Free All This Talk of Love by Christopher Castellani

varieties, as well as the full-fat milk she prefers. Under the table, her right foot pokes around for a while and eventually finds a home on his crotch. Th is part, the candid free-form talk of literature and department gossip, is his favorite, less predictable and enervating than the sex. Today she reveals that Professor Audrey Wang, hired to bring some diversity to West Hall, will apparently not get tenure, and that a second-year transfer, Max Bradford, “creeps everybody out” with his glass eye. She does not mention the Fanon chapter, on which he’s desperate for guidance, or Dr. Lexus’s memo.
    “And next week, I’m on that fucking panel in Chicago,” she says. She lifts the bowl to her lips and drinks the rest of the milk. “Are you going to that, too? I keep forgetting.”
    “No,” he says. “ Th ey rejected my paper.”
    “ Th e gothic thing?”
    “Yeah. It’s not done, so—”
    “ Th ey’re idiots,” she says. “I’ll take a half-baked Frankie Grasso paper over their overwrought bullshit any day.” She smiles. “You’re lucky, though. Now you won’t have to go. I’ll end up writing my talk on the plane like I did last year.”
    “It would have been good for my CV,” he ventures. “And it looks like a fairly decent lineup.”
    She shrugs. “I guess. To me it reads like yesterday’s news.”
    “Still,” he says, “I’ve never been, so I guess I have a glamorous notion.”
    “Oh yes, it’s terribly glamorous,” she says, laughing. “Pasty-faced English types in vintage suits sucking down cocktails, holding court on uninspired and irrelevant ideas. If they weren’t so blatantly insecure, you’d hate them for their arrogance. Instead you just feel sorry for them, and for yourself—because all the shit you talk about them goes double for you.” She reaches back, puts her hair in a ponytail, and suddenly looks a decade younger. Frankie’s age, give or take a few years. “ Th at’s what you have to look forward to, my darling.”
    “Still,” he says again, “it’s the life of the mind.”
    “ Th at it is,” she says, with the feigned earnestness of a shrink. She digs her foot in deeper between his legs. “But the body is more honest.”
    “Honesty’s overrated,” he says. He thinks a moment. “No—not just that. Th at’s too glib. I think honesty might in fact be the ultimate red herring. It’s nothing beyond the literal—”
    She’s making an anxious face. “Can I be honest with you now?” she interrupts.
    He looks at her. She has a wide, flat nose and a jaw almost manly in its severity but the smoothest skin his lips have ever kissed. Th ere is a tiny hole in her right eyebrow where she sometimes wears a silver ring, and the faintest shadow of hair on one side above her upper lip. She is beautiful in an unexpected way, like the angry little sister of the homecoming queen, and sometimes Frankie wonders if her rebelliousness is as put on as her jewelry.
    “Why not,” he says. Sunlight streams in from the blinds in the window above the sink, striping her skin.
    “I’m really sorry,” she says, squinting. “But don’t count on that fellowship.”
    TH E TWINS’ PARTY—ANOTHER party! Because isn’t life just a string of parties with dead air in between?—was Prima’s idea. She planned it before the confirmation, when she noticed that Matt and Zach’s twentieth birthdays fell on a Saturday. Th ey’d go out and drink illegally that night, anyway, so what was the harm in having them and their friends drive out from Penn State to her house, where she could supervise and the cops couldn’t bust them? Also, Zach didn’t need another arrest on his record.
    Th at first violation was just underage drinking, not DUI. Th e Buckley boys love their lives too much to drive drunk. In case their friends don’t love their lives, though, Prima greets each of the drivers at the front door and puts their keys into a locked drawer in the master bedroom. She’s already