If Maureen were an object she would be the tube of shoddy off-brand chapstick I brought from the CVS that time Kyle and Maddie tried to buy a handle of vodka, and I didn’t want to look involved. So when they went to check out I said in a hopefully nonchalant voice, “I forgot to get chapstick.” I had only met Kyle and Maddie the previous week at freshmen orientation, so they wouldn’t know I had been moisturizing my lips exclusively by sticking my fingers in the grand tub of Vaseline I got from Dad when I had pneumonia five years ago, rubbing the salve all over my lips with three fingers.
I saw Maureen in my creative writing workshop that first September. I was at the back of the room and she was at the front. Instantly I loved her wild brown hair, always done up in a gold clip, her patchwork bags and flowery skirts, the smooth and even sureness with which she spoke in class. Not by accident, we frequented the same cafes, Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings, she and her hot latte with honey and I nursing my iced americano three booths away, eyes occasionally darting over my laptop screen. One day I ordered a hot latte with honey and our hands reached for it at the same time. She spoke first and we talked for what felt like hours. And so it was, Thursday evening, Sunday morning, two hot lattes with honey, talking about the things she loved, that I knew she loved because she posted about them on her public Tumblr. Matty Healy and the Strokes and doomsday preppers and Sofia Coppola and Sun Bears.
I always think about the one day she invited me to the house she shared with seven other girls, a lavender Victorian with white trim just past the edge of campus. I sat on her couch while girls in Birkenstocks with blonded hair from the sun and farmers’ tans and red cheeks laughed in the yellow-tiled kitchen. I didn’t know why I was there. As she braided her roommate’s hair in the early morning light and they laughed about something they had seen on the television last night it occurred to me that I, in my big t-shirt from Ross and bob haircut and wire-framed glasses with the chipped paint, would never be part of her world. And another foreign thought took seed in my brain: maybe I hated her.
Chapstick has this way of being all sweet and smarmy and you feel all cute putting it on in class, but sometimes it gives you a headache and it actually ends up making your lips drier in the long run. Andrew Garfield said once of Emma Stone that she’s like a shot of espresso, which Maureen once also said about me, but something in her intonation made me feel like it was a bad thing, although that only occurred to me when I played it over and over again in my head. In the shower, with my morning tea, over and over, a shot of espresso. Soon I felt sick and I didn’t know if being a shot of espresso was a good thing and I came to resent her, her and her flippant, saccharine ambiguity, on her lips and mine, the aromatic fumes of peppermint wafting their way into my head, shot of espresso, a tube of chapstick, and a long, long time before I fall asleep.
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