CUTTERS
VS.
JOCKS
A Prequel Novella to
Binding
Arbitration
by
ELIZABETH MARX
Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Marx
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For all the girls with the courage to jump the tracks and for all the boys waiting on the other side to love them.
And vice-versa.
Special thanks to Kagan Tuncay for use of photo of Rosewell House for cover.
CONTENTS
1. WE SHOULD BE WOO’D AND WERE NOT MADE TO WOO
4. CHAMPIONS KEEP PLAYING UNTIL THEY GET IT RIGHT
5. NOTHING CAN COME FROM NOTHING
6. HITTING IS TIMING. PITCHING IS UPSETTING TIMING.
7. OUR REMEDIES OFT IN OURSELVES LIE
8. MOST BALL GAMES ARE LOST, NOT WON
9. THINK YOU I AM NO STRONGER THAN MY SEX
10. IF WINNING ISN’T EVERYTHING, WHY DO THEY KEEP SCORE?
11. THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE NEVER DID RUN SMOOTH
12. YOU WIN SOME, LOSE SOME, WRECK SOME
13. MY WORDS FLY UP, MY THOUGHTS REMAIN BELOW
14. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT TO SAY IN THE LOSER’S LOCKER ROOM
CUTTERS
Cutter is a derogatory term used by Indiana College students to refer local youths in Bloomington. Akin to townie, it was used in the 1979 movie Breaking Away, but cutter originally referred to someone who worked in the local stone cutting industry in Indiana.
VS.
Versus.
JOCKS
Jock is believed to be derived from the word jockstrap, and synonymous with male athlete. It has become ingrained in American culture as a negative stereotype. Like meathead or muscle head, it’s based on the theory that a jock is muscular, but unintelligent and unenlightened, unable to carry on a conversation unless it’s related to sport or exercise.
WE SHOULD BE WOO’D AND WERE NOT MADE TO WOO
A Midsummer’s Night Dream
Elizabeth
Do you believe in love at first sight is an illusion? Madonna’s lyrics funneled through the speaker system. I tripped going up the stairs into the alcove, as I caught a glimpse of him. Never before has a single person made such an impression on me. And no guy, with the silky nod of his head, has overwhelmed me with a gaze that seemed to penetrate me, all the way to my soul.
Weren’t there supposed to be fireworks, violins, and rose petals at a time like this? It was just my fortune, since I had bad luck fermenting in my blood, that my awe-struck moment was illuminated by the glare of college football on a television screen, the crunching of peanut shells under-foot, and stale stout stabbing my senses.
It was the fall of my junior year. I had avoided any such entanglements since I’d enrolled at IU. It was Saturday night, at McCreary’s, a bar that sits in a commercial strip mall right down the way from the movie theater on the mall side of Bloomington. As if a saloon from the Wild West, the wide plank floors are marred and scuffed. And watch where you walk, because peanut shells litter the floor. Poetry, profanity, and phone numbers whittle the wooden walls. It’s patrons are a mix of cutters and college kids. McCreary’s had some of the best sandwiches in Bloomington, with names like Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and Call of the Wild.
Vicki and I had just seen a movie, and right then I was so dumbfounded I couldn’t remember the title.
The second I walked into the bar, I was informed that we were playing pool in the Hoosier Room. McCreary’s four pool tables sit at the four cardinal points in little alcoves cordoned off by half walls.
Vicki and I worked together at the Waffle House. While I went to class and the library, she said she’d take a pass on anything past primary. She’d only come to Bloomington to escape her small-town parents who thought marijuana was a seasoning added to brownies.
I had no desire to play pool, but I agreed because there was no talking Vicki out of something once she set her mind on it. Case in point, her hair was chartreuse right now, popsicle green, with a white lighting streak running down the side of her bangs.
We stepped into the tiny niche and one of our opponents greeted us. The lookout was tall and muscular, with dirty blond hair. His teammate was positioning his long athletic frame over the table, looking at his shot. When he heard the introductions, he looked up. He brushed his dark hair away from his blue eyes and took in Vicki, his eyes seemed to fill his face, but he didn’t sneer, which is what most jocks did when faced with Vicki. It wasn’t that she wasn’t pretty; it was just that she was a lot to take in all at once. And once she started talking, it was hard for most people to listen, because her voice reminded you of a mouse trying to swallow a hurricane.
The jock nodded in greeting, and then turned toward me. His lips crinkled into a lopsided smile, and he beamed me with his killer blue eyes. I felt like I had walked straight into a beam of electrified male energy. The dimple in his chiseled cheek was so deep he could use it as a trap, and I didn’t doubt that he’d caught quite a few gals in that crevice alone.
Researchers say that we can judge the attractiveness of another person in .13 seconds. I knew he was someone I would never forget. It wasn’t just his physical appearance that ensnared me, but his eyes locked on me like he wanted to sharpen his ego on my bones. His presence was so calm, cool and collected that I took two steps back. The hair all over my body stood up, and then knotted. I tried to blink. I couldn’t. My eyes were Super-glued on him. Vicki and the other guy were speaking, but I couldn’t hear them because blood was boiling in my ears like a thick pot of chili at the Waffle House right before Saturday afternoon kick-off.
I shook my head and told myself this wasn’t real. Love at first sight was a physical response, simple attraction. Some might call it lust. I forced my eyes away from him and listened to the introductions. His friend’s name was David, I thought. I couldn’t be sure because I was locked into a clear box with the guy leaning on his pool stick, and someone was sucking all the air from the confined space. I wanted to panic breathe.
“I’m Aidan,” he said.
I put my hand out, but when his hand came into view, I pulled mine back. His deep tenor stroked my consciousness. I was certain that he could read the nature of my attraction on my flushed face. He didn’t need the ego boost. I swallowed down my instinct to make a run for it, extended my hand again and said, “Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth is a beautiful name.” His words were the third lure. I was a goner. “Everyone calls me Band-Aid.”
David reintroduced himself for my benefit. He said they were baseball players at IU. I stole another glance at Aidan, but he seemed unaffected by what happened, and started asking me questions to figure out from where he knew me.
David racked the balls and said over his shoulder, “You’ve probably seen them on the square.” Translation: David assumed that because Vicki was a cutter, I was too.
Aidan shrugged, easily swallowing that information hook, line, and sinker.
For the next forty minutes, I listened to Vicki and David carry on a conversation, while Aidan watched me. I refused to glance his way, but every once in awhile, my will power slipped. I barely pulled my wits together enough to play.
After each of Aidan’s shots, he stood alongside me, inching a little closer each time. By the end of the match, the cuff of his rolled-up shirt sleeves brushed against my bare arm. He was trying to fluster me, so I concentrated on putting stripes in pockets, and ignored whatever game he was playing.
Vicki distracted David with her friendly banter, while the snug fit of my jeans diverted Aidan. We whipped the jocks. Aidan wanted to go three for five, but I shook my head in refusal.
As I stepped out of the space, I turned back for a final glance. The loss sent a little spark of determination to Aidan’s cheeks. It seemed jock boy was way competitive. It was a good thing it was only a tiny spark, because if anything else ignited, the small room and the entire strip center might have gone up in flames.
FANS DON’T BOO NOBODIES
Reggie Jackson
Aidan
She beat me at pool. It must have been the fact that the moment I laid eyes on her quiet, dark beauty I knew I wanted her. Those forest green eyes drew me in and made me long to know what was going on behind those nerdy specs. It was as if her glasses were a shield she could stand behind watching the world at a distance, taking it all in and making her internal observations without giving anything away.
She was a cutter with a tart mouth I wanted to roam. Okay, I wanted her body, too, but it was her mouth that kept me intrigued. After she’d won, she couldn’t escape fast enough, so I stalked her and her friend into the bar. Her full lips spoke words laced in warning and challenge. I overheard her say, “I’m not interested.” And I knew it was in reference to me.
She was one of those girls who could set a guy down with a look or a few piercing words. “Really? I could try harder.”
She made some idle comment about me being a prince charming type, so I tried to correct her impression. “Afraid you can’t measure up?”
This was absolutely the wrong thing to say. The green of her eyes turned gold like a fire breathing dragon does right before it marshmallows your appendages.
“I’m not interested in stumbling along with the masses,” she said.
Now, I’ve got one hell of an ego, and a girl telling me twice in less than sixty seconds that she isn’t interested is like shoving a red flag down my throat. I would find a way to make her interested. I mean, I was a stud on campus. And yeah, she’s smoking hot, but she’s a cutter, a townie. They usually roll around at my feet like practice balls. “I hardly think you stumble, and you’ve already stood out from the crowd. That’s the first game I’ve lost to a girl that I didn’t throw.”
“You lost because you were too busy checking out my ass.”
Yep, pretty much.
“Checking you out was worth the loss to my competitive nature.” I toasted her highball glass with my beer.
“What do you want from me?”
“How about a date?” A naked date.
“Nope,” she said snidely.
Might as well go for all of it. She was going to intentionally walk me. “Sex?”
“You have a girlfriend.”
This one was smarter than two cutters and a coed put together. “Why would you say that?”
I almost launched out of my seat when she strummed her fingers over mine, speaking seductively. “Your class ring is hanging among some lovely coed’s perky breasts right now.”
I’m going to embarrass myself. “Did you say perky breasts?”
Her glass clinked into mine. “You keep up better than most jocks.”
I ran my thumb over my ring finger. “We have a very open relationship.” I’d made it very clear to Amanda that I was a free agent, but she still insisted on keeping the ring she had snatched off my dresser, saying she needed a part of me.
“I’m sure you have an open relationship,” she said in disgust, “and I’m sure she doesn’t know anything about your extracurricular activities. Thanks for the offer, but I don’t play second string.” Elizabeth picked up her belongings.
This girl had that sassy kind of attitude that drove me crazy. I’d happily make her a starter. I gave her another once over. She was right; she was no second stringer. She had cascades of dark chestnut hair, eyes crisper than evergreen, and a body that could rock the cover of Maxim. “You know any other girl wearing those glasses would not appeal to me, but there’s something different about you, Elizabeth Tucker.”
“These,” she pointed to her chocolate retro frames, “librarian glasses enhance my ability to call a spade a spade.”
“Wow. Who burned you so bad?”
“No one.” She plopped off her barstool. “Everyone.”
“You were more fun when I had you corralled in a small room, unable to speak.”
“Guys always lose interest, once I start talking.”
“I like to listen to your voice, even if I don’t know what you mean half the time. I’ll catch on sooner or later.” I took hold of her hand and stoked her palm; it drove almost every girl I’d ever touched crazy. “You have the prettiest hands. You talk with them.” I’d learned that girls loved modest compliments and observations.
But not this snooty cutter. She flipped me off and strode away.
I shook my head and laughed. I’d always been like a bull. Once you raised the red flag, I was relentless until I captured it.
O, WHAT MEN DARE DO
Much Ado about Nothing
Elizabeth
Several times when my mother was indisposed, I was shipped off to one of my great aunties. The summer I was twelve, I rode a Greyhound bus to Chattanooga, to my great-aunt’s house. I enjoyed the farm in the rambling hill country of Tennessee, up until the point her twin grandsons came to visit.
It was that summer I learned how to put boys in their place.
The boys were fourteen, and the roughest, rowdiest, freckled-faced things I had ever seen. And they were curious about me in a way that I found less than flattering. When I made it clear that I was not going to let them put their grimy hands up my skirt, they decided to make my life miserable.
They were determined to convince Aunt Oglear that I was the devil’s spawn. They opened the chicken coop and blamed me. They scraped up my hands by tossing me off of the porch swing. They set a contraption to dump dirty water over me when I came out the barn. It was their version of a wet t-shirt contest, and they howled like coyotes as I sputtered through the water. Then they started calling me Yankee Girl. After twelve days of their shenanigans, I decided the good-ole-boys needed a Yankee lesson in manners.
My aunt Oglear was Silly Putty in their hands, as most southern grandmothers are. But their grandfather was no dumb duck, and he knew those boys were trouble in spades. Everyday Uncle Roy gave them specific warnings not to let the bulls out of the bullpen. He didn’t want the bulls in the pastures with the heifers. Every day the boys gave their word they wouldn’t, but within half an hour, he’d catch them up on the fence posts taunting those bulls with sticks and rocks.
The poor animals were busting with as much testosterone as the boys. In retaliation to the boys taunting, the bulls would charge the fence repeatedly, garnering hoots and hollers of mirth from the little jackasses. I watched this display muggy afternoon after muggy afternoon, and finally a plan formed.
The day they were to go home, their grandparents went into town and gave them explicit instructions against monkey business.
What they should have warned against was bull business.
I followed the boys out to the fence by the bullpen, and offered them each an opportunity to see my assets. I told them to meet me in the barn loft. Ten minutes later they came just like calves to the slaughter. When they climbed into the loft, I’d climbed down the outside ladder, ran around the front of the barn and locked them in. I barricaded every exit and there wasn’t a breeze to be had. As the temperature rose to its zenith, so did their anger. They screamed and yelled for the better part of the morning, as I sprawled out in a chaise lounge with a tall glass of lemonade, without any lurid glances.
In the early afternoon, I meandered out to the pasture and opened the bullpen fence. It didn’t take long before the bulls realized their luck and were down the hill chasing the heifers. When dust kicked up on the road leading to the farm, I knew that Aunt Oglear and Uncle Roy were coming home, so I quietly opened the barn door. My two tormentors were striped to their briefs, asleep in a pile of hay. I disappeared into the potting shed behind the house, slipped on an apron, rubbed dirt on my face and watched with glee.
Their grandmother found them and immediately took a switch to them for letting the bulls out. An hour later, their grandfather came back from rounding up the horny bulls and he was fit to be tied. The grinding gears from the truck hauling the bulls called the boys out of the garden where they had been sent to weed. They kept bickering over who was going to tattle on me, but their grandmother was supervising their pulling and hoeing from the kitchen window and neither of them dared to be the one that stepped out of the turned up soil.
When they tried to blame me, all those hours of taunting the bulls fell deaf on their grandfather’s ears. He took them to the bullpen, put their hands on the top rail of the fence, and made them drop their pants. Then he beat the tar out of them with his leather belt.
After I stopped laughing, I found my way to the house. Aunt Oglear washed my face asking where I had been hiding. I told her I had been working in the garden shed all morning, which was what I usually did when I wanted to escape with a book. I sat at the kitchen table and my auntie put a plate of cookies down in front of me on the red checkered table cloth.
She stood over the sink, shucking corn. When one of the boys yelped especially loud she said, “Well, Elizabeth Ann, if you can’t beat them, arrange for them to be beaten. You timed that just right. Their daddy is coming up the road and neither one of them is going to sit comfortably for a week.” She turned and smirked at me.
That was that day I learned to school my face when there were questions I didn’t want to answer.
She chuckled. Whether it was from my not giving anything away or from her amusement I couldn’t say. “Plough deep while sluggards sleep.” She wiped her hand on a dish towel, patted my shoulder, and went out the screen door laughing.
Needless to say, on any further trips, the boys were much more gentlemanly. Once, when they thought to call me Yankee Girl again, their grandmother said, “You want everyone to know that Yankee outsmarted the two of you?”
They both blustered, but they called me Cousin Libby from then on. And I fondly referred to them as the Bullpen Brothers.
CHAMPIONS KEEP PLAYING UNTIL THEY GET IT RIGHT
Billie Jean King
AIDAN
The next afternoon, I went searching for Elizabeth Tucker on the square. The cutters were milling about, most recovering from hangovers, smoking cigarettes and sipping 7-Eleven coffee. I approached a gangly-looking dude, with a knot of dreadlocks at the back of the head, and asked him if he knew an Elizabeth. He shook his head no, dropped his skateboard, and rolled away.
I went back to campus and parked in front of the library. As I hefted my backpack over my shoulder, I figured I could find the little cutter at the Waffle House sooner or later. A old man was pacing back and forth in front of the libraries entrance, the weird thing about him was he was dressed in short pants and a bow tie and he had an old fashions baseball cap. When he saw me, he opened the door to the vestibule for me. As I crossed the threshold he said, “Remember what you’re looking for kid.”
The hair at the nape of my neck stood up. When I put my hand on the door that would deposit me into the lobby of the library, something compelled me to look back.
The old guy was gone.
I had no idea what department that kind of weird taught in, but I wanted to stay far away from it. Probably, philosophy, I’d stay way clear of that.
I smiled as I headed to the third floor, where the jocks studied and the cheerleaders stalked, but I wasn’t in the mood for any pom-pom antics, so I found an empty table on the fourth floor. I pulled out my English lit book. I hated English lit, but I started reading: “Nor did her who was so wise shortly before--perceive that Love with his darts dwelt within the rays of those lovely eyes--nor notice the arrow that sped to his heart.”
Seriously, a guy wrote this? I felt the second prickle of unease dance down my spine and looked up. Elizabeth Tucker was facing me. She was sitting alone at the table directly in front of mine, staring at me with the same amount of wide eyed shock I was feeling. As soon as I saw her, I was lost. I looked down at my notes. “For beauty’s wound is sharper than any weapon’s, and it runs through the eyes down to the soul.”
I stared at her and let the suspense of what I’d do next build in her eyes. I flashed a playboy smile as I approached her, a smirk that had rocked many a lucky girl’s world. “What are you doing here, Elizabeth?”
She refused to pull her eyes away from a book, that was both older and about three inches thicker than anything I’d ever read. “I certainly wasn’t planning on a rendezvous with you.”
“You mean you didn’t appoint this place for our meeting?”
She peeked from her monolithic tome and rolled her eyes.
“May I sit and bask in your presence?”
She kept her eyes fixed on her book. “Isn’t that my line?”
I chuckled, and then I spent the rest of the day studying her.
I always found her at the exact table on the fourth floor. I took the fact that she didn’t move as a sign that she wanted a full on pursuit. It was only a matter of time once I applied the full-court press on her.
After, a few weeks, I started to find comfort in the fact that she was always curled up around a book at that table, right where I left her. She was more solace than the third floor full of jocks, frat boys, and sorority chicks combined.
I stayed in the library for hours staring at her over the tops of our books. Why she insisted on reading 18th century literature when she was wasn’t a student touched the fringes of my questioning mind, but I was so buried in business books that I never gave her presence any other thought than the consolation and convenience it offered me.
Most nights I arrived with a definitive plan about how I was going to lure her into the stacks, where I would flirt and steal kisses that would only leave me wanting more. I even coaxed her into a grad students study cubical, when I saw him leave for the day. In the intimacy of those tiny rooms, I got the closest to her, but she never allowed for hot and heavy make-out sessions.
Over the course of the fall and spring semesters, I learned to depend on how she saw things. She evaluated problems from all the angles and gave solid advice. Her friends looked to her when they were hurting, lonely, or morose, and she offered healing words. And I soon considered myself one of her friends.
I knew she wanted me, more than she ever let on. But Elizabeth Tucker had complete command over herself. She always left me with the feeling she never needed me or anyone else. Perhaps that’s what intrigued me. Or maybe I was frightened because she could live without sharing her secrets with me.
She was the most intensely aware person I had ever met. I wanted to become intimately acquainted with the secrets behind those majestic eyes. I wondered over and over again: Where exactly had she come from? Who was waiting there for her? What type of secrets was she keeping from me?
NOTHING CAN COME FROM NOTHING
Lear
Libby
The wrong side of the tracks was a misnomer because French Lick, Indiana was so small that the length of the tracks was hardly the distance of the high school football field. Maybe it was the transient length of them that hadn’t prevented my trying to constantly attain a first down.
French Lick is just shy of two thousand residents and was originally a French Trading Post. Thus, the French. In its heyday, it was known for its sulfur springs, and in the nineteenth century boasted one of the largest healing spas in the nation. The sulfur made the lick, and if anyone can explain the meaning of that to me, then thanks. By the time I was coming up, the spa was closed and the whole town was well past its prime.
I grew up in a small house that the rest of the community referred to it as a shack. And didn’t every shack, in every small town, have a resident crazy lady? I was a bright child, so from the earliest age, I knew that my brother and I resided with what the town referred to as the crazy lady on Loquat Lane.
Ora Jean Gentry, my mother, was raised in a sewn up mill town in Alabama. Jeanne didn’t grow up in a happy home. Her mother loved her, but she made the continual pursuit of her father’s affection her life’s ambition. Trying to attain the love of a man who’s always moaning the regrets of hard living is like trying to siphon liquor off a dry still.
Jeanne continued her quest for love and affection from men who only used and abused her. She was a beautiful woman. Picture Marilyn Monroe’s body and Elizabeth Taylor’s face, and you can imagine the allurements men were drawn to.
Jeanne ran away from home when she was thirteen. She hitchhiked, on looks alone, from Alabama to Chicago. The police found her in a forest preserve, in the arms of an eighteen-year-old James Dean type. Unfortunately, whatever innocence she had managed to preserve in those early years was gone by the time the police strobe lights washed their shocked expressions. My mother was sent to a juvenile home where she became fodder for countless other predators.
By the time she was sixteen, she was diagnosed as manic-depressive and placed in a state mental hospital. She was shipped from institution to institution, even spending time in an abbey in the Chicago suburbs, where she said that the nuns locked her up every evening. She said she lay in a fetal position in the center of her metal-clad cell praying that no one would come for her in the middle of the night.
She was released into the custody of cousins who lived in French Lick. So, Jeanne went there indefinitely. She found employment in a diner as a waitress. By that time she was seventeen; she fell head over heels for my father. My mother claimed he was an artist, but my grandmother referred to him as the drunk, which was one of her nicer references.
Either way, he had my mother knocked up in no time. In the eyes of the law, Jeanne was underage and my father was twenty-three. He was given the choice between jail time for statutory rape or marriage. He chose the latter, and they were married in April. I was born in November, and they were divorced by the spring of the next year.
My father has always been an apparition to me. I don’t really remember more than a tall figure at the door, whispering heated words to my mother that escalated into an argument.
After my father disappeared (really, he ran away, as nobody would steal a louse), my mother had a break down and spent the next three months at Choate Mental Health Facility. Over the years, she spent a lot of time there. State mental hospitals were not pretty places. I knew because I visited her enough to have developed a deep impression.
The broken down playground that stood off to the side of the main entrance, where even grass refused to be reborn was a constant reminder of my withered life. I wanted a perfectly tended grassy knoll, surrounded by a flower garden and large trees swaying in the warmth of the sun. Often these thoughts would assault me, as I was dragged across the threshold of the place. It was the smell that started the panic deep inside my gut. It was an odd combination of excrements and human pain.
State facilities were little more than warehouses, with gray cinder block walls, composite tile floors, and glaring florescent lights. The mentally ill weren’t the only residents, but alcoholics, drug addicts, and what were then referred to as perverts were also housed there. On visiting days, everyone would stand in their doorways and gawk down the corridors. Some of the stares were comical, some were predatory, but the vast majority was empty. Blank stares, either drugged into oblivion, or fried by electrode shock therapy into submission.
What kind of a person thought of running hundreds of volts of electricity into someone’s brain to re-scramble? But the masochistic bastard probably had a lot of letters behind his name. I couldn’t argue with the results, it was the only thing that brought my mother out of her mania. A side effect was memory loss. By the time I was sixteen, every time they strapped my mother to one of those tables, I prayed to God that she would forget me completely.
Now that I’d met Aidan, I had a glimmer of understanding of what Jeanne felt for my father. Love is a kind of madness—and crazy runs in my family.
HITTING IS TIMING. PITCHING IS UPSETTING TIMING.
Warren Spahn
Aidan
By the time I opened the door to the Waffle House, I convinced myself I was there for the perfect afternoon snack, apple cinnamon pancakes. I zeroed in on her as soon as I walked in; she stood facing the pass-through into the kitchen. It was the first Saturday afternoon after I returned to IU from California and I was seated on a revolving stool behind the walk up counter.
I felt the same tumultuous cloying anxiety I’d felt the first time I saw her. Everything I had ever wanted had come to me easily, granted I was a hard worker; you didn’t become an All American at a Big Ten University otherwise. I played baseball, which was my passion, but I decided to go out for football this fall which offered me a perfect excuse to return to Bloomington early.
Playing football was hot and grueling, and I wanted the challenge of it, but I wanted an excuse to be near Libby even more. I had never wanted to be around anyone the way I did her. Sitting alongside her, counting her breaths made me happy.
I had no doubt it was her in front of me, when I slid onto the spinning counter stool. I’d studied her body. I could have majored in her, knowing every twist and turn of her figure. I knew its form, as well as the arc on a perfect curve ball. And I’d looked at it from just about every angle possible. Well, except for looking down at her under me, that is. That fantasy did what it always did to me, and I was thankful the counter top was there to hide my embarrassment.
She was wearing a standard pink 1950’s style one-piece waitress dress, with matching white collar and apron. It was knee-length and it clung in all the right places. She was on her tip toes placing a check in the turnstile, which she swung around so the cook and owner, Old Mr. Rodgers, could pull it off. She hadn’t noticed me yet, but I didn’t mind checking out the most beautiful cutter’s backside while I waited to capture her attention.
Libby reached overhead for a roll of paper towels, and the two cutters saddled on either side of me were enthralled with her rising hemline. Their roaming eyes were too possessive for my liking, so I cleared my throat. Neither one of them paid me any mind; they could not conceive that I would want what they considered cutter property.
That was what I should have recognized when I glanced down the counter: cutters and college kids definitely antagonized each other. They might mix it up, they might score drugs from each other, but they didn’t patronize the same establishments, they do not mix ranks, and they never shared their women.
Elizabeth turned toward me. Little Bit was her cutter nickname, but she was always Libby to me. I swear her smile lit up my world like fireworks after a grand slam homer. She was just as drop dead gorgeous as I remembered her, except her creamy skin was nicely tanned and a ‘Little Bit’ would not have been enough to satisfy me. Her dark ropes of hair were tied in a knot at the back of her head. Her green eyes flashed through tinted glittery pink retro glasses. With a light sprinkling of freckles across her nose, she wasn’t the kind of girl every guy would follow around on campus, but anyone who caught her clever quips and observations would definitely take a harder look at Libby Tucker. She was a hundred notches above average, and that explained the clowns on either side of me.
Her demeanor spoke good old-fashioned common sense, but when you didn’t use it she could just as easily dish up an old-fashioned tongue lashing. I adored that tongue.
I gave her my best megawatt smile, wondering where her tan lines ended. She squinted, before pushing her glasses up her nose, making the little old ladies chain swing on the arm of the glasses. On any other girl I knew, the glasses would have been really fugly, but she was dazzling in them. She was every guy’s quirky retro fantasy chick.
Her pouted lips contorted in mock disgust. “Well, well, look at what the cat drug in. Beautiful baseball boy.” The glasses slipped down her perfectly pert nose, so she adjusted them again, before putting her hand on her hip.
“No baseball, babe. It’s all about football now.” I winked.
“Fabulous Football F... wow, I can’t think of the finish.” “Friend, Fun, Flame, Fairy--the make-believe kind--, Fix, Fury.” I raised my eyebrows with each new suggestion.
“No, none of them, but if you had said them in alphabetical order I would have been truly impressed, Band-Aid.”
I laughed, remembering our shared camaraderie, our long walks all over campus, our late night clandestine meetings in the library, our ongoing flirtation that formed a friendship in spite of my jock ways. She challenged my mind and made me see things that otherwise I would have ignored.
The instant she smiled, I was willing to cross any boundary, real or imaginary, to have her. She was forbidden fruit, but I wanted pick the tree clean. Just a glance, and all the charged up attraction overwhelmed me.
One of the cutters wasn’t having it. “If college boy is done with you, I’d like my check,” he snarled.
“You know, Johnny, you can make a real ass out of yourself, and you don’t even have to put your mind, or lack thereof, into it.” Libby slapped his check down in front of him.
I moved. The closer I got the more bravado he lost, so by the time I was in his face he was bent backwards over the barstool behind him. Libby grabbed my arm over the counter, it was the first time I felt her touch in two months. The pressure of her gentle fingertips against my bare arm immediately sent all my blood south, and it was anything but soothing.
“If you get into a brawl, I’ll lose my job and the only sport you will be playing is Pick-Up-Sticks.” She worked her hand up my arm, until she could gently tug on my T-shirt sleeve. She wasn’t calming me, but she had my attention.
I refused to lose my cool, and my eyes narrowed. “Disappear before I forget this is a place of business, cutter.”
Long-haired Johnny made short work of dropping bills on the counter. When he reached the door, he turned around. “Later fabulous football fuck, hope she likes it.” He dropped his skateboard and went zooming down Kirkwood Avenue.
Libby shrugged her shoulders to cover for the awkwardness, but I could see the hesitation in her eyes. She knew the cutter was right. I wanted her just the way he thought I did. It frustrated me, because I didn’t like being so transparent. And I was torn, because I knew I needed to get her out of my system, but I didn’t intend to hurt her to get it done. I would break it off gracefully, just the way I always had.
“If I see him again, I’m going to beat him bloody and leave his body parts in a big recycling bin behind Assembly Hall.”
“Whatever floats your boat. Just make sure you wear gloves and have a good alibi.”
“Like I was alone all night with this incredible girl named Libby.”
“Libby is not that kind of girl. She won’t even succumb to Band-Aid,” she rang up Johnny’s check at the register dropping the seven-cent tip into her white ruffled apron.
“You do remember my real name?” I asked curiously, even though I liked the way Band-Aid rolled off her tongue.
“Of course I remember,” she said in mock distress with her hand across her brow. “We spent all last year playing cat and mouse. You, on the other hand, must have forgotten all about me.”
“You’re unforgettable, Elizabeth Tucker.” I moved my head around pretending to evaluate her. “I can’t decide if your best feature is those flashing green eyes or the flirty smile. But your worst trait is that you can curse like a sailor and you enjoy English Literature.”
“Banford Aiden Palowski, Ski to his friends, i.e., other jocks, Band-Aid to all the girls, and there’s a lot of ‘em.” She rolled those fiery emerald eyes at me. “Age twenty-three, six-foot-four, approximately two-twenty. Throws a mean ninety-four-mile-per-hour fast ball, followed by a curve ball that makes batters dizzy. Best feature: beautiful baby blues. Worst trait: will try to get just about any of the previously stated gaggle of girls into the boinking room.”
I swallowed hard before quickly masking my shocked expression. How did she know about the boinking room? “Five.”
“Pardon?” She started away from me wiping down the silver boomerang-patterned counter top by the coffee pots.
“Six-foot-five.”
“That extra inch must make all the difference in the world,” she paused, “especially in the boinking room.”
“What’s a boinking room?” I asked, looking from the spotless black and white tiled floor to the recently painted ceiling. All of the last year’s grease spots had disappeared.
“You know that extra bedroom that you and your clever roommates leave unoccupied for the purposes of sex, the room with no other amenities other than a bed. I wonder how often you wash the sheets? I hear the room is available on a first come, first serve basis, or is that where you bad baseball boys conduct your cheerleaders’ orgies?”
She was walking toward the row of booths along the window wall when I got off my revolving stool, grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back up against my front, placing my hand over mouth. “I can’t stand to hear you say another word. It sounds really disgusting when you say it.” I whispered it into her ear, letting the words roll down her neck.
Her squirming offered me an excellent view of her lacy pink bra. I hoped she hadn’t heard me swallow hard or breathe in the scent of her sweet skin, but I couldn’t resist her. She smelled like apple pie. The fruit on this tree was going to kill me. Didn’t it ruin Adam? An apple did him in, too.
She bit my fingers before turning on me with her eyes blazing. “It is disgusting. That’s why it sounds disgusting.”
“For the record, I have not used that room since I was a sophomore. How’d you find out about it?”
“Why would I divulge an excellent source of information on the bad baseball boys’ boudoirs?” She looked me up and down with her hand resting on her slim hip.
“I would never take you there.” I bowed my head hoping that was enough for her to let it go.
“Where’s that, Band-Aid?” She winked as her hips swung away.
“You know what I mean, Libby.” I gave her one of my best stare-downs, but trying to intimidate her was like trying to throw a no-hitter. You could make the attempt, but more often than not, someone would squeeze off a hit when you least expected it.
“The boinking room?”
I cringed when she said it. It sounded so sordid and seedy. I was mortified that she knew about it. Someone had broken the code--I’d worry about that later--but for now I needed to change the subject. “What are you doing after work today?”
“Boinking.” She had the gall to smile at me with a directness that few girls her age could muster.
“Either you know nothing of which you speak, or you know someone who has had an illustrious visit to the inner sanctum of our apartment.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Guys like boinking. I especially enjoy it when you say it.”
She batted my hand away from the vicinity of her breast, where I confidently pulled on a chunk of her hair that had escaped from the knot.
“Right. You’re just trying to get me to stop saying boinking, and I know you copped a look down my dress.” Her pearly whites smiled one of those I’ve-one-upped you once again smiles.
“Okay, okay, I’m at your mercy. Please don’t say it again. As to the other, I am only an immature male. I can’t resist a breathtaking view.”
“Right.” She continued to wipe down the counter top.
“They are exquisite, Libby. Wouldn’t I know?”
Her scowl said she was far from flattered. “I would say you’ve seen more of them than I have.” She narrowed her eyes on me. “But, alas, how do mine compare? Compare and contrast them, say, with your girlfriend’s.”
Crap, double crap, this was one subject we usually avoided. I guess she had all summer to think about what I had been doing and with whom. I called her at the Waffle House a couple of times, but either she wasn’t there or whoever answered said they’d give her a message. I never heard back from her, but here I was, first chance I got. “I, uh, mean to say that uh…”
“Beautiful-busted-baseball-boy-boinking-by-self.” She pouted her lips and I prayed that she’d put them on me soon.
“You really are too sarcastic for your own good.”
“You’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to outsmart me.”
“I’m a guy, and it’s normal to check you out.” I looked around briefly. “And you’re so fine you make my mouth water.”
“And you have a girlfriend, yet here you are on my work-step once again.”
“I would show up on your doorstep, if I knew where you lived.” She had established strict boundaries. Where she lived was just about as hard to pinpoint as some umps’ strike-zones.
“Bye,” she said, waving her hand at me as she strutted around me. She went to the opposite counter, and picked up the dirty plates from her last customer.
“For the record, I have never had a serious girlfriend. She’s a girl and a friend.”
“Like, I’m a girl and a friend?” The food she’d ordered was up. She balanced the heavy white porcelain plates on her arms, delivering them to two middle-aged men sitting in a pink and black vinyl booth. They had been unable to keep their eyes off her. And they’d snickered when she’d had me by the balls. I should have been used to it by now, because she always had me. I think that’s why I kept coming back.
She ignored me and started refilling the salt, pepper, and ketchup containers from the far end. I sat in the stool directly in front of her, watching her with an intensity that was sure to annoy her. I moved along the counter with her. I didn’t say anything else; I just stared in silent observation. I knew from past experience she could only resist looking at me for so long.
When I captured her attention, I reached out and stroked her arm saying, “Come on, Libby, at least be my friend.”
She snorted. It was unladylike, but I had to admit that I was turned on by it. She looked up at me like I was an annoying bee buzzing around her honey. “As long as you understand that that’s all it will ever be.” She refilled the last condiment rack and looked up at me. “Don’t you have something more important to do than watch me work?”
“I have more important things I’d like to do with you.” I winked in a suggestive way.
“I’ve told you before, Aidan, that it’s not going to happen.” She slammed her blue order pad on the counter. “All play and no work makes Band-Aid a very dull boy.”
“Do I look like a boy to you?”
“You’re right.” She scribbled on her order pad and put a check on the turn style. “You’re growing up, maturing. Yet I still have to spoon feed you the same information.”
Old Mr. Rodgers yanked it off the turn style. He glared a narrowed eye at me, and beat on the bell on top of the counter until Libby went over to him. They spoke in hushed voices.
When she came back, I raised my eyebrow in question.
“He doesn’t like you or your kind very much.” Libby untied her apron before placing her money on the Formica and counting it out.
“My kind?”
“You know, a pretty boy collegiate athlete, out to use and throw away a hometown girl.”
“I have never used you, Libby.”
“Only because I’m strong enough to say no,” she said without looking up from her change sorting. “Don’t think you can fool me the way you’re kidding yourself, Aidan.”
When she said my name it was like a whispered prayer.
“I have to change, and then we can go for a walk on campus. We could have a picnic. But you need to promise to behave.” I didn’t speak a word, but made a cross over my heart.
Libby started toward the swinging doors with her apron strings trailing the floor.
Vicki barreled out of the kitchen. She went straight for the juke box and shoved some quarters down the things throat before stabbing the buttons. She picked up a rag taking up Libby’s duties, as Elvis filled in the silence. Her uniform was skin tight. She wasn’t curvy like Libby, but she always threw me off because she had a different hair color every time I saw her. It was dyed hot pink and cut into a shaggy style. She was a couple of years older than us, and she was pretty in a small-town-girl sort of way.
Vicki sloshed a glass of water down in front of me, humming to Caught in a Trap. I smelled something burning. Old Mr. Rodgers let a few very creative curses fly before metal hit metal, followed by a hiss.
Vicki mopped up the water in front of me with a rag. “You want to place an order, charm boy?”
I couldn’t think of apple cinnamon pancakes, because my eyes had strayed to the sway of Libby’s hips disappearing through the kitchen door. I pulled my attention back to Vicki.
“Rumor has it you know how to show a girl a good time.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Libby needs someone to show her the time of her life. She’s seriously intense, and you’re the only guy she’s ever given the time of day. Don’t blow it.”
The next thing I knew, Mr. Rodgers stormed through the swinging door, and barreled right for me. He dismissed Vicki with an evil eye and a jerk of his head, before starting in on me. “Elizabeth Ann is going to make something out of herself. She doesn’t need any jock getting in the way of her dreams. So I plan on keeping my eye on you. If you do anything I don’t care for to that girl, I’m going to skin you alive and feed your cocky carcass to the pigs out on some farm so far away from here that your teammates will never hear the first or the last squeal.” He smiled at me through his yellow, slightly crooked teeth.
“Whatever your concerns are, I assure you, they’re unfounded. I have no intention of hurting anyone.”
“Palowski, I’ve seen the likes of boys like you before.” He stacked his fists on his hips and stared me down. “Come in here and think you can have anything you want and no consequences. I’m here to tell you, there’s a price to be paid. You so much as blink twice, the wrong way, and I’ll make sure you never play another inning.”
“Are you related to her or something?”
“No, I’m more of a guardian angel. You know Michael, the arch angel with the large wings, and even bigger sword that he uses to slay his enemies with. I’ve heard tell that sword is so sharp it could skin a pig alive before the littler porker even knows it’s lost its curly cue tail. In the next blink of an eye, he’s a Christmas ham. I’m sure someone of your breeding doesn’t want to end up in bean soup like any old ham hock.”
“The final test in any plan is in its execution.” I said, confident that my education was superior to his.
“Before thou engagest, ask thyself, is thy plan mightier than my sword?” He paused. “Because I guarantee you, my sword is sharper than my tongue. If you do anything to screw up that girl’s plan, you be yellin’ sooie from several counties away.”
Before I could respond, Libby reappeared. “And what plan might that be?” she asked.
Mr. Rodgers’ answer was lost on me. I lost my entire train of thought. It was Libby’s long hair, hanging down her body that distracted me. She usually wore a pony-tail, but now the soft brown ringlets hung around her bare shoulders like a veil. Her hair surrounded her face, making her eyes a vivid green, suddenly as dark as the summer grass. The vintage floral dress she had on was probably from a second-hand shop, and it had ribbons for the straps; both of them slipped onto her upper arms making the bows land like little butterflies resting on her tanned biceps.
I tried to stop staring, but it was more than I could force my eyes to do. The dress was worn. The cotton had been washed so many times that the light butter color would be transparent in the sunlight. And it was a gorgeous, sunny August day. Sooner or later, I was going to get a look at Libby’s almost naked self.
She observed me in mock disgust, turning around when one of the cooks placed a brown shopping bag up on the pass through. She placed a few bills on the check for Vicki.
“I’ll pay for that,” I said reaching for my wallet.
“Not today, Band-Aid, it’s my treat.” She put the bag in my arms. “Carry this. You need something to do with yourself. Concentrate on not dropping it, would you.”
I followed in her wake. She grabbed a long strapped brown satchel, pulling it over her head. The strap rested crosswise over her torso, defining her unrestrained breasts in the gathered fabric of the cinched top. I was trying to figure out what kind of underpants she had on when she let the glass door of the restaurant backslap me in the face.
I crashed back to attention, when a dark shadow settled on Libby in the entranceway. It was the old philosophy guy, he wasn’t a professor at all, he was dressed up like a turn-of-century ump. I heard him say, “I’ll show you where the strike zone is.”
The strange thing is, his mouth didn’t move when he said it. A prickle of unease crept up my spine.
Libby reopened the outside door for me.
I looked around and the ump vanished. “That old guy a regular here?”
“What old guy?” Libby looked around confused. “Serves you right, getting clonked on the head. I’m up here.” She waved her hand in my face.
I smiled back to cover for my confusion. I said, “I know but I so want to be there.” I glared at her breasts again. God, she was so perfect.
As soon as we hit the sunlit pavement there wasn’t a lot of Libby left to my imagination. I’d already imagined most of it. But in Libby’s case, reality was so much better than fantasy.
She pulled up suddenly holding her dress down in the breeze. “Friends aren’t lecherous with each other.”
“Lecherous?” I asked.
“Look it up, Band-Aid. You do own a dictionary? Or is that strictly forbidden in the vicinity of the boinking room?”
“Excessive or offensive sexual desire. I’m no dummy, just surprised you’re using such an old fashioned word.”
“Old or not, it’s the perfect word, as opposed to ‘Boinking’ which is such a modern phrase. Pray tell, kind sir, whatever does it mean?”
“Have you been reading Shakespeare again?”
“Sorry. Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, and Kate Chopin. Heard of any of them?”
“Didn’t any guys write back then?”
“No, they were busy boinking. Except for Flaubert. Well, he was boinking too, but he had the audacity to write it all down.”
“I can see you aren’t going to let this go.”
“What’s that?” she asked innocently.
“You know what I mean, Libby.” I gave her a stern look, the one I reserved for opposing batters or bad ump calls.
She gave me a glare guaranteed to keep me on my toes, as we crossed the street and headed toward the center of campus.
We passed IMU, the student union, walking in the direction of the Fine Arts Plaza. The square was bordered with the auditorium on one side, the School of Fine Arts building, the Lilly Rare Books Library, and the crowning achievement, I.M Pei’s 1982 Art Museum. In the center sat a beautiful bronze fountain, spouting sprays of water that carried pebbles of mist on the breeze meeting our warmed flesh. Flower beds behind the benches encircled the fountain, and tall grass blew in the breeze casting us in soft shadows. I took in the fountain, as if for the first time.
Libby claimed a bench taking individually wrapped sandwiches, containers of fruit, and soft drinks from the bag.
She looked at the fountain for only a second before saying, “The Birth of Venus by Robert Laurent. It’s beautiful isn’t it?” I had trekked past the fountain often in three years and never gave it a second thought. It was just another landmark that thousands of students passed by daily, but never thought twice about. But I could tell that Libby had given pause to it.
“It’s beautiful, but not nearly as pretty as you.”
I watched her swallow the compliment, still staring at the fountain, before she glanced at me. “He did it in nineteen-sixty-one; the theme came from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. There are a dozen sketches for the sculpture in the museum. This is the depiction of Venus being born from the Sea, the fish leaping about spraying water in homage to her; she represents beauty and love in Greek Mythology.”
“I think you’re a much better representation of beauty... and love,” I smirked until my dimple ached, knowing just how to get to her. “And you have much prettier breasts.”
She happened to be drinking from a coke can. She coughed, and gagged down what she could. The rest came out her nose, spraying all over me. I caught her by the forearms, pulling her into my lap, handing her napkins while I wrapped my arms around her convulsing form. I gently settled my lips on hers. I didn’t charge ahead. I just placed delicate kisses all over her swollen lips and she tasted even sweeter than I remembered. I drew her bottom lip into my mouth, unfortunately that brought her right back to reality and she was never one to play fair.
She wrapped her arm around my neck. “Why don’t you tell me all about the boinking room now? I’d love to hear your side of the story.” She spoke very seductively as she bore a look so deep into me that it reached my stomach, churning all my emotions into a giant knot.
“You never play fair.” I placed her back on her portion of the bench. She was so slight, I had to have a hundred pounds on her, but for some reason I felt small whenever she had that superior look on her face.
“Oh, and you do?”
“I try to play fair with you, but I can’t win that way, so I sometimes have to resort to other measures.”
“What exactly are you trying to win?”
Your heart. I swear to God, I thought it, wondering where that was coming from. I’d never have the guts to say it. So I did what most guys would do. “Your body for a night.”
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