The Perpetual Motion Machine by Brittany Ackerman

I picture a muffin rising over its edge while baking. My jeans are too tight and my stomach hangs over them. “You have a muffin top,” Kenzie says to me.

Mine is purple, Jensen’s is gold, and Kenzie’s is hot pink. We’re all wearing jeans and Sugar Lips tank tops. We all sit in the back seat and make her mom the chauffer. Our theory is that her mom likes us, the Brittanys, the good girls, the ones who have never gotten in trouble. Her mom drives the three of us up in her Range Rover. Right now he lights another smoke and I toss mine into the snow and it goes out instantly.Kenzie Bedner invites us to Orlando. Right now one of us wants to stay and the other wants to go. And when he goes on it come summer he only makes it a few days before he blows out his knee and has to come home, back here, to Bloomington, Indiana, and we only see each other again next year at a party when we’re both with other people who we don’t love, but right now we don’t even love each other. Maybe the only thing that matters is the hiking trip he’s planned. The tutoring, the novel, the short story about the men on a boat throwing over soggy rum boxes, the friends at his house that stay uninvited, the tapestry of the mandala, the weed cookies, the acid he took last weekend. I watch him figure something out in his mind, a theory that he doesn’t need to be here, he doesn’t need this place, or me, or anyone, and he’ll be just fine without any of it. I’m ready to throw my cigarette behind me and walk in. He holds the cigarette in his mouth while he moves it. The door to the building opens and there’s a rush of warmth. We shared a cigarette out the window and looked at each other and didn’t speak. We left Woodburn Hall and walked down 7 th street back to his car and I sat facing him on his lap in the driver’s seat and pressed my back into the steering wheel.

He had to go for extra credit but he wasn’t taking notes so he didn’t get the credit anyway. We shared a red spiral notebook and played hangman. I think about the time we went to that lecture on thermal expansion and sat in the back row and whispered to each other. I can’t tell where smoke stops and breath starts. He says, “Let’s skip” and I say, “But I actually did the reading” and he says, “You stay then” and his hands are shaking from the cold. I still don’t know him very well, I think to myself, as we stand outside of Ballantine Hall. I didn’t even understand the reading but I want to go inside.

The Perpetual Motion Machine by Brittany Ackerman