Camille Gets the Creeps

Camille Delamare doodled from her perch on the last row of the college auditorium. A bear smacking on a honeycomb connected to balloons with dangling strings. A cherry-topped ice cream sundae. The wall clock traversed its route in mind numbing ticking.

She flicked her black hair over her shoulder, her skin covered by the straps of her white tank top. Her bare legs flexed against the back of the seat in front of her. The professor, who she imagined to be Colonel Sanders in academia, opened his briefcase and nodded to a neckbearded teaching assistant slumped on a stool. About time.

The TA's shirt fluttered like a sail as he grunted and leaned to pass tests out. He fist bumped students with A's circled at the top right corner of their tests. After a girl with the last name Davis flipped over her paper, the next test trembled in the TA's grasp. Camille's handwriting looped at the top. He gulped and ascended the carpeted stairs, careful not to trip in front of the University of Arkansas cheerleader.

She clicked her black nails against her pulldown desk, her dark eyes locking onto his.

The TA's Birkenstock caught on the carpet, and he stumbled, careening against the chairs in front of her. She didn't flinch. She smirked, unimpressed. Serves him right for eyeing my legs all class from the corner. He beamed bright red and whipped around to the opened briefcase.

94%. Coffee and all-nighters for the win. She flipped through the test to the first sign of red ink. She shook her head.

"Parturition wasn't supposed to be on here," she said under her breath. She looked up and cleared her throat. "Excuse me, don't I deserve a dap?"

"Oh er - yeah - sorry." He rushed forward, his flushed cheeks matching the marker on the whiteboard. He stuck a fist out, willing his eyes not to sink into the swell of her cleavage.

She jabbed a finger against her test. "But #9 shouldn't count."

Her perfume washed over him, the scent of jasmine caressing him into a daze. His other hand fidgeted in his pocket. If Camille inherited any defining trait from her French mother, it was the power of her unwavering stare.

"Well... we... covered that in Week 6, I think."

She flipped her notebook to Week 6's notes, hiding the bear and honeycomb under the deluge of highlighted, loopy notes. *No childbirth questions on test* appeared in purple pen, underlined two times.

She finally fist bumped him. He fumbled backward to the professor, who gave the class a thumbs up as he left. She slung her Arkansas cheer bag over her shoulder, its red and white nametag spelling 'Camille' in cursive. She ignored the glances her way when she rose.

Friday meant a pep rally at the outdoor Greek Theater, and afterward the Hell on the Hill party at her sorority house, Delta Zeta.

Her BMW convertible zoomed past rows of intramural fields teeming with other Greeks. Bud Walton Arena's white dome emerged amongst the parking lots stretching for blocks. Her boyfriend had asked her out outside the north side of the arena the day she skipped out of her first cheer practice, flush with a white bow in her hair. Had it been two years already? Damn.

His pickup line still made her cringe. "Want to pig out on Mexican food tonight?" as he leaned against a bronze statue of the school's mascot. So cheesy. But so him.

She entered Bud Walton and turned left down its brick corridors to the women's locker room. Her friend Monica's short blonde hair bobbed from the basketball court when she saw Camille.

"I'm right behind you, Cam."

Camille changed into her cheer uniform, a white top emblazoned with ARKANSAS in red letters, and a matching ribbed skirt reaching halfway to her knee. She stood straighter, aware of men's eyes sticking to her toned thighs every time she put it on.

At 18, she flew to Ann Arbor and Gainesville for recruiting visits. Her dad begged her to stay closer to the family estate in Malibu. So in classic Delamare fashion, she compromised and left her family 1,600 miles behind.

By 20, her morning workouts and cheer practices shaped her into a college fantasy. Her hair spilled down her back to her heart-shaped ass that filled her spandex workout shorts in a way that slowed football practices. The Razorback offensive coordinator argued she was too distracting, eventually getting cheer practices moved to a different time, but only after Camille's coach, a bespectacled, handlebar mustachioed grandfather with an affinity for windbreakers, told him to "finally win some fucking games so we have something to cheer for."

The coordinator leered at her from his box the final concurrent practice, eventually calling the head football coach so Camille couldn't guide recruiting tours on campus because he couldn't get a word in to the young men, or their dads and brothers. One quarterback's mother requested a male tour guide because 'Lord knows my boy can't handle pennies and that girl's a damn full dime.'

She'd shrugged. Their eyes gawked at her ass wiggling away.

Her breathing quickened at the rat tat tat of the drums in the parking lot. She stepped in front of her locker mirror and applied her lipstick in even crimson turns. After fastening her hair with a pure white bow, she plucked her phone to snap a picture. The smooth skin of her midriff peeked out when she raised her pom-pom.

Monica hurried in. "Your boyfriend's a lucky guy."

"Usually," Camille said, the flash reflecting in the mirror.

"Aw, are things still weird?" Monica touched her shoulder. "You really deserve the best, you know." She paused. Camille pushed her bag into her locker. Her friend continued.

"He's coming to HOTH tonight, right?"

Camille nodded. "He assumed it's a Star Wars party. Oh my god his face when I told him no. Poor guy."

~~~~~

Wilbur Coffey squinted at the cracked screen of his Timex, but the 74-year-old couldn't make out the numbers. He dangled his feet above the hole in his front porch, its beams shattered as if an anvil smashed through them.

His bald head reflected the glare of the moon, balanced by ears that stood out like open car doors. He slid his hand under his blue Fayetteville Public Works jacket and scratched his gut, the fabric splotched with stains from working in sewers his whole life.

His house looked like it'd been decorated for Halloween all year long. Its windows stared out like voids. Oak limbs crisscrossed in front of the porch, dousing it in deep shadow. The greyed fence pickets fell toward the street like jagged teeth, the splinters begging gravity to finish them off. Specks of white paint hinted at their last paint job, well before any of the college kids up the hill had been born.

He sat on the porch staring out with his soulless dark eyes, eager to latch onto passerby.

"Don't mind if I do..." he whispered, stuffing his hand in his pants for his evening porch wank. Even the movement of a dog and its owner on the sidewalk didn't stir him to remove the obvious hand in his not so whitey tighties.

"That's quite a hound dog, my pa used to hunt with his." He stuck his tongue out between his missing front teeth. "'Course a good dog'll find more than game..."

The dogwalker tilted her head toward Wilbur, and from her view, she wouldn't have been wrong thinking she'd come across a Neanderthal or a missing link in human evolution.

"Uh- thanks." She pulled the leash, but the dog braked and buried its nose in the weeds. Pale cheese from a week-old casserole crawled with flies. The woman recoiled, pulling her beagle back onto the sidewalk.

Wilbur's eyes narrowed, lingering on her trim physique. "Trash doesn't always come around these parts... wouldn't want it in my house."

She hurried away. He snorted. Damn college kids. For all their learning, they can't even hold a conversation. Not like people used to. He stomped twice and pushed the door open into the pitch-black house.

He couldn't remember when he'd last paid an electric bill. Maybe when his mee-maw was alive. But there was no need since he snaked an extension cord through the weeds of his backyard into his neighbor's shed, past hundreds of holes he'd dug to hide his money.

He lit a candle and dragged his warped toenails on the floor. Every step crunched through the knee-high sea of candy wrappers, plastic cups, and grease-stained containers of chitlins. He could see through his entire shotgun house to his clothes hanging limply on the clothesline out back. All faded grey sweatpants.

He'd seen on the Johnny Carson Show how geniuses wore a single type of clothing to reduce their daily choices to focus on decisions that mattered, so every day, rain or shine, he'd throw on his Fayetteville Public Works jacket and sweatpants. His genius had eluded him. He dropped onto his sleeping bag and brushed aside a carton of turned yogurt. If it spilled, he couldn't see it anyway. Flies buzzed in the dark. He rotated the knobs on his TV.

"A limited time only! No more thinning hair! Simply spray it on and be amazed!" An actor's scalp erupted into a full head of curls. "Available at all participating Walgreen's!"

He rubbed his bald head and imagined it full of hair like it was the 1970's again.

"Hmmph. I'd be swimming in women. All breaststroke." He grinned at his joke and relaxed on the plaid fabric. He'd use the line on the waitresses at Denny's once his hair grew in. Something stabbed him in his ass. Probably the damn can of sardines from last week.

He clicked through the channels and licked his lips when a Razorback pep rally came on. The flittering light of the TV stop-motioned his hand worming into his pants. Most of the shots were of the band and a windbreaker clad football coach pointing his finger in the air and yelling into a microphone. Wilbur forgot his name - he'd probably be fired in a year or two anyway. Shots of the coeds on the cheerleading squad quickened his strokes downward.

"Mmm..."

His hands grasped his gristly cock as best they could. Decades of arthritis turned them into half-bent, misshapen claws. Camille danced at the end of the UA cheer line, her black hair bobbing amongst the sea of blondes. Not that he knew her name. Her white top with 'Arkansas' adorning it in red eased up her stomach as she slinked upward and rolled her hips with the music.

A line of drool ran down his chin as his cock popped out of his pants. If there was anything above average about Wilbur, it was the aged gristle that bobbed in front of him. As thick as his wrist, it'd done its damage in the '70s, leaving girls limping from his trailer at odd hours of the night. Fifty years later, its uncut length still dwarfed his hand.

Not that any of the girls on the screen would ever look twice at old Wilbur and his double wide ears.

To touch one of those stuck-up sluts... just give me 30 seconds... and I'd...

The cheer squad lifted their legs into side splits, flashing crisp white under their skirts. Wilbur's hips bucked forward, and he groaned, half from the agony in his hands.

"Goddam! Ugh, dear pretties go on for me, go on... Show off your bodies, your tight little bodies for daddy..."

A male cheerleader launched Camille into the air, her splits offering a glance at her toned thighs before he guided her back down.

Wilbur grunted. His erection throbbed and his hips jerked upward. Fuck me. Where do they find these girls? They certainly weren't walking around his part of Fayetteville.

"That's it, ahhh..." His face scrunched together, his tongue twirling outside his lips. White globs sprayed onto the television set and ran down his length in milky rivulets. His balls pulsed upward, shooting drops onto the trash pile.

His breathing slowed to gasps, his eyelids weighed down. As he drifted to sleep, his TV abruptly cut off. Before he could wonder if his cum had zapped its circuits, his neighbor's door slammed so hard it rattled Wilbur's windows.

"Coffey, you stealin' my power again?"

Wilbur slunk out of his house with his sleeping bag still bunched around his feet, only his whitey-tighties keeping him decent. The neighboring porch light cut out by the time his feet plodded around the hole in his porch.

"You making accusations you little wimp? Got half a mind to sic my nephew on you. Les fought in Grenada!"

He squinted at his watch, still unable to read the unmoving hands. His beady eyes rose to the position of the moon. 9, 9:15. Time to go to work. He shuffled back inside to grab his shoes. He'd worked 40 years for the Public Works Department inspecting sewers to earn his jacket. His odor permeated so vilely management forced him to scour the sewage passages at night to not interact with other inspectors.

In three months, on his 75^th birthday, management budgeted $29.57 for a cake and Coke for his mandatory retirement party. Check marks littered the unlit bathroom wall for every day he'd worked in the sewers. The wallpaper suffered and sagged under the 9,987 marks. And so had Wilbur.

He arrived at the bus stop below the stone steps of the Delta Zeta sorority house 30 minutes later, a walk that would've taken a normal person 10 minutes. He lay on the bus bench and dozed until a cloud of exhaust woke him to a coughing fit.

The bus driver tilted toward him and yelled. Wilbur stared at him blankly, only able to see moving lips. He fiddled with his hearing aid, jamming a paper clip in it, the device screeching like a bat out of hell.

"Gramps, gotta tell you something, hurry up down there!"

"You wouldn't be rushing either, sitting up there in that cushy chair," Wilbur said, finally on his feet. "I'll probably crawl through three miles of shit tonight."

"You smell like it too!" the bus driver said, pinching his nose. "You gotta find another way tonight, my radiator's blown."

~~~~~

The Delta Zeta house, built of golden colored brick, reflected the rays of the afternoon sun. It stood at the top of the U of A's sororities literally and physically. Its head-turning women caused a number of fender-benders over the years; its perch on the hill of Dennison Street and Hargrove looked down on downtown Fayetteville and the freshly cut lawns of other Greek houses. Reaching the house required traversing a staircase of 27 stone stairs overhung by trees and scrubs - not always an easy task for a sorority whose official emblem included whiskey jugs and wine bottles.

Camille dragged her boyfriend by his tie, stopping to run her hand through his buzz. It'd taken getting used to. The sequins of her black dress glittered; she hooked her matching elbow length gloves onto him. Her curves reflected in the tinted glass of a parked bus, all was in place, her hair woven into a French braid that swished against her bare shoulders and back with each click of her heels.

His eyes lingered on his girlfriend and how the muscle in her legs twitched every step. Her perfume slipped over him, but his shoulders hunched in his blazer that was two sizes too large.

She slipped her velvet gloved hand into his. "Baby, it'll be fun. You look handsome. James Bond and his Bond girl." The bus squealed forward in a haze of exhaust, leaving the pair alone below the stone steps.

"Yeah, if he bought his suit at Goodwill. You know I don't. Cut the crap, Camille. Why'd you really bring me here?"

"Please not tonight..."

"To prove a point?"

"Jesus, when was the last time we went out? And no, Chipotle doesn't count."

He stopped halfway up the stairs. "How am I supposed to afford a date for you? Take out another student loan?"

She took his other hand, and they turned from a couple dressed as zombies hurrying up the steps.

"For me? What does that mean? Tonight's literally free."

"You're a Delta Zeta. A cheerleader! There're expectations with you I wouldn't have if I dated any other girl. I take you to Chipotle because I can't afford Urasawa every night!"

He adjusted his blazer and swatted a leaf brushing his neck. A breeze reminded her how short her dress was, the sequins did nothing to fend off the cool air.

"My sisters just want to see you. They barely know you! 30 minutes—"

"And I see how guys stare at you, burning holes in your ass and looking through me like I don't exist. How am I supposed to fake it in there, even for 30 minutes?"

She grabbed his hand, which was soaked in sweat. "I'm here with you." She winked. "I'm wearing what you told me," she said, looking around and hiking her dress up her nylon covered legs to expose her stocking tops. "And we'll go to your LARP thing tomorrow."

"It's SLARP. Not LARP. Society of LARP." No amount of assurance ignited his eyes.

The Kappa Delta house's grand room was a second home for Camille, with banners of "HOTH," "Hell on the Hill", and "KDs Please!" lining its master staircase. Speakers churned out Luke Bryan's latest country hits amid the witches and demons streaming through the front door. The beats echoed off the white marble, and Kappa's congregated, their smiles lighting as drinks filled their Dixie cups. The DJ knew her stuff - the KDs loved Luke Bryan - their step show in August featured his songs and no other. HOTH had a genuine risk of line dancing breaking out.

The next thirty minutes dragged for Camille, chatting with her sisters while tolerating her boyfriend's silence. His frown enflamed a headache in her temple. He was nothing like when she'd first met him, the goofy guy who found a beer cap while cutting open a pig in their anatomy class. Was saying yes by the Hog statue a huge mistake? It looked more and more the case.

Her dress hugged her hips, and male glances came from the patio by the Grecian columns and the connected ping-pong tables serving as the bar. Monica bounded toward her, her gold hoop earrings bouncing off her neck. Two red horns peeked from her shoulder-length blonde hair. She shrugged.

"I ran out of time."

Camille's boyfriend nearly tugged her glove off. "It's been thirty minutes." She held her ground, eyeing Monica's crimson romper.

"You look amazing. The best devil here." He released her hand, stalking out the house and jaunting down the steps. The two girls' mouths dropped, and Camille waded through the crowd, emerging to the cigarette smoke-tinged patio. Even at thirty paces away and in the dark, it was obvious his suit rode high on his shoulders. His fault for not giving a single fuck to look good.

She adjusted her glove. "What are you doing? Let me finish talking to Monica, then we can go—"

"You said thirty minutes." He tapped his watch. "It's been thirty-one."

She placed a hand on her hip. "Stop acting like you're five and being such a fucking buzzkill. All that bullshit about dating me - it's like you're TRYING to get dumped tonight." A beer bottle resting on one of the column bases clattered off, spraying froth toward her. She ignored the droplet on her leg and walked down a few steps.

"What do you want me to say? Sorority parties aren't my scene. You knew."

"It took you until tonight to realize I want more than a $8 burrito sometimes? Jesus Christ."

He stole off into the night past the bus stop at the bottom of the stairs. Her heels clicked back up the steps. Fuck him. He's not ruining my night.

Monica took her close, whiskey lingering on her breath. "What was all that about?" One of her horns was missing, but she was oblivious.

Camille shrugged. "Insecurity, an asshole being an asshole. Let's get a drink."

The pair walked from the bar balancing two shots each. Warmth surged through Camille by the fourth drink, and she leaned her weight on the rail of the master staircase. She blinked twice, fighting the heaviness in her limbs and the rolling motion in her head. More of her sisters joined their huddle.