Emails from boys in my class
He’d noticed my birthmark, a state-shaped blemish that disrupted the skin of my left thigh. I caught him staring for a moment before he looked away. Boys usually noticed my birthmark; it looked like a geographic feature or like an ink spill, the birthmark on my thigh. There was something absorbing in the blemish; it was a diversion from my body, otherwise perfectly white and unmarked. My eyes met his, and then he looked away. I placed a hand over my thigh. He looked back once more, and he could see how my hand was placed on my thigh, covering the birthmark, and then again he looked away. We were in class together. In this class there were seven boys and one girl, and I was the girl, and I had a distinctive birthmark on my leg.
His name was Simon, the boy that I had caught staring. Later that day, after our class had finished, I received an email from him. It was signed “Kindly, Simon.” That was how I learned his name. He appeared to be asking, in the email, if I was interested in studying together because the content of this particular class “one found difficult,” and he wondered if “perhaps I was struggling as much as he was” and if we “banded together, we could make haste to tackle the subject better.” I’d made several attempts at replying, yet each sentence seemed only to disappear under the backspace.
I thought of Simon, as I knew him. He was slobbish, in a way. Upon his entering the classroom, my nose would, unintentionally, carry on a sidelong search of his smell. It clung to the scent, odorous though not entirely unpleasant. Redolent of old milk and dry scalp, dandruffy, and underneath, some long-since-faded Old Spice. Twitching, each morning my nose would abut his vapours, making out the smell-Simon before he made his actual, physical entrance.
He, Simon, seemed almost to arrive in class by piece, his constituent parts entering one after the other. They appeared stuck, caught, in the previous days. The bits of him that made it inside still retained their historicity; they were concerned with what came before, with the past. His drab outfitting, for example, was usually corduroyed and plaided. His blazer and his trousers always crumpled and ruffled. These were bygone vestments, moth-eaten. He struck me as “born in the wrong generation,” so to speak. Perhaps this was something he would have actually said, even; he appeared to lack a consummate irony. He spoke also stiltedly, with affect, in strange Victorianisms. He sounded like a university plaque.
I’ll admit, for a while I got caught up in his sticky idiom. I was forever observing his desk clutter, that bindered array that seemed to offer him no space for writing new work, only reading the old, his labyrinthine notes, handwritten in a distinct, spider-like cursive. I remembered the hours of etching, his posture slumped, inevitably, his poor pen grip. What I would have given to read even an excerpt of this bizarre corpus! I was entranced by the fluency through which it appeared to be rendered. This concentration, Simon’s, could have lain unbroken for weeks were it not for my leg, uncovered, my birthmark misdirecting. His yellowy eye was drawn to me, my thighs like milk, and the birthmark enveloped. Did he want to collect me, like some bright utensil, and take me back to his nest? I imagined it, dandruff dusted, betwigged in only the finest old woods.
I did not believe this degree of audacity to be possible, however. Simon, deep as his desire may have been, did not possess the requisite gall, I think, to collect anyone. He was no engenderer, and so instead he hid and emailed and waited. Waited for me, for my reply, spun his stuffy argot. Though his writing was dashing, his intent was as gentlemanly as the rest and so not at all. Simon, I imagined how he must have perspired baffledly over his keyboard; he probably handwrote the thing longhand before transferring it to email. How he must have constructed each line, each sentence like an equation, adding and subtracting, forming, perfectly, his dusty trap. I was charmed, really, by the effort and the style, his adorable medievality. Nonetheless, the email remained transparent to the end; perhaps he had not counted on my noticing; they usually don’t. I thought about it for a while, my reply. I was wary of developing in him notions, one way or the other.
It was not that I thought of him badly, poor Simon, only that I was uninterested at this time in whatever twice-rehearsed but still clumsy moves he had planned for me. Were I to assent to his invitation and meet with him, I guessed that this would be in contrived proximity at a too small table in the dark part of the library. Some such place that would force a conjoining intended to appear natural. I did not also wish to aggrieve him, of course, for I was sure that in his way he meant well; perhaps to him I was his muse, his birthmarked Calliope. I thought of the tendency of quiet and well-meaning boys to turn violent should they find themselves rejected. I did not want to invoke his shy tempest, lest I end up headless, or worse, he turn the knife on himself. Maybe paranoid, but these were my long-jumped conclusions.
Jordan was not unlike Simon, transparent, but in the opposite sense, not obfuscating but bold, manful. I had endured his sometimes clever but often interminable class talk for some time. He had seen my birthmark also. I’d follow his eye as he spoke to me, lazy but for my leg, drifting down from my face, past the expected breasts, further down, to the birthmark, like an ink spill, on my left thigh. Like a tattoo, the sting of my birth. This mark had marooned itself in the soft white sea of my lower thigh. This had made problems for me, because it drew the looks of the boys in my class, perhaps even now causing or inspiring the emails themselves. At times I had imagined, however, someone tracing it, the mark. Some strange fingers.
He had emailed me also. Lazing over the page, I was drawn quickly across, there, to another email, emboldened. We met on the first day; he was the first to introduce himself, actually. He shook my hand. I told him my name and that I was pleased to meet him. Jordan’s email read as I expected, carried on his sometimes forced-seeming casualness, and read like someone trying to write obscurely, smartly, but not, trying to hide in the email. He would mix, completely flagrantly, the colloquial with obscurantisms, and judging by his idiolect, he’d read or at least considered reading something. His request then was unclear, vaguer seeming than Simon’s. Something about “coffee,” and “the logos,” and that we’d “had a good talk.” The fog of the email was somewhat dissipated after close inspection; however, his intentions were undersigned, readable.
Jordan with the high cheekbones was clearly well wrought, but his beauty implied an emptiness to me. This was perhaps an affixing of past experience and of cliche, but his email did him no favours. I was familiar with his classwork also; it was known to me to be many short Google Docs long, addended one after the other until they formed almost a whole. There was rarely cohesion in the whole Jordan, however, only these vague imaginings and a long spiral of thoughts too disparate to be connected. He slicked his hair back with gel, and he had blue eyes. He was wont to dress cogently with the evolving of the subcultures to which he variously subscribed. There was a way with Jordan that you could see in him every cultural idea that he had collected and how these had formed his outward appearance. He wanted to exist always in the next week. I imagined Jordan as he thinly wove this proposal. How his beringed fingers clacked over the keys and hastened to produce this future-diction. It read circuitous. I afforded Jordan his longueurs so long as he produced in me a laugh every few lines or at least an expulsion of air.
He could be funny. There had been boys like him in the past. Good-looking boys who took an interest in me, who saw in me something strangely beguiling. Have you ever found yourself devolved to making jokes of the boy’s advances so as to reduce your inevitable reddening? A reddening made altogether more embarrassing because it is misplaced? Jordan with the high, long cheekbones like gutters could rouge me any day, but it did not mean it was on his account. I could tend towards wanton embarrassment. I remember his sunglassed eyes met mine. I’ll admit that I blushed, but I regained my composure, and I returned my blood and my gaze to my birthmark, and I could have sworn that it had darkened a little. When Jordan approached me affably after class, I made recourse to look him up and down disapprovingly. His tubelike jeans looked so unfinished and so large as to swathe his likely chicken-thin legs. The jeans ebbed and receded at the shores of his bright white sneakers. They were of plastic-wrapped origin, if I were to guess.
I was bored by Jordan. He effused light metals and pine and modernity. Smelled like a website. I believe I’ve mentioned the cheekbones, which are impressive for their planelike quality and for being god-given but are nonetheless poorly balanced by the consequential glasses and the plasticky haircut. Innately he lacked the ugliness and the smell of Simon, which, in my opinion, made him so beautiful. Simon had a burgeoning monobrow, which I perhaps forgot to mention. Underneath he could have been attractive according to convention should he shave a bit and take pains to not look so graphically morose. This was what attracted me to him more, I think, because in his strange-appearing mistakes, he invited some degree of question. Jordan, on the other hand, invited no debate; no search was to be undertaken of his shining features. They had already been well canvassed.