The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [173]
She rushed out of the room and shut the door.
“Hi, Mom,” I heard her sweetly sing out. I listened to her feet thumping fast down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Then I heard two female voices in conversation, but could not discern what they were saying. Little Emily was gone for a long time. I sat on her pink bed for a while, in my borrowed clothes. I got up and inspected the things in the room. It wasn’t a boring place to be left alone, crammed to the gills as it was with all manner of interesting diversions. I opened and shut every drawer in the bathroom, sniffed all her little perfumes and rolled out red nibs of lipstick, noted the pack of cigarettes stashed in the medicine cabinet, and noted the presence of tampons that indicated she had already begun to menstruate. I cannot resist the lure of the accoutrements of human femininity: I love women’s bathroom counters, stocked like alchemy labs with all those puffs and powders and potions and phials and bottles and canisters—the heady, intoxicating smells of all that stuff! Then I scanned the spines of the books in her bookshelf, looking for a text to pass the time with. There were lots of books that I guessed were things she had been assigned to read in school, simply written slender volumes deemed “literature” while still being accessible to youth—Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies—a lot of girls’ classics—Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Little Women—and then, interestingly, a lot of books that were juicy with sex—Anaïs Nin, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Justine, The Story of O. There were textbooks, picture books, poetry: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath. The books were arranged in no immediately discernible order: not alphabetical, not chronological, not Dewey decimal. I had already read some of these titles, either curled up in an armchair in Mr. Lawrence’s library or sitting beneath a lamp at one of the long wooden tables in the reading room at the University of Chicago library. To pass the time I settled on a whimsical bit of frivolous juvenilia about a girl who for some reason is living in an attic with her family, in the pages of which I busied my eyes until little Emily’s return. Eventually she came back. She opened the door slightly, slipped inside, and clicked it shut behind her.
“You can stay here tonight,” she said in a voice two degrees north of a whisper. “But my mom and dad don’t know you’re here, so we have to be quiet. And you have to go in the morning. I have to eat dinner now. I’ll bring you some food later.”
Again she was gone, and again, maybe an hour or so later, she came back, this time with a plate of lukewarm food: chicken, carrots, peas, etc. “Here. I snuck this up for you.”
I was insane with hunger, and I ate it sitting at her desk, devouring with indelible gusto every edible atom of what was on the plate, and thanked her with an energy bordering on groveling.
“You must have been hungry,” she said.
“Starving!”
“I have to do my homework now.” She dumped out the contents of her backpack and flopped a heavy textbook open flat on her desk, switched on the desk lamp, and got to work on a series of mathematical equations.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“My algebra homework, dipshit. What, they don’t teach algebra to circus midgets?”
“No!”
“I know. That was sarcasm. We’re doing rational inequalities. I hate this stupid bullshit.”
I looked over her shoulder at the big glossy textbook pages from which she was copying “problems,” as she called them. I watched her work, and comprehended nothing. It was all a bunch of chaotic and elusive symbols to me, numbers mixed up with letters, lines, shapes, dots, punctuation marks, alien markings as enigmatic and indecipherable to my eyes as hieroglyphics carven on the walls of an Egyptian tomb. Little Emily, though, was apparently so accustomed to the business of unlocking these symbols’ mysteries that she was actually bored with it. She raced, flew right through the “problems,