LAMINATION COLONY: Shya Scanlon

Handpepper stared down his trouble-student until her laughter fizzled out. They had a running beef. He knew she judged him. He knew she knew all there was to know about the material he taught, her parents some kind of brainy pair of mucky-mucks. What she didn’t know was that there was more to life than knowing things. Grace, that subtle beast, should grab you and not let go. There was style and tact, finesse; there was the “how” that no recalcitrant student, regardless of intellectual stature, would ever divine by simply contenting herself with the “what” and calling it good.

And what kind of a name is Zara, anyway?

Once he’d gained the upper hand internally, he thrust his real one out before him in a burst of unanticipated
desire to put Zara in her place. Now here was a girl with things to hide. He retired his sorry methodology with the spurious declension of a child dropping an uninteresting toy, and pointed at her, turning his hand then over and curling the finger back into his fist.

“Zara perhaps you’d like to come up here and show us your stuff,” Handpepper exclaimed, he hoped without too much moxie.

She looked at him, surprised. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been called on for anything classroom-related, and wasn’t sure how to act. She paused. The class, wrapped up in its own distractions, had been ignoring the exchange, but began to take notice as Zara rose from her seat. She did so slowly.

Zara Allen-Karuth had enjoyed a grip on the attention of her peers from the minute she’d first entered school. Her reputation preceded her. Kids would walk down anxious hallways and shrug up to walls as they passed her, not wanting to get hurt, not wanting to get any of her on them, whatever it was she was, had, stuck-to or snuck-from. Anything she touched was in trouble.

The aisle leaned outward as she made way toward the teacher, parting around her like a schizophrenic sea. By this point most kids had learned to separate fact from fiction, but there remained the autonomic response, the rubberneck effect that extracted awkward looks from otherwise low-affect faces. She smeared by them now with an almost whimsical forward movement. Zara didn’t quite know why she accepted the challenge. For surely it was a challenge. She looked into the nearing face of her teacher, his eyes burning, embarrassed and successfully masking the fact. He dazzled her despite himself.

Handpepper’s smile stiffened as she came near. He’d not thought it through, but found himself surprised to find her closing in. His groin grew tingles. Pepper on the palm. He came-to. She was standing beside him, expectantly, her long arms leaping down her body toward the floor. He followed them to her waste, back up. He glanced over her shoulder at the far wall, where there were posted those papers by student’s who’d made the grade, good examples. Zara’s were among them. She was his star student. They stood together in silence, eyeing each other, until a spitwad cruised by, provoking motion.

“I stand here in the circle, then?” Zara said, rhetorically.

Handpepper pulled another pencil from his jacket pocket. “If you would be so kind.” The pencil tip was carefully placed into the small opening. He stood back. The class looked on with glazed expressions. They’d missed it both times before, and had some inkling that there was something to see, but they weren’t sure what to expect. They knew only that Zara was about to fuck some shit up. Which was enough. For her part, Zara too was accustomed to blowing the lid off whatever she touched, twisting tassels into little whips, suggestion into something else. She approached the surface of things recklessly, assuming nothing impenetrable lay behind the curtains she loved to part. Today she approached the front of the class feeling oddly drawn to Handpepper, to his fragility, but not wanting to nurture it. He was on the verge. He just needed a small tap, carefully placed.

She hesitated. Everything was in order. Attention was on. Handpepper was rubbing his hands together slowly, striking a vaguely pedophiliac pose, and she knew exactly what she was supposed to do. She took a deep breath and stepped into the conduction spot, trying to feel for slight variations in her mood, her electrostatic charge. Hairs stood on end. She shivered. She closed her eyes. And then… And then… And then ball-all.

Eyes open.

Focus.

She looked out at the class, knowing well she didn’t have long until the light below their upturned faces pulled those pink cheeks back down, before their open laptops regained control. She needed something to regret.

“Do you have any questions about the process, Zara?” Handpepper, uneasy, had added a small rocking motion to compliment his finger wringing. Class interest waned.

“No.” she answered. Which was true.

“Well perhaps we could get on with the demonstration.”

Right.

Zara thought that if she traced her way through her life, even a small section of it, surely she’d run across some snag, some little sweetness she might use to power the machine. Wasn’t an insult given - or received - all she needed, some kind of guilty episode she’d packed away? She began back with an eye for the abnormal, something that might stand out, she reasoned, to someone watching her, someone with some sense of what might be something she shouldn’t feel so good about, something worth hiding. El Farto perhaps..? Nothing. She wandered back. Knuckle’s Dirty Dogs..? She thought of her dirty Turk, his eyes sliding down her face to the bare skin of her neck to her burgeoning breasts. She pressed them forward, affording a better view. She licked her lips, accepted the dog from greasy hands that stood in protest when she tried to pay. Still nothing. So further back, and faster. Her mother..? She wandered through their morning routine.

Her mother was always up first, having spent the small hours of daylight working her book into a frenzy of exclamation points and sub-textual apology, preparing breakfast, waking Zara out of her escape, waking her again, again, cold breakfast sitting on a table scattered with her father’s pipe tobacco and papers from around the world; she waited for ill feelings. She snuck into her parent’s bedroom. Rifled through the drawers. She knew everything in them already, of course. No secrets in this household. Her mother had shown her the dirty toys when she could barely name them. Underwear. No money. She walked back, eyes still closed to the classroom, and into the kitchen, where her mother feigned displeasure at Zara’s decision to skip the meal.

This wasn’t working. She looked back on these things with bemused boredom, surveying the events, the people in her life, with such familiarity that she had barely to pay attention to the task, creating as much as recalling, painting strokes over the pictures to amuse herself, make it glow a bit where faded outlines lay.
Further back. Two years, three. Her father reading in the kitchen, single malt in hand, pipe, and Zara fresh from a shower, towel-wrapped. He looks up, smiles.

“Zara have you ever thought about how you define yourself?”

“Dad,” Zara was not impressed, “why do you always sit in the kitchen to read?”\

“I don’t always sit in here,” he protested. He watched his daughter get a glass from the cupboard and walk to the sink, fill it. “Would you say that you’re more restricted or enabled by that definition?”

Zara began to circle the table, touching each chair as she went by, skipping the one her father occupied. “It’s a funny place to read,” she continued. “It’s so domestic.”

Marshal kept reading. “It might be, according to this, that definition actually mobilizes meaning, like
placing a dyke in a river. The water,” he looked up, “can speed up and change direction.”

Zara finished her drink and returned to the sink. She turned on the faucet and began to rinse the glass. “Not
that I mind,” she said without turning around. “I think it’s cute.” She turned off the water and put her glass on the dish rack. This was all very deliberate. Her father looked on as though she was setting herself up for a punch line, her body cutting through the room from point to point like a carefully reasoned argument. Ask coy question; make subtle remark; flirt. She let her towel slide down her body until one bare 14 year-old breast was peaking over the napped fabric. QED.

“Zara your towel is slipping off.” Marshal casually noted. He pointed toward her and tipped his index finger up and down, motioning for her to right it. He looked back down at his book. “So given this metaphor, what do you think happens when the self is undefined?”

Zara sighed. She let the towel completely drop, and stood there in the middle of the kitchen while her father read. She watched the smoke curl up from his pipe and get caught around the light bulb above the table, dimly lit, conserving energy but still running up the bill. She looked around the kitchen, then down the hallway. The rest of the house was dark.

“Zara are you going to stand there all day?”

She opened her eyes.

Empty seats yawned in front of her, standing in for students, and to her left Handpepper, briefcase in hand, was on pause in the doorway. He looked smug. “Because you’re more than welcome to.”

Zara watched him leave, then turned to the ETM only to find it cold, blank, dull as the bulb in her kitchen. She thought about her father, her idiotic maneuver, his response, and shrugged.

“Whatever,” she said, and retrieved her bag from the back of the class. She hurried back toward the door, bent on skipping the rest of the day. She had a boy to track down.