Hadley Franklin
Falling
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Billy’s death made her special. It wasn’t what she’d wanted – obviously, she wished he were alive. Obviously, she would rather unsee the way his face had smashed against the ground, swimming darkly in all that blood. But he wasn’t and she couldn’t and it had accidentally made her into this soft and broken person everyone wanted to love. After the funeral, where Billy’s mother had clutched her hand and made her promise to call once a month, her friends had fixed her a vodka cranberry in a big water bottle that she sucked on until she passed out in Ariel’s lap, and Ariel’s boyfriend Marty carried her to bed. She’d wrapped her legs around Marty’s waist, and he’d let her drag him into the bed, too, and they’d cuddled a while, even though Ariel was downstairs. She’d always liked Marty because he had big arms and was smarter than Billy – he was taking Modernist Writers And The Middle Class, which you had to apply to get into. That night he stroked the sliver of skin between her skirt’s waistband and the hem of her t-shirt, a shivery little inch. He didn’t leave until they heard Ariel calling his name.
All her professors gave her a pass on her remaining assignments for the semester. Some of them had taught Billy and cried with her during office hours. The college president sent out a campus-wide email, calling it a tragic accident and urging safety and responsibility. ‘Look out for each other,’ she implored them. ‘Measure the cost of your actions.’
Her mother offered to fly her back to Minnesota. The senior girl from her Russian lit class insisted on smoking her out. Her name was Ronnie, and she started every sentence in class with, ‘I see your point, but…’ Ronnie’s dorm had huge Indian-looking tapestries hanging from the walls. They smoked out of a glass bong and threaded their fingers together and apart. Ronnie told her she’d had an abortion freshman year, that she’d never met her real mother, that her stepmother was a bitch.
‘My real mom is probably a bitch, too,’ she said, ‘But I still get to believe she’s a good person somewhere.’
When they hugged goodbye, Ronnie held her face.
‘You’re an angel,’ she said. ‘You’re so fucking beautiful.’
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People were always touching her. They hugged her, patted her hand, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, squeezed her to their sides. She was constantly swaddled in their embraces. The more she insisted she was okay, the less anyone believed it.
.
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She spent a lot of time with Ariel. They sat cross-legged on Ariel’s bed, smoking cigarettes out the window, ashing into a little floral tea cup, and watching French films about handsome women with short hair on Ariel’s laptop. The women were always having sex with the wrong people, and the consequences were often tragic, but they never cried. Lover after lover died or fled and the women smoked and ground their cigarettes into Paris sidewalks and kept living.
Ariel told her Marty was too close to his parents.
‘They talk almost every day. He needs to get some space. That’s why we’re at college.’
Ariel also told her what Marty was like during sex.
‘He’ll be totally silent and then suddenly, like out of nowhere, he kind of groans really loudly for a really long time. And then he’s done.’
She laughed and laughed when Ariel imitated him, guttural and loud. She told Ariel how Billy used to close his eyes so tightly when she blew him that she wondered if he was picturing somebody else. She squeezed her eyes shut and bobbed an imaginary head up and down, but Ariel didn’t laugh.
‘God,’ Ariel said, ‘I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you.’
She wanted to tell Ariel she’d missed the point, but instead she nodded. Ariel hugged her. She could smell baby powder and cigarettes. Ariel wouldn’t let her up to breathe for several minutes.
Ariel was at her parents’ for the weekend, and Marty invited her to a guest lecture on courtesan poets of the Italian Renaissance. She pictured herself buxom and pale, opening herself to men of power, writing by candlelight in a velvet bed. She pictured Marty and his sudden moans. She reached over and squeezed Marty’s knee, which made him jump. She did it again, so he grabbed her hand and held it. When they left the lecture, they went to Marty’s room and lay on his bed facing each other. They were so close, they couldn’t look into each other’s eyes.
‘I liked Billy,’ Marty told her. ‘I always really liked him.’ But she only remembered them greeting each other in that male hand-slapping way, and then returning to their girlfriends’ sides like children returning to their mothers after being forced to play.
‘I didn’t always like him,’ she said. ‘Not always.’
Marty drew lines over her sides with his fingers. He held her face. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said and kissed her. ‘We shouldn’t do this.’ Then he pulled off her shirt.
She was too tired to pretend she felt guilty. She felt ancient, like she’d been stealing men for thousands of years, like she’d already heard everything he was going to say.
‘We should stop,’ he said and bit her lip. ‘We should really say goodnight.’
The room was bright and blank. A poster had unstuck from the wall and hung folded over, revealing its white underside. She could see herself in the mirror behind the door. She looked powerful; a grasping body playing catch and release. He was perfectly silent, just as she knew he would be.
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Sometimes she pretended Billy was alive. Walking home from class, she’d pretend he was waiting in her hall. He’d be sitting on the floor, sparking his lighter, his giant headphones on. When she’d ask him in, he’d bounce to his feet. He’d hug her and her head would only reach his armpit, and he’d smell like old denim. He’d do something dumb, like lift her in the air or lick her ear. It was easy to pretend.
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His family turned him into a scholarship. The college president announced it by email. The William Young Scholarship for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. ‘Billy’s passion for art and his dedication to this school will live on,’ the president wrote. ‘Thanks to the Young family’s generous contribution, one student every year will have the gift of an enriching arts education, and we will continue to honor Billy’s memory for years to come.’
At parties, she was never left alone. Girls flattered her hair and her dress, fingering her bangs and the fabric of her skirt. They warded off boys who wanted to talk to her.
‘Don’t be a creep,’ they said, ‘She’s in mourning, okay?’
She was untouchable, unfuckable, blameless, golden.
Someone’s girlfriend from another college spent one party confessing to her all the guys she was sleeping with at her school.
‘You can’t tell my boyfriend any of this,’ the girlfriend said, swigging from a bottle of white wine. ‘I trust you completely.’
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She and Ariel were drinking gin and grape juice and getting ready for a concert on campus, some post-punk band that had driven up from the city, boys with uneven haircuts who everyone liked. Ariel had thrown off the fifth dress she’d tried and was lying back on her bed in just her underwear.
‘I think Marty is cheating on me.’ She lit a cigarette and blew a billow of smoke through the window screen.
‘How do you know?’
‘He’s just being so cagey. Texting in the bathroom. Stuff like that.’ ‘He’s probably just anxious about finals.’
‘I guess. He’s going to the thing tonight, so. Maybe he’ll relax.’ She watched Ariel smoke out the window. Billy used to say that Ariel liked to pretend she was tragic.
‘A cardboard cutout of a tragic heroine,’ he said.
She didn’t like when he was mean about Ariel. It made her feel stupid for liking her. She’d punish him by spending parties tucked in the bathroom with Ariel. They sat out the night in bathtubs and shared boxes of wine. Sometimes, they pulled the curtain closed and were quiet while people stumbled in to pee. When they left, she and Ariel would laugh and their laughter would echo against the tiles, bouncing back to them again and again, magnified.
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At the concert, she stood in the back while Ariel searched for Marty in the crush of people near the stage. The basement was humid and so dark it was hard to see anyone. She felt herself floating to the dank concrete ceiling, watching the room. Bodies shoved and twisted and danced. Everyone looked the same in the murky light.
Ariel and Marty found her and pulled her deep into the crowd. She was crammed between elbows and purses and water bottles filled with clear alcohol. She tried to toss her hair and twist with everyone else. Marty kept trying to catch her eye with meaningful looks, intense and sexy looks, looks that were meant to lay his desire all over her.
She looked everywhere except his eyes, but they caught her anyway and drew her back.
Ariel slipped out to get high with someone outside. As soon as Ariel left, she felt Marty seize her hand. They found a nook in the shadows by the back dining hall entrance. He pressed his hips against hers. His legs were powerful, his waist broad. Billy was boney and slender. His hips left bruises in the flesh of her thighs.
She wondered what the fall felt like. She wondered if, just for a moment, just at first, the channel of air, the stomach drop, the chill wind – she wondered if it had been joyful.
Marty reached under her skirt.
‘You look so hot,’ he said. He had no breath. It almost sounded funny. ‘I think I’m falling for you,’ he said. She laughed. She couldn’t help it. They were interrupted by the shout. Ariel was suddenly between them, pushing and pushing, hitting Marty in the chest, sobbing in a gulping way. Marty held Ariel’s shoulders, talking in an endless stream of apologies. While the couple grasped each other, she walked away. She could hear them still crying and talking over each other as she climbed the path across campus toward her dorm.
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The night he died, she’d met up with Billy. He’d been quiet, listening. They’d held hands and smoked cigarettes on a gravel path that skirted the art building. They’d sat on a stone bench and she’d complained about her advisor being a dick and they’d made plans to see a Georgia O’Keefe exhibit in the city that weekend. Their kiss goodbye had been short, just a brushing of lips, a kiss for the middle of a relationship, one to be lost amongst many more.
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She walked the hallway to her dorm and sat outside her door. One of the fluorescent lights was broken and buzzing. She lit a cigarette. Somewhere down the hall, glass broke and someone cheered. Ariel texted, ‘Why did you do this??’ then ‘Bitch.’
Two girls walked in and as one unlocked the door to her room, the other whispered audibly, ‘That’s the one who had the boyfriend who, you know. Fell.’
She saluted the girls with her cigarette. ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I’m the one.’
After leaving Billy that last night, she didn’t walk straight back to her dorm. Instead, she walked past her building, past the dining hall and the science center, out the north campus gate. She threaded through a few quiet streets, then turned back. She wanted to see the college from the outside, to view both its smallness and greatness at once. Her whole life fit in that space, but she was sure she could feel her life growing, swelling to take in more and more possibility. She was going to have a large life, an important life. She could feel it.
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Hadley Franklin holds an MFA in fiction from New York University’s Creative Writing Program. Her stories have been published in Cagibi, Joyland, The Boiler, Narrative, Quartz Literary and others. Her work was selected for the Red Light Fiction reading series, and her writing has been nominated for a Best of the Net award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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