Free Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts by Courtney Hamilton

this metal?”
    “You know,” Julia said, “I’m kinda hot. Mind if I go for a swim?”
    “I’m not sure I have a bathing suit that’ll fit you,” I said.
    “Don’t worry about it,” she said.
    Not six minutes later, I watched as my naked mother did the breast stroke in the shallow end of the pool while simultaneously managing to engage two of the naked 18-year-old boys in conversation.
    My roommate was a 25-year-old graduate student from New York. Her name was Bettina. She was in the art school and had recently created a group show in downtown L.A. at the Woman’s Village with the Lesbian Women’s Art Collective—a collective she had founded.
    Bettina was the Queen of the Lesbian Collective. It was her subjective impulses that created the Collective’s operating rules.
    Admission to the Lesbian Collective was by application only, a review process for which Bettina had final approval. Only those who were militant lesbian-feminists—no guys (the oppressors), no flowery/‌romantic art (delusional), no make-up or girly clothing (slave garb) were admitted. If you were seen talking to a man for any reason other than necessary functions, wearing a tiny amount of make-up, or behaving in an “oppressed”—traditional female—manner, you were booted from the Collective without warning. For members of the Lesbian Collective, taking classes from male instructors was strictly forbidden.
    Of course, Bettina objected to my being her roommate. She called me “a Breeder” because I wasn’t a lesbian. But the registrar’s office told her that she couldn’t select her roommate by sexual orientation, and she either roomed with me or hit the street.
    Bettina’s show at the Lesbian Women’s Art Collective was called “I Do… Not” and was performance art about destroying wedding images—literally. It featured Bettina and her Collective Lesbians doing things like demolishing engagement rings with sledge hammers, ripping a bridal gown with shears, and smashing a wedding cake with their bare hands while chanting, “I Do… Not.” Too bad about the cake—it was chocolate. I went to the show and waited to see if part of it was participatory, like everyone would get a piece of the cake. It wasn’t.
    But one night Bettina walked in the dorm with her girlfriend, Wanda, wearing the ripped wedding gown and said, “Have a piece of cake.”
    “Isn’t she beautiful?” said Wanda, a welder in the art school. Eventually they all took turns playing the bride with the ripped wedding gown. Whoever played the bride got to take what was left of the cake home that night. Wanda and Bettina left me with the cake while they went for their honeymoon at Wanda’s apartment in Van Nuys.
    Except for Bettina and Wanda, no one spoke to me outside of class during the first month I was at the school, no one except for this nut on the Theater School Faculty—the dean—who chased me around the school screaming, “Hi Fake!” “Hey Fakie” or “Hello Ms. Fakie.”
    I couldn’t find anything at the school because the administration had decided that signs ruined the visual “flow” of the building. The school itself was built on four straight levels with two central elevators connecting each floor, such that the building could be turned into a shopping center, insane asylum, or a rest home if the school failed.
    At first I never saw anyone in the school. At most, I would walk down a hallway and see one person who would scurry down the hallway like a roach that had been exposed to light and would never acknowledge me.
    A door would open, I’d wait for a person to appear, and the door would slam shut without anyone materializing. I would walk down empty concrete hallways seeing no one, hearing only the sound of my feet hitting the concrete or the hum of the fluorescent lights. And it was freezing. Although the temperature outside could often go above 105 degrees, the building seemed to have a thermostat that had been permanently stuck