Transfiguration

Ten

There are few places more cursed than a college library on a Friday night. I had been putting off a Critical Theory paper for two weeks, and I knew that I had to start it then if I was to have any hope of finishing it by Monday. As Caleb and Lilli presumably tilted red cups of liquor into each other's overflowing mouths, I toiled under the moody light of a banker's lamp, writing: The veil which Marx sought to pierce with his refrains of self-emancipation was by design the only pillar that could bear the weight of justification needed for such a radical ideology to take root.

It was 10pm. Even the librarians were looking at me funny.

I sheathed my papers and shoved them into my bag. I knew I was too weak-willed for the task at hand. On my way out I visited the restroom, assuming it would be empty.

It was not. The boy in the red down jacket stood in front of the long counter of sinks—except now the jacket pooled around his ankles like a half-shed skin. He had his jeans pulled down his left hip and the exposed top of his tush angled toward the mirror in an effort to get a good look at it; in the second before he snatched them up I glimpsed a bruised, raw patch of flesh and a smattering of angry red spangles. My eye traveled up from his hip to his back, to the swollen ridges of his shoulder blades straining against his thin cotton shirt. I imagined they were hot to the touch.

He stared at me, his face a stricken mask. I mumbled an apology and retreated.

I don't know why I lingered. Part of me was mortified, another part indignant that he would go about something so private where just anyone could have walked in on him. It seems deranged I would have waited outside the door for twenty minutes just to hit him with a "Dude, what the hell?" but there I still was when he finally emerged (recocooned in his jacket), his expression of furtive shame stretching to one of captive horror.

"Hey, I'm sorry," I heard myself say. "I just wanted to make sure you were all right."

"I'm fine," he said. "I'm more than fine."

He made his escape. Alone, I relieved myself.