Emily Carter

All right, maybe I do. Maybe I do talk first and think later. Yes, it’s true, I admit it freely. It’s because I’m from the city. Now, you can say to me, Glory B., it’s no crime to think about what you’re going to say before you say it, to figure out how it relates to the topic being discussed, or if it does at all, or if what you’re going to say has the slightest factual basis whatsoever. I’ve got that argument down cold, because listen, words are my music. When I talk, I improvise. It’s not so much what I’m saying as how it sounds. Take jazz, all right, let’s use jazz as an analogy, parallels are always good. Now, what I mean is, what—do you think every time Bird sat down to blow he had the whole musical score right in front of him? Did he have the whole thing thought out? He did not. Well, he probably did not, I’m not entirely familiar with the man’s work, but probably, most likely he improvised is what I’m saying.

One night, right after spring break, they were caught bending over a bong, boys in a girl’s room, after curfew. If boys got caught in a girl’s dorm, the girls got suspended. If girls got caught in a boy’s dorm… the girls got suspended. This, said the headmaster, was to encourage chivalry on the part of the boys. But if anybody, of any gender, race, creed, or color, got caught smoking pot, it meant immediate expulsion. Unless you were an integral part of that year’s varsity lacrosse team, which was the recipient of much alumni generosity, in the form of checks spotted with a nostalgic, manly tear or two.

I hate the word “horny,” redolent as it is of yellowed callouses and pizza-crust bunions, but there you go. Sober for eighteen months, I’d been giving up my will to God and practicing the three Ms—meetings, meditation, masturbation. But no matter the electronic reinforcement, it gets old mashing the little pink button all by your lonesome, night after night. Now here’s the dilemma I’m staring at: I Am HIV-Positive, Who Will Have Sex With Me? If I were a guy it might be different, but carrying around the eve of destruction between my creamy white thighs doesn’t exactly make me feel like a sex goddess.