Two Lists

Alexis’ hands fly across the keyboard. Even emailing her History of American Cinema professor about proper citations is more interesting than the class she is meant to be paying attention to. She can feel Dr. Verano’s ears listening to the rapidity of her typing—she is hitting far too many keys to be transcribing his circuitous closing summary, and he knows it. She knows he knows it. Even so.

Sincerely, ENTER ENTER, Alexis Eliott. Send.

“Don’t forget that you have a Blackboard discussion board post due by 5 p.m. tonight,” Dr. Verano calls to the fleeing class. Alexis swings her backpack up onto her shoulders and reaches her hands behind her neck to flip and free the insistently strawberry blond tendrils that are caught beneath the straps. Two strands remain ribboned around her fingers. She sighs and shakes her head, bemused, as she shoves out the classroom door. Two more baby hairs to add to an unruly collection that keep her hair from ever being evenly grown out.

“Hold up,” she calls as she emerges from the elderly, stony building that is humid and somehow hotter than the direct sunlight. Alexis’ sprint is disjointed and unbalanced, her backpack fighting her for every step as she tries to catch up to Sophia and Mady.

“Hey hey,” Mady greets her, not breaking her stride. “Sorry we didn’t wait, I literally could not have stayed in that classroom one more minute. I was about to scream.”

“It was fucking brutal, man,” Sophia groans. “I don’t have a clue what to post on Blackboard, like I don’t care about Aquinas’ relationship to Aristotle.”

“Just bullshit something about him being the Catholic Aristotle so it’s more applicable to religion than Aristotle’s pagan philosophy. Or argue something about Aquinas’ sexism compared to Aristotle's,” Alexis tells her.

Sophia shakes her head. “Dude, that doesn’t even sound like bullshit, it sounds real.”

“It’s a gift I’ve honed through years of practice,” she informs the girls. They snort with laughter and start discussing what they’re craving for lunch, but Alexis is already being drawn elsewhere.

She cuts in. “Hey, guys, I have to go, I just saw someone I need to say hi to, I’ll see you later!” Again, she bounds away, off-kilter and rushing. Sophia and Mady call distracted goodbyes.

Using her hand as a lever and his shoulder as a springboard, Alexis launches herself a foot into the air and a foot forward so that she lands in front of Eric, who appears both startled and unsurprised when he sees his aggressor.

“What’s up my guy, how are you doing?” Alexis asks, holding out a fist for Eric to bump. He high fives it. “Every fucking time,” Alexis complains lightly.

“It’s my thing,” Eric affirms uncompromisingly.

“One of these days you’ll forget and reciprocate properly and then I will officially be special.”

“Yeah, okay, sure. Tell yourself that.” She laughs, and his shit-eating grin, self-satisfied from the pleasure of his own sarcasm, widens at his success.

“I will, actually. So anyway, where are you headed?” Alexis asks as they cross in front of a building that is sleek and white and entirely incongruous with the one she just left.

“In here,” Eric tells her, gesturing to the glass doors. “I have microbio.”

“Gross,” she replies promptly.

“Exactly.”

“Okay, well have a good class!”

His thanks gets lost in the sound of the backpack’s synthetic material rubbing against Alexis’ shirt as she takes off again, hurried.

She reaches the dining hall, greeting the workers and chatting with Jared, a fellow senator in the student government, while in line for careless wraps that, ultimately, do not stay wrapped at all.

The metal feet of the chair screech as Alexis throws herself backwards into its wooden seat. Then she checks the time—12:29, a minute early—and waits.

12:41, Julia arrives. Her breath is even and unhurried. “Sorry I’m late, I was doing homework with Andrew and Victoria and of course we didn’t get anything done and I left later than I meant to.”

“All good, girl.” Alexis smiles up at her.

As she drops her backpack onto the tiled floor, unconcerned about the sticky, slightly blue stain beneath, Julia tells Alexis, “I’m going to get food, I’ll be right back.”

“Okay!” The word bounces off of Julia’s diminishing back.

Alexis’ phone is in her hand in six seconds, checking her two texts and nine Snapchats. But her eyes flick up every ten seconds, scanning for recognizable faces.

“Hey, Brian! How’d your test go?”

“I love your pants, Lily!”

“Gianna, I heard you PRed, congrats!”

By the time Julia returns—12 minutes—a parade of seven flash greetings have passed the table. She slams into the chair opposite Alexis; frustration coats her mouth and tinges her sigh.

“God, they take so long to make a fuckin’ sandwich, it’s insane.”

“I know, and they’re not even good,” Alexis agrees instantly, finally taking a bite of her cold and toasted sandwich.

“But it’s also literally one of the only edible food options on this campus that isn’t a burger and fries,” Julia points out before sliding down in her seat so that her hair flows like a sheath of black ice over the back of the chair.

It takes Alexis 14 seconds to look away. “Ha, yeah. But, anyway,” her thoughts finally come back to her. “Um, I have a meeting at like 1:15 so I can’t stay too much longer.”

“Ugh, that sucks. Just skip the meeting.” Julia’s eyes flick around the dining hall.

“Dude, I can’t just skip a meeting with my advisor.” Alexis’ eyes are static.

“Oh, yeah, that would not be a good move. Okay, so this will be a quick catch-up. How was your weekend?”

At this, Alexis lights up. “Girl, I have so much to tell you. So Friday, I woke up feeling horrific for my 9 a.m. because I’d gone out with Tori, Kate, Naomi, Jill, and Beth the night before and the Uber took so long to get to us that I didn’t even get back until like 2—it also cost like $65 which is ridiculous. But, I chug water and throw up and I instantly feel better,” Alexis throws her hand out to the side. “My personal trick of the trade. So then Friday I go to Hemingways with Sophia and Mady…”

It continues like this for the rest of the 13-minute conversation, for the rest of the day. Walking through the world with a million names on her tongue.

         ~~~

That night, after dinner, her single greets her barefaced. She always intended to decorate her dorm room with pictures, but whenever she went to print them, she realized that she’d forgotten to take any. The family photos hibernate in her desk drawer, undisturbed.

Alexis drops her backpack onto the linoleum and closes her eyes, standing in the middle of the room. Her hands cup her stomach and she gives herself five rises and falls of the chest before she lets her hands fall away and her eyes open again.

Then she moves to her desk and opens the bottom drawer. Inside are two yellow legal pads.

With both in hand, Alexis sinks to the floor, not bothering to go to her bed or even the chair six inches away. This position, kneecaps and shins painfully flush against the floor, feels right for the task at hand.

At the top of each legal pad, in thick, black Sharpie, is a title. 

On the left: PEOPLE I WOULD INVITE TO MY WEDDING

On the right: PEOPLE WHO WOULD INVITE ME TO THEIR WEDDING

The left list is no immediate issue; Alexis hasn’t even kissed anyone in seven months. But she keeps track.

Her eyes scan the two pages, finding the holes where the eraser has defeated the paper’s integrity, the yellow-turned-grey splotches which backdrop names that have lived on either list indecisively, the blank spaces in the middle of the roster.

There are handfuls of names that overlap between the lists. The names of her Mom, Dad, siblings, and distant relatives are pristine, having never been erased from either list, though her Mom and Dad will hopefully never make an appearance on the right. A few others rank in this golden league: Kitty and Jilly, childhood best friends. Ryan and Jackie, the few highschool-holdover-into-college friends who have never wavered. Alexander, a nonnegotiable groomsman. 

But almost all the other names on the right are smudged and unsure; they have been fretted over, reconsidered, erased, and rewritten at least once. It is only one third the length of the left list and studded with blank space bullet holes.

Alexis hunts, slowly, unwillingly, for a name on the single column of the right list. There is so much undefined gray. Despite her best efforts, some of those lost ones’ names remain ghostly visible. Sophia. Mady. She finds what she is looking for right beneath Eric’s name, which is purposely present but still barely readable through the fog of a poor and frequent eraser.

Julia.

The loop of the J is unobscured and the l is a clean slash. 

Alexis digs her nails through the paint coating of the pencil and into the soft wood; she never gave up on the natural tool, never made the switch to mechanical.

She flips it upside down, the soft eraser facing the page. She scrubs out her name. It disappears completely, no graphite residue.

The right legal pad is placed on the floor, gently. One less wedding Alexis is certain she will be invited to. Her eyes close. She places her right hand where her clavicles meet and rubs her thumb up and down, up and down the column of her throat, the pencil’s tip pressing into her jaw.

The left legal pad remains in her other hand, loosely, stabilized by her thigh. Both of her hands tighten for a moment, squeezing, before releasing their charges. The legal pad slips, creating a ramp between her knee and the floor, and the pencil is suspended by her hair and chest. Alexis picks it up again without looking, her eyes staring into the false, yellow wood of her desk drawer. The pencil’s bluntly shaved wood catches her hair and snaps a strand.

Julia’s name is in the third column of the left list. This one is cramped but clean. There is so little fog; so few blanks.

She traces Julia’s name.

Spring 2022