Eveline

Before meeting Eveline at Cabin F, I had to make sure my roommate wouldn’t be around.

“Can I get about… 2 hours alone in our cabin?”

“Sure, why?”

Well, I wasn’t going to mince words. He would figure it out anyway.

“Eveline’s coming over. We want to be alone for a while.” 

The reaction in his face was what most would describe as a “sneer”. At the time, I thought he reacted out of moral judgment (being Catholic) or simple disgust at knowing what she and I would be doing on top of the shared mattresses we had grouped on the floor of our cabin. We had grouped them together like this not for any homoerotic reason, but simply to be closer to the only source of heat we had - a wood fire inside of an old-fashioned metal stove, complete with metal pipe and chimney. No, neither of these were the reason for his negative reaction. He was simply jealous.

I don’t remember how she came to me, or if I went to her cabin to let her know we could meet in private, but I do know that I had to make sure the wood stove in Cabin F was working by the time she was there.

There were a few different tricks to get the thing going properly: some hand sanitizer soaked into index cards, the perfect ratio of dried pine needles, twigs and bark all assembled into a miniature prehistoric human dwelling inside of the iron furnace, esoteric incantations. What’s more, if you didn’t have the appropriate amount of airflow you were doomed to have your creation be a short-lived waste of kindling and time, plunging you into a frustrating and cold evening of repeated attempts at heating your living space while assignment deadlines loomed. And by cold, I mean fucking cold, since the school’s property was located way out in the “foothills of the Sierras” as all of their promotional materials proclaimed. 

On the flipside, if you stoked the fire too much you would find yourself in a glowing sweat lodge, the heat only further accentuating the general atmosphere of libidinal psychosis that dominated the daily lives of the student population.

The inhabitants of Cabin F regularly made this mistake, feeding ever-larger pieces of wood into the mouth of the stove and staring stupidly at its hypnotic glow. Fully clothed yet mentally orgiastic séances conjured bizarre and poetic fervor within us and our visitors. There was the skinny 16-year-old who had already proclaimed herself a nymphomaniac, or the buxom but thick-headed crush of my cabin mate (who sadly required extensive assistance in interpreting the romantic verses he penned in her honor), or, when we were in her good graces, Eveline.

The interns, college-aged employees of the school who were meant to act as moral and academic role models for the students (despite the very minor age difference between the two groups), always showed suspicion surrounding our late-night behavior during their “lights-out!” check-ins as they smelled the commingling of pheromones, cheap wine, and vaginal fluids accompanied by cultic 12-string and eerie bellchimes. 

But don’t you know

God is disabled

He’s disabled

He’s disabled

Clouds may gather

All around you

But he’s disabled,

He’s disabled

The words only gained meaning much later.

If they had been determined to fuck us over, the interns could have easily proved we were breaking a host of school rules, but they didn’t want to. We were 16, 17, 18… not much younger than them. Again, the small difference in age between students and school interns worked to undermine the hierarchy on campus and cause other, more prickly, issues. My cabin mate knew this too well, having accidentally spotted one of the female interns, Janelle, taking off her clothes in the woods to take a piss. She saw him, looked straight into his eyes, smiled, and continued to remove her underwear as he watched.

He spent the better part of the following months dreaming of her, criticizing her neuroses, aching to fuck her, or marveling at her clunky intelligence and bookish charm. In reality, the poor guy never had a chance, but it was well known that intern/student relationships had blossomed in years gone by. That isn’t to say he was unlucky with women. In fact, Eveline knew how close he and I had become, and tried to stir up shit by coming onto him during one of the many school trips that were part of the program. He was more than game, but unfortunately for him the entire student body was sleeping in the same room, preventing anything beyond frantic, paranoid groping. Unfortunately for her, he only related the incident to me a decade later, rendering the operation unsuccessful. But I didn’t need to fell into a jealousy trap in order to want her.

She wore a short black dress showing off her neck and decolletage (a word she taught me, proudly and truthfully explaining that hers was exceptional). She had small, round breasts and dirty blonde hair, tangled, messy and beautiful, but I couldn’t admire it for long. The sun was setting, and I drew the blinds to make sure no one could see what was going on inside Cabin F. 

I was smooth, not by practice but by accident, and I put on the same music we had shared when we first began to talk, when we first began to feel close, when it seemed like we could truly have something more together. 

Don’t I know you

Better than the rest?

All deception,

All deception

From you

Slide guitar, electric organ and drum machine; wood popping, hissing. We fucked on the combined mattresses in every imaginable configuration and what seemed to my teenage brain like a very long time. She couldn’t finish. I took off the condom and came in her mouth. She swallowed, not because she loved me, but because it was the most convenient option. We relaxed for a while. No one said “I love you” or “I care for you.” The fire kept going. I had set the vents just right.