If Things Would Be Different

Xe is staring sleeplessly at the back of Alanna’s shirt. The classroom is hot. It’s too hot. It’s insensibly hot. His satisfaction at the undressing of girls is not proportional to his dissatisfaction at having to stew in his own balls, and feel moisture in the crack of his ass. Yes he is bad-tempered thank you for asking. Do you mind if he rants to you for a while? Cause he’s hot and pissed and blueballed. So he wants to rant. About how stupid teachers are.

Here’s an obvious question: When the temperature is perfect outside, when it’s spring, and the trees are turning green, and for a few brief weeks it is not too hot, and not too cold, in the capricious city of Montreal, when the weather outside is delightful, why, why he asks you, is he presently stewing in said balls, like a gourmet soup of himself? The stupidity is like, mesmerizing. You have a building, full of people with too much education. That’s it. Too much education, too much teaching, not enough time spent actually doing things.

Because look like, look, check this logic. There are people at this school who have degrees in thermodynamics right? Like there are people at this school who can explain to him at the atomic level, how heat distributes itself through rooms. And there’s somebody who could show him how to plot the curvature of ideal fan blades, how to insulate and circulate heat. There’s someone who could show him how to design and build the walls and body of this building, and someone who knows the history of how it was built. There’s someone who knows how to smelt the metal to make air vents, and how to connect those vents so that they don’t leak or spill, how to produce a low-pressure system in a closed circuit, or a high pressure one, how to cool air, how to heat air, how to move air, how to distribute air, how to filter air, how to scent air, how to oxygenate air, and how to exhaust air. If you took all the professors on the St. Mary’s College faculty, you could probably understand the entire cycle of heat passing in and out of the school down to the joule. They understand all of it, they know how it all works. But it’s hotter than a sauna in this room, and nobody has any solutions or explanations other than, “there’s a problem with the heating system.” Yeah. No shit. People have sweat dripping off their faces while they’re sitting at their desks, everyone is clear on there being a heating problem. Fix it.

“Well we don’t know who’s responsible yet.”

I don’t give a shit who’s responsible. Everyone’s responsible. I’m going to climb on my desk, chew on this binder, and make involuntary humping-gestures if someone doesn’t open a window in the next three to five seconds.

Luckily, for everyone, someone does. Open a window. And the instant the frame cracks there’s the sound of someone jackhammering cement that barges in through the gap.

The teacher, who is, sweating his motherfucking nuts off, has gotten the back of his dress shirt completely transparent with moisture. The guy has a globular balding head, that shines like a Christmas ornament. He writes things on the board that are not math, they’re just the spasms from his heatstroke. He turns around to look at the racket from the window, and at the tiny girl standing guiltily beside it. Xe can feel the breeze from that tiny gap across his face.

“You will cloze this?” Says the spherical headed man, pointing the chalk at her like a wand. The whole class groans like indigestion.

“Sir. Please. Just one window.”

“Well, for noise pollution, one window is not so different than a hundred windows, is it? No? Any more questions? Will you sit down please.”

“What?”

“Sir.” Says a female voice. “Just speaking for myself, I think I’d be able to focus a lot better with the windows open. The construction noise is less distracting than the heat.”

People murmur behind her, all together, like, a good meal, a supportive murmur. And they all look at her. She didn’t raise her hand obviously, it’s not like he’s going to tell her to put her hand up before she speaks. The glistening dome-headed man, turns to her. His white-collar shirt is starting to show sweatmarks on the chest; and where his belly touches one of the buttons, there is a dark translucent spot. He wipes his face with the back of his hand, the one holding the chalk and waves his arm at the windows, while saying,

“Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. You sure you all can hear me?”

He asks this question to her directly. Alanna lifts one effortless gossamer hand and makes the a-ok gesture, as the windows open and cool air rushes in along with abundant fresh oxygen and plenty of ear-crushing noise.

Xe looks at her back, and he feels everyone else do the same. She’s wearing a grey tanktop and her hair is half-up, in a bun. Everyone is feeling the same love for her that he does right now, he knows it. It’s a feeling he has all the time, but right now everyone has it, where it’s just like, thank god for her man.

All these smart people, and nobody fixes the problem, they just stand around talking about the problem, and giving excuses for why it’s somebody else’s responsibility to fix the problem, and how, if they tried to fix the problem, that would make them look guilty, and they aren’t guilty, nobody’s guilty, right? Nobody’s guilty for this half-a-cup of viscous salty liquid that’s clinging between the pimply cheeks of his ass. Nobody is responsible, they just shrug and go on teaching young people the skills they will need to take charge and be engines of change in the world at large, all while demonstrating exactly zero of those skills.

You know what’s hilarious? Professors will give you marks if your answers are wrong, but well justified. That means, giving excuses for things is like, programmed into education from the start. And it might just sound like he’s ranting for no reason, or from butt-crack moisture, but you know, all this talk about education being severely impractical and boring and basically a big trivia game instead of like learning to ride a bike, all this stuff, it sounds like just boring shit that is only interesting to sexless adults with too much free time; until you find yourself in a seriously sweaty situation where all the knowledgeable people are better at pointing fingers at each other than putting their knowledge to use. It’s all just politics and policies until the temperature starts rising.

Whatever. He’s done talking. He’s just going to watch the transparent droplets slide down Alanna’s neck and over the front of her shoulder into magical reaches unknown. With the breeze now it’s actually much better. Everyone looks more comfortable, and the fact that nobody can hear the bald man at the front anymore is just a bonus. It feels like Xe’s head is being massaged by mechanical noise, like the jackhammer outside is being applied to the base of his tailbone.

She uses one finger to curl the hair over her right ear. He watches her hand. He wonders if he’s the only one who watched her hand just then. He figures probably not. Her skin looks like the fizzy atmosphere over champagne.

The problem with the building, is the problem with science, it’s the problem with government, it’s the problem with all the things that people make, it’s shortsighted. It was made to be one thing. One building. And then it was expanded, into a bigger building, and a bigger one, and a bigger one, until it became less of a building and more of a motherfucking castle. And the front is gleaming and white with giant huge columns like outside the Parthenon. It’s an epic frontage. And, like everything else, it’s a bunch of BS because the actual internal planning is a pile of flaming poo. It’s bullshit but lit on fire, so it’s hot. Get it?

Shut up. Go away. He’s just going to look at Alanna’s hair for a few more centuries. It’s — like it’s actually the best hair, of any human, since, like — Rupunzel, or Medusa or something. Like you have to see this hair, it’s copper colored like, a fox. Like a spring fox. And her skin is pale like deserts on the moon, but her eyes, yo, blue. Yes. Welcome to Calculus class. Good luck trying to learn anything.

Hey, let’s be real here. What is any school’s brand name but a bunch of marketing bullshit, and a facade? People don’t pay for high quality education, they pay for fancy frontages, and iPads in the classrooms and uniforms and prestige and emblems and logos. Right? Come on tell him he isn’t right.

Look at the front of St. Mary’s. Look at the front, see the columns, see the brilliant gleaming neoclassical institution of higher learning, and wonder if the architecture is ironic or straight-faced or if the building is just really really old. If you want to learn the answers to these questions, feel free to take the orientation tour with your mom, like Xe did. He learned the answers, but he’s forgotten them. Sorry. How old is this building? Old as shit. How hot is it inside his jeans right now? Hot enough to steam hotdogs. How long until this class ends? Too long. How hot is Alanna? Hot enough to cure hypothermia with her breath. How many white kids took the orientation tour first semester? n-1, for n less than or equal to one.

Were you there? Were you there with your mom, while guys of your exact, age, height and social status drove buy in cars, with girls in their passenger seats, girls who pull on their long hair and chew gum and look out the window at you like you’re a safari exhibit?

“And to your left you will see some asians taking the orientation tour with their moms. Feel free to wave but please don’t throw rice at them they don’t like that.”

Hey, while he’s ranting, can he say to all dudes who put sunglasses on the backs of their heads, instead of folding them and taking them off and putting them in a glasses case like normal citizens; those dudes who put their sunglasses like that, he wants to tell them all — it looks like they’re trying to check out their own asses. Yeah. Take that, he hopes you get three different flavors of gonorrhea from all your girlfriends and then suffocate on a plastic bag in your kitchen. Dicks.

Fun fact. People who wear sunglasses over the back of their head, like looped around their ears and then under the skull in the back against their neck; like they’ve got eyes in their from which they use to look at their own asses while standing in mirrors — those people who wear sunglasses like that — should — well they should not be allowed to do that. To wear them like that. Because it looks stupid. Fuck it’s hot in here.

Xe looks at the window and it’s so hot it looks like the light from outside is dimmer than the light inside. Like the sheer heat of the space is making it bright. Like looking out from a burning building. Xe wonders if you can feel heatstroke coming. Or if it’s like a real stroke. It’s not like a real stroke is it? Where you have to see if your smile is crooked or you can’t lower your arms at the same speed or your pupils are dilated differently? Xe wonders if his pupils are dilated at different radii. Radii. Radii. Radiians. Radians. What class is this? He lifts his head and scratches the crown, then scratches another spot that gets itchy and then another and another. He scratches with great energy. He’s looking at the straps of Alanna’s top. The skin is, like, nobody in the world has skin that nice. Probably. Probably not. It’s like, it’s like not baby skin cause that’s a cliche but like — well like fucking baby skin. Skin that hasn’t been touched. Skin that is pure like if you filled a tray with cream, how that would be pure. How you would just see a smooth uniform layer and if you touched it it would be creamy, because it would be cream. It’s possible Alanna is made of cream. Highly possible. Highly probable in fact. Xe’s confident that under close examination Alanna’s skin would be some derivative of cream. Cream-based skin. Not skin cream. Cow cream. Milk cream. Alanna might be made of milk. She might be an outer layer of cream with milk beneath. Milk might flow through her veins.

Her hands come up and take the hair off one shoulder and move it to the other shoulder. She does this sometimes. It might be for cooling, Xe has no idea, but it’s lovely to watch. Her hair is like copper of assorted grades, when you move it through light it shimmers. Xe was just thinking it was a little hot to have your hair down — he would imagine — but then, what do you know, Alanna is pulling it together and shaking it back to lift into a ponytail. It’s a long ponytail. It gets the hair off her neck. Xe sees little wisps around the base of her hairline that escaped the elastic. He sees the edge of her shirt and the shadow the shirt makes on her skin. When her hands go up in her hair he sees her arms. She turns, looks to the window, looks at the board, back to the window. When she’s turned to the window with her hands above her head it is apparent that she has a full bosom. That is to say her chest looks very unlike a man’s chest. It looks like, there’s something in it. Her shirt. There’s something in her shirt. Something. Her tits specifically. Her tits are in her shirt. Xe doesn’t like using the word tits, especially on Alanna but today the word is appropriate. Absolutely appropriate. Those are tits. In her shirt. Is she wearing a bra? Oh dear god. She might not be.

He lifts himself up on the desk for a better angle. He tries to see the border, the ridge beneath the cotton. He can see none. It can’t be. She can’t not be wearing a bra. Surely he would have noticed when she walked — wait, she was wearing a sweater. Could it be? Sweet lord. Could such a thing be true on this day? Alanna in a tanktop and no bra? Sweet lord, you are so merciful.

The room is hot. Not the air. The room. He can feel it permeating through the soles of his shoes. He can hear it in the creaks of the wood and masonry. On the dry surface of the desk he feels where it’s travelled through the rubber caps, up the metal legs and into the polymer wood and through the plastic covering into his finger-beds. The person at the front is hallucinating if they think anyone is paying attention to them. Maybe only enough to notice that they’re still talking but that’s it. They might see a bald head glistening with oil. They might see the ironed collar soaked through and beneath the armpits where the fabric is transparent with moisture. Surely no one is paying attention. The teacher has a German accent. Or he’s just German. He’s German and he has an accent, his accent might be Spanish for all anyone can tell, they’re all busy fanning themselves and tweeting about the heat. Ironically. They wouldn’t tweet, ‘It’s hot’ they’d ironically say, “Dying of heat in Cal 2, what else is new? #welcometomylife” or “Keep getting asked if I just worked out #pleasefixthis.”

Xe didn’t know if that first one was 140 characters or less. Truth be told he didn’t tweet. He had Twitter to follow people. He followed Alanna. Her Twitter was a lot more interesting before Instagram. At first Xe didn’t know what was going on, and then he searched it, and found she had Instagram, but that her account was private. Like a friend request he could request to follow her, and she would look at his account, look at his pictures, and probably deny. Seeing as he didn’t have any pictures. He thinks about that pretty often actually. Seeing her Instagram feed. It must be — well it must be something. A privilege. Alanna keeps looking at the window but her breasts aren’t as easy to see when her arms are down. He has to wait, and rabble his fingers against the desk, and inevitably, she will turn and he will barely get a glance again. She’s definitely not wearing a bra. There’s no strap. Unless he’s hallucinating. Her tanktop straps are thick enough to hide a bra, but who does that? Make sure their bra straps are hidden beneath their bra? Christian girls? Not Alanna anyway. Those bra-straps would be showing. And given that there aren’t any bra-straps; not pink, white, black, grey, blue, green, pastel blue and green, silver, off-white, yellow, crimson, magenta, cerulean or periwinkle… (Alanna favors blue bras.) (He’s known that about her a long time. It’s like she wants to be secretly blue under her disguise.)

She must not be wearing one.

There is nothing. No blue of any kind. Just her skin. Hot and moist but not shiny. Luminiferous though — with heat. She keeps needing to touch her hair. Maybe it’s hot. Xe guesses it would be hot to have that much hair. It probably sucks the heat right up. The hair. Sucking heat in, cause it’s all fiery. Not red. He said fiery not red, those are different things. Still, he wants to be careful not to say “fiery” to Alanna. Not that he ever would have the occasion to. Just, you know, in case. It’s not like he wants to speak to Alanna. Such an idea would be — well ludicrous on so many levels but just for starters every conversation he’s ever had with her has gone from bad to worse after two sentences. She’s nice to him and he’s rude back to her. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t like to think about it. It makes him sad and angry and also cold towards himself, like somewhere inside the mediocre person is a great person looking at him and thinking, “I can’t believe I’m you.” Sometimes he likes to be that great person for a little bit, and such times always give him occasion to hate himself. Because how could he not? For one thing, everything he wanted was just a hands-breath out of reach all the time, that was his existence. How good is he at Dota? Just shy of a professional. How close is he to Alanna? Just shy of being a friend, maybe, a distant friend, who you don’t really hang out with but know, sort of, in the sense she knows your name and if she saw a picture of you on Facebook at her friend’s house she might say, “Oh hey I know that guy. That’s Zee.” And then what would she say next? “He’s… nice.” Nice was best case scenario. Second best case scenario would be “smart.” Worst case scenario would be, “a weirdo.” Although, he wouldn’t begrudge her for calling him that. He was a weirdo. Actually, on reflection, worse case scenario would be her seeing the photo and not wanting to be associated with the person, and just not saying anything. Because why would she say anything? It’s not like Xe was hot. It’s not like her friends would be asking, “Whooo is that guy?” Xe doubts if Alanna’s friends even date asians. They probably would only go for a ripped asian like a kick-boxer or something. The only way an asian guy gets a girl of Alanna’s caliber is by doing martial arts. Or being super rich obviously. You can get anything if you’re super rich. Actually, Xe kind of felt like Alanna had enough money to not give a shit about riches. He doesn’t know if she’d be impressed by like, a guy who schmoozes her on his yacht. Maybe she’d be more impressed by something, you know, action-oriented. Like Elon Musk. Or Craig Kielburger. Or those dudes who just — who just like — do shit, so that people around them just have to stop looking at them as normal human beings, and just accept that not everybody’s made like that. Some people are just like, unrelatable and yet still beneficial to the people around them…. he guesses. Fuck it’s hot. Xe wonders if Elon Musk’s girlfriend is as hot as Alanna. She should be. Bold leaders should have beautiful partners. Shouldn’t they? It’s not like — it’s not like — if Xe wasn’t rich he wouldn’t ask her out. Wait. He means. If he was rich, he would ask her out. Definitely. Bet your bottom dollar. He would try, if he could take her to Paris for a weekend, he would definitely try. But he couldn’t. How much did that cost? Thousands of dollars. That’s a lot of Dota tournaments. Still, if he went pro it could be possible. You never know, one day you make a move at a tryout and suddenly you’re wearing branded jackets and getting paid a weekly salary into your bank account with plenty of zeros. He’d seen it. He’d seen guys go from rags (well relative rags), to (relative) riches, in, well literally overnight. The night after the tryout. Luck played a role. So did practice. It may not have been, hyper-realistic… in the sense that there were literally thousands of other guys all over the country who played high-level Dota and who could compete for a spot. But it happened.

Still. The competition was not to be underestimated. You want to play pro Dota, you’re not going up against the local scrubs. You’re competing with every wizardly 9 year-old and shut-in in North America (or Canada at least.) In a tryout your up against the whole country. If you got creamed, if you fed hard, if you wiffed an Ult, people would notice and remember, and you might never live it down. So it wasn’t something you wanted to put yourself through all the time. Maybe a few times a year, if you were feeling strong, and ready to do or die; having eaten plenty of carbs, and blueberries, and having drank enough water to drown a camel (because Xe always got nervous before semi-professional dota play). (An when he was nervous he drank water.) (It wasn’t like it was harmful. He just pissed it all out, clear as summer rain, not a trace of yellow to be seen.) (He could pee enough to fill a baby pool in a single day.) (It was concerning for his mother.) ((He found it oddly pleasurable.)) It’s not like he could control it. He was thirsty, he had to drink, if he didn’t drink he’d be ancy. It’s not like he was drinking pop; it was water, how bad can water be? It broke down the time for him. It was like — he would be playing tomorrow at 5; however much time that was, it didn’t matter because all he had to do was get to the next pee break. If he was playing he’d get Lawlman to micro his hero in the jungle and keep his farm up while he peed. It was possible to pause, but it tended to piss people off: pausing for forty-five seconds to a minute, twice or even three times in a game. So instead he’d wait till there wasn’t any teamfighting, and then go as fast as he could. Lawlman didn’t ask why Xe peed so much, and he didn’t complain about having a whole nother hero to manage while he was controlling and possibly fighting with his own. That’s because Xe’s cousin had a great capacity to subdivide his mind, and have multiple orders going out to multiple heroes simultaneously. He could play Chen, and micro for Xe, all without putting the least apparent stress on his faculties. If ever they dual-stacked and somebody on their team went afk or abandoned, he would make it a point to play the extra hero and try to win regardless. Lawlman was always trying to win. Xe had never seen anybody who wanted to win so hard. Losing was like death to him.

Lawlman would definitely go pro when he was old enough. Xe might still be trying-out, in his late twenties, still in school or maybe graduated by then, looking for a career, still dreaming about pro Dota. Still thinking about Alanna; all those years ago, when he used to sit behind her in classes like this one. Would he one day be thinking about this exact moment and wishing he could come back to it? This moment. This time. The time she wasn’t wearing a bra. He might capitalize it:

The Time She Wasn’t Wearing A Bra.

Surely he wouldn’t capitalize on it? What could he do? There was nothing to do, when someone wasn’t wearing a bra. It’s not like you can ask them to bounce around.

There are little vertical ridges in the grey cotton of her tanktop. If you look very closely you can see them. It’s ribbing. It makes the fabric flexible one way and not the other. Like lungs. Like the ribs around lungs. And Xe can see Alanna’s ribs through her shirt. At least he thinks he can.

Alanna is so skinny. Sometimes too skinny. In his opinion. Usually too skinny around exam time, usually perfect right after the holidays. Even in highschool. It was like she stored up for the winter and looked content and comfortable and then by summer she had to wear bathing-suits, so she would proceed to skeletonize herself in order to better appeal to all those men who like emaciation and bones and missing-teeth and earwax. Not that Alanna ever seemed like she was doing what she was doing for men. It’s not like she had a fucking shortage of them. Hers was the ability to commandeer any room she walked into. Dudes would be hanging out with their girlfriends and then she’d walk in with her friends and they’d have a massive fucking problem on their hands. On the one, devotion, faithfulness, connection, trust; and on the other, well she’s wearing mini-shorts. Not looking at Alanna’s legs if you can see them is a profession of homosexuality, as far as he and his were concerned. She was a dancer. She knew how to move them. To Alanna a chair wasn’t a chair, it was a prop. She would spin it around, sit in it with purpose, and then spin it back later when she was bored and bring her feet up on it. She wasn’t a ham either. There were many hams, especially among the theater kids, who treated any public venue as an opportunity to fetch attention. She never looked around. She didn’t engage the crowd. She didn’t vary the tempo or fluidity of arm and wrist motions in correspondence with how people were reacting to her at the time. She was like a nuclear clock in a sea of wind-up watches. She knew her own rhythm better than anyone knew theirs and stuck to it. It wasn’t possible to unbalance her. You could be the best looking guy in the world and she wouldn’t hesitate to shout you down in an argument about something that mattered to her and didn’t probably matter to anyone else. Like the subject of memories. Alanna had very particular opinions about how memory works and sometimes she would need to talk about them and have you agree. If you did not agree she would not try to convince you. But she would ignore you or harass you depending on her mood.

If she was feeling generous there was no one nicer than Alanna. She was nice to everyone. Literally everyone. And he knew this wasn’t his bias because if you spoke to almost anyone at St-Mary’s they would tell you Alanna was nice. If you held the door for her, she would say thank you, every time. Like every time. She could have walked to school, gotten soaked in the rain, had one of her heels break and her laptop fall in a puddle; all before arriving at the door; but if you held it for her, as she blustered by (in bare feet no less, because how are you going to walk with one heel?) you would catch the words “thank” and “you” wafting by your ear. Because you held the door, and that was the sort of act for which a person should say thank you.

But Xe was aware though that, if someone is pretty, they’re going to make other people behave in stupid ways, for which people will blame the pretty person. And the way blame works, once enough people start blaming you, rightly or wrongly, they start flaming you.

So people called Alanna a slut. A lot. It was disturbing. He would be hanging out with people and he’d hear a girl say “that redhead slut” and he would think. She can’t be talking about — ? Or there were the asian girls, his sisters friends or people who went to her all-girls school, sisters of his sister’s friends. If he hung out with them he prayed Alanna would never come up. They could rip her apart, asian girls. They had the cultural distance to call her “that white slut.” It wasn’t like there weren’t “sluts” in the proper sense, if there was a proper sense, among his sister’s friends. They liked men. They even liked to have sex with them. So people flaming Alanna was like people flaming in Dota as far as Xe was concerned: something done by people who couldn’t get good at the game and needed a way to vent their feelings of perpetual loserdom.

Because it sucked to suck at Dota. And almost everyone did. Everyone fucking sucked at Dota. Even people who had been at it for years. This was usually because they always played the same heroes with the same item builds. Years! Hundreds, thousands of games. That was like learning chess, and only ever playing three moves into any one match or something. It was like, not understanding the big game, and preferring to play your own tiny hopscotch within it. Sometimes you’d see people with a 2 year-old item build, and you’d tell him, “Yo, buy a Soul Ring next time,” and he’d get all defensive and uppity and tell you to fuck off and, “Play your own game.” But there was no, “own game” in Dota. Everyone is playing in the same game, all the time. Ten people, all connected. And at St-Mary’s. How many hundreds? Connected? Not so connected? Connected in the sense that they all went to the Facebook page for St-Mary’s memes. Also connected in that, a guy hanging out with his girlfriend, is still bound to know who Alanna is. Even if it’s only as “that redhead slut.”

P.S. Chicas, debasements like that don’t actually work. Guys know the difference between someone who’s crumbling inside, not knowing themselves or what they want to do or not do with (or to) their bodies — and someone who is just too hot to hold.

Alanna was like the opposite of crumbling inside. She made things crumble around her. She was just full of life. And had lots of guys in her Facebook albums. Like tons.

If that made her a slut then every girl wants to be a slut, guaranteed. But that’s not what the word is supposed to mean. It’s supposed to mean a chick who sleeps with everyone.

Does Alanna do that?

Lol. (Xe wishes.) (Not really.) ((Actually on second thought, really really not.)) (((On third thought he takes it back.))) ((((He takes it back. He takes it back. He takes it back 10³⁰.))))

The thing about Alanna was that she sometimes went after guys the way guys went after girls, which made her look — like… actually Xe is completely fucking speculating at this point, but, from her Facebook…

Yeah, he sees why his sister’s friends call her a slut. The sheer number of guys did get to be a bit much sometimes.

But Xe guesses that Alanna really doesn’t stop to wonder what his sister’s friends think. Like. Don’t they secretly wish they were her, on some level? Like don’t they? Yeah they say they hate her, but secretly deep down, if she wanted to be their friend, don’t you think they’d like her back?

Like. It’s Alanna. You’re not going to beat her, so there’s only one smart option.

It must suck for her friend’s boyfriends. Like Xe’s not even thinking of how her friends must feel. Just like the dudes. It must suck. When one of your GF’s girlfriends is teeth-freezingly hotter than everyone else on Earth.

Does anyone ask her out? Like? Who would have the balls? You’d have to have a large amount of ball in each testie, and then you might even need three or four nuts in total.

Xe wonders, if he was that hot, would he just get tired of people never asking him out? Like, because they were intimidated, so you had to just — fucking — pull your boots up and do the job yourself? It’s not like she had to work hard. I mean what did it take. She literally had to say three scentences. There’s a practice for any sport. She walks into the gym. Watches long enough for everyone to know she’s there; wondering who she’s there for. When the practice finishes she walks up to any guy — any one, chats him up for three scentences… five minutes later the guy’s untying his shoelaces, thinking about heaven and death and what gifts are given for free and what things we deserve and don’t deserve. She had the capacity to make men get spiritual. Xe had seen it. He worked the sport’s desk. He knew. He knows the way those guys would leave afterwards, shivering a little, thinking about blue eyes and big white teeth that all show; knobby kneed like they’re five years-old again, and just got asked to share their snack with a Disney Princess.

It’s not like you could blame them if they broke up with their girlfriends for a shot with her. How often do moments like that come along?

And Xe can just imagine the trauma of having her break up with you. Which is where all roads meet. Because as far as he and his friends had been able to gather — she always did the breaking up. And she always did it sooner or later.

Sometimes that would be the news of the day.

“Alanna’s RS just went single.”

“WOOOOOOOO!”

Not that they had any reason to celebrate. It’s not like any of them were at bat. Why did it even matter that another dude struck out? Still. They reveled in his defeat. They would speculate on how long the next one would last. It was always measured in days, and never more than two digits.

Xe was pretty sure, based on experience with his sister, that Alanna thought of her boyfriends like bags of chips. Flavorful. Perhaps satisfying. But always enjoyed with a little tinge of regret; as though she would rather have picked something else. From that point, it was only a matter of time before she got sick of the taste.

He was happy when he heard that she’d thrown another one away. Now her Relationship Status was hidden, like everyone seems to do these days. But it was usually still possible to tell when a breakup had occurred by watching for the purge. There would be a dude in all her pictures one day, then the next day. Bam!

Non-person.

Gone. All the same parties, all the same photos, all up, but everything with Alanna and the dude side-by-side will be suddenly an irrevocably gone. He liked knowing that those macho douches got attached, and then had to go through all that heartbreak.

Plus it’s not like they gave up either. He was sure she got lots of drunken midnight texts. His sister used to. She would talk about it, to her friends on the phone at breakfast, while Xe ate Froot Loops and studied the workings of the female mind. He wondered then if he would ever drunkenly text Alanna. Something like, “You’re what I’ve been livin’ for.” Cause that was clever and also a song lyric she would recognize. The Guess Who, great band. Xe had listened to their stuff (mostly the hits but other stuff too that he could find). He downloaded a discography. He wanted to be wise the next time it played and Alanna started bobbing to it. Not that he would bob. He’d probably just appreciatively nod his head, like what he imagines a connoisseur holding a wine glass would do. And he’d say, “They really don’t make music like that anymore. They really don’t.”

And Alanna would notice Xe’s wine glass, and his cigarette, and his black and white horizontally-striped shirt, and his beret, and think,

‘How have I never noticed this guy before? He’s so cultured.’

Ahh the Guess Who. Actually, Xe didn’t love it, to be honest. It was a bit… well 70s. There was a lot of fairly hippy stuff, and hippies annoyed him. He saw them as people with a good philosophy who’d failed in organization. It was just a shame, and stupid. Stupid undisciplined people. All the same, he had to admit some of them made some great music. But when he saw American Woman on the album he knew it had to be a mistake. American Woman is a Guess Who song? He played it, and sure enough, it was the one; the one that played at the Habs games sometimes. The one he feels like he first heard while watching the Super Bowl. Cool. That was a Canadian band? Way to go guys.

Xe is impressed by how proud he feels for his nation, knowing some of their music was played at the Super Bowl. It’s a welling in his chest. Nobody can sing about American women quite like Canadian men; wasn’t that the truth.

Alanna wasn’t American, Xe thinks she’s Ontarian. Gross. But he forgives her. She knew the Guess Who probably because they were a Canadian band, and therefore always overplayed on the radio. She wore maple leaf rub-on tatoos on her cheeks in elementary school. There used to be a picture of her in a classroom or something. Xe remembers.

Alanna wasn’t an American woman. She was a Canadian in the strictest sense. In the sense that she knew the national anthem in English and French. She was never one of those wizardly kids with bilingual parents, something Xe appreciated given that his mother spoke no language with accuracy, only enthusiasm. His school experience had been plagued by not knowing how to say what he wanted to say. Thinking first in Mandarin, then trying to translate to English or French and frequently mixing sounds from the two. His teachers would look at him and say, “Honey you have to tell me what you want in English, ou en français.” And Xe would pucker his face and try to get the words out unadulterated.

When his mother found out about this, it was the end of anything but English in the house. His mother asked him to pick which he found easier, and Xe said, “Angresh.” Whatever that had meant, she interpreted “Anglais,” and from then on English was the word.

His mother would have fits of being unable to pronounce things, and she’d wag her arms madly trying to remember the sounds to communicate with her child, finally resorting to jumping up and down and pointing. It worked though. He learned English and then afterward he learned French and now Mandarin was a thing of the past. He would hear people speak at school and have a vague idea that they just said, “kingdom” or “bicycle” or something, and the recollections would leave him nostalgic for a while. Sometimes he wishes he could read it. Some kids learned Chinese on weekends. His mother put him in Catholic Sunday school instead, because it’s what a white lady on their street said she was doing, and Xe’s mom wanted her son to be a motherfucking Canadian white kid too. When they found out he wasn’t baptized, that was a whole thing. They had to baptize him. They had a whole tub of holy water to baptize the adults that day. The whole time Xe was just thinking of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and trying not to laugh. There was no one else in the church. It was actually extremely cultish. He was allowed to wear his underwear though, that was a small blessing.

Then the priest spoke, and there was magic smoke, and all kinds of ancient chants and offerings were made to this and that vengeful deity. Xe was actually quite glad he didn’t miss it. My god there is a lot of gold in a church. They’re not fucking shy about it either, it’s like out there, sticking right out. Why would you put so much gold under poor people’s noses and then ask for money? It’s like, how bout you pawn off some of this bling before you go passing that basket around, Father? Still, if he had to do it again he would. Baptism. Not a very painful process. Kind of cool actually. Like if you maintain the proper ironic distance, and don’t take it too seriously, it’s not bad. Surely there were worse things to do in a day than take a little insurance out in the afterlife. And then, while asian kids went to learn Chinese, Xe got to hang out with white kids and learn about Jesus and tongues of fire over people’s heads and stuff. It was all very glamerous and interesting to his young mind. So when anal kids would ask pesky questions about forensic details, Xe would squint his eyes at them and think, in French or English, “Obviously it’s not real you tard, stop ruining it for everyone.”

Xe thought back to those days, and sometimes it made him want to be a kid again. He’d never ached over Alanna when he was a kid. She was pretty and nice and happy and god did she run fast. You’d never seen a person run so fast. And she was a girl, so, obviously guys would chase her, not knowing what they were supposed to do when they caught her, perhaps wanting to take her clothes off… but then what? She would run and run and never be caught. Uncatchable. When she was a baby she would have probably run around naked. She seems like the kind of person who would have done that as a baby.

Xe sees her legs under the chair. Her shoes are off. Her bare feet slide out of the flats and then back in. She has a beautymark under her foot that he already knew was there. Her toes scrunch together and then fan out, like frog toes. She has a beautymark on her calf. It’s very distinctive. He doesn’t know when it first appeared but he’s known about it a long time. It’s smaller than a dime but dark against her skin, almost behind the knee but slightly below. On the right leg.

Her head is reaching bun-requirement temperatures. She starts piling it on top to get it off her back, her arms lifting up, holding it in place and pinning it down, like it’s alive, because it is. Of course it resists her. Of course it wants to fall back to the rest state. That’s not gravity. It’s the hair. That orangey — oh did he say orangey? She hates that. It’s not orange it’s like metal. Metal can’t be orange. Not rusted metal. Shined metal, unoxidized, virgin metal is Alanna’s hair. Like strings of varying temper and shade. Not strings. Tiny strands, infinitesimally small filaments of gold or ember brown, moving through the air like sea creatures along the ocean floor. She shakes her head to get more of it in her hand.

There’s a whistle. The bald man at the front looks momentarily around, like he’s a dog hearing the sound to go home, after which he puts one hand on his desk and stares at the board trying to remember where he was going with this. The back of his dress shirt is completely soaked from the neck and all the way out to the hips. It looks to Xe like an image of the back of Christ’s head. It has the right shape. Assuming He had long hair.

The whistle was for Alanna. She turns around, still doing her hair up. Sweet mercy she turns all the way around to look in the corner. Her armpits are like little icecream scoops. She keeps her elbows away from her head, as dancer’s are wont to, to occupy as much room as possible. Her breasts — god her breasts. Sweet lord. Her tanktop is low cut. It’s a low swooping cut. Provides no more than two inches of cleavage. But what cleavage. It’s like looking into the bosom of the mother of sleep, when you’re so so exhausted that you can’t even move anymore, and to see, just out of your reach, the deepest gentlest rest you’ve ever had, escape from all your fears, safety and comfort and sanctity and warmth, all those things, and you are like in the middle of the Arctic, with all the winds and snow to justify the metaphor, freezing and seeing serenity there, fire on your skin, food, hot water poured over your head and trickling through your hair over your ears and down your back so fast you can’t anticipate it. A sensation of pure salvation, to not be hunted, to have your life safe and secure for one brief moment — so was it to glimpse into the crease of Alanna’s tanktop.

And beyond the crease what silhouettes were there to be seen. Such flawless circles. Celestial, planetary, the shadows between them like the phases of the moon, in perfect geometrical regulation. Through the movement she makes as she turns around from the waist you may witness their motion on the air and speculate upon their weight —

Xe breathes outwards suddenly and changes position in his chair without moving his head in the slightest —

So yes. When female astronauts move in space, do you ever wonder what their boobs look like? Of course you don’t. What astronaut has a rack you would want to look at? Alanna should be an astronaut. And girls like Alanna. They’re smart enough, they’re hard working enough, the only problem is that being an astronaut isn’t glamorous enough. You have to work with nerdy boring people all the time, and instead of welcoming you for your goodlooks, and recognizing that you represent something positive for the advancement of science, they would all judge you and be jealous and say that you got the spot because you gave someone a blowjob and didn’t really deserve it. People are so fucking stupid. Xe bets Alanna doesn’t even give blowjobs. Like to guys she’s dating. She’s probably too classy for that.

Ok Alanna giving blowjobs was never a thought he should have allowed into his head. Not in a classroom this hot. Because was she too classy? Was she? Wasn’t she also a slut? Like in the positive sense? A freak in the bed? Wasn’t that what that meant? Xe didn’t know if blowjobs were freaky or not, in the common parlance. He knew of way freakier shit. Much freakier shit. Enough that he was pretty much desensitized to all of it. It wasn’t easy to get his goat. He could very frequently say, “been there done that.” In the sense, been there, seen that. Insofar as “there” could be represented by a web address. Xe had been many places if you counted the web as geography. Actually he was pretty sure he’d been everywhere man.

There were people who tossed brand names around. Sites that they liked or coveted, resources they used to find the best stuff on the web. Xe was beyond that. He knew the Internet like the back of his hand. He understood where it was growing and who was feeding on it and who was feeding it. He liked to find himself on random websites, he felt like a mayor checking into a little tumbledown village, knocking on windows, trying to see if anyone was home.

He could navigate all the branded sites and he had ways to aggregate their inflows together to get the juiciest bits of information the fastest. It’s not like he used it for anything, mostly. He mostly just told his friends about it, and got cred for being the first one to hear. Not virtual cred, cred is not a thing, physical cred, that is, metaphysical cred, the cred that exists in people’s minds when they think of all the times you surprised them by being awesome.

That was funny. Some people are awesome by driving girls with copper hair to beachside dates. Some people are awesome by being the first to write in chat that pictures were leaked of the new iPhone. These were lifestyle decisions. Xe doesn’t remember making the decisions himself but maybe it started when his mom enrolled him in art lessons instead of karate or something. Maybe if he’d been more active as a kid he would look less — well, less — like he does now. Which is to say, not a guy who does martial arts. A guy who plays competitive sport while sitting in a computer chair. It is true Xe was once much fatter. Much. His sister knows it’s very painful to him, and doesn’t bring it up. His mother thinks it’s cute and hilarious and likes to remind him of it when his face is swollen on Saturday mornings from having slept with it in the pillow. She uses her hands to compress her cheeks and lips together to emphasize how much of a pig he used to be. Xe doesn’t think about that time often. In the sense he doesn’t really think of the past often. To be honest. Like if he’s being honest. He never really thinks about the past. He tries to focus instead on the — well Alanna’s in the past. Alanna is in his past. She’s like one of the landmarks by which he remembers his school years. When her hair was braided all the time, when it was in two ponytails on the sides, when it was oily and finally when it was long and like, lion mane, you looked at all the colors and wondered how that possibly could have been the same girl from last year who spazzed-out at lunch.

And you wondered how that girl before him could once have been a little girl. With no boobs and no butt and basically a little boy body. Because kids all look the same, more or less. Except for how you dress them. Pink for girls. Blue for boys. Xe’s mother picked that up very quick. She dressed him up in white and people kept telling her she had a beautiful daughter which would cause her to, for whatever reason having nothing whatsoever to do with culture, throw a raging shit-fit.

Xe dressed in blue. Alanna dressed in pink. Once this would have been the case. They were born on the same day after all. (Well not the same day, day.) (Not the same day exactly; she was born on the tenth of July, he was born on the tenth of October.) (The ten was the same.) She was two months older. She looked five years older, but that was a developmental thing. White people aging quickly would bite them in the ass, he knew. Not that Alanna would age quickly. She just hit puberty in stride. He remembers first noticing that Alanna had boobs. It was strange. He wasn’t the only one who was noticing. Just like he wasn’t the only one who was noticing her now.

The whistle was for her after all. Xe watches her face as she looks at them and gives them looks. She appears curious, like she didn’t know they were talking to her; which she must have, because she turned only after the bald man rediscovered the board. She’s still trying to get the bun on. Jesus, the way she moves her arms makes them jiggle. They flounce and look heavy. He can see where the fabric caves between them. He can see the shadows. It was like, planets seen at a distance. Not in size, in size they were more like, grapefruits. Perhaps grapefruits was too much. What confused you was that her body was small, slim, and they were huge and weighty in comparison, and the skin like she’d just taken a shower. In any case he can see her nipples.

He tries not to make a big deal of it. Tries. In his mind, certain things are within control, maybe a larger number of things than in most people’s minds. But one is not. Xe’s penis is already been erect for some time and just then, all of a sudden, he had the very strong impression that he was about to have an orgasm. Things stop being funny very fast. Xe likes things to be in control. Sometimes that becomes a kind of need. Now he needs very much to control himself. Stop looking at Alanna. Stop using your imagination.

How much time is left? He taps his foot. He needs to get out of this unbearable. Heat. It’s so hard not thinking of something when you’re trying to not think of it. Every time you remember you’re trying not to remember, you’ve accidentally remembered. So he remembers her. He knows she’s in space, in reality, in front of him. An arms-length away. That’s it. The real Alanna. Not her avatar, not her picture, not her profile, not a pre-rendered digital modeling, her. Flesh. A person in flesh. In the flesh. In the flesh was her so was she the flesh. You couldn’t separate Alanna from her body, she was unobjectifiable.

Xe doesn’t know if she’s turned back to look at the front. He’s not looking at her anymore. Unspeakable events nearly occurred. Events of such unspeakability that Xe dare not speak them, even in his head. That was scary.

Would people know? Would people around him know? Would he like, groan or something? Would he let out a massive groan and then Alanna would turn around very tall in her chair, with her nose sharp like a wafer cookie and with only her top teeth showing and her eyebrows all bent and ask, “Did you just cum in your pants?”

Oh Jesus. Xe points his feet out and lifts his legs to keep from spasming. Something about Alanna saying the word — well the word, the little word. It’s too much to — And her mouth when she says it — Oh Jesus. The C sound, the hard C that she needs her teeth to make, and the U that needs the deep tongue and finally the sealing of the lips for the Mm.

He tries to not look like he’s having a seizure. He needs occasionally to twitch forward like he’s preventing himself from sneezing. But oh what a nightmare of a sneeze. If he fails. Would they know? Would she turn around? Would it — smell? Or something. It would be sticky that was fine, would it soak through though? Would it be visible? In the heat would it liquify and drip into his pants and make a stain and when he’d be walking out people would see the stain on the back of his pants and say, Zee, I’m pretty sure you just came in your pants man?

More concerning was Alanna finding out. He could say it was white out, if it was white. Or just like, shit from the chair if it was just a wet mark. More concerning was having to be confronted by Alanna about it, especially if she’d have her tits right there, pointed at him. Confining.

The Day When Alanna Wasn’t Wearing A Bra. Would this be a day to remember? How the fuck did he think he could satisfy a woman who was so hot, her sitting there fully clothed was enough to bring him to a climax, with zero stimulation (aside from his leg shaking which he can’t help)? How the fuck does he think he could satisfy a woman like this? He would just perpetually displease her and come too early. She’d kiss him and he’d just —

Stop thinking about that. No kisses from Alanna. No thoughts of Alanna’s mouth at all. Her teeth. Her lips. How puffy they are and how far they stick out and the roundness and the way the top one has almost two horns and the bottom one is just pink and round. How the teeth are always there, they’re too big to hide. She wants to stare at you, or if she’s about to speak, those teeth will be in there. He imagines that she likes to bite with them. Leaving red dotted lines like sectioning off things to be surgically removed. He imagines she likes to use her tongue very softly when she’s bitten to test the sensitive skin, and maybe taste blood. He’s sure she can draw blood, with those magnificent teeth. This is not helping him. He tries to find something to occupy his mind. Teeth. Think about teeth.

Xe’s sure Alanna would like a guy with teeth like hers. His teeth are more, complicated. The top had braces, the bottom didn’t. The bottom look like a graveyard of yellow stone. The top look like off-white blocks of mortared rock. It’s all very ugly by contrast. You expect him to have nice teeth when you see his uppers and then, your enthusiasm fizzles away when he opens his mouth wide enough to let everything show. He’s sure Alanna wouldn’t be able to like a guy with bad teeth. He wouldn’t be able to like a girl with bad teeth. He thinks. Not unless she was extremely hot everywhere else. But it doesn’t seem right to him, Alanna kissing someone who doesn’t have perfect teeth. Who’s a guy with perfect teeth? Like a black guy. No, like a movie star. That was the sort of mouth she would kiss.

Alanna didn’t have time to do normal people things, he imagined. Like. He couldn’t imagine her sitting bored in front of her computer looking at memes like he does too often. Does she look at memes? Probably not. She was probably too busy — riding motorcycles or something. Sometimes Xe would see commercials for like sunscreen or cellphones or something and see her there. There would be like four people of various shades. Two white people and two not white people. Maybe an asian and a dark-skinned girl. The white girl would never be with the asian guy. She would be clearly hugging on the white guy wearing sunscreen holding a cellphone. She would be sitting in the passenger seat listening to tunes and dancing along, putting up the volume louder, running through sand in bare feet and throwing down her bags and running into the water. First to get her feet wet. He sees those commercials in the summer when he’s inside with a fan on his face, thinking, I wonder if Alanna is doing that right now?

It must be so much fun to go to the beach with your friends. Xe looks up. Alanna’s not there. There are people putting their books away and the bald man is gone. Fuck. He looks in the corner where Alanna was whistled-at from. There are two asian guys. Huh? He was sure they were going to be stoners sitting in the corner. They have their laptops out. He wonders if they have Alanna’s Instagram.

Holy shit it’s over. The class. The heat. Somehow it’s cooler with all the bodies not in it.

Hmm. It’s over. Will he one day be thinking back to this moment, and wishing? What would he remember? How she looked, the fact that he nearly came? Maybe he would forget that. Maybe he would forget all this. Maybe he would only remember her vaguely as the girl he had a crush on in elementary school, high school, and now college. More likely was that they would go to different schools. Her to McGill, him to Concordia, or vice versa. And that he would only have her Facebook to remember her by. Seeing the lines of handsome men who got to walk around the front of two-door convertibles, to open her side, that she might get in, and that her hair might glimmer in the current.

Why the fuck does he even think about Alanna? Isn’t it childish? It is. It is childish. This is exactly what he used to do in the third grade. He fantasizes about, her talking to him, by accident, over something stupid, and then he impresses her and then she starts noticing him. Maybe she starts thinking about him as much as he thinks about her and then one day she can’t bear it anymore, she tells him and he’s like,

“Holy shit I’ve been wanting to tell you for so long. So long. So so so fucking long. Me too. Me too. That’s exactly how I feel about you.”

But it’s a stupid fucking idea and he knows it. He totally knows it. But he still tortures himself with it. He knows any conversation with her would end in disaster and yet he still fantasizes about the possibility. He can’t stop himself. And all the while he’s thinking about how, it’s not really his fault. That he’s asian. That he doesn’t look like, well like — you know like — a man — is supposed — to like — look. He doesn’t look like that. It’s not his fault. He can’t control it. How is it his fault? It’s not. It’s just happening to him.

Xe doesn’t need to put anything away really, he hasn’t taken anything out. His back is soaked. He looked around into the corner. Was it those guys who whistled at Alanna? Asian guys? Pretty ballsy. He means it’s not like it’s going to get anywhere. You’d be much better off whistling at a grizzly she-bear, at least when she gets at you she’ll kill you fast. Not that Alanna was violent. You saw it in her when she danced though, the potential for violence. Xe — well he’d seen her dance. You can buy tickets. You don’t have to actually be related to someone in the show to buy tickets. You can just buy them. Plus she performed at the variety show last year. That was plenty violent. Give her a weapon and every single one of those moves would be deadly, each flowing from the next, downing foe after foe, with twist and spins in between. Plus there is the beat. The tribal beat. Ancient. The rhythmic swaying of female hips, the bouncing and twisting and flow of muscled and liquid bodies. There were always guys on stage but they were more like set-pieces. A guy might dance with a girl on stage but it would be so that you would look at her dance against a generic male body. It was like how sometimes in clothing ads the people are like, holding dogs. They’re not selling the dogs. You’re not even supposed to look at the dogs, really.

But those guys on stage, Xe bets they got to hang out with the dancers a lot. Sure lots of them were probably gay but there had to be some straight ones. Would the straight ones, maybe after a practice, exhausted, get to take one of those girls up on stage back to his apartment and see if they were as nasty as they pretended to be? Would he maybe get to know all the dancers intimately, so that the motions up there beneath the lights were not only euphemisms but clues, hints as to the secret life of beautiful people who move as though they were born to the sound of a beating drum.

Of course it just looks like they were born being able to do that, the truth is that they just started learning when they were young. Back when it didn’t seem sexy. Like at Alanna’s studio shows when the little girls get on and start shaking their undeveloped ends in ways that are certainly bewildering, but not sexy. Actually more like disturbing actually. But then there would be the fifteen year-olds that would cause the fathers to look at each other with sideways glances, all asking the question of whether it was ok or not ok to be thinking what they were thinking.

How old is fifteen really? A great man asked that.

They were on the borderline. They might have had bottoms but no boobs or vice versa. The safest thing was just to look at the lighting equipment the whole time, or watch the antics of the outstanding camera guy who weaves between their bodies like a pilotfish among sharks. His mission is simple and masculine: catch video footage of these sweet privileged girls descent into debauchery from all the most alluring angles (later to be put on dvd and sold for twice as much as was reasonable in the lobby of the dance studio). Then finally, the women would come on. The teachers and assistants dressed in baggy clothing and with gangster baseball caps too large for their heads turned at strange angles. But mistake not. The clothes are not so unrevealing as you might first suspect. You see their bodies move in them. They press against the draping material with their stomachs and backs, and so leave ghosts of themselves where they moved; where their clothing yet hangs in the air, suspended for a hushed instant. Plus they jump and their shirts come up exposing their stomachs. They know this is going to happen but they pretend they don’t. They pretend they’re too busy being sexy and fierce to know which way you’re supposed to wear a baseball cap. You might be able to criticize them for many things, not the least of which being that they were spoiled Canadian girls listening to hardcore gangster music written by criminals who would treat them, if they could get their hands on them, like succulent and breaded chicken fingers in ridiculous clothing. Girls in the hood didn’t dress like that, Xe knew from movies, they dressed like women. Hot suburban girls dressing like hostile urban men, it was all so preposterous and absurd that if Xe sat there thinking about it he would totally miss the buffet.

Dancers. I mean, honestly. Their bodies are like, excuses for sculpture. They’re not skinny. They’re dexterous. They throw and catch themselves to rhythmic ripples in the air. There isn’t one of them who isn’t totally fuckable. When the teachers are on stage, all the dads have their legs crossed. And all the wives are frowning. And they’re all wondering if that hip-hop for moms thing at the community center wasn’t so ridiculous after all. They’re so hot, all of them, it’s like a game to find which is the least hot. It’s usually different for every person. Personally Xe finds the asian teacher the least hot, but he doesn’t hold it against her. He’s sure she has to beat the guys off with sticks. It was a matter of preference. One thing he believed was universal however, nobody would put Alanna at the bottom. She might not be at the top for everybody, he knew people were weird. But she would be nobody’s bottom. Unless it was a guy with some kind of sweaty and anxious fear of breasts.

When Alanna pops her chest with her hands out, there is literally no where else on the stage that anyone is looking. People’s gums fall out of their mouthes. She doesn’t smile, she just looks smolderingly angry. Of course her teeth show, and her eyes look blue from the back row. Afterward all her little kids come and stand around her and they give her flowers and all the teachers get flowers.

Xe looks at the guy dancers where they stand at the corners of the stage and he wonders, even as he goes home, to watch videos and masturbate, is one of them going to get lucky?

Xe wonders way way back, when his mother was signing him up for summer camp, when she was in the school gym at registration with people speaking English and French everywhere and her trying to find a place to stand, with a bag that she needed to put on the ground, and him holding on to the straps of the bag, while she used her free hand to hold the pen and the paper, the green pen the lady had given her and that she was going to make sure to give back, looking for an uncontested spot in the room to sit down and fill out her name, Xe’s name, his age, their address, his Medicare number, their telephone number, if he had any allergies or medical conditions, three more boxes she didn’t understand and finally, what activities he wanted to participate in. He wonders if she spent much time on this. If while she was looking for a spot to sit and write she was deciding on activities for him, or if she had already known what she was going to pick. He wonders if she knew what everything she was ticking off was. She would have been sure to understand if you had to pay extra for anything. If she ticked swimming it meant all summer, three times a week he’d be taking swimming lessons. Did she read the entire list? Did she see hockey and think, no, too violent? Did she see drawing and think, no, too gentle? Did she see computers and think, yes, intelligence? Did she see soccer and think, yes, how Canadian and Western?

Xe was eight or nine or whatever. He was a blank slate. He could have been anything. He wonders if his mother saw, at the bottom of the list —

Dance.

And if she would have thought, no, too girly. Or if maybe she didn’t see it. Or maybe dance wasn’t on the list at all. But if it had been. And she had ticked that box. It’s hard for him not to wonder if things would be different.