Workshop

Jasmine woke into her dream uneasy. Blinded by bright white sheets, she couldn’t find her underwear, her clothes, her hand melting into the morning sun. She panicked before sinking herself into the drunkenness of the dream. She felt herself lightheaded, weak, capricious, rolling and weightless. She was a signal cutting in and out. Undressed, she walked into an adjoining room. A dirty guitar chord struck somewhere and choked her. She was bleeding mascara. There was a girl. The girl was a small girl, gangly and tan. She came up to about Jasmine’s hip. The girl had all of Jasmine’s colors, all of her vampish parts. The girl was dressed. Um, sorry, said Jasmine, trying to cover her own naked body. The girl held out her hand but Jasmine had nothing to put in it. 

Jasmine woke up, naked in Kenji’s bed, suddenly heavy and with her stomach turning, to the sounds of children playing in a playground which must have been directly across the street. Kenji was a thirty-year-old corporate graphic designer whose apartment looked like a spread in Apartmento with its seemingly untouched therapist-office-looking chairs and a kitchen of martini glasses that looked like they belonged on the Starship Enterprise. His apartment was so unfamiliar to her. She remembered he had told her, half-asleep, that he was going to work. She turned. An organ under her left breast hurt. Alone and haunted, Jasmine found her clothes which had been absent in sleep. She considered stealing Kenji’s amazing cologne, but not even the spirit of mischief was about her. The sky outside was a gray color. There was no morning sun. I must dress, she thought, I must dress and leave and avoid looking at anything and get on the bus and go away. She was late for workshop, anyway. 

For a Sophomore psychology major like Jasmine, getting into Victoria Reeves’ upper-division creative writing workshop had been a feat not unlike getting into one of the many chic downtown parties where Jasmine could, siren-like, watch Victoria and her impossibly beautiful co-editor Jenny Lou Brown, as well as about a hundred of downtown’s most glamorous artists and writers (and publicists, and “creative directors”) bump glittery cocaine into their huge, drunk, jet-lagged faces shameless and fearless with their boundless “projects;” their bulging designer bags and their beautiful, flowy outfits. Is that what it’ll be like to be thirty? thought Jasmine, messing with Instagram on her phone under the table to edit a screenshot of her RSVP on Create Mode, so it would match the name on her fake ID. 

Jasmine spent most of her time perfecting the skill of burying the sinking guilty feeling, low in her stomach, that she was not really allowed to be wherever she was. Every semester at school, she hung her head with its fake Vivenne Westwood earrings in front of the scratched acetate window where the registrar methodically signed her scholarship waivers. Tuition, health insurance, housing stipend. Tens of thousands dollars, Jasmine figured. Despite the sign over her head in these moments which read “Student Life,” Jasmine didn't really think of “being a student” as something someone could do. When her father called her and told her he was proud of her for things like her grades, she felt like a middle-schooler, like her period was showing through her pants, and she asked to speak to her mother, who was always too busy to talk. 

What Jasmine really did, without being paid, was Instagram. She maintained a clean 3x4 grid which was mostly photos of herself: there she was in her favorite black lace dress, laughing with her friends in a popular dive bar; there she was comfortably mirrored by her selfie and bathed in the light which bled through her bedroom window; there she was or rather, there was her body, in a small red bikini, tanning on her friend Scarlett’s roof, her head obscured by a magazine. BLESSINGS MAG read the thick, uncracked spine in bold, serifed letters, EDITED BY VICTORIA REEVES AND JENNY LOU BROWN. Jasmine quickly saved her photo and closed out the app. 

Every single person in LIT-402 ADVANCED FICTION was beautiful. They were Victoria’s devotees more than her proteges, and BLESSINGS was an open secret: those who didn't long to be published by BLESSINGS simply longed to go to the parties— to be invited to the parties, to meet people— and everybody attempted to speak in a lackadaisical vocal fry like Victoria, or to pull off some nerdy girl-next-door look like Jenny Lou, who had recently booked an ad campaign with American Apparel.

The girl who sat across from Jasmine had platinum blonde hair with bleached eyebrows to match, one with a small silver bar through it. She was always huddled with Lily, who pulled off a lipstick look that was a perfect step in-between Marilyn Monroe and Courtney Love. Jasmine sat next to Scarlett, who shook a brilliant mess of curls as she clandestinely mascara’d her long, fluttering eyelashes. Though Scarlett and Jasmine had officially met in this class, Scarlett ran a small vintage clothing boutique on the Lower East Side that Jasmine had frequented over the summer, once shoplifting a Jean Paul Gaultier tshirt by balling it up and stuffing it into the pocket of her cargo pants. On the first day of class, Jasmine had looked at her and blurted out, Material Technology Archives! before rushing home to stuff the shirt into the very far back of her closet. Scarlett was so cool. She had priced the shirt at $400. 

Jasmine loved Scarlett. All of the stories Scarlett brought into class were written in ALL-CAPS. Scarlett and Jasmine were also, to the best of their knowledge, the only girls in class who had been personally invited to the BLESSINGS party. With a girlish comradery that almost tasted like espionage, Sarlett shot Jasmine a text from her macbook: Don’t tell me that’s what yr wearing tn. 

The part with the vomit, Lily was saying, I guess that was, like, umm, from the Abject, right, like we read, from Kristeva? I wanted to work in some sort of body-horror element. Lily was the third girl this week to write a story about her eating disorder. Well, not her eating disorder, but an eating disorder—ostensibly. Nobody said anything about it, and perhaps few could articulate it, but within the workshop a small competition was mounting for the coolest or most down-to-earth anorexia story. The girls’ voices around the subject were steady and smooth, evolved past the teenage specter of shame.

A robust cast of characters inevitably cropped up within each story, and a sport could’ve been made of piecing together the real parts, the real people. But the sport of watching sparkling Tiffany’s bangles hang off of everyone’s wrists was more intriguing. Jasmine listened to their nails on their macbook keyboards, watched the flatness of their gums. Once, at Scarlett’s Lower East Side apartment, Jasmine had rummaged through her bathroom cabinet. It hadn’t ever occurred to Jasmine to ask Scarlett what her skincare routine was, she just photographed the evidence with her phone. She loved to look at the crinkled text-on-packaging and type the brand-names like formulas into Google. One hundred dollars. One hundred and ten dollars. Sold out. 

Even when they had zits the girls in class were beautiful, glib regarding their zits. Their zits could have their own podcasts. Jasmine was learning a vocabulary— they were all processing “feminine rage” through the “female gaze”. Mostly they talked about movies. I love that you have this, um, unlikable narrator, like how the narrator’s such an asshole to her mother in that first scene, Scarlett was saying, so later when you get to that part where she’s crying and screaming and vomiting you’re not like, “oh I feel so bad for her.” You’re just like, “gross.” She said this without removing her gaze from her laptop, her razor-thin eyebrows absolutely still. 

A collection of heads turned to Victoria, who, after a sharp breath, said, no, right, Scarlett, I think it’s totally important to consider how the relationship with the mother sets up this story, right? But a tired Jasmine lagged trying to focus and found herself, instead, watching Lily’s amazing plump lips. They were quivering. They were so beautiful, thought Jasmine, and suddenly she felt that she wanted nothing more than to have them. She wanted to watch Lily’s quivering lips kiss Kenji, she wanted to open her hand and for her hand to be holding Lily’s warm lips, she wanted to pet them, she wanted to hold them wet against Kenji’s cock, she just wanted them. 

X 

Jasmine liked to do her homework in the Philosophy department library because it was usually kind of abandoned, save for the five or six Philosophy grad students who made regular use of the space, quietly waltzing around in their wristwatches. They were tall, white, hipster-type men who usually had rough beards and wore round glasses and sometimes shared their cigarettes with Jasmine. One of them, Ian, had been her TA. Jasmine fingered the loose adderall in her pocket. She was going to finish a paper for Psych. 

Jasmine loved Adderall. Playing music in her headphones, Jasmine loved to type on her laptop, get up to grab bottle of water, type on her laptop, get up to smoke a cigarette with Ian, type on her laptop, get up to run over to the japanese grocery store across the street and buy penny candy, type on her laptop, get up to use the bathroom. Jasmine loved Adderall. Adderall made her pee so much. And Jasmine’s favorite part of the library was the bathroom. The strange architecture of the building somehow meant that the single-stall bathroom was larger than some of the study rooms in the library, and it housed two separate long, deep windows.

The giant, bright nonplace that was the bathroom equaled psychosis to Jasmine. She pressed the palms of her hands into the backs of her eyelids until she saw a black-and-white tiled dancefloor. She had such a shit memory. As she was peeing she felt the searing blue-light residue of the words she had been writing, and began to consider what her essay’s next potential movement or reference might be, but actually convinced herself that when she returned form the bathroom to her little cubicle in the library, she would open her laptop to find that she had written gibberish. Everything would look like: eihkfjbgjlhijlj o ghkhgrl? Fehkdgjhkhag heoihgal gfjlkhhnlk. Oh, she would laugh, peering into her glowing screen, obviously. And then the scene would melt away. She had been having a dream, or a stroke. Ke$ha still hummed quietly from her broken headphones. Looking sick and sexy-fied. She listened to Ke$ha ironically. Because she was a serious writer. A philosopher actually. Wait no a psychologist. In the library. 

She had also been wondering if Ian was stoned or gay or suicidal or what. He had never hit on her, and he always had this far-away look in his eyes, one which she could never interpret until one time, at the reception to some art thing, she had been wine drunk and found him awkwardly standing in some hallway. The word flashed before her— melancholy— but almost immediately the look settled back into something unknowable, infeasible, something she wanted to touch like a child wanting to touch a real red lava flow but it is only a picture in the encyclopedia. Feelin’ good? he had said, outside with their cigarette. Feeling great, she replied. Or maybe even just, great, and that was the end of it. Jasmine felt the Adderall kicking in, kicking her heart, making her heart beat like an eight-oh-eight drummmm, she felt herself wanting to hunch and tremble, like there was an earthquake or something. But she just pressed her palms into her eyes harder. Failure is easy to see in a person. It’s more difficult to see what another person finds bearable. 

X 

Jasmine breathed the cool night air in hard against the vintage ‘60s bustier she was wearing as a top. Her thighs itched in her tights. She had convinced herself that this look was something like, “ballerina-core,” her hair was pulled into a tight bun and her face was glowing with her lingering summer tan. She wanted to look clean and friendly but her dark hair was always making her vampish. Boys on dating apps were always telling her she looked goth, meaning that she looked hot, in a sort of dead way. Boys were always sleeping with her. She was always sleeping with boys. Like Kenji, who materialized like a mirage right at the door of the party. JASMINE! he screamed, and Jasmine thought, shit, fumbling on her phone with her fake RSVP. 

It was only after her third drink Jasmine realized that, in the choreography of Kenji waving her into the party, no-body actually had checked either her ID or her RSVP. She realized this at the same time as she realized she hadn’t spoken to anyone at the party, not Scarlett, definitely not Victoria, not one person other than Kenji, and that she was currently in a car which was going back to Kenji’s apartment. She was looking at her own reflection in the car window, thinking, wow what a pretty girl. If only she did something. It was like: wonder if this doll talks? And then she remembered it was her. She leaned her head against the window and watched her reflection vanish into her breath’s hot condensation. It was so fun. It was almost like speech. She was hyperventilating.