Inspite of sharing five classes a week, it took a while before he noticed her. But for a couple days after he did, he just watched her, in awe.
And then there she was, during a break, approaching him down a corridor, about seventy feet away, in conversation with another chick. Her over-sized army-surplus jacket was open for the first time and he saw her breasts, small but firm, pointed and freely bobbing under a sweater as she walked. The pockets of the jacket drooped within inches of the knee-high black boots her pants were stuffed into. Her clomping reverberated down the corridor.
He stared unconsciously. She had lank brown hair that hung to mid back and bounced with her stride, and as she passed, she signaled him by tucking a strand behind an ear. She had a thin-boned frailty and the hunch of someone expecting an explosion. Her skin was the hue of milk glass and her laugh-ready eyes were light blue.
Normally he would have settled for furtive glances and a nod and a smile as they passed in the hall, but he was only a couple weeks out of the mental hospital, and her attractiveness and his jarred inhibitions shoved him at her when he saw her after class in line at a water fountain. With her right hand resting on a cocked hip, she was staring into thoughts, and smiling. He got immediately behind her.
“Like that book?” he asked of a book by philosopher Alan Watts in her back pocket.
She turned around, after the surprise of his voice.
“Yeah,” she said, pleased. “He’s great. He’s so articulate.” She took the book from her pocket and held it with both hands. “Some of the things he says. . . Wow. . . He’s too much.” She shook her head in wonder. She had bangs over an oval face with a pointed chin and an aquiline nose.
“I had lunch with him a couple weeks ago,” he blurted out. Immediately he cringed with regret, but he was careening downhill with no brakes.
“Oh yeah?” She was impressed. “This is the first book of his that I’ve read. I don’t know that much about him. I just discovered the cosmos a couple months ago.” She threw up a hand in happy exasperation at the overdue arrival. “Did you like it?” she asked, holding up the book.
“Uh, well I haven’t exactly read that one . . . yet. But I looked it over.”
It was her turn at the fountain. Afterwards, she straightened and stood aside for him.
“Where did you meet him?” she asked, while he gulped water.
“In a mental hospital,” he replied with a slight smirk of pride, then returned to the water.
When he stood up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he noticed with relief that she was waiting for him. Her expression was solemn but sympathetic. He now knew the degree of her hipness.
“I was a patient at Langley Porter, up at U.C.” He said it as if reciting the inscription on a trophy. “ Watts used to come around and talk to the patients every once and a while. Joan Baez came once too.”
He was confident now.
“What was it like?” she asked delicately as they slowly began walking down the hall.
“The hospital? Oh, it was o.k. I learned to play pool, and the food was alright. The rest of it was a waste of time.”
“What was Watts like?”
They had reached the end of the hall and he could see she was starting down an intersecting hall in a direction opposite to his.
“Uh, feel like a cup of coffee?” he asked.
She stared at him a moment, then said, “Yeah, sure.”
