Tonight, Tonight

I am back in college.  "What I really didn't get," I say to my friends, leaning in, "is why they were so desperate to feel us up.  I mean it.  I remember being at the drive-in the first time when I let a guy feel my boobs.  It took him about five hours to get my damn bra unhooked, and he was panting and wheezing like he was an asthmatic and I was feeling nothing.  I mean nothing!  I was looking out the window at the car next to us, and it was a family, you know? a mom and a dad and two little kids in their jammies, and the mom had fallen asleep, her head was against the window and her glasses were all crooked.  And I just wanted to shove this guy off me and go get in the car with that family.  And then he finally gets to my boob and just...holds it, like it's his fucking lunch money or something!"  

It is Friday night, late.  Everybody who's anybody with anything special to do has gone home or to a party for the weekend, but because none of us ever ascribe or are privy to any sort of familial or social atrocity here we are, the Nerd Herd, the Kansas Cartel of Fry Hall at Any Conservative Christian University in the country, sitting on the floor in Laura's dorm room.  Maybe I am criss-cross-applesauce, just because I am dumb and unaware of trends, but am rather comfortable with what feels right.​  Laura, a Wynona Rider knock-off with an uncanny, almost sick fascination with the taste of Le Sueur canned peas and a weird aversion to washing off her makeup at night, is in bed, and the rest of us are leaning against the wall facing her.  We look like a lineup accused of some eccentric crime.  "Well," Megan says, "for him, touching you was like. . . I don't know, I mean they fantasize for what, months? years? about feeling a real breast.  So when they do, that's enough.  To just feel it."  I nod yes, hard, with some kind of self-importance that lies within the teenage realm of approval of what everyone else must think of your body, your mind, your soul.  Meggie lives in Chicago now, and has a daughter named Millie who was conceived by artificial insemination.  

"Well, it was cold," I say in defense of myself.  "I remember feeling a little breeze against my nipple and thinking, Gawd, this is so weird.  I'm sitting here in a car with my boob hanging out like laundry.  And then that guy came around with the flashlight, you know, the morals squad? so I smacked my date on the top of the head to make him quit.  He came up like a fish, I swear, his eyes all pop-out and his mouth hanging open."  

Lauren, Laura, Megan, and Susan are laughing so hard and I think, Gawd, this is so strange.  This is the best time I've ever had.  

Susan, the token lesbian of the group, had been cleaning out her fingernails with the small blade of her Swiss army knife.  Now she snaps the blade closed and says with disgust, "How could you have done that?  What was the point?  You weren't having any fun!"

"Well, did you have fun the first time you let somebody do that to you?" Laura asked Susan, not even meaning to save me from Susan's wrath.

"Absolutely.  We knew exactly what we were doing."

"How did you know?!" Lauren asks, her red curls, freckles, and smile the face of pure innocence.  She is a doctor now, a pediatric associate with Children's Mercy in Overland Park.  

"We were alike," Susan says.  "The translation was simple."

We are all quiet for a moment, thinking.  I suppose we are all imagining Susan making love for the first time, and for me, anyway, the thought is a tender thing.  

Suddenly Laura sits up in her bed, lifts up her nightgown, baring her chest, her ugly black comforter flipping on top of itself like an old coin that can't decide which way to land.  Heads or tails, tails or heads, which will it be?  "What's this?" she asks, exposing her rather flat chest. 

No one answers, and she says, "A back."  And then, into the awkward silence, "That's a joke, you guys."  

I found out about 3 years ago that Laura died of breast cancer in 2008.  She'd discovered a lump at some point between 1995 and 2007 I was told, and then the biopsy had revealed the ugly truth:  Malignant. She left behind a husband, two daughters (age 3, twins), a Methodist minister mother, a behind-the-scenes, passive father, and a perfect, pretty sister.