  Ella Hart, the president.  Gretje Kooistra-Collar.  Adriana Bucaj.  Deah Ago.  Elektra Mullalli.  Natalie Dang.  Deah Ago, Elektra Mullalli, and Adriana Bucaj love pics.  Desmond Berger, folks. Desmond Berger.
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 Ella Hart, Addison Nichols, Hailey Ezeh. Erin Petite, Evelyn Goll, Elektra Mullalli, Natalie Dang, Zeinab Hachem, Melanie Delphina, Deah Ago, Reagan Spurlock, and friends prep for game night and pizza and Capri Sun.  It takes a steady hand: Hailey Ezeh makes her move while Erin Petite looks on.  Spoons. Only with Jenga pieces.  Kara Svoboda and Zeinab Hachem learn poker.  Natalie Dang, Reagan Spurlock, Melanie Delphina, and Leah King playing some Scrabble.  Addison Nichols plays some solitaire.
 Lots of new chapter members. And a few old folk. And one really really old man.  Gretje Kooistra-Collar takes attendance. Adriana Bucaj, Deah Ago, Elektra Mullalli, and Gabby Colombo (front, left to right) can't wait to share their favorite book.  Chapter members killing time until the real food arrives.  Slay!
 Executive Board Members (from left to right) introduce themselves: Ella Steiner, Gretje Kooistra-Collar, Erin Petite, Ella Hart (president), and Zeinab Hachem.  Above: Chapter members clamor to get supplies to make bookmarks.  President Ella Hart is in a zone making her bookmark.  Yuliana Kowalczyk, Zeinab Hachem, and Natalie Dang get their craft on.  Evelyn Goll, Desmond Berger, Erin Petit and Aryan Patel first for pizza.  Rony Korab leads Team Wordle.  Paddles. That is all. Oh, and Popcorn!
Wet Cigarette Guy, Leo, In Limbo
There’s a leaf on the carpet. It’s red and orange and smaller than the palm of my hand. It’s damp, too, and it burns the carpet a shade darker as I glare at the muddy boots tucked in the corner, right beside the plastic chair, green and stiff and, incidentally, like the flattened cigarette on the doorstep, stuck with crumbled pieces of leaf. We fly in on Saturday. The old woman next to me smells like cheese. From tarmac to town car to the snow-white hotel two miles from the restaurant with the best sandwiches for fifty, I indulge in the babblings of an American singer. Katya from Tina’s sociology class, Katya with the short red hair and the yellow teeth, says her brother is too magnificently depressed to be left alone in his apartment. He smiles when I meet him and, certainly, with a flash of a tattooed finger and similarly yellow teeth, I disagree. Katya’s brother goes by Leo, asking me, as I let the tantalizing effects of musical media drown out the slight lisp to his tone, what “Leo” as a name is in reference to. To irk something deeply pretentious, I say the actor. He adamantly disagrees, insisting on a more direct comparison to the painter and explaining his innate prodigy for the arts. Katya writes pungent poetry on an extra napkin. The Netherlands comes into view through an oval window after a lazy six hours, and it paints me gray. The one bedroom we’ve rented bleeds upon my shaky serenity. There’s an unruly stain on the cold side of the pillow, and I take the couch; the cushions are hard. Minimalism taints the wet air. Parking lot views and stark exteriors invade the window next to the serving-size T.V. and the loveseat with its color-patch avant-garde-ness. There’s a certain decadence to the fluttering culture that dances between tall trees and the minuscule Volkswagen three long suitcase strides away. Solace is the landscape. The Dutch know small. It’s a compact snow globe, flurries of cobblestone and the orange cat asleep in the sun falling onto the bridge of my nose like tissue paper stars. Solace is not, with the dim lamp on the side table and the worn-out copy of The Catcher in the Rye beside it, Leo. “Classic,” he says, mumbling around a pencil in his mouth as he turns the page. There’s a small, screaming, and crumbling part of me that wants to reach down his throat, pull his vocal cords out, and press them down like flowers between the pages of his book. Katya doesn’t talk like her brother. Her inability to find him intolerable comes off ingrained. Leo chews like an old man in a cartoon, big and loud and obscene. “You know,” he starts, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “it’s so crazy that they just, like, eat sprinkles on bread here.” Dinner is bread and butter. Katya had to meet a friend. Leo said we should stay in with his shoulders. “When I was a kid I used to steal them, you know, the rainbow ones. I’d steal them from the pantry and eat them in my room.” His head is like an oval, lit by the window and distinct amongst his presence. Katya only ever talks about being young in passing with vague details and a vivid sense of disinterest in her eyes. Leo talks about being young, I draw from brief interactions, often with a punch. The Netherlands dulls Leo’s auditory disturbances. His yellow smile blurs into townhomes and flower-dotted railings. I smile, now, and my big, all-consuming grin widens white around his head and pops it like a cherry tomato. The windchill dries my lips but I stretch them split like cracked concrete around his entrails of offbeat opinions and red knuckles. The Netherlands dulls the undying spitefulness that makes up, whole and overshadowed by the sun, me. “I’ve had so many of these tiny pancakes,” he starts and huffs a causal notion, in a cafe in the middle of midday on a Tuesday, “I think I’ll be sick,” he finishes with a suck of his teeth. And I think, too, he looks sick because when his eyes meet mine there's a gaunt twist to his mouth and an expecting wideness to his expression I grow a sudden distaste for. Leo laughs with his mouth like an ill hyena. Much of our time is spent walking. Walking down streets, through museum hallways, from the front of the boat with the exuberant tour guide to the back with Leo, discussing the intricacies of the canal’s wildlife with a stranger. Much of our time is spent in that dwindling space between observation and motivation that grows moldy when you’re on your feet. Two weeks are infinite in the presence of Leo. Katya smiles with her teeth, traces of plaque against an ideal complexion daunting, if not careless. The sky dances between buildings like a ballerina in a planetarium, projected onto the stars, swirling. Contrasts muddle my consciousness. I consider, with eyes on the ballerina in the heavens, that no one delicate enough to appreciate her could be Leo, infinitum, and maybe it’s a preordained, pessimistic tendency that makes my skin burn. I pale like a shaking lizard, mumbling about journalism the night before we leave, bags packed, and Leo says, quaint: “You do magazines?” I find it stupid. Though, a week and a half in, I find myself rather equivalently idiotic, so I let him wander the idea. “Journalists are always doing pieces for magazines, talking about magazines, saying they’re doing things for magazines about hotels or bridges or sad people in corners.” It’s ironic, I think, as I sit on an orange chair nestled between a perpendicular intersection of wall, right beside a lamp, and nod. We fly out on a Saturday. Leo tells me about his girlfriend, Anne, who really, with the way he describes it, isn’t much of his girlfriend at all. Katya sleeps. The Netherlands and its one-windowed, glossy hotel room leave me wanting. Acquaintances are, conclusively, bad travel partners. |
