You could call this col­lege a com­mu­nity. If com­mu­nity meant that we were all in­fants to­gether, des­per­ately seek­ing a mother’s breast to suck. It was the cheap­est for­mula we could find.

It was a nat­ural fit for me and my sib­lings: we were home schooled from the start. We had sucked the life out of our mother through a cord, lis­ten­ing to her read­ing and swim­ming in her am­ni­otic fluid. We had sucked at her breast while she dreamed up The Great­est Home Ed­u­ca­tion Any­one Has Ever Had, sucked up all she had to teach about proper hand­writ­ing and man­ners and the Great De­pres­sion. We sucked our thumbs vis­it­ing all the major Civil War bat­tle­fields east of the Mis­sis­sippi and south of the Ma­son-Dixon. Our fa­ther didn’t be­lieve that Mar­tin Luther King Jr. was any­body par­tic­u­larly vir­tu­ous, so we sucked that idea right up, too. I thought the Con­fed­er­ate flag was kind of pretty, and I didn’t un­der­stand why every­one seemed so pissed about it. Now that mother’s milk had run out – she claimed her knowl­edge ended at log­a­rithms – we en­rolled part-time at the col­lege.

You could call it a com­mu­nity. If com­mu­nity meant that we were all peer­ing into the mir­ror in the girls’ bath­room, study­ing the pro­gres­sion of im­ages, search­ing for a rev­e­la­tion about whether our dreams were going to live or die. The dim light of the girls’ bath­room cast our faces in a flu­o­res­cent sui­ci­dal glow. I began to wear makeup to cover up the fa­cial dis­col­oration. I got sev­eral of­fers of ret­ri­bu­tion. Is some­one beat­ing you up? I’ll take him. Just tell me who. The truth was that I didn’t sleep and I was get­ting grey-eyed from my gog­gles. Grey-eyed god­dess my ass. Athena never swam three miles be­fore first pe­riod.

If pre­vi­ously I lived in a spir­i­tual realm, sus­tain­ing my­self largely on books from the li­brary and the liv­ing water they al­ways were talk­ing about at church, I now lurched into a grotesque phys­i­cal one. Cig­a­rette smoke wreathed my face and my body fa­tigued it­self wan­der­ing around, pick­ing my way around the brown­ing de­posits of chew­ing to­bacco. I found lit­tle cor­ners of the cam­pus where stu­dents were for­bid­den to smoke, where I could hide and eat the calo­ries of an ath­lete. It was the boys’ game at lunch, to see what I had brought to eat. The old men study­ing there only said hello, only shook my hand warmly, only helped me with my physics equa­tions. The young ones saw me dif­fer­ently and I hated it. My mother lamented my boy­ish­ness. Why don’t you wear a nice top? She wasn’t the one walk­ing through the halls to the math and sci­ence classes, filled with boys and their wet dreams about being en­gi­neers and buy­ing big trucks. I gladly fled my house for early morn­ing prac­tice. No one in that pool was awake enough to ques­tion my fem­i­nin­ity.

No one ques­tioned much at the col­lege. We were all a bunch of ba­bies and we knew it. Look­ing for mother’s milk, look­ing for a for­mula.  

I found mine one day when I looked up to the board and saw a school of fishy equa­tions swim­ming across the board with sound ef­fects. Swoop wheep hooo, sang the teacher. Chika chicka chic­kee, that’s our as­ymp­tote right there. I stared. This wasn’t math.

Our teacher didn’t have a last name, so we made up ru­mors. We told any­one who would lis­ten that she had got­ten mar­ried so many times that she had fi­nally set­tled on no last name at all. So her name was just Val. Every­thing about her was pleas­antly dis­tract­ing. She looked like Lady Lib­erty, slen­der and grace­ful with a fat dry erase marker held high in her hand. She had the spirit of the Lady, too. I couldn’t un­der­stand a word she said but I wrote them all down. She was going to lift us out of stu­pid­ity, she was going to kill medi­oc­rity dead. We were tired, pim­pled masses yearn­ing to be free, and she was going to teach us cal­cu­lus.