A Scene From A Classroom: in Under 1000 Words

She’s devouring her wintergreen gum, just leaning into it. She smacks it up and down, flips it over, and then plays with it against tongue. This tongue move, among others, is designed to provoke me (I don’t think I have to go into what else can be done with a tongue). But I’m not going to look: I’m stiff with my eyes forced forward, hands occupied now with a pencil, now with a cup of tea. It’s suave on my part – I’m drinking the tea like I enjoy it. She’s trying to trick me into looking at her; or, worse yet, smelling her. But that’s the worst part, that I can control my eyes, but not that which rolls over and over my delicate nasal membranes. Of course, I could plug up my nose, pinch it up with one of these superfluous hands, but then she’d know she has me, and in front of all of these people, they’d all think, just like she’d think, “there, the girl takes a little shower, puts on a little something something in the way of perfume, and he falls to pieces.” So, no, I’ll play her little games, but I won’t look at her – and damned if I’ll let on that I smell her.

She has taken a shower, recently - a brilliant ploy on her part. She gets to come in here, sit down, and sit back, while I squirm imaging that soft, frothy sponge ensconcing every nip and tuck of her white white skin and those little playful beads tingling here and there, rolling down her back like the gum across her tongue. Dark hair playing this way and that. It’s almost too much. It’s almost more than I can handle. Fortunately nature has bestowed upon me a rather abnormal amount of constitution, most likely a merciful gesture of compensation for my uncanny powers of observation.

But I’m suddenly gripped with an awe-imposing kind of power – my breast suddenly feels swelled and wrenched up with a kind of inhuman strength. And I’m not one to push against inspiration such as this – no. “You’ve got to live life when you feel it,” is what someone told me sometime.

Still looking right, I swing my left leg hard left, leading it right into something that I imagine to be her skirt (which quickly leads me to any number of other imagined objects) right as another sting of scent strikes and wobbles every bone in my body. I think I caught something of her neck in that. Luckily, I still have the strength to retract my left leg, to finish off my retaliatory move. Nature has instilled me not only with a sizeable constitution, but with flawless nerves, as well.

I’ll wait a second on this move (as numerous books and men’s magazine advice columns have advised me – I am quite a student of human nature, as well), also to catch my breath. She couldn’t have expected that one – no, not in thirteen million years and the Kingdom of Heaven!

“Sorry,” I whisper as I turn to her.

Now is the time to hold this little bitch right my gaze, hold those green eyes steady, show her what her little plays have come to. “Melt,” I believe, is the parlance. This will, naturally, ensure my supremacy in the relationship, and also ensure the consummation of any number of wild sexual acts, the likes of which people write alternative songs about. Some of these acts, I am sure, even though much has been written about them, I am sure to be the first ever to partake in, as it is simply beyond comprehension how one could both imagine this act, consummate it, and write about it to boot. (this paragraph will, obviously, be stricken from the record, but I did have a fun time writing it).

I have those green eyes in sight now, and I bear down – this is the point at which she’ll “melt” – it will be the moment commemorated in innumerable emails and phone calls to good-smelling girlfriends. “What should I do?” and such. I have you now, you little slut.

But she looks at me as if she doesn’t know what just happened, as if she understands neither why I am ostensibly apologizing, nor the function of my analogy in the greater context.

Then I realize it – she is good! Sweet Christ on a Blood-Cross, she is good! She’ll have me knocking on her door at odd hours of the night yet!

In the sudden confrontation of her maneuver, I can do nothing but back away, turn away, and try to keep her smell from rolling, rolling over me. But I realize it is hopeless – she must have made some sort of movement with her body, specially practiced and then executed, whereby just a touch of the rawness from under her arm wafts over, slips under whatever that body lotion is.

I have nearly had it. I am crushed. I’ll need to make one hell of a move to bounce back off of this – most likely looking her number up and calling it from payphones. The time for advice from magazines is over. The took me off of script the second she made that brilliantly “puzzled” look. It’s all instinct now.

God, I can still smell her gum.

And I’m about to punch her, I’m about to turn and crack one good right upside her carefully arranged temple, maybe break a bone or two in my hand, when I realize the day is over. They’re leaving, all of them, and I am now to leave. The day is over, the sun is down, and now I nothing else but this constant voice, when it gets dark. And the only consolation to the hours of monotony, heat ahead, is that it will all be without her wintergreen gum, and the smell of her neck rubbing against that white cotton t-shirt.