already,” Coral waved it off then said, “Well, since I’m loaded…” and held out her hand for the dessicated mushrooms.

 “And I have no idea why he’s here. Or why she is.”

“Yeah,” Yeager said, giving vent to disapproval, “Cause he’s supposed to be Flipper’s plus one.”

“I really don’t mind,” Flipper said. “And we’re not really a couple. He can do what he wants.”

“Besides,” Russell said, surprising himself, “I’m Flipper’s plus one.”

He felt so bad for Flipper. He took him by the hand and walked him out of the room, and then Anigel and Ross followed, and the hall became an impromptu dance floor as suddenly, the trills of REM started and Michael Stipes announced:

 

Oh life is bigger
It's bigger than you
And you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no I've said too much
I set it up

 

Anigel saw Andy walking away with the girl, leaving the party, wondered what his deal was. Flipper saw Russell. They were dancing together in that silly way that friends dance. They were all singing.

 

That's me in the corner
That's me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough

 

Russell was daring to put his hands on Flip Sander’s hips, and the look on Flip’s face changed to recognition.

As friends danced together or side by side, Flip walked with Russell through the open door of 216 where the blacklight was more black than light, and they pressed together and kissed. As Flipper’s tongue entered Russell’s mouth, Russell pulled his face closer, and they were of a height. Russell was just a little lighter, not fully made. His finger kneaded the inside of Flipper’s palms. They pressed together and swayed in the dark. Russell had thought he would try shrooms tonight, but now he wanted this night to be whatever it was on its own merits.

Abelard Hall lay northeast to the rest of campus, attached to the chapel, and outside of Saint Alban’s chapel was a fountain that ran the whole year so that, though for three of the seasons it wasn’t much to look at, when winter came, it was a frozen sugar loaf, blue white, and little rivulets of water still forced their way out, to glitter in the December light.

Ross and Anigel, leaving Russell to the tender care of Flipper and knowing that Jimmy and Macy were somewhere at the party,  walked around and around the fountain, hands in their pockets,  hoods pulled high against the impossible wind. When she looked to the east of the school there was nothing but leveled fields and trees in the distance, and when she looked north there was nothing but a Wal Mart and a few other buildings. And then there was very wide sky, stretching out above them unguessable and white.

“What are you thinking?” Ross asked his friend.

“I was thinking about how big and scary it was out here with no boundaries anywhere around. Last night, while we were taking the train up here, I was thinking the same thing. Russell was snoring beside me, and the further we got from Grand Rapids, the less we were anywhere. It was just turning into space.

“It makes me scared, Ross,” she said.

“You agoraphobic?” Ross raised an eyebrow and she punched her friend in the arm.

“No, I think that was just a metaphor because I started to realize my life... had all this space. You know?”

Ross nodded because he did know.

“I come here and it looks so much fun and it makes me think, what will I do when I get out of Soubirous? It’s only a two year college. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

“Maybe you should get through the rest of your first year at Soubirous!” Ross took this chance to hit his friend back.

She sighed and sent him a heartbreaking smile and Ross said, “So that’s why everyone thinks you’re so hot. I forget you’re pretty. I’ve known you too long.”

Anigel threw her arms around her friend.

“Oh, Ross,” she said. “It’s hard not to worry about the rest of your life when for so long I didn’t even think I had a rest of my life. You know?”

Once they’d kissed, the change in Flipper was visible. He wanted to keep his arm wrapped around Russell, but thought it was a bad idea in front of Ross and Anigel. He just told them he and Coral would watch out for Russell at this thing and they could leave if they wanted to, and they wanted to. Anigel and Ross quickly had their fill of these parties, and when they were gone and not long afterward, so were Jimmy and Macy, and Russell was relieved to be with Flipper alone, dancing in the semi dark.

He thought of the Escher pictures, and how nothing in them made sense and the world was turned upside down, and the world was turned upside down indeed because a year ago he’d been scared of life and a retiring fifteen year old who was too much of an old man and too much of a virgin to enjoy anything, and now he felt like a philosopher  slut, a whore saint, and he was away from the two adults and the cousins who should have been watching him, walking hand and hand with a twenty year old, smoking clove cigarettes Macy had gotten off of some bug eyed kid they’d met earlier tonight.

You could see stars out here. Out here, Saint Alban’s on the edge of a little town in the middle of farm fields was nowhere at all, but he felt totally secure. There was no need to say look at all those stars. There was no need to say anything.

Abelard Hall was quiet when they returned. They walked up the stairs saying nothing, holding hands, and on the landing between the women’s floor and men’s, Flipper turned and kissed Russell. They made out on the steps until they heard the squeak of a door above or below they could not say, and then Flipper walked him up, and pushed open the door to the men’s floor. Russell stopped by Jimmy’s room, and he could hear his cousin rough fucking some girl, hear her panting on the other side of the door, his small grunts, the squeaking of a mattress, the grinding of the bed on the wood floor. So he followed Flipper and stopped at Ross’s room, which was open, and laid his coat and his hat and gloves in a chair to let it be known he was home. Ross must have been down with Anigel, maybe in Money or Coral’s room. Russell followed Flipper to his door. He hung around Flipper’s neck while the black haired boy with the thick sleepy eyelashes kissed him, and then, leaning back on his door, Flipper opened it and passed through it with Russell, and lying on the bed, they linked arms and legs, and kissed.

“This is my favorite hangout,” Cody said. And then he said, “Actually my favorite hangout is becoming Noble Red, but before that, this was my favorite. And it’s still good.”

It was well into the night, and they were all close and comfortable in the dark lounge of the little old house attached to gas station and mechanic shop off Thompson Road when Cody said, “I hadn’t planned to be this drunk. I don’t want to be quite this drunk.”

“We should get some coffee,” Nehru suggested.

“There’s some at the gas station.”

“I’ll get it.”

“Do you know how to get there from here?”

Nehru admitted that he did not.

The gas station and mechanic shop on Thompson Road was one of the few remaining old kind, pumps on a macadam out front set up before a two story house with a convenience shop on the first floor, repair shop off to the side. Most of the house was used for storage and almost forgotten save part of the first floor now serving as a lounge for the mechanics.

It wasn’t that anyone would have minded Cody being there. It was simply that Cody was here when he wanted to be alone, when he wanted to be with his thoughts and get high as fuck, float on the Sacred Net. He had no wish to call attention to the existence of a whole house which people seemed to have forgotten, so rather than pass through the repair shop or the little door that went straight into the convenience store, he walked out of the back where, in summer, there were overgrown weeds and where he kept his truck, and rounding the house, he entered the convenience store.

He came back with coffee and cigarettes and they smoked weed and Nehru said, “This is really nice. I’m having a great time,” and Cody, choking on marijuana, coughed and said, when he had recovered: “This night is the best.”

As Nehru bent to pick up the cigarette he’d dropped, Cody noticed: “And you have a really nice ass.”

Nehru laughed, more flattered than he wanted to admit. He was close to telling Cody how good he looked too when Cody declared:.

“My fucking lips are numb.”

Nehru didn’t feel especially high, just mellow. Cody’s hand was comfortably on his thigh and his arm around him, and everything felt right. He thought of his friends. Of Josh, and Anigel and Rob who had sent him to Josh and he thought of Rob and Chayne making love, and he thought of Gil and Mark Young and wondered when they would fuck, and he was so moved while he stroked Cody’s head against his breast. He blew smoke into Cody’s mouth while Cody stroked his thigh, and now they were kissing.

“I’ve always thought the world of you,” Cody said.

And then Nehru stood up. And he was so hard, his cock so heavy that he loosened his trousers, pulled down his briefs and pushed his cock into Cody’s open mouth, and Cody pulled on him sweetly, and he heard, behind him, Brad say, “Yes, Nehru.” In a corner of his mind Brad and Marissa were fucking and he was fucking Cody’s mouth to the rhythm of their fucking and Nehru knew he’d wanted something like this all night, and then, swelling larger and harder at the greedy attention of Cody’s mouth, he sank down, feeling his bare ass cheeks sink into the old cushions of the couch while Cody went to his knees, sucking him.  When he finally did open his eyes, when he was half dressed with Cody, he blinked into the darkness and realized this lounge was the living room of the unlived in house.

Cody said nothing, but led him upstairs. In a box filled room, Cody undressed him and they were on the bed, Cody sucking him, licking his nipples, licking under his arms, down his stomach, between his thighs, taking balls into his mouth, turning him over so Cody’s tongue thrust into his ass. Cody was murmuring, “Fuck my face now.”

And so Nehru did fuck his face on the edge of the bed and it felt so good to plunge his very hard dick into someone’s mouth while they sucked on it, to rub his own body the same time he rubbed Cody’s, to tease his own nipples and then, when he slid across that same face, and Cody licked his balls, and the little road between his balls and his asshole. He thrust his tongue deep into his asshole and Nehru was dimly aware that when Cody said, “Fuck me now.” he would.