She settles down at her tiny bistro table: a Craigslist find moved from one tiny apartment balcony to another. Now, in a real backyard, on a wide stone patio, the set is dwarfed. The pieces look miniature, fragile, like doll furniture.
Ann Marie takes her first bite: garlic-rich and mozzarella-sweet with just a note of licorice-tang basil. She pours herself a glass of wine and takes a long swallow: mellow and deep, like velvet or smoke.
She takes another bite, another drink and tries not to think about the mountains of papers left to grade tomorrow, Mac’s test in particular.
She takes another bite, another drink, and tries not to think about real professors at home with their families or her students out in loud bars — grinning wide and buzzing with life. She tries not to think about her Mom’s imaginary running commentary on garlic breath and lonely Friday nights.
After Ann Marie finishes her two slices, she pours herself another generous glass of wine. She puts up her hood, pulls her sweatshirt cuffs down, protecting cold ears and fingers. She drinks slowly, rolling the dark liquid around in her mouth.
Ann Marie leans back and looks up at the lights. Against the black sky, the wires disappear and the tiny bulbs look like a thousand frozen fireflies.
Fireflies.
It had been her first sexual experience in college — her first real sexual experience at all. Freshman year, while all the other girls had been finding boyfriends, or at least hookups, Ann Marie had instead found her niche in the Physics Department and her way onto the Dean’s List.
At the beginning of sophomore year, she’d seen him around, not in classes, but in her dorm. She wasn’t sure if he lived there or was just visiting a friend. He was skinny and lanky and loud like all the other boys, but there was something else, too: the way his jaw had started to fill out square, the way he walked: a slow-motion swagger. She didn’t even know his name, but he invaded her dreams.
And then she’d seen him at a party, across the room. She’d gone into the bathroom to put on more eye shadow — an attempt to look smoky and mysterious. She’d had a couple more drinks, pushed her way through the crowd, introduced herself.
Within minutes they’d been alone outside, walking toward the back of campus. He’d swiped a mostly-empty bottle of flavored vodka off the bar, and they’d passed it back and forth, wincing at the berry sting.
They’d ended up at the old gazebo near the edge of campus, the one rumored to be haunted by long-dead lovers.
They’d sat on the worn bench seats, finished the vodka. Ann Marie, buzzing with nervous energy, with anticipation, unable to sit still, had stood up, walked to the steps. Out in the dark, fireflies had blink-blinked, and without thinking she’d stepped down the stairs and toward the light and cupped one gently in her closed hands.
She’d turned around, mortified. A braver girl, a woman, would’ve been kissing him right now. And here she was acting like a child, chasing fireflies. She’d been terrified that he would laugh at her, leave.
And he had laughed, but in delight. He’d bounded down the stairs like a little boy. Together they’d caught a dozen, and he’d coaxed them into the empty vodka bottle, careful not to smush them or rip their delicate wings. And then, in the vodka-haze-firefly-glow, lips had found lips, and hands had found buttons and snaps, and bare skin had found bare skin.
It had been just the one night, just a post-party midnight fling, stupid maybe, but Ann Marie hadn’t regretted it, not ever. Even now, all the sensations — the heavy air, the berry-sting breath, the stick and unstick of slick skin — are vibrant in memory, indelibly alive.
Ann Marie closes her eyes. She wishes for it sometimes: a return to reckless freedom, every day packed with hormones and heightened emotions, every week a perfect balance between quiet weekday afternoons in the physics library and the loud-music-beer-smell euphoria of weekend parties.
But she knows her life will never be like that again. Will never be like Mac’s life ever again.
Ann Marie rises and takes her dishes back in the house, turns off the music, flicks off the pergola lights. She’s halfway up the stairs to bed before she stops.
In her pajamas, she walks out to her car, digs through the bag of midterms until she finds his.
Inside, she sits on her couch, flips to the answer, reads it over. She smiles, almost laughs. It’s funny.
What if the poor kid was just making a joke? Just didn’t think? Ann Marie can almost understand how he could’ve done it: high on the first-time freedom of freshman year, on sock-on-the-doorknob sex, on flavored vodka and fireflies.
Ann Marie goes back into the kitchen and pours herself another half glass of wine.
~~~
“Professor Strobeck?” A girl with her blonde hair in a high ponytail appears in the doorway of Ann Marie’s office.
“Yes?” She can’t place the girl’s face, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t in one of Ann Marie’s larger lectures.
About Jenna B. Morgan
