Deanna Roy - Forever Innocent

“Sorry,” Corabelle said. “We were all over the place.”

“All over each other, I’m guessing.” She crossed her arms over her neon green sweatshirt, one shoulder cut out to reveal an equally bright pink tank. That girl liked her color.

Corabelle didn’t answer that, and I had to force myself to keep quiet and let them have their tiff. When she stood up, I took her hand.

“I get it,” the girl said. “I get a little crazed over a new guy.”

“I’ll call you later on, okay?” Corabelle said.

“All right. I want details.” She appraised me from my boots to my black T-shirt. “They’re bound to be good.”

“Let’s go,” I said, tugging Corabelle toward the door.

“You two lovebirds going up in the tilted house now or saving it for later?” the girl asked.

I turned around. “What are you talking about?”

“The assignment,” Corabelle said. “The professor gave us a task to do in the house on the roof.”

“Somebody was in la-la land,” the girl said, and I really wished she’d just go away. “I have to put in an extra shift at Cool Beans, but you might want to get it done. They aren’t open but a few hours a week.”

About the last thing I wanted to do was waste what little time I had before heading to Bud’s on homework, but Corabelle said, “That’s a good idea.”

When we got out in the hallway, instead of heading for the stairwell, she went for the elevator. Several others in the class were waiting outside it, and I could see we were going to have a lot of company. “What are we supposed to do up there?” I asked her.

“Measure the angle of a photograph on the wall against the true straight line from the center of the ceiling. There’s apparently a chandelier that hangs properly.”

“Can’t we just get this off their website or something?” I asked.

Corabelle squeezed my hand. “It’ll be fun.”

I wanted to say, no, you naked on my sofa would be fun, but we were surrounded by students. I pulled her to the back of the group as the others squeezed onto the elevator. “Let’s see if the rest of them can get through it first and then we’ll go.”

“Okay.” She let me lead her down the hall and pull her around a corner that ended abruptly in a doorway to a lab with a biohazard sign and more security locks than Fort Knox.

I yanked her into my arms and kissed her thoroughly. I didn’t stop until I felt better, less tense than I’d been having to sit away from her during class.

“Gavin,” she said. “We do have to carry on with normal life.”

I pulled her in close. “I don’t want to.”

She laughed. “You have that same whiny voice you got when you had to go home every night when I lived with my parents.”

“Feels about the same too.”

“You’re killing me. I don’t remember getting this sore before.”

“We never had a break before.”

She wrapped her arms around me and rested her head on my chest. I could have stayed there for hours, but the locks behind us began to turn, and we had to step out of our secret alcove to let a harried-looking student dash by.

“We should probably head up,” Corabelle said.

I sighed. “Okay. I still think we can get the answer somewhere else.”

“You didn’t pay a lick of attention in class, did you?”

“How could I, when you were sitting so close, naked under all those clothes?”

Corabelle smiled, and once again I wanted to revel in it, seeing her happy again. I vowed never to do anything to take that smile from her. Maybe I could do a reversal on the vasectomy somewhere down the line without telling her. It would work. I would make it work. She didn’t even have to know what I had done.

We punched the button to the elevator, and I was pleased to see it empty when it opened. I held her close as we ascended to the roof garden. The tilted house was part art experiment, part joke, depending on who you asked. It had been installed a year ago and made a big splash in the student papers. I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but you couldn’t help but notice the little blue building if you looked up, hanging off the roof like it might fall with the slightest breeze.

“Have you been up here before?” Corabelle asked as the doors slid open.

“Nope.”

“Good.” We stepped out into the hall. A dozen or so students were waiting to get in to go down. I recognized a couple from the row in front of me. “27 degrees,” a tall guy in a hipster fedora said.

“I got 28,” countered a girl.

“It’s 27,” said another girl.

“I say let’s go with 27 and head out,” I said to Corabelle.

She shook her head and tugged on my arm, past the growing horde and through the glass doors.

The garden was still blooming, chaotic with flowers and bees, and a few straggling students who were all saying, “27 degrees, don’t bother measuring” and moving back up the path.

We waited by a pair of Adirondack chairs for the rest of them to move through and walked up the steps to the house. Inside, a woman with a badge led an older couple around the small interior room. “Sorry about the crowd,” she told them. “Sometimes professors require their students to come up here.”

“What are those blue flowers by the door?” the woman asked, and the three of them stepped outside the house to look.

I pulled Corabelle into the corner by the fireplace, catching her as she stumbled into me. “This is very disorienting,” she said.

The floor was slanted, and the walls were at opposite angles, the pictures hanging to complete the unsettling sense that you were the one off-center. Corabelle clutched my arm. “Are you feeling sick?”

“It’s strange.” My head couldn’t quite wrap around the disconnect between the tilted floors and slanted walls and the way my body tried to hold itself.

“Look up at the chandelier,” she said, still trying to find her footing.

I pulled her closer and examined the metal loops hanging from the apex of the ceiling. Seeing a straight line that matched what my brain said was up and down calmed the sensation that I was falling sideways.

“It’s like finding true north,” Corabelle said.

We still held on to each other as though we were lashed to a ship’s mast in a storm, but she no longer seemed like she was going to fall. I knew if we looked anywhere else, to the sides, or down, or even straight ahead to the door, we’d lose our balance again. But as long as we focused on the right spot, the world was manageable.

The tour guide stepped through the door. “It’s calming, isn’t it? Some people actually feel sick inside here, like the last poor couple. But if you just stare at the chandelier, you find peace within your discomfort.”

“Who built this?” Corabelle asked.

“It was installed by Do Ho Suh, an artist from Korea,” the woman said. “He wanted others to feel the disorientation that he felt coming to a new country.”

“It certainly works,” Corabelle said. Now that she had looked away from the chandelier, she gripped me hard, already starting to sway. “Do you get used to it?”

“I only volunteer here once every two weeks, so I have to adjust all over again every time. After about half an hour, I can manage. Are you here for the assignment?”

“Yes,” Corabelle said.

“The picture your professor wants you to measure is that one.” She pointed to an image of a baby, allegedly one of the deans.

Corabelle tried to step toward it and stumbled into me. I managed to catch her, but my stomach began to turn. The angled walls seemed to be falling inward. I tried staring at the floor, but the position of my feet made the confusion in my brain hit a fever pitch.

I wanted out of there, back to normal ground, where I could control things again. Screw the assignment. “Come on, Corabelle,” I said. “It looks like 27 degrees to me.”

The guide looked displeased with us, and Corabelle almost protested. But when she turned to me, something in my face changed her mind. She just said, “Thank you” to the guide as I led her out.

Once we were back on a level surface, I expelled a huge breath. “Not my thing,” I said. “Thanks for not being the usual you and insisting we do the assignment the right way.”

“You were turning kind of green.” She squeezed my arm.

I glanced back at the house. It seemed perfectly normal from the outside, well, other than the fact that it teetered on the edge of an eight-story building. Funny how something so ordinary could knock you sideways.

We reentered the hallway and waited for the elevator. “Can I make dinner for you tonight?”

“Since when do you cook?”

“I’ve got the internet. I can figure it out.”

Corabelle harrumphed. “I’ve got to see this. When do you get off?”

The doors slid open and I pulled her close to me. “As soon as you get there.” As the elevator closed, I lowered my mouth to hers. 

“Girlfriend, you have to SPILL.”

Jenny hadn’t let me so much as tie my Cool Beans apron before peppering me with questions about Gavin.

The shop was quiet midafternoon, just a few regulars. Austin was conspicuously missing. He probably decided to stop coming. Jenny perched on a stool in front of the counter covered with little table signs. She was switching the summer specials out for the fall coffees. I winced when I saw “Hot Pumpkin Spice,” which Jason had threatened to re-nickname me with.

“About time we switched out the menu,” I said.

Jenny pointed a finger at me. “No stalling. I want to know everything.”

“We seem to have gotten back together, that’s all.” All sorts of torrid scenes flashed through my head, the car, the shower, on his weight bench. But I didn’t need to share all that.