Emma Lee Freeman! From the moment the professor called your name in speech and debate, I knew that you were the one that I had been looking for, to raise angora rabbits with and have our bones molder together under the earth. From the way you correct Professor Picciotto when he pronounces your name as one word, not two, I can tell that you are going to be the girl who will not take my shit when I wake up the in the morning and decide I don’t want to go college, I want to go to the Arctic and stop Japanese whale hunting. The authoritative way you sit in the molded plastic chairs tells me that eight or nine years from now, your closet is going to be filled with the kind of pinstriped pantsuits that Bette Porter wore and when I was seventeen, I locked my bedroom door and touched myself while thinking about Bette Porter’s pearls and disapproving looks and because of all that I’m pretty sure I love you Emma Lee Freeman. From where I am seated, five seats to your left, I can see that you look just like Smokey Robinson, but younger and prettier and grumpier. You’ve got your hair shaved to almost nothing, and I want to put my nose right on those tightly wound curls and inhale deeply because I know that you will smell just like cedar trees and oranges and beautiful human being and I love all of those smells just as much as I know you will love me, Emma Lee Freeman.
By the time I am done calculating the number of kisses it would take to transverse the wingspan of your beautifully muscled arms, Professor Picciotto has shut off the powerpoint of the syllabus, turned on the lights and you have started walking out the door like you bought and paid for it.
Emma Lee Freeman! It can’t end like this.
I ran headlong after you, down the steps of the amphitheater classroom and out the hallway, tripping over my own feet.
“Emma Lee Freeman! Please don’t go. I’m pretty sure we are meant to be together forever, so please wait up.”
You stop dead in the hallway and let our classmates stream past you like water.
“I don’t know you and I’m enrolled in Krav Maga this quarter so don’t fuck with me.”
“Okay! That’s okay. We can get to know each other. My name’s Paige and I’m an agriculture major. I have one brother, the toes on my left foot are webbed, and I’m pretty sure we should get married. It’s okay if you’re not gay,” I add breathlessly, “we can work on that.”
You fold your arms and cock your hips and I want to drop down on my knees and learn what your clit feels like on my tongue, oh holy holy holy.
“You are crazy”, you inform me. I nod. “You are a crazy girl, Paige. I don’t even know you.”
I drop down on my knees in the middle of the crowded hallway because I don’t need my dignity when I have your intelligent blue eyes looking at me and also I am hoping that you will take the hint and drop your pants. “Seven days. Give me seven days, bro”
I can see you thinking about that. I like that. You look good thinking. You always look good.
Is that seven consecutive days? Or seven class days?”.
“Seven class days,” I decide. More time.
You shrug. “No skin off my nose.”
As you walk away, I am shaking with excitement. Emma Lee Freeman, I am going to make you so happy you won’t even know what to do with yourself.
Day One
When class ends, I am prepared. I walk over to you and lay out my presentation materials as you look on with the bemused tolerance of a kindergarten teacher with a class armed with sugar and pint sized mafia vendettas. I don’t know why you are surprised. I had the internet and plenty of time.
“Emma Lee January Freeman, born in Smyrna Tennessee April 9th 1989. Your father is a notable historian of the Creole people and your mother is a bioluminescence researcher at Lane College. When you were thirteen, you came in first in the Tennessee State Young Engineer’s Contest. You made a robot that would harmonize with you when you sang to it. I’m pretty sure you’re an only child. You did archery and Girl Scouts in high school. You were the recipient of the Marshall Scholarship your senior year. You’re really good at blocking your Facebook, but I can tell from your pictures that you went hiking last weekend. You look really great in hiking shorts.”
You arch your eyebrow at me and I’m suddenly glad I wore underwear today.
“Congratulations. You know how to use a search engine.”
I am prepared for this. I pull the wad of index cards out of my back pocket.
“Your roommate your freshman year said that you never went out with her, but you held her hair when she came back. Your computer science professor wants you to be her TA next year. The ladies in the cafeteria remember you. They said that you always say thank you. You attended a couple of meetings for the Gay-Straight Alliance, but they haven’t seen you for a while. You don’t have any exes on campus.” I give you my best winning smile. “Clearly, you’ve been waiting for me.”
“Hmphf”, you say as you gather up your bags, but I think you’re a little impressed.
Day Two
When you get to your seat, there’s a neatly stacked mound of love tokens waiting for you. You pick up a bottle of flaxseed oil (it’s good for your heart and when we get old together, I want to be able to rest my head on your chest and listen to your heart beating as steady as sunrise). When you turn to look at me, I give you an enthusiastic wave.
Chicks dig an enthusiastic wave.
Day Three
Today, you are wearing stockings with a seam that runs all the way up your legs past the hem of your skirt and I make myself blush when I think about where those black tracks end. You are wearing some kind of broke down cashmere cardigan that looks like you borrowed it from your grandpa, but it falls in all the right places and I’m willing to bet it didn’t look half so good on him. I wonder what your nipples look like. I feel like a pervert. I put my head down on the desk. No more ogling.
“Paige,” Professor Picciotto calls out. “What is your presentation topic for the semester going to be?”
My head pops up like a prairie dog.
“My love for Emma Lee Freeman and how I don’t want to objectify her at all but instead love her as a whole and complicated human being, just a really really beautiful human being who happens to want to spend the rest of her life with me, she just doesn’t know it yet.”
The class erupts into laughter. Laugh all you want suckers. I’m going to have the cleverest girl in the world in my bed and we’ll see who’s laughing then.
“You might want to refine your thesis statement,” Professor Picciotto says. “Do you drink copious amounts of coffee before coming to class?”
I am confused. “No? I am like this all the time.”
To my left, I hear a giant derisive snort. That’s okay, Emma Lee Freeman. You’re hearing me. That’s progress.
Day Four
I stay up too late the night before class melting chocolates into molds the shape of Argentina, Madagascar, France and Japan (the places I want to go with you and drink malty local beers and get you off with my tongue and hands in midrange hostels) and I’m not surprised to wake up face down in a puddle of drool in an empty classroom. I am surprised to see you, Emma Lee Freeman, standing in front of me with your arms folded and your bookbag stuffed with chemistry textbooks and flyers to teach health education to underprivileged high schools slung over your shoulder.
I love the steady way you look at me, like I am a deer you’ve got in your crosshairs. You have clever eyes and a soft mouth, like your parents loved you enough. You are good at being quiet, like a person who understands the universe that exists between two silent people. I watch you watch me. I wipe some drool off my cheek.
“Well?” you finally say.
“Well what?”
“What are you going to do today?” Is that hope I hear in your voice? Disappointment? Annoyance?
I rummage around in my backpack for the bag of chocolates tied shut with a ribbon the exact shade of electric blue as the Nikes you were wearing the first day I met you. But I must have sat too close to the radiator because what I am holding on to is a bag of brown paste with little lumps of peninsulas sticking out.
“I’m sorry”, I say despondently. “I can make it up to you.”
“Oh yeah?”. If you are actually flirting with me, and in my book there is a picture of your seaglass eyes peering at me from under your extravagant eyelashes next to the definition of flirting, I am going to keel over and die.
“I can carry your books for you”, I start. “And I can do your laundry, or whatever you want.”
Your shrug gives me the kind of joy a magnet must feel when it stops resisting the pull of another magnet.
“Alright.” You drop the strap onto my shoulder and I sag with the weight. Darling, you are even stronger than you look.
-.-
I tag after you all day, like a faithful dog without a leash. In the panini shop on campus, I cut you off before you can hand your bills to the cashier. I glare at a freshman occupying the nicest table next to the window until he gets up and makes room for us. When your order is called, I jump up before you can and make sure to bring you little paper cups filled with pesto, siracha, ketchup. I open science building doors and sit beside you in class holding uncapped pens at the ready in case your pen runs out midway through your notes on hydrogen bonding. When I carry your packages for you at the post office, the clerk asks if I’m your assistant.
“No,” I reply. “I am deeply in love with her and I am practicing showing her instead of telling her. Although I do tell her.” I turn to you. “I love you, Emma Lee Freeman.”
You regard me, and hand me another box.
At the end of the day, I am lying on your brown dorm carpet as you do your homework on the bed. I’ve got my whole body sprawled out like an invitation and I’ve been watching you diligently plug away the problems for the better part of the last two hours. It is very warm in your room, a dry warmth. The great and terrible first snow of the season is falling outside your window. I am drowsily thinking about all the future homes we will have and the kind of warmth that will fill those homes when you put down your pens.
“What are you doing?”, you say without looking for me. “What are you doing here?”
I prop myself up on your elbow. “Because I melted the chocolates.”
You tap your knee with the fingers of your left hand one after the other in a carefully controlled sequence. “I thought you were here because you love me.”
“Bro!” I lean over and rest my chin on the top of your bed. “I love you more than I love my bed on cold mornings. I want to foster children with you and fed you ginger tea when you catch colds from them. I want to follow you to grad school, wherever the fuck you want to go, even New Zealand. I have spent the last weeks cuddling my pillow and pretending it’s you.” I pet the soles of your Converse. “If that’s not love, that’s okay. I just want to follow this feeling through to the end.”
You nod, and my chest is burning like a forest fire. Oh please, Emma Lee, darling, baby sugar. I feel my ribcage crack outwards with the force of my heart reaching towards you. I feel myself caught in a trembling abyss of choice. I feel like I want to toss all my plans at your feet and let you rearrange my life’s direction to better please you. I feel like exploding quietly. I feel like I need some private pantless time for a minute.
You pat the foot of your bed. Imy life’s direction to better please you. I feel like exploding quietly. I feel like I need some private pantless time for a minute.
You pat the foot of your bed. I curl up gratefully on the comforter and fall asleep to the sound of your pencil scratching across the paper.
Day Five
When you are not here when I wake up, I assume that as a much more responsible student than me, you’ve probably already gone to class. I brush my teeth with my finger and use the dental floss contraption you’ve set up for me on your door to lock your room.
When I get to class, you are not there.
When I give my presentation, which I stayed up nights practicing to my desk chair and color coding my cue cards, you are not there.
You are not in the seat I’ve assigned to you as part of your domain, nor behind me, nor in front of me.
I feel your absence like a crack in my bones. With an hour of class left to go, I pick up my backpack and walk out. I need something to hold me upright and I want it to be you and I don’t know where you are, so when I walk outside, I wrap my arms around a tree and bawl.
Day Six
I go to class brimming with breakable love. You are still not here. I want to go home. I want to be the kind of person who has a home, and not the kind of person I am, with two parents in two separate houses and no home. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t fall in love with beautiful absent girls. I want to be as chaste and as closeted as a Catholic. I want to be curled up at your feet. I want an ice cream sandwich. I don’t want to be alone.
Day Seven
I go to class. You are not here. I put my head down on the desk. I am thinking about community colleges and degrees in cosmetology when there is a small tap on my left shoulder.
Emma Lee Freeman. You look a little tired and there are bags like suitcases under your eyes and you are more beautiful than ever before.
“Come out with me to the hallway for a second,” you say, ignoring Professor Picciotto’s attempts to take roll.
I follow you out into the linoleum hall in a daze. My hands are aching to touch you. I drunk with relief and I know that’s no excuse, but I let my hands wander on to your hipbones.
“Where did you go?” I ask and I sound like a child. How could I ever hope that you would love me? I am a wreck and a fool, I fall in love too easily and I don’t do my laundry nearly often enough. “I thought you were fed up”, I confess. “I thought you had had enough and you were never coming back.”
“I went to a robotics conference. Paige, c’mere.” And you tip my chin up with one finger and bring my mouth closer and suddenly we are kissing. You slip your hand under my shirt and I am making tiny markings in that place where your neck and your shoulder meet and I am completely unsure what this means, or why I want to keep traveling down your neck or why it seems so imperative that I bury myself somewhere around your midsection and stay there till someone physically removes me
I run my mouth over the pink seashell of your ear, just the way I’ve imagined all those sweaty sleepless nights. Go big or go home. “Are you sure? I’m kind of a mess, Emma Lee Freeman.”
You are holding me like I am the kingdom’s jewels.
“I know you’re a mess. But you’re also kind, and honest and loyal and dedicated. You’ve worked harder for me than anyone has ever bothered to.” You pull me closer. “I think we will do just fine.”
We walk back to class, together.
