The Importance of Waiting Until…
“Waiting” by H. Kopp Delaney
FICTION
by Janani Hariram
Gazing up at the imposing brick home, Till began to feel the first creeping vines of anxiety crawling up the back of her throat. She glanced over at Thomas “Tommy Boy” Washington next to her. He was as confident and assured looking as ever, chin held high like he was posing for a portrait after conquering the French army. She sighed as they entered the ivy-choked building.
A kitschy plaque declared “Built in 1945” on the side in the main hall, warning visitors to wipe their filthy peasant feet before entering. The peasants had not, in fact, wiped their feet. The floor was sticky with spilled beer that sloshed out of red solo cups. Girls laughed highly, falsely, at their various boyfriends’ jokes. Those guys all looked the same to her; of a breed with Tommy Boy, they were all blond, well-off, ripped and constantly excited to talk about “this amazing new band I just discovered, they’re really niche I don’t know if you’ll…understand them, y’know?” It was truly the shock of Till’s life to be in the same group as them.
Being one of those girls who had fervently and secretively looked up “butch lesbian” on Google Images all through high school, Till had finally committed to the look in blessed, parent-free college. She felt the need to prove herself, being a late bloomer in terms of carabiner-wearing, and had made up her mind to become one with the Bros. She had approached Thomas during BIO 101.
“Your parents are funny.”
He had turned to her, mouth dumbly open, “What?”
“Your name. They named you after two presidents.”
He gamely continued to gape like a fish.
“Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? They ought to call you Mr. USA.”
He had blinked his watery blue eyes.
Realizing she was beaten by the impenetrable iron wall of his brain, she had changed tack, “So, what sports do you like?”
He had lit up, “Call me Tommy Boy.”
She was part of his clique after that. Tommy Boy very deliberately never asked about her sexuality or name or homelife. Their friendships solely contained sports talk, lewd jokes, bemoaning the dating lives of various members, complaining about classes, and vaping behind Science Hall. If Till ventured anything beyond this she feared she would be excommunicated and forced to grow her hair in femme, emotional fashion—the opposite of a woman condemned to a nunnery. All this to say, the second Tommy Boy saw a few cheerleaders beckoning, he abandoned Till to the rising tide of drunk partygoers and didn’t even think to feel bad about it.
In one of her well-meaning but fruitless attempts to encourage Till to socialize, her mother had told her, “If you’re scared of dancing or talking too much at parties, you can always take a break in the kitchen! I promise it’s not as scary as you think. I remember being your age, scared to death of boys making fun of me and the mean girls-”
Till had stopped listening after that, but apparently the advice stuck. She went ahead and practically glued herself to the sink. People moved in and out, and Till gave them all her best approximation of a tough cool-guy nod. This was probably why she didn’t mind the flimsy friendship she enjoyed with Tommy Boy and the gang—she wasn’t very good at talking and did not like doing much of it. If they did not know her very well, at least they did not think her off-putting and ridiculous.
Quite suddenly, when she was checking her cracked watch face, a beautiful girl approached Till. Glittery makeup, smudged eyeliner, low neckline on a sparkly top, the works. She was also quite evidently drunk and held a vape pen in one long-fingered hand.
She leaned a hip against the sink, “So,” taking a drag, blowing it out in a small puff of smoke like a baby dragon, “what’s your name?”
Till blinked. “Till,” she said.
“Till what?”
“No, that’s my name. Till.”
Now the girl blinked. “No shit? Why?”
Till shrugged, “I like the idea of waiting for something.”
The girl blinked again. Till wondered if some glitter had gotten into her eye.
“Far out,” she said, “you picked the name yourself? Far out. So, are you a…er…” she gestured vaguely.
Till shrugged again, “Nah. My parents named me Winifred, which I thought was boring as hell and also the name of an old lady who gets murdered in an Agatha Christie novel.”
The girl laughed like bells twinkling, touched her arm, “You’re funny!”
Till felt her heart doing treacherous loop-de-loops. Don’t fall for the obviously straight girl right now. Arm-touching was definitely sending a signal though, right? She could be a high femme, maybe, or perhaps she was open to experimenting?
As suddenly as the girl, food entered the kitchen. A group of football players had returned with boxes of pizzas with various toppings and, most enticingly, a cake. Till then remembered that this party was actually the birthday party of the star quarterback. They all jostled in, screaming at the top of their lungs, so joyously nonsensical they may as well have been speaking a different language, and shoved the birthday boy’s face clean into the cake. Then they all laughed some more, as he tried to clean himself up. Finally, his petite, doll-like girlfriend licked some cake off his face, whispered seductively in his ear, and dragged him upstairs by the wrist while the other men cheered.
“Woahhh, Kevinnnn!! Get some!” they yelled while one tall guy wolf-whistled in the background.
They finally left the kitchen like a hurricane crossing the plains, destruction in their wake.
Till’s girl had not seemed very interested in the proceedings; a good sign for the potential homosexuality Till hoped for. Feeling positive and justified in her positivity, Till happily took out her fork and began digging in to the collapsed cake.
“What are you doing?” she asked, behind Till’s back, sounding sour.
Till stopped, still chewing, “Eating the cake.”
“How and why did you just pull a fork from your pocket?”
You could hear the italics in her pronunciation.
“I don’t like using other people’s.”
“So…you’re like a snob?”
“No. I just get hungry sometimes, and I want to be able to eat without worrying where other people keep their stuff. I feel bad rummaging and not cleaning up after myself and all that.”
“So, you just bring your own.”
“Yep.”
“That’s weird as hell, mate.”
Till turned to see the girl wrinkling her little snub nose. She shrugged, at a loss for anything else to say. The girl was staring at the fork, as if it had personally wronged her. She seemed to be reading something into it that she did not like, though Till had no idea what; it was just a fork.
“You shouldn’t eat that; fucking Kevin got all his beard germs in there,” the girl finally said as she walked right past Till and gave a disgusted look that seemed to encompass the whole room and everything inside it.
She looked like an Empress turning up her nose at the lepers when she sashayed out of Fucking Kevin’s kitchen. Till realized she had not even gotten the chance to ask her name.
Feeling perhaps dramatically depressed by the events of the kitchen, Till had downed multiple red solo cups with god knows what in them and was currently wandering the halls in a haze with her frosting-smudged fork in her jacket pocket. She usually washed it, for the record.
“Chug! Chug! Chug!” Tommy Boy had jokingly chanted at her, passing her another cup when he caught her in the teeming crowd, crawling on top of itself like an anthill.
He seemed to be having a wonderful time.
The house was truly huge; the steps seemed to go on forever and even double-up on each other. It was like that artist? Who drew those stairs? Till couldn’t place his name. She was currently on what she thought was the second floor, alone and bitterly happy about it. The walls on either side of her seemed to bend away from each other, like opening flower petals with her as the stigma. She felt very tired and ashamed and lonely, not at all deserving to be part of a flower. College was supposed to change everything, allowing Till to finally become the person she had wanted to be all her life. So much for that. Her strangeness was apparently irrepressible. The only conversations where she could maintain the tough girl image of herself were with Tommy Boy, and that seemed depressing enough for another drink. She took a big gulp.
Flowers had got her thinking. She tapped her fingers rhythmically on the curving wall. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. She love-
Following the fish-eye curvature of her bendy fingers on the brightly painted wall was making her sick. There was what looked like a door near her hand, and she lunged for the knob, fiddling desperately, somehow confident that it must be a bathroom. When she finally got it open with her clumsy fingers, she saw a bedroom and two fully naked people in it.
They gazed boredly at her, unabashed and only slightly peeved by the interruption. She quickly closed the door and then puked in the potted plant at the end of the hall. What a thing it would be to be naked in a bedroom with someone at a party and feel so completely secure in your love that someone else gazing at it would not be blasphemous.
Till had decided parties were, definitively, not for her. She could say that confidently now that she had been to one. Her stomach felt empty and her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. Her mouth was dry and her heart ached—the latter being most important to her, despite all her attempts to build load-bearing walls around it. They were never able to withstand as much as she hoped for. All in all, she was ready to leave; Tommy Boy or no Tommy Boy, she was not concerned. She was going to go to her dorm and nap until the heat death of the universe, if possible.
She had to swim to the door, making wide gestures to give her space in the, somehow, even greater crowd. She didn’t know these many people even went here. At the living room area, flanked by the front door at one end and the breakfast bar at the other, she spotted Fucking Kevin upside down on a recliner with sharpie squiggles all over his face. Happy birthday asshole. She was about to stalk her way to the beckoning door, the rectangle glowing with moonlight like the pathway to heaven for all she hated this damn building and party and people—when there was a collapsing noise behind her, like a building sliding to its doom in a hurricane’s wake.
One of the many pastry boxes had fallen down from the precarious tower the football guys had constructed. A slumped plum pastry lay on the floor, pathetic and almost exactly like what a disastrously ruined cake looked like in cartoons. Till sputtered a laugh, unable to contain her (still somewhat drunk) mirth. It was so endearing in its goofiness. Oh, what the hell.
She knelt down, pulled out her fork, and scooped up the top, non-floor bits of the incredible smelling food and stuffed it into her mouth, daring anyone to mock her. Everyone else had already returned to their drunken debauches, however, paying her absolutely no mind. That was absolutely fine with her, honestly. She was done with the whole thing. Fuck everybody in this whole damn place who had made her want to be anything other than what she was. She didn’t even know Fucking Kevin.
She looked up, chewing with the angry determination of a woman on a mission, to see someone folding their delicate legs on the other side of the collapsed pastry. She had long, dangly earrings and a dimpled smile. She winked at Till from under her bangs, then produced a spoon from her pant pocket like a magician. Lounging luxuriously, she took a giant bite of cake, and then went “Mmm!” with such delight that Till grinned, proud of the little cake. She extended her forkful. They sat there, for hours, slowly and unabashedly feeding each other, not caring who saw.