The Freshman Ch. 13

Once she had her model in the right mood, Suzanne pressed the play button on an old cassette player to fill the room with the sound of New Age instrumental music that featured fast drumming. Cecilia quickly got into the spirit of Suzanne's selection, imagining herself dancing naked in the tropics below a full moon at midnight. She danced passionately on the backdrop, only vaguely aware of the click-click-click of the camera.

Suzanne rapidly took pictures, reloaded film into her camera, and adjusted the lighting. She worked feverishly, but knew better than to interrupt her subject and risk spoiling her concentration. As a result, she missed some good shots, but got plenty of others. After the fast drum-piece ended, Suzanne switched to a much slower piece, hoping Cecilia could make the change from dancing to a fast piece of music to dancing more slowly. Switching music worked with some models, but not with others. With Cecilia it worked just fine. Cecilia moved slowly and passionately in front of her photographer, now completely distracted and not paying attention to her surroundings at all.

Within 40 minutes Suzanne had shot several rolls of film on her new model, who now stood in front of her exhausted and sweaty. The spell lifted, leaving the Dominican shaken that she had been able to surrender herself so completely to her friend's camera. As Suzanne unloaded the final roll of film from her camera, she was very satisfied with her new friend's performance. Cecilia continued to stand against the backdrop, catching her breath and sorry to see the modeling session end. Yes, this was something she truly had enjoyed.

She could see why Jason enjoyed modeling for the art department, but she was convinced modeling for a photographer and being able to move about with passion had been much more fun than anything Jason had done to date in the art classes. She definitely wanted to get him into the studio for some sessions posing for Suzanne. She wanted her boyfriend to have his body properly documented on film by a gifted professional photographer.

----------

Several days later Suzanne invited Cecilia back to the art department to see the developed pictures. Cecilia was impressed by the images' beauty and unabashed eroticism. Cecilia saw a part of herself she had not really known existed in images that were quite sensual. The pictures were so well done that Cecilia was aroused...looking her own body of all things. Suzanne gave her copies of all the pictures, and then did something standard for the profession, asked her to sign a model's release. Once Suzanne took back the release, the Dominican's body became an important part of her artistic portfolio.

The two women spent the next hour getting to know each other better as they ate at a natural food restaurant Suzanne liked. When the restaurant played a song by the banned group "Socrates' Mistresses" the conversation turned to the band and the fact that Cecilia had corresponded enough with Kimberly Lee-Dolkivna to consider her a friend. It turned out Suzanne was a fan of the group as well as was very impressed upon finding out about her friend's connection with the Danubian band. Upon finishing dinner they returned to Cecilia's dorm room so that Suzanne could hear the newest CD in its entirety.

Back in Cecilia's room the two women opened up to each other, sharing personal secrets that neither had shared with anyone else at the university. The friendship between them deepened as they discovered even more details about their lives they had in common. They were somewhat surprised to find out they came from similar family situations and that both were estranged from their parents.

Cecilia was much less forgiving of her family than Suzanne seemed to be of her father. For some reason the words "fuckin' bitch" sealed Cecilia's heart against not only the brother who spoke them, but also against her mother and her entire neighborhood. She had no intention of allowing anyone from her family back in her life, to the extent that during her freshman year she bought a phone with a caller ID function to screen any calls coming from New Jersey. If a call came from area codes 201 or 973, she simply did not pick up. Eventually calls from the two area codes diminished and ceased, and with that Cecilia made the final break with her life prior to college. She had not had any contact with anyone in New Jersey since the beginning of the year.

Cecilia talked at length about her family's apathetic attitude over her academic success and her mother's complete opposition to her studies in Chicago. She went on to describe, in bitter detail, the scorn and contempt heaped on her by her brothers and her female classmates year after year as she struggled to get through high school. She repeated the final words that pushed her to run to catch the departing bus to Chicago. The Spanish accent and bad grammar from her Dominican childhood came out in her speech as the deep anger in her character surfaced:

"They called me a 'fuckin' bitch'...my fuckin' brothers did, and even my mom. That's what they called me, Suzanne, a fuckin' 'puta', and I ain't never gonna forgive 'em! I ain't no bitch, but I ain't gonna do what they want!"

Suzanne, who was a much quieter person than Cecilia, was a bit taken aback by her friend's sudden display of temper and bitterness. However, the Dominican's unpleasant memories about her family matched Suzanne's own about her father. Suzanne confided the grim recollection of seven years of terror she had endured being physically and mentally abused after her parents got divorced and her mother mysteriously left. The physical abuse from her father lasted from the time Suzanne was eleven until she was fourteen. She did not go into details, but related that the physical abuse abruptly stopped, only to be followed by continuous verbal abuse, insults, and put-downs that continued up through the day Suzanne graduated from high school. Suzanne, like Cecilia, did very well in her studies, but that was in spite of, not because of, her father's role in her life.

Finally the two women finished talking about their pasts. It was quite late and Suzanne needed to get to sleep. Cecilia handed her a recorded cassette of the "Socrates' Mistresses" music from the latest CD. Ordinarily Cecilia would not have dreamt of recording her Danubian friend's music to pass out to anyone. However, she trusted Suzanne not to give it out to anyone else, and besides, "Socrates' Mistresses" was not allowed to sell anything in the US anyway. Suzanne departed back to her own room, taking with her the tape.

As she lay awake thinking about her past, Cecilia realized something important from her conversation with Suzanne. What she realized was a detail that, over time, would help her come to terms with her own unpleasant memories. It seemed Suzanne's father treated her with complete hatred and malice, while Cecilia's family treated her the way they did largely out of ignorance and the street's disdain for formal education. Whatever their faults, Cecilia could never claim that her family actually hated her while she was growing up. Instead, they rejected her because she was an outsider to the values and social demands of the neighborhood's subculture.