Free Paulina & Fran by Rachel B. Glaser

insignificant groups. Paulina sat frozen in her chair.
    “It’s actually really perfect. They’re both corny and have no instinct for fashion,” Paulina said. A muscle twitched in her face. Nils walked by, and normally Paulina would have shouted out to him, or at least criticized him to them, but she was silent. “She’s ruined everything,” Paulina said.
    “Maybe she’ll die,” Allison said lightheartedly.
    “She’d haunt me. Though she’s no great mind, she’d figure out how.”
    “What if you died?” Sadie asked. Paulina gave her a nasty look. “No, I mean like, then you could haunt her .”
    That Fran could find happiness with Julian was excruciating to Paulina. Fran was adding on to a project Paulina had halted. Hadn’t she mined all there was? She took her blanket out from her bra.
    “You still have that bit of rag?” Sadie asked, pitying her.
    “It looks like Joseph Beuys’s wolf blanket,” Allison said, “but smaller.”
    “This blanket was given to me by a spirit in the night,” Paulina said. A smile fleetingly premiered across her face before drooping like a dead plant. Allison rolled her eyes.
    “Let’s go,” Sadie said. Already they were tired of her again.
    “Fine, go. But I feel poisoned and might do something horrid we’d all regret.”
    “Like what?” Allison asked. Paulina wanted more of a reaction. She sat silently, depriving them of her answer.
    “Then come to the cafeteria with us,” Sadie said impatiently.
    Paulina refused. “It’s always crawling with freshmen in their high school wardrobes.”
    “If you want to hang out before the party, we’ll be at Eileen’s. You know the address.”
    “No, I don’t. I forgot it,” Paulina said unhappily.
    “You know it!” Sadie said, gathering her things. “Listen, stay here all you want, but lock up when you go.” Paulina gave them a pained look, but still they left her.
    She sat on the porch for a miserable half hour, the plastic bands of the lawn chair sticking to her thighs. The dread she’d felt in little packets over the last few months now traveled to her from a greater source, in huge waves from the town’s reservoir of dread, sending dread meant for other people, a collective dread her body absorbed with no immunity. Shepictured the dread like smoke or oil. Oil that turned into smoke. She felt like a ruin of a woman, like a cold, empty cave. She tried to draw up a life plan, but a mean magnet sat on her brain, preventing her from thinking forward. She was stuck in the ugly cell of the moment.
    Eventually, Paulina rose from the chair, stormed into the room Sadie used as her closet, and ransacked the shoe rack for the red leather boots.
    In a daze, Paulina marched downtown. Naïve bitch, Paulina thought, and pictured Fran laughing in Norway. Fran dancing at the Color Club. Too easily, she imagined Fran naked. Gather your thoughts, bitch, Paulina thought. I love myself I love myself I love myself, Paulina chanted to herself. Do the breath thing, get your breath straight. She tried to remember what it was that she usually summoned to keep her from crying, but instead pictured the Holocaust—the thing she pictured to stop laughing during a lecture. She made a sound between laughing and crying. Two flat-chested girls turned to stare.
    She was surprised to find she knew his schedule and in what classroom he was watching mediocre films. She burst in the door and they all looked up, squinting like shrews at the light. He was slumped in the back row. Paulina marveled at the weird creatures who had chosen film/animation/video as their major. Beastly looking people she recognized fromfreshman year hadn’t transferred as she’d assumed; they’d actually been holed up here, tinkering with buttons.
    Paulina saw that none of them knew how to use makeup, that the boys were clinging to their eccentricities, that the girls were clutching their insecurities dear. They wore big T-shirts and had stringy hair. Two of them wore