do you believe in life after love?

Lorraine’s dorm was once a hospice. Wood floors, hospital fluorescence in the hallways. Decades of white paint smear over four short walls. She’s plastered them with polaroids of her girlfriend. 6:17 PM: girlfriend was supposed to call 17 minutes ago. Lorraine sits cross-armed on a rickety college-issued bed, art history homework print-outs scattered on her knees, phone face-down, black, and silent. Lorraine imagines herself saying tired cliches to her friends: “Yeah, this long-distance thing just isn’t working out.”

Lorraine’s dorm shares a bathroom, jack’n’jill style, two doors to one room, with the girl living to her right. Marina. A Russian whose masked accent emerges only in the soft ths of “the,” “thing,” “then.” Marina too talks often on the phone, to family. Her voice seeps through their shared wall.

Lorraine is a good student. All A’s, participation points in Socratic seminars for saying exactly what professors want to hear. She never falls behind on reading. Except this semester. Her mind, a trusted workhorse suddenly bucking reins, refuses to focus. Art history homework sits untouched as Lorraine waits for girlfriend to call.

Lorraine’s mother says: never do homework on the bed. You’ll fall asleep and never focus. Lorraine can’t sleep these days, either. So, whatever. Glazed eyes trace a black spot on the wall. Bunny-shaped.

Bathroom door opens on Marina’s side. Marina sometimes brings the phone with her, keeps talking as she washes hands, her sharp syllables and horse-spurts of laughter echoing off the brass tub. She’s hung up on her mother now, though. Lorraine hears mechanical bee-buzzing, an electric toothbrush. Lorraine knocks on her side of the bathroom.

“Hey, Marina? Can I come in?”

Marina mumbles “yes” around a toothbrush head.

Lorraine steps into their closet-sized bathroom with a toothbrush of her own. The girls aren’t close, not even friends, but sometimes steal moments of this intimacy reserved for lived-in couples and childhood sleepovers, brushing teeth side-by-side, spitting in one rusted sink, sleeves touching.

Marina combs fingers through her pink, chopped, chemical-frizzed hair. She’s what they call handsome: thick eyebrows arched like wingtips, shovel-jaw, trapezoid cheekbones, thin lips lined red. She wipes toothpaste gobs off her cleft chin with a fist.

Lorraine asks, “Can I ask you something?”

“You just did.” Marina smiles. A girlfriend taught her the concept of dad jokes, a loaded gun in Marina’s now-trigger-happy hands.

“Ha. Do you believe in clairvoyance?”

“Seeing the future?” asks Marina. “Maybe.”

“I’ve been having visions that my girlfriend is cheating on me.”

“That would be mind-reading, no? Unless you think she’ll cheat on you in future?”

Lorraine shrugs. “I guess. Though maybe that is actually what I mean. That she hasn’t cheated yet, but will soon. I see it very clearly in my head”

Marina stuffs her hands into Adidas track-suit pockets, rocks on her feet. She says, “This girlfriend, she is in a band?”

“No, she’s not in a band.”

“But she is musician?”

No: Lorraine’s girlfriend is a magician. But Marina had misheard sometime ago, and it was too late to correct now.

Marina spits white into the sink: “Musicians always cheat. Trust me. My ex-girlfriend played bass. My mother said to me, ‘This girl will bring you ruin. We are already poor, we can’t have you running off with rockstars.’ Well, I never listen, and then she cheat on me with drummer.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You know me though, I just keep rocking on,” says Marina, pinky and pointer finger raised, tongue out. Lorraine smiles.

“And hey,” Marina says, touching Lorraine’s shoulder, “If you are clairvoyant, tell me: will I win lottery today?”

Lorraine puts two fingers to each temple, eyes closed, head shaking, a cartoon of a fortune teller. “Yes, you will.”

“Yes!” Marina pumps one fist. Both laugh. Lorraine finds delightful Marina’s old-man vices: cups of black instant coffee brewed in late hours, cigarettes exhaled from an open window, lottery scratch-offs every Sunday.

“My mother says,” Marina continues, “that it’s a waste of money to play. But I think, if I win, the whole family will be fed. All the aunts and uncles and cousins that are begging us for money.”

“Is that who you’re always talking to on the phone? The aunts and uncles and cousins?”

“Yes.” Marina rolls her eyes. “All day, they’re in my phone, blah blah blah. You’re in American university, you need to help us out. And I will, of course I will, I love them, but I am here for me, no? To make my dreams come true?”

“You do have to be selfish sometimes.”

“Yes. You speak like true American.” Marina washes her hands. “Okay. I’m going back to my side. Have a good night.”

Lorraine feels a disproportionate loneliness flood her system as Marina closes her bathroom door. She slides one long sleeve of her shirt up to the elbow. A rash pimples her forearm. Lorraine runs it under cold water. The burn persists.

Back in her room, back on the bed. Her homework is a scholarly article on Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck, an automaton of the 18th century, alleged by the creator to turn grain into shit. A magic trick: of course a metal duck did not digest. Pre-prepared fake duck droppings were stored in the automaton's bird belly. The article’s scholar insists: the duck is significant because it represents man’s changing attitude towards God, for how could He be creator of all things if man himself could build, or even try to build, an animal with the same faculty as a living animal supposedly created by the Almighty, and blah blah blah, the words swim and collide in Lorraine’s eyeballs and she instead stares, unblinking, at the wall with the black bunny-shaped dot and Lorraine swears the dot has expanded, swelled to the size of a wild hare, buck-toothed, bug-eyed, spear-eared.

Lorraine checks her phone. No call, no message, 6:38 PM. She sighs, lays on her pillow, unwashed and wafting of dander. Last semester, she’d been good about switching pillowcases every week. Dust settles on the salt lamp glowing orange on her bedside table. A woven rug peppered with crumbs on old-hospice-wood floors, a metal chair with crumpled clothes: if Mom saw the state of this dorm, fits would be had. Lorraine sees the hard edges of all her objects — the stuffed bears and vases of dead flowers and college-rented textbooks with screaming yellow labels — as if they were alien invaders. She scratches a new crop of red bumps on her forearm. She stares at her own small face in her polaroids, bespectacled and shaggy-haired, beside her grinning girlfriend.

That polaroid: taken in July after high school’s junior year. Half-melted ice cream cones sticky on their fists. That date was when girlfriend did her first magic trick. Her fingers swallowed a coin, then Lorraine’s ear seemed to spit it out. Lorraine clapped and giggled into her shoulder.

Girlfriend said, “I think I want to pursue this, like, seriously.”

Lorraine: “Magic?”

“Yeah. Wasn’t that good? I think with a lot of practice, this could really be something.”

“Yeah, sure, babe.”

Brief passions often seized Lorraine’s girlfriend. Learning Spanish, then French, then Esperanto and Klingon, all to a first-grade level. Unicycling, but only short distances. Adopting a ferret off Facebook Marketplace, putting it back on the market a week later. She was tall and broad and long-haired, a barrel-chested loud-laughing Viking; hard not to be infected by her enthusiasms, no matter how short-lived. But even then, in high school, Lorraine was skeptical in her support; she suspected magic would soon be buried in her girlfriend’s graveyard of former interests

But she persisted. Soon all dates devolved to girlfriend rehearsing, with Lorraine as her first, tester audience. She pulled long lines of tied-together ribbons from her sleeves. She gulped down ping-pong balls and so many pennies. Larger and larger objects disappeared beneath her plastic top hat. More often than “I love you,” Lorraine heard, “Pick a card. Any card.”

Senior year of high school, as Lorraine cried and sweated over AP Art History exams and college applications, her girlfriend booked gigs at bars and coffee shops and retirement homes. She sewed a sequined purple costume, bowtie-and-pansuit, and hired an assistant, Jacqueline. Jacqueline helped take the show to the next level: 5-second costume changes, woman-sawed-in-half trick. A whole woman disappearing was much more impressive than a coin. Jacqueline, Lorraine couldn’t help but notice, had a curtain of horse-strong hair, a cute sniffing-bunny nose, lush lips painted red. Girlfriend insisted: their relationship was strictly professional. So what if the profession required Jacqueline to prance on-stage in cocktail dresses and stilettos, with makeup dark and sprakly?

After graduation, Lorraine left. Jacqueline stayed. She toured the state doing magic shows with Lorraine's girlfriend. Said girlfriend is now 45 minutes late to a scheduled weekly call to keep alive her and Lorraine's long-distance love.

The rash on Lorraine's arm swells into continents. Red Europe crowds against Australia. Lorraine scratches, and suddenly sees it so clearly: her girlfriend licking Jacqueline's red-painted lips, her girlfriend wrapping an arm around the other's waist, with white doves flying from the sleeves. She’d made a joke about clairvoyance, but this vision is far too lucid. She stands, scratching red ribbons of blood into her forearms. She kicks up the carpet, throws a teddy bear against gnarled wood. She snarls at the wall, where black dot becomes pulsating mass, a hive of bees thumping like one heart.

A knock on her bathroom door. Marina, thin mouth open like a wound.

“Knock knock.” Marina whispers.

“Sorry, was I being loud?”

“No, it’s joke. Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Lottery winner.”

“Lottery winner who?”

“No, joke stops here. I won.”

“What?” Lorraine asks. “With the scratch-off ticket?”

Marina nods.

Lorraine: “Congrats. How much?”

Marina tells her. A train ram into Lorraine’s ribcage. She says, “Jesus. Oh my God. That’s a lot of money. A lot of money. What are you going to do with that?”

Marina shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Wow. Wow! Congrats!” And then, Lorraine slings her rashed arms around stunned Marina. And then Marina hugs her back. And then Lorraine pulls back her beaming face, and looks at Marina’s string-thin maroon lips, and Marina looks back, and they breath once and smile, and suddenly Lorraine licks those lips, sucks the girl’s teeth, her tongue, and they are kissing, long threads of saliva linking mouths, fingers dug deep into each other’s hair. Lorraine closes her eyes; behind her eyelids, rabbits dance, mechanical ducks shit into magic top hats, and Jacqueline struts, beheaded by a magic saw and soaked in sequins, and when Lorraine looks again at the rusted bathroom, these figures still waltz behind Marina’s pink head.

Marina pulls back, folds in like a mollusk. Rabbit fear shrinks her pupils.

Lorraine asks, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to share this money. With anyone. I don’t want to give any to my mother or my family or anyone else.”

Lorraine nods. “You don’t have to.”

“I’m going to leave this place. I’m going to drop out. I’m taking my money and I will run away.”

“Good. Good! Fuck this place! Fuck these people! Fuck doing homework and waiting around all patient while everyone else runs around doing whatever they want. Fucking cheaters, all of them!”

“Yes! Will you help me?”

“Of course I will. I’ll drive you to the gas station right now so you can cash out. Get that lottery ticket and we’ll go.”

“Okay. One second.” Marina, wild-eyed and sweaty, slinks back through her side of the bathroom.

In her own room, Lorraine rips up her art history homework. She stands hypnotized by the black swirl sliding upwards on the wall. An annoying trill in her ears, a bird trapped in a computer’s birdcage: it takes several minutes to register her phone’s ringtone.

“What? What?” Lorraine screams into her phone.

“Woah, there. Hi, baby.”

“Don’t fucking ‘baby’ me! You’re an hour late calling me!”

“Lorraine, I told you, I had a show. I told you I’d call right after. I texted you about it last week, this week, and this morning, and all three times you said ‘okay.’”

“Oh! Oh! Your show! So what, you can make out with your assistant on stage and get to call it magic?”

“What are you talking about? I don’t have an assistant. I stopped touring with Jacqueline months ago, and even when we did perform together, it was strictly professional. We’ve been over this.”

“I know you’re cheating on me!” Lorraine cries, the words caught in a swollen throat. “I saw it! We’re breaking up.”

“Lorraine --”

Lorraine hangs up as disheveled Marina flies in through the still-open bathroom door. Her eyes are wide and lined with little veins. “I can’t find it.”

“Can’t find what?” Lorraine asks.

“The lottery ticket! The scratch-off I just scratch off. I’m looking everywhere.”

Through the tunnel of the bathroom, the girls emerge in Marina’s dorm. Packets of cigarettes shed loose tobacco on a floor littered with clothes, chip packets, chipped coffee mugs, jewelry thrown from its boxes. Drawers on the desks and cabinets sit gutted. The closet is emptied. Everything that once stood on a college-issue desk -- laptop, pencils and their shavings, a lamp, a lighter -- has slid off and shattered on hospice-wood. Marina stands between mountains of bags and clothes, a hand weaving through frizzed locks. She yells at Lorraine: “Help me!”

Lorraine sifts through jeans, shirts, binders of math equations, tins of instant coffee. Marina beside her also digs like a dog. She mutters, what the fuck, where is it, what the fuck.

Lorraine shifts to the cabinet. The wall connecting to her own dorm is a different color than the rest, beige and bulging.

“Why is this wall beige?” Lorraine asks.

Marina, emptying a saltine box on the floor, answers, “I had black mold on that wall.”

“Did they get rid of it?”

“I don’t know.” Marina pushes a few final saltine crumbs out with one nail. “I have bad rashes for weeks, you know? Then I see black spots on my wall. I call Buildings and Grounds. I ask for new dorm. They say, we’ll fix it. They scrape something, then paint over. I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t black mold make you hallucinate?” says Lorraine.

“I don’t know!” Marina yells. She’s moved on to her own clothes, ripping through the pockets of her tracksuit, taking off her sweatshirt, shaking it, tearing the seams. Lorraine, flipping through books of poetry, loose pages flying, thinks of that one movie, that one line of dialogue:

“Your first husband also disappeared.

“But that was his job. He was an illusionist.

“But he never reappeared!

“He wasn't a very good illusionist."

And it makes Lorraine laugh and laugh and laugh.