Boyfriend in a Dress Read Online Free PDF Page B

normally wouldn’t, it’s the backdrop to all our greatest dramas. More than anything it affects the moods. Bad things shouldn’t happen on sunny days, it’s confusing.
    It was an exchange year, with an American student who got to be conscientious in England while I pissed it up in Illinois for three terms. The only downside was that I had to stay in university accommodation, which meant sharing a room with a complete stranger.
    And my roommate was trained to kill. This was the thought most prevalent in my mind early on the day I met Charlie. Her face, contorting with rage, her mouth screaming random obscenities, and she was trained to kill: not just chickens after two days of starvation in some mosquito swarm of a jungle, but real people, actual humans, in battle. She had spent two years in the American Army Reserves, and they let her have a knife, and probably a gun, which she had no doubt stolen and kept. She was trained to kill, and in the process of throwing my stuff around the room, beating my bed with her pillow, twisting and snarling at me, and screaming abuse. This was not the first time, but certainly I had never actually feared for my life before. Trained in the art of slitting a man’s throat in the dead of night, and she was very much pissed off with me. I knew for a fact that she was seeing a counsellor. My roommate, Joleen, mentally, medically unstable, able to slit my throat, and barely two feet away from me. The last time she was mad, which wasn’t even this mad, I had been nearer to the door. But on this particular day, I was practically pinned against my debunked bunk bed, while she held the sides of herhead, palms wide, pressing her temples, as if the pain wouldn’t stop, as if the voices wouldn’t stop. Did she hear voices? I’m not sure, but I would never bet against it. J. Edgar Hoover? Probably. He was a psychopath in women’s clothing as well. Like attracts like they say.
    Joleen turned to face me, and started screaming. I was petrified.
    ‘You fucking bitch, you are like a dog on the street, I have less respect for you than a fucking dog on the street, you fucking piece of shit, you fucking bitch.’
    She was pretty much repeating this over and over. I don’t know what the voices in her head were telling her, but they were anti-me, that much I deduced.
    ‘Joleen, simmer down and at least tell me what I have done!’
    I tried desperately to keep the situation reasonably calm – no rising to the bait and feeding her fury. I felt it was important not to make direct eye contact with a psychotic, so I looked at her forehead with one eye, while sizing up the door with the other.
    ‘You can’t use my fridge, it’s my fucking fridge, don’t put your stuff in there, you bitch!’ she screamed back, her face turning a yellowy red, the colour of serious illness.
    ‘Oh, right.’
    At least now I knew why she was angry. She hadn’t said anything before. And it was only some beers to drink while I got ready that night, and an eye mask.
    ‘Don’t you think you’re blowing this all out of proportion, Joleen? It’s a couple of beers, for a couple of hours. Let’s talk about what this is really about. It’s Dale, right?’
    The last time Joleen had actually tried to do me harm was because of Dale. Dale was her friend, her only friend. She loved him, I knew that much. You could tell from every sideways glance, every admiring beam in his direction, everydistracted glazed daydream of what they could be together. But he did not love her. He used her. He used her car, used her soap powder, used her phone. He had a room in our dorm, not two hundred feet away, yet he was never there. He wore Bryan Ferry suits. He quiffed his hair, but rarely washed it. He was a five feet six, nine-stone weasel of a man. He wore second-hand winkle-pickers, which were so badly scuffed at the front it looked like he kicked dustbins for a living. He chain-smoked Marlboro Reds, and he wrote poetry on a bashed-up old