Fire Watch (12 page)

The first thing my new roommate did was tell me her life story. Then she tossed up all over my bunk. Welcome to Hell. I know, I know. It was my own fucked fault that I was stuck with the stupid little scut in the first place. Daddy’s darling had let her grades slip till she was back in the freshman dorm and she would stay there until the admin reported she was being a good little girl again. But he didn’t have to put me in the charity ward, with all the little scholarship freshmen from the front colonies-frightened virgies one and all. The richies had usually had their share of jig-jig in boarding school, even if they were mostly edge. And they were willing to learn.

Not this one. She wouldn’t know a bone from a vaj, and wouldn’t know what went into which either. Ugly, too. Her hair was chopped off in an old-fashioned bob I thought nobody not even front kids, wore anymore. Her name was Zibet and she was from some godspit colony called Marylebone Weep and her mother was dead and she had three sisters and her father hadn’t wanted her to come. She told me all this in a rush of what she probably thought was
friendliness before she tossed her supper all over me and my nice new slickspin sheets.

The sheets were the sum total of good things about the vacation Daddy Dear had sent me on over summer break. Being stranded in a forest of slimy slicksa trees and noble natives was supposed to build my character and teach me the hazards of bad grades. But the noble natives were good at more than weaving their precious product with its near frictionless surface. Jig-jig on slickspin is something entirely different, and I was close to being an expert on the subject. I’d bet even Brown didn’t know about this one. I’d be more than glad to teach him.

“I’m so
sorry,”
she kept saying in a kind of hiccup while her face turned red and then white and then red again like a fucked alert bell, and big tears seeped down her face and dripped on the mess. “I guess I got a little sick on the shuttle.”

“I guess. Don’t bawl, for jig’s sake, it’s no big deal. Don’t they have laundries in Mary Boning It?”

“Marylebone Weep. It’s a natural spring.”

“So are you, kid. So are you.” I scooped up the wad, with the muck inside. “No big deal. The dorm mother will take care of it.”

She was in no shape to take the sheets down herself, and I figured Mumsy would take one look at those big fat tears and assign me a new roommate. This one was not exactly perfect. I could see right now I couldn’t expect her to do her homework and not bawl giant tears while Brown and I jig-jigged on the new sheets. But she didn’t have leprosy, she didn’t weigh eight hundred pounds, and she hadn’t gone for my vaj when I bent over to pick up the sheets. I could do a lot worse.

I could also be doing some better. Seeing Mumsy on my first day back was not my idea of a good start. But I trotted downstairs with the scutty wad and knocked on the dorm mother’s door.

She is no dumb lady. You have to stand in a little box of an entryway waiting for her to answer your knock. The box works on the same principle as a rat cage, except that she’s added her own little touch. Three big mirrors that probably
cost her a year’s salary to cart up from earth. Never mind—as a weapon, they were a real bargain. Because, Jesus jiggin’ Mary, you stand there and sweat and the mirrors tell you your skirt isn’t straight and your hair looks scutty and that bead of sweat on your upper lip is going to give it away immediately that you are scared scutless. By the time she answers the door—five minutes if she’s feeling kindly—you’re either edge or you’re not there. No dumb lady.

I was not on the defensive, and my skirts are never straight, so the mirrors didn’t have any effect on me, but the five minutes took their toll. That box didn’t have any ventilation and I was way too close to those sheets. But I had my speech all ready. No need to remind her who I was. The admin had probably filled her in but good. And I’d get nowhere telling her they were my sheets. Let her think they were the virgies.

When she opened the door I gave her a brilliant smile and said, “My roommate’s had a little problem. She’s a new freshman, and I think she got a little excited coming up on the shuttle and—”

I expected her to launch into the “supplies are precious, everything must be recycled, cleanliness is next to godliness” speech you get for everything you do on this godspit campus. Instead she said, “What did you do to her?”

“What did I—look, she’s the one who tossed up. What do you think I did, stuck my fingers down her throat?”

“Did you give her something? Samurai? Float? Alcohol?”

“Jiggin’ Jesus, she just got here. She walked in, she said she was from Mary’s Prick or something, she tossed up.”

“And?”

“And what? I may look depraved, but I don’t think freshmen vomit at the sight of me.”

From her expression, I figured Mumsy might. I stuck the smelly wad of sheets at her. “Look,” I said, “I don’t care what you do. It’s not my problem. The kid needs clean sheets.”

Her expression for the mucky mess was kinder than
the one she had for me. “Recycling is not until Wednesday. She will have to sleep on her mattress until then.”

Mary Masting, she could knit a sheet by Wednesday, especially with all the cotton flying around this fucked campus. I grabbed the sheets back.

“Jig you, scut,” I said.

I got two months’ dorm restricks and a date with the admin.

I went down to third level and did the sheets myself. It cost a fortune. They want you to have an
awareness
of the harm you are doing the delicate environment by failing to abide, etc. Total scut. The environment’s about as delicate as a senior’s vaj. When Old Man Moulton bought this third hand Hell-Five, he had some edge dream of turning it into the college he went to as a boy. Whatever possessed him to even buy the old castoff is something nobody’s ever figured out. There must have been a Lagrangian point on the top of his head.

The realtor must have talked hard and fast to make him think Hell could ever look like Ames, Iowa. At least there’d been some technical advances since it was first built or we’d all be
floating
around the godspit place. But he couldn’t stop at simply gravitizing the place, fixing the plumbing, and hiring a few good teachers. Oh, no, he had to build a sandstone campus, put in a football field, and plant
trees!
This all cost a fortune, of course, which put it out of the reach of everybody but richies and trust kids, except for Moulton’s charity scholarship cases. But you couldn’t jig-jig in a plastic bag to fulfill your fatherly instincts back then, so Moulton had to build himself a college. And here we sit, stuck out in space with a bunch of fucked cottonwood trees that are trying to take over.

Jesus Bonin’ Mary; cottonwoods! I mean, so what if we’re a hundred years out of date. I can take the freshman beanies and the pep rallies. Dorm curfews didn’t stop anybody a hundred years ago either. And face it, pleated skirts and cardigans make for easy access. But those godspit trees!

At first they tried the nature-dupe stuff. Freeze your
vaj in winter, suffocate in summer, just like good old Iowa. The trees were at least bearable then. Everybody choked in cotton for a month, they baled the stuff up like Mississippi slaves and shipped it down to earth and that was it. But finally something was too expensive even for Daddy Moulton and we went on even-clime like all the other Hell-Fives. Nobody bothered to tell the trees, of course, so now they just spit and drop leaves whenever they feel like it, which is all the time. You can hardly make it to class without choking to death.

The trees do their dirty work down under, too, rooting happily away through the plumbing and the buried cables so that nothing works. Ever. I think the whole outer shell could blow away and nobody would ever know. The fucked root system would hold us together. And the admin wonders why we call it Hell. I’d like to upset this delicate balance once and for all.

I ran the sheets through on disinfect and put them in the spin. While I was sitting there, thinking evil thoughts about freshmen and figuring how to get off restricks, Arabel came wandering in.

“Tavvy, hi! When did you get back?” She is always too sweet for words. We played lezzies as freshmen, and sometimes I think she’s sorry it’s over. “There’s a great party,” she said.

“I’m on restricks,” I said. Arabel’s not the world’s greatest authority on parties. I mean, herself and a plastic bone would be a great party. “Where is it?”

“My room. Brown’s there,” she said languidly. This was calculated to make me rush out of my pants and up the stairs, no doubt. I watched my sheets spin.

“So what are you doing down here?” I said.

“I came down for some float. Our machine’s out. Why don’t you come on over? Restricks never stopped you before.”

“I’ve been to your parties, Arabel. Washing my sheets might be more exciting.”

“You’re right,” she said, “it might.” She fiddled with the machine. This was not like her at all.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up.” She sounded puzzled. “It’s samurai-party time without the samurai. Not a bone in sight and no hope of any. That’s why I came down here.”

“Brown, too?” I asked. He was into a lot of edge stuff, but I couldn’t quite imagine celibacy.

“Brown, too. They all just sit there.”

“They’re on something, then. Something new they brought back from vacation.” I couldn’t see what she was so upset about.

“No,” she said. “They’re not on anything. This is different. Come see. Please.”

Well, maybe this was all a trick to get me to one of Arabel’s scutty parties and maybe not. But I didn’t want Mumsy to think she’d hurt my feelings by putting me on restricks. I threw the lock on the spin so nobody’d steal the sheets and went with her.

For once Arabel hadn’t exaggerated. It was a godspit party, even by her low standards. You could tell that the minute you walked in. The girls looked unhappy the boys looked uninterested. It couldn’t be all bad, though. At least Brown was back. I walked over to where he was standing.

“Tavvy,” he said, smiling, “how was your summer? Learn anything new from the natives?”

“More than my fucked father intended.” I smiled back at him.

“I’m sure he had your best interests at heart,” he said. I started to say something clever to that, then realized he wasn’t kidding. Brown was trust just like I was. He had to be kidding. Only he wasn’t. He wasn’t smiling anymore either.

“He just wanted to protect you, for your own good.”

Jiggin’ Jesus, he had to be on something. “I don’t need any protecting,” I said. “As you well know.”

“Yeah,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Yeah.” He moved away.

What in the scut was going on? Brown leaned against the wall, watching Sept and Arabel. She had her sweater off and was shimmying out of her skirt, which I have seen before, sometimes even helped with. What I had never
seen before was the look of absolute desperation on her face. Something was very wrong. Sept stripped, and his bone was as big as Arabel could have wanted, but the look on her face didn’t change. Sept shook his head almost disapprovingly at Brown and went down on Arabel.

“I haven’t had any straight-up all summer,” Brown said from behind me, his hand on my vaj. “Let’s get out of here.”

Gladly. “We can’t go to my room,” I said. “I’ve got a virgie for a roommate. How about yours?”

“No!” he said, and then more quietly, “I’ve got the same problem. New guy. Just off the shuttle. I want to break him in gently.”

You’re lying, Brown, I thought. And you’re about to back out of this, too. “I know a place,” I said, and practically raced him to the laundry room so he wouldn’t have time to change his mind.

I spread one of the dried slickspin sheets on the floor and went down as fast as I could get out of my clothes. Brown was in no hurry, and the frictionless sheet seemed to relax him. He smoothed his hands the full length of my body, “Tavvy,” he said, brushing his lips along the line from my hips to my neck, “your skin’s so soft. I’d almost forgotten.” He was talking to himself.

Forgotten what, for fucked’s sake, he couldn’t have been without any jig-jig all summer or he’d be showing it now, and he acted like he had all the time in the world.

“Almost forgotten … nothing like …”

Like what? I thought furiously. Just what have you got in that room? And what has it got that I haven’t. I spread my legs and forced him down between them. He raised his head a little, frowning, then he started that long, slow, torturing passage down my skin again. Jiggin’ Jesus, how long did he think I could wait?

“Come on,” I whispered, trying to maneuver him with my hips. “Put it in, Brown. I want to jig-jig. Please.”

He stood up in a motion so abrupt that my head smacked against the laundry-room floor. He pulled on his clothes, looking … what? Guilty? Angry?

I sat up. “What in the holy scut do you think you’re doing?”

“You wouldn’t understand. I just keep thinking about your father.”

“My father?
What in the scut are you talking about?”

“Look, I can’t explain it. I just can’t …” And left. Like that. With me ready to go off any minute and what do I get? A cracked head.

“I don’t have a father, you scutty godfucker!’ I shouted after him.

I yanked my clothes on and started pulling the other sheet out of the spin with a viciousness I would have liked to have spent on Brown. Arabel was back, watching from the laundry-room door. Her face still had that strained look.

“Did you see that last channing scene?” I asked her, snagging the sheet on the spin handle and ripping a hole in one corner.

“I didn’t have to. I can imagine it went pretty much the way mine did.” She leaned unhappily against the door. “I think they’ve all gone bent over the summer.”

“Maybe.” I wadded the sheets together into a ball. I didn’t think that was it, though. Brown wouldn’t have lied about a new boy in his room in that case. And he wouldn’t have kept talking about my father. In that edge way I walked past Arabel. “Don’t worry, Arabel, if we have to go lezzy again, you know you’re my first choice.”