The Parallel Apartments by Bill Cotter Page A

dug. The smell of grade-school summers and fireflies. Justine wanted a cheeseburger.
    â€œMimeography is a perfectly satisfactory method of graphic reproduction. Sit.”
    Miss Jenkins went to sit.
    â€œI have another lecture,” said Dr. Quentinforce Johnsonson.
    â€œOh,” said Justine. “Okay.”
    â€œIn conclusion: I don’t know how it happened. It just seemed… correct. As if it were the best, and only, thing to do: inevitable and immutable as a tide.”
    â€œYou gave me back. To my mother and grandmother. On a street corner.”
    â€œYes.” More students came in. The professor ignored them. “At that moment, Livia’s feelings were difficult to guess. But Charlotte, she was euphoric. She held you tightly but tenderly. She apologized to you over and over. She helped you up into the van. She was tearfully triumphant. She did not want the wagon. This was 16 July 1971.”
    The security guard came in carrying an old-fashioned overhead projector, a long, thick power cord trailing behind him. A small student wearing a Joy Division T-shirt followed the guard, pretending for the benefit of a girl swaddled from neck to Nikes in burnt orange that he was going to stomp on the cord.
    â€œI didn’t hear anything of you, or Livia or Charlotte, until 1988, when they said on the news that you’d disappeared. There was a photo of you, perhaps from a yearbook. By then I also had not heard from Betsey since 1980, when our lawyers had gone to depose her at ASH as part of our divorce proceedings, a juridical buggering lasting seven years. Beg pardon.”
    Justine watched the students compress themselves into the neat rows of the amphitheater like atoms of carbon. She felt a sudden lust for college, a kind of anti-nostalgia for the idea of elective learning, which she’d never had a chance to try. The only formal class she’d ever taken (apart from Darling M’Nabb’s) was a pastel-drawing class in Brooklyn, which she’d quit in blanching embarrassment after two sessions when she realized she’d brought oil pastels—basically crayons, in both cost and substance—when the medium that was being taught was soft pastels, which cost, by volume, approximately forty times as much. Nothing had since convinced her more that her artistic calling lay in the discipline of collage.
    But real college, like the professor’s class, not a $225 two-subway-and-two-bus-rides-away class in coloring, seemed pleasant, doable. Hot, even. Why Justine felt this way, after being told by a professor of such a class that as a child she’d come this close to having her limbs segregated from her torso by a madwoman intent on the piecemeal stuffing of as much of Justine as she could into her womb, she did not know.
    The faint odor of mimeography chemistry.
    â€œThe fire ants were bad in 1971,” said the professor. “They were bad again in 1988. And they’re bad now. Be careful, my dear Justine.”
    The professor picked up his satchel, and, taking each step with caution and concentration, holding out his dead hand for balance, descended into the pit of the hall to the stage.

IV
    1968
    In 1968, as a junior in high school, Livia had known four things about Burt Moppett: that he was the guy who’d nearly been a mass-killing victim when he was fifteen; that he was dreamy without seeming to realize it (which just made him all the dreamier); that he led a local band, Ye Moppe Hedds, that was based on the 13 th Floor Elevators formula, a sound at odds with the prevailing Austin scene; and, last, that she was secretly falling in love with him.
    Livia had never gone to hear Burt and Ye Moppe Hedds, partly because her slowly fermenting crush on Burt had lately grown intoxicating, rendering her shier than ever, and partly because she was too young to get into the bars and roadhouses he played in. Her sort-of best friend, Brenda Lathers, whom Livia tutored in