Vertical Expression

Vertical Expression

         Eight quarters gleamed in her palm before skinny fingers scraped up the cover charge and a mouth asked, "Under 21?" around a cigarette.
         Marlowe nodded, feeling herself for her wallet. She was new at this.
         "No ID needed," wobbled the cigarette as the fingers emerged again. They pulled at her wrist and cuffed it in a strip of bright pink paper. "Go on in."
         Go on in. It was that easy.
         Vaguely disappointed she didn't get to claim all of her 19 years, Marlowe stepped into a roomy cave of dark scuffed wood warmed in low light. Her nostrils picked thin tangy smoke from the air, the toes of her sneakers creaked over floorboards, and she relaxed a little. The Tavern, at least, was exactly like she expected.
         Exposed in the middle of a few early minglers, Ed and Tonya stood by the pool table. The grin he was trying to suppress made him sway from side to side, camera bumping around his scrawny neck.
         "Hey." Marlowe leaned next to Tonya, who kept still and unblinking.
         "Isn't it great?" Ed's arms flung out and his lips peeled apart to show four teeth pushed back from the rest. "It's perfect for a sociological study of the quote unquote normal college student's recreational habits! I might have a little trouble with this lighting, but—" He thrust a blue banded arm under the girls' noses. "I can buy beer!"
         "So it actually worked?" Jonathan peered around Ed's elbow.
         "Shh! I have to keep my cover." A small battered notebook settled in Ed's hands. "But yeah, it totally did. Got a pen?"
         Silently, Tonya reached into her purse and handed Ed a pen. He took it and scribbled, glancing around and edging away to inspect graffiti carved into dried gum stuck to a wall. "Fascinating..."
         "We've lost him," Jonathan said. Marlowe smiled and mentally played Spot the Resemblance between the brothers. She couldn't find anything alike except the rounded corners of their eyes.
         "Yup." Tonya clipped her single word short and pulled her invisible cloak of martyrdom tighter around her shoulders. Marlowe wondered how her roommate could breathe in that thing.
         At first, perched on their green felt island, Marlowe was content to people-watch. Groups flowed in around them in waves until she couldn't shift without bumping a body part, couldn't stare without catching someone's eye, couldn't exhale air another nose wouldn't inhale a second later. It filled the lonely spots inside her until there was just no more room to be anything but happy.
         Then the music started.
         "Ahight ahight ahight!" boomed overhead. Suddenly her feet and hips and shoulders started juggling a bass line and synthesizer whine, trailing restless energy through her nerve endings.
         Suddenly she wanted to dance.
         "Come with me?" she aimed at Tonya.
         "No."
         "Please?"
         "I hate crowds."
         "I do too!"
         But that was an obvious lie, and Tonya didn't move.
         "Fine." Marlowe's frustration shoved her across the Tavern, slowly leaking onto the beer-stained floor; when she hesitated on the edge of the dance pit, she had nothing left but the old uncertainty.
         JUST—DA-ANCE, -ANCE, -ANCE...
         Her knees found a rhythm to bend, her head nodded along, and her hands stuffed themselves into her jean pockets, embarrassed to be so exposed. But it felt good, almost natural, to move a little.
         OH YEAH, -EAH, -EAH...
         Marlowe closed her eyes and let the lyrics—not even words, really, just echoic mouth sounds that wound together and sprouted from each other like vines—grow through her. Engrossed in feeling her thoughts carried away, she didn't hear Jonathan beside her at first.
         "I said—" The next few syllables were snatched out of the air by a burst of drunken insistence nearby. "—you are."
         Her eyes jumped open. "Me?"
         "Yeah." His face was one smooth plane, stretching seamlessly for a round nose and pale lips, chin lifted to bridge the extra inch to hers. "She asked." 
         "Tonya needs me?" she said into his nearest seashell ear. It was ringed in black curls that shook briefly.
         "Nah," he said. "Ed's there."
         Marlowe stretched her neck over her shoulder but all she could see was other people. A brief wave of claustrophobia swelled above her head. "I don't see them."
         "He's there."
         For a minute, they both scanned the mass of flailing arms and legs and faces and hair pulsing together; for a minute, they both absorbed as much as they could, cramming for an anthropology exam on a foreign culture.
         "I want to dance," Marlowe said before she thought about it. 
         Jonathan considered her, then poured the rest of his beer down his throat, set down his bottle, and shrugged off his coat. "What the hell," he said. "I'll go with you."
         When she examined her impulse afterward (squatting over a toilet hole under a cartoon dick behind a slab of wood that barely covered her privacy and didn't latch right), Marlowe found nothing extraordinary in it. The fucking thing was called a dance party, after all, and when the hell would she ever see Jonathan again?
         No, Marlowe had nothing to lose.
         Grabbing Jonathan’s shoulder to dig a pocket of space for themselves, she let out a laugh for no good reason, threw it to the ceiling and listened to it absorb into the crowd. Jonathan looked back at her.
         "This okay?" he shouted. She nodded. "Good."                         
         Music and people pressed against them on all sides, forcing the awkwardness out of  the intimacy, letting her forget her shirt straps allowed for no bra, keeping her arms pinned to her side so they couldn't flap like broken wings. Jonathan twitched into a two-step in front of her, and she relaxed.
         Her thoughts had steadied to the strobe light's pulsing dot when he grabbed her hands and swung her backwards. She saw the room rush by in a delirious swoon before he caught her spine and eased her upright. He didn't let go; his palms parted slightly and branded her hips with sweat, cupping her movements. 
         "Don't worry," he said. "I got you."
         "Thanks," she said. A little dizzy, she tried to steady herself on his collar. "I like your shirt."
         Her thumb strayed to trace his jawbone as his left hand followed purple fabric up to the bare spot between her shoulder blades, guiding their lips together in a soft crash. Tasting sweat and alcohol and the faintest hint of spearmint, everything went marvelously, rhythmically blank. 
         "Marlowe Thomas!" the DJ read into the nearest mike. "Gotta message for Marlowe Thomas? Where you at, Marlowe?"
         "Guddummt," she muttered to his teeth. They retreated, pulling apart their sticky foreheads from another second's contemplation. "Here!" she shouted and launched herself into the DJ's view. "I'm Marlowe!"
         "Marlowe Thomas, you wanted outside, babe. Repeat, Marlowe wanted outside the front door. Go on, get outta here." 
         ***
         It was Tonya.
         "I can't," she was babbling, her stream of words spilling frost on Ed. "I can't. I can't. I tried, but I can't. I just can't, do you hear me? I tried to make myself for you because you love these and—"
         "I hear you." His voice wanted to be soothing. "I hear you, luv."
         Marlowe skipped off the front steps onto the sidewalk, blessing her decision to wear sneakers. "What's the matter?"
         "Don't fucking call me luv! That's what you call—" Reigning in her rage, Tonya drew a deep breath. "I'm sorry. I'm not mad at you. I just—"
         "Panic attack," Ed told Marlowe, who noticed his camera bag zipped, his army jacket buckled, and his nails poking out of his gloves. "I think I need to get her home."
         Marlowe knew enough to let Tonya alone. "Okay."
         "You guys coming?"
         "I just need to get my jacket."
         "Yeah," Jonathan said, startling her. "Go ahead. We'll give the lady some room."
         Ed nodded and tripped the few yards Tonya had already covered in their apartment building's direction. "See ya!"
         The night air wrapped Marlowe in its cold embrace. A breeze brush her hair back in one great clump, and she opened her arms for more relief from the sweat that had been boiling her skin for the past hour and a half. To breathe air so sharply clean it cut the sinuses was a level of perfection, she felt sure.
         "Hey," she heard behind her. Jonathan stood there studying her.
         "Hey."
         There was nothing else to say, but their mouths kept moving.   
         ***          
         The clock watched her slide through the dark, peeling a slice of hallway light open and closing it gently on stocking feet. She shed clothes, leaving a flat Marlowe-shape on the floor, as she padded to the bathroom.
         1:30 am.
         Twenty minutes of wet soapy warmth later, she stashed the night and Jonathan away in a safe corner of her heart, and she tucked herself naked under a mound of comforter. Beside her, her boyfriend—her boyfriend, the bear of a graduate student who hated bars and needed extra time to work on his thesis—he let out a tiny snore when she kissed his exposed flank, then rolled over deeper into sleep.

THE END