Michelangelo's Notebook Read Online Free PDF Page A

white. In her spare time she’d torn up the swamp green linoleum tiles and had a sanding party for the old hardwood floors.
    Her computer was a used Sony laptop she’d picked up for peanuts from a sale at her mother’s faculty office and was stored under the ratty red velvet couch in the “living hall” just in case a junkie had the energy to make it up five flights of stairs to steal it. To Finn, the cramped apartment was a palace and a magic doorway into her future. From here she could go anywhere—even though she couldn’t really imagine herself being anywhere else at the moment.
    Unlocking her door, fury unabated, she stormed into the apartment, threw her backpack on the couch and then began to undress, leaving a trail of clothes from the couch to the bathroom. She soaked herself in the minuscule tub for the better part of an hour, shaved her legs even though they didn’t really need it and washed her hair as well, which didn’t need it either.
    Still furious after all that, she let the tub drain, ran a freezing cold shower and stood under it for as long as she could, counting her blessings and imagining Crawley wandering around Central Park waving a white cane in front of him, screaming, “I’m blind! I’m blind!” Serve the creep right. She pulled her worn terry-cloth bathrobe off the hook on the bathroom door, grabbed a towel and padded into her bedroom, looking for something to wear while drying her hair. She flopped down on the bed and stared blankly into her cupboard.
    She groaned. This was her night of reckoning with Peter, her boyfriend of almost two months now. She was supposed to meet him and a few other friends at Max’s Garden on Avenue B for dinner. There was an unspoken agreement that “tonight would be the night” at last, with most of the agreement coming from him and her getting tired of putting him off. Peter was handsome enough and smart enough and nice enough but Finn had always been very careful about who she went to bed with.
    In Columbus, at sixteen, Finn had already been wonderfully beautiful and dreadfully shy. It was a deadly combination. Boys her own age were terrified of the beautiful dream and bolstered their own feelings of inadequacy by calling her the Red-hot Iceberg and the Red Snapper. The result was she never went out on dates and by the end of her sixteenth year she hadn’t been so much as kissed on the cheek by a boy.
    Eventually she’d thrown caution to the winds and told her problem to a young junior professor she babysat for, a widower in the English department at OSU who had a little two-year-old boy. She’d had a secret crush on him from the time they first met over a diaper change, so in the end she didn’t have trouble believing that in one night she’d gone from never-been-kissed to not-a-virgin-anymore, and she’d never regretted it for a minute. It might be the kind of thing Oprah would have called sexual abuse, but she hadn’t felt that way about it then, or now. To her it had been a miracle. On the other hand it wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about very often.
    The man had been kind, gentle and by later comparison, an astoundingly good lover. He’d also been smart enough to limit the relationship to a few months, not long enough to make her feel obligated to something beyond strong friendship. But he gave Finn enough time to gain the experience and the confidence she desperately needed, and taught her a few things about teenage boys.
    He’d also given her a firm, practical grounding in condoms and how to use them and told her every excuse a guy was likely to come up with for
not
using one. By now she’d heard them all and more besides. She had a few condoms in her bedside table just in case, and there was always one tucked into one of the secret pockets in her wallet. Neither AIDS nor pregnancy was in the cards for her future, and somehow she didn’t think Peter was either. Of the five men she’d been to bed with since the professor, only