Megan Elmendorf
Your ego dealt you a playing card That’s left you bleeding in the schoolyard.
Robert Knox
Love and War
I pull Penny close and whisper very loudly, timing the words between the hammer-head
drumbeats of the band's endless cover of Looey-Loo-ay, "Let's go back to the room!" Maybe
Miles and the Wellesley girl won't still be there; maybe they will have withdrawn to his
bedroom. Penny hears enough to nod and yells something back that I don't catch. I take her
hand and turn, but find myself confronting a blocking presence, his too-familiar face regarding
me with an expression I don't care for.
“Pardon me, friend,” he shouts.
He looks from me to Penny and wiggles an up-and-down motion with his index finger,
some sort of sign from the preppy guys' codebook I'm supposed to understand.
"Can I dance with your pretty lady?” he says, loud enough to be heard over the band.
He is not my "friend." He is the privileged character from a celebrity family, whom I
observed checking out Penny in the dining hall in the company of his boozer cronies. Up close
this prince of the legacies is average height, about my own size, and perfectly ordinary in
appearance, his features suggesting neither beauty nor intelligence, although radiating a
palpable sense of self-regard.
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