God, Laura… she's so… pathetic. She's so clueless, sitting there, chattering at her computer with a baggie of bear spray under her desk. She's so ignorant, flitting around campus as though she might actually be able to save her old roommate, to make a difference in this cracked and defective world. She's so childish, her box of cookies open beside her, hot cocoa steaming, like sugar and chocolate might stabilize her careening Earth. Laura is so goddamn innocent. And I don't know what to do with her.
The first time, I don't even mean to. She's just lounging on her bed, and I'm reading, and I look up, and she's staring at me.
"What is that?"
"What's what, cupcake?"
"The book. What language is that?"
"Gaelic."
And then she's standing up and coming to sit next to me on my bed, looking over my shoulder at the book.
"You speak Gaelic?"
"No, I'm just staring blindly at the squiggly lines for kicks."
"Very funny."
I don't even remember learning Gaelic.
"I can translate some of it," I tell her, for no reason other than I don't want her to get bored and wander away.
"Okay." She lays down on my bed, and I start to flip pages. It's actually a love story, probably a written version of a spoken fairytale, pretty boring, but I start to turn Gaelic words to English for her.
"The… boy walked through the forest with his hands behind his back. He looked around at the trees and grasses, at the small footprints his shoes left in the soil. He stared up at the leaves."
I look over, and Laura's closed her eyes. She opens them when my the sound of my voice falters.
"Carmilla? You okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah, sorry."
"You don't have to keep reading."
"No, it's okay."
So, I read some more, and she closes her eyes again. The little boy wanders around the forest until it gets dark, like an idiot. And then, since he can't find his way back home, he ducks into this little cave, like an idiot. And, like an idiot, he curls right up and goes to sleep.
Laura's breathing steadily next to me. I think can't tell if she's awake. I stop reading because there's a dragon that comes in the next paragraph, and I don't want her to miss that part of the story, and I want to watch her chest rise and fall with her breaths.
Just like before, though, she opens her eyes when I go quiet. She looks so peaceful, curled up there on my blankets. I start to lean in, like I'm going to kiss her, like an idiot. But she's already turning over, sitting up, and bounding away because she's just remembered that she has to update her little camera people on her fruitless search for Betty The Doomed Roommate.
"That's a cool story, Carm," she says, as she settles into her chair and reaches for a cookie. "Maybe I can find an English version to read."
I stare at the back of her head while she gesticulates at the camera.
The second time, I absolutely mean to. Laura has a free evening, and I have a free evening, too, coincidentally, because I'm pathetic, and because I have a corset that I would really like to wear.
I also have a kind of a plan. Her last class lets out around six, so I light some candles for when she gets back. Smoke smells like light.
She doesn't get back to the dorm at 6:15 like I thought she would. Or even by 6:30. I get bored.
I pace and drink a can of grape soda. I discover that if I add blood to the last of it, it tastes like sugary, grape-tinted blood. I also find that it doesn't burn when I stick my finger into the melted wax of a candle.
Laura's still not back at seven. I get worried. I consider calling that beanstalk warrior princess she's always with, just to make sure she's not dead, or to check whether they're making out in a cupboard or something.
Laura walks in before I pick up the phone. My head jerks up at the sound of the door opening, and there she is, standing before me in the doorway, strands of messy hair stuck to tears running down her face.
"Laura?" I'm over to her in a second flat, half expecting my mother to be standing behind her with a knife. The hallway is empty. "What's going on?"
Laura looks down, away from me, and slumps towards her bed.
"Did something happen?" I follow her across the room. "Did someone hurt you?"
"No, Carmilla," she says, falling onto her mattress. "Just… stop."
She won't meet my eyes. I don't want to take a step back, but I do. And then I step back again to sit down on my own bed. I watch her, but don't talk. She wants quiet.
She's sobbing as quietly as a person can, burying her face in a pillow. The sounds she's making might be words, but they sound more like moans. The candles are still lit, the room still smells like smoke.
"Laura?" I say finally, because I'm genuinely concerned that she might be possessed or dying or about to implode.
She stops gulping down air just long enough to look up at me. She stares me dead in the eyes with the most petrified look on her face, like a great aunt she thought had long since rotted is floating towards her, hand in hand with a skeleton groom.
"I'm going to fail psych."
I stare back at her with an incredulous look on my stupid face, eyebrows raised, mouth open. "What?"
"All the- the videos and the missing girls-" She gestures towards her camera. "I've missed so many classes, haven't had time to do anything. Oh god," she moans, "My dad is going to kill me."
"Good thing he made you take martial arts then, huh?" I say, which was the wrong thing to say, because she glares at me.
"It's not funny, Carmilla! I've never failed a class in my life."
She takes in the room, finally, in all its smokey-candle glory.
"What's all this? What were you doing?" Her voice is accusatory, and I consider telling her the truth, but she's not actually interested in hearing the truth, or any other answer for that matter.
"If you were going to have another one of those study buddies over, I swear-" She stands up and tosses her pillow behind her onto the bed. "I don't need this tonight." She half stomps, half stumbles out the door and slams it behind her.
I sigh and start blowing out the candles.
I'm going to ask her out. Like, traditional, "Do you want to go the the movie with me?" type stuff. It's really damn hard to miss the hint there.
I make her hot cocoa one morning, which makes her look at me and say "Why are you being nice?"
I say, "Sometimes I'm nice, cupcake. Gotta stay unpredictable."
I read while she talks to her camera. I wish she would turn it off, in case I screw this up royally, but she never does, so I submit myself to looking like a fool in front of hundreds of viewers. And my mother.
"So, Laura," I say, walking up behind her. "I was wondering…"
"Yeah?" She interrupts me before I can finish the sentence, because she's Laura and she has Things To Do, probably.
"I was wondering if you wanted to do something together this weekend." I hear my own voice sounding smooth and calm. A miracle. "There's that… campus fair thing going on, right? Perry mentioned it?"
She raises an eyebrow at me. "You?" she says. "At a fair? Carm, you'd burn to death from the laughter of the innocent."
I'm about to burn to death from the obliviousness of this overprotected, sugar-crazed creampuff child.
I drop it, and we don't go to the fair.
I wander into the room one night, probably about 2am, and I see Laura's silhouette in the darkness, sitting up in her bed.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey."
I set down my bag and move towards the bathroom.
"Where have you been?" She says.
"Nowhere."
"I couldn't sleep."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She doesn't say anything else, so I go into the bathroom to shower and change, and when I come out again, she's still sitting there.
"Hey, Carm? Could you read more of that Gaelic book?"
It takes me a minute to remember which book she's talking about.
"Yeah, sure."
I rifle through my books to find it and sit down next to her. We pick back up at that stupid sleeping boy in that stupid cave.
"The dragon curled its tongue and thrashed its tail all around the tiny cave. The boy yelled out in fear. He ducked and tried to hide, but there was nowhere for him to go."
Laura's eyes are closed again and she's leaning back against the wall. I don't want her to open them. I don't stop reading.
I translate the words to tell her about the boy slipping between the dragons legs and running from the cave. He runs through the forest, small enough to dart between the trees while the dragon is stuck trying to break through them. He ends up running into a unicorn, which isn't like the sparkly kind of unicorn you think of today. It's the old kind of unicorn that's covered in scales. It's friendly, though, or so the boy thinks, until it morphs into another dragon.
The boy dies at the end. I'm not big into stories with morals.
When I'm done, I start to move off the bed. Laura's still sitting up against the wall, though, and I don't want to just leave her like that.
"Laura?" I brush my hand along her shoulder.
"Hmm?" She opens her eyes and looks up at me.
"You should lie down."
"Oh, yeah."
I'm still kneeling on her bed as she turns to curl herself beneath the blankets. She looks up at me.
"Laura?"
"Yeah?"
"Can I kiss you?" I don't know how much more obvious I can get.
Her eyes widen.
"Yeah," she says.
I lean forward until my lips meet hers. She wraps an arm around me to pull me under the covers, and I pull her head to my chest.
"You're cold," she says.
"Yeah." I kiss her again.
"Since when did you want to kiss me?"
"A long time, cupcake."
"Seriously? Why didn't you say something?"
"I tried."
We sleep in Laura's bed, except I don't sleep much, because I'm listening to her soft heartbeat and steady breathing. What a naive girl, has no idea how much her pulse matters. Lucky.