Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [16]
Lonnie was the assistant editor for the Copenhagen Campus Chronicler, which said all I needed to know about the quality of that publication.
“I just need to let this one go,” he explained.
I accepted the manuscript from his badly chapped hands. His mouth was similarly red and chafed above the lip. During class he often ran cherry ChapStick over both his lips and his raw knuckles. He wore windbreakers everyday and never took them off. Altogether, his life seemed one constant battle against a secret gale.
“I’ll try to read it over on the weekend.”
“You don’t have to,” he replied, crossing his arms. He glanced up, blushed, looked back down. “I mean if you want to, but whenever is fine with me.”
I said okay again, and he left the room with a hasty good-bye.
My feet throbbed. I sat down in one of the student’s desks, having lost the motivation to collect my notes and the day’s papers. Curious, I flipped to the first page of Lonnie’s story:
Rinaldi: A Story of Love and of Rage
Beneath a blistering fester of Remus’s third sun the weakened Rinaldi was pacing his way fastly towards the tower. He was thinking one thing: of Roseanne and her hair like a flowing waterfall of ember flame… .
I cradled my forehead in my hands. I felt a headache coming on.
4
Zoë’s latest project was Eli Morretti, the boyfriend of an old college roommate. He lived in Cincinnati where he’d been working as assistant curator for Juxtapose Gallery. Though he never came to see Zoë during his visits to campus where his girlfriend, Jillian, was still a student, Zoë frequently drove downtown to Cincinnati to support one or the other of the many exhibitions he was particularly passionate about. These trips stopped in September when Juxtapose unexpectedly closed its doors, leaving the city without its more adventurous gallery and leaving Eli now three months out of work. This misfortune had been further followed by pestilence: In a matter of weeks his apartment had been overrun with an infestation of bedbugs. Just as quickly, Eli moved from an object of Zoë’s affection to a potential recipient of her militant charity. How we should help him had become a frequent topic of conversation.
There were many aspects of the Christian faith that Zoë found troubling but the injunction to love your neighbor appealed to her humanitarian sympathies. When she opened our apartment to someone she was more than hospitable, she was downright altruistic. She didn’t keep anything she could find a way to give or share. She had friends over for dinner and sent them out the door with the leftovers and the pots we’d cooked them in. She let people raid her closet for new outfits to wear to parties and never asked to have the clothes back. She gave her books away when she’d read them.
Having taken the long view on material objects and having found them rather meaningless, she was always baffled when I harped about condensation rings on the coffee table or missing DVDs. They were only things after all. What was mine was hers and what was hers was for everyone else to use. Whenever one of her friends had a crisis, something of mine invariably went missing.
She relayed the sordid tale of Eli’s bedbug plague while I was writing lesson plans, a project that required my full attention and left me ill-equipped for conversation much less decision-making. She wanted to know if he could stay at our place. He was a good guy, a Christian, very fun to be with, wouldn’t know how to be an intrusion if he tried, and besides it would only be for a few days, maybe a week—maybe over Christmas break to take care of the apartment for us—just until he could find a new place.
Unwittingly, I said I didn’t mind.
It was Saturday and almost the end of the semester. My To Must Do list had grown exponentially since Monday. I forced myself out of bed at six and headed straight for The Brewery, a pile of student essays in hand.
The owner, Jimmy Barnes, had erected the popular shop from an old bar. The Brewery was so successful he had quickly made enough to open the T-shirt press in the