And when I peed on the floor at Pi Lam, I assured my friends it was fine because it was the study
room and no one goes in there. That’s what Sam said. He’d gone to find a condom and I’d already
undressed. At least I was being responsible—with the condom, I mean. I thought Sam looked like Rahm Emmanuel, who was Obama’s Chief of Staff then and made headlines for accosting Eric Massa naked in the congressional gym’s locker room to pass the universal health care bill. In a New York Times profile, he bragged his office was bigger than Joe Biden’s.

I’d met Sam during my brief stint as a reporter for the campus newspaper. He was the campaign manager for a Student Body President candidate doomed to lose. The candidate was hot so I primarily watched him at the debate I was supposed to cover and said yes when he offered me a ride back to my dorm, though it was only a five minute walk. Then Sam was talking from the passenger seat, fast and direct, hyped up on political adrenaline. His mother was from Brooklyn like me and he sang “Brooklyn Girls” by Charles Hamilton to me and I asked for his number under the pretense of future journalistic inquiry. My ethics were questionable, certainly.

That night I was out with a boy I loved who had a French girlfriend and his friend who looked like a bird of prey when I texted Sam, calling him Rahm, to offer him the newspaper’s endorsement in exchange for a good time though in reality I had no say over the endorsement. On a couch in the Pi Lam basement he asked why I was wearing a sweatshirt to a party so I took it off, revealing a v-neck tee, and he slid closer to me. I peed on carpet so it soaked up quickly. I don’t remember what the sex felt like. Mostly I remember walking out into the night, leaving the house aglow with its red cups, its lingering odor of sweat and Everclear, behind me as I tripped dancingly down West Cameron, proud the way a dog might be after peeing on a grand old tree. Here’s what I want: for all girls to be free.

EmilyBanks_authorphoto
Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Heavy Feather Review, Bear Review, The Cortland Review, Superstition Review, and other journals. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland and currently lives in Atlanta, where she is a doctoral candidate at Emory University.