Jacob woke up with his legs on the bed, his torso on the floor, and his hand gently resting on a vomit-filled trashcan. The first thing he noticed on this fine day was his morning breath, which smelled and tasted like he consumed a big helping of regurgitated food, rotten eggs, and a side serving of ass the night prior. Every muscle ached, and every brain cell in his body seemed to be dead and gone for hours, their rotting corpses stinking up his brain. The only activity in Jacob’s head was the occasional drifting thought: what a fucking morning.
Over a long span of time, Jacob delicately pulled himself out of the complicated position he had gotten himself into and proceeded to crawl to the mini-fridge, where he slowly ate moldy oranges and some questionable milk. Even chewing was a slow effort that morning, a sign that things weren’t going to go well for Jacob. It was only halfway through his mediocre meal that he remembered his morning calculus class, which had started 10 minutes ago.
He was on the move. After stumbling into some pants and fumbling his key in the lock, he sprinted to class, working only on adrenaline to get him there. Jacob might have been able to make it in the room unacknowledged if he hadn’t stumbled over a stool and slammed himself into a table. Jacob had everyone’s full attention as he dejectedly sat down in the back. He hoped for the sake of the guy next to him that he didn’t reek of booze-laden sweat, but, considering the guy occasionally glanced his way through the corners of his eyes, things were most likely not going in his favor.
Eventually, his pores leaked out some of the toxins in his body and Jacob became more aware of things. The pains in his back started to ache more and more and he began to wonder—what the fuck happened last night? He remembered most of the party, some brief flashes of the street as he was walking away, but everything after that was gone. No matter how hard he tried to remember, it just wouldn’t come to him. Eventually he gave up. During his musings, his back continued to hurt, not with the dull sort of ache that comes from sleeping on the floor, but a sharper pain, a surface pain. He reached for his back and put his hand under his shirt, feeling tender indents going all up his back. He couldn’t stop touching the marks, feeling how tender they were. Before he knew it, he had spent most of the class period thinking about his back. He quickly stopped touching the marks and went back home as soon as possible to check it out.
He walked towards his mirror and took off his shirt, hoping this wasn’t something he would really regret. He turned his head to see his back covered in deep scratches deep enough to break the skin. If this was all, he could have felt at ease and wished he could remember an awesome night of sex, but it was worse than that. Underscored by the scratches was the phrase “Ally owns you” written in dark lipstick and scrawled all the way down his back. The lipstick seemed to drift down farther, so with wide eyes, he quickly pulled down his pants. There, on his right ass cheek, was the remnant of a phone number, way too smudged to be read by anyone.
Holy shit. Whoever this girl was, she was really kinky.
He took a shower and removed the lipstick, wincing in pain occasionally when he washed it off of a particularly deep laceration, but hours afterward, it was still all he could think about. Who was Ally? Why don’t I remember a girl writing on my ass? And what the fuck else happened?
Days passed and it was still on his mind. Every girl he met, he asked for their name, hoping that one of them was named Ally. Sadly, it was always Julie, or Katie, or Kim, never Ally. It got to the point that whenever he closed his eyes, he tried to get a vision of her face, sifting through the faces of all the women he had met to try and figure out what she looked like. Nothing worked; he only saw a flicker of a face that just as quickly faded away.
When he should have been taking notes for Spanish, he just doodled around the phrase “Ally owns you” like a bizarre twelve-year-old girl. What did she look like? What kind of fetishes does she have? Does she even remember that night? The thoughts whirled around in his mind again and again, but he still couldn’t recall what happened. He even went so far as to try and remember the illegible phone number that was written on his ass, writing down combinations of what it could have been and calling them in the night. The only responses he received were from bored, annoyed people who didn’t like to be called at four in the morning.
Weeks passed, and one morning he was late for class again—not because he went out drinking—in fact he hadn’t had a drink since the incident. This time he overslept. He crept into the room and slid himself into a seat near the back. He looked around for someone from whom to steal the notes, and his eyes fell on the guy next to him.
He was a rather effeminate man, with black shoulder length hair and a small frame. He was concentrating very heavily on the lecture, much more than most of the dozing kids, so Jacob turned to him and asked, “Hey man, can I borrow your notes?” The guy quickly edged his notes at him and didn’t even bother to glance his way, staring straight at the professor with a slight frown on his face. “Well,” Jacob thought, “that was rude,” but said nothing.
After class, he quickly stopped the man and thanked him for the notes. He just shrugged and, with a small smile, averted his eyes. Frustrated at this rude behavior, Jacob held out his hand and said, “My name’s Jacob. And YOU are?”
The man finally looked him in the eye. With a soft, sweet-sounding voice, he told him, “My name’s Alex. . . but my friends call me Ally.”
Maggie Anderson is a freshman?English major and a Literary writer for Generation.
