Mousy girl had the palest white skin, the deepest dark brown almost black eyes, and jet-black hair. She stood about 5' 4" and weighed 115 pounds dripping wet naked. She had floppy b-cup breasts, small but very dark brown aureole, and thick almost bulbous nipples. She shaved her legs. She usually didn't wear stockings, until the weather turned winter, then she wore stockings, leggings, whatever else to be warm in old drafty Hemmings' classrooms. She didn't shave her pits. It was her way of being "continental" as she put it. They were quite bushy. Her eyes were just a little beady not those big fashion model saucer eyes. Her nose just a little crooked. Her lips just a little too thin for her to be called beautiful. She was the kind of girl that made you look twice or maybe three times because you couldn't tell if she was pretty. With dark lipstick and the right eye shadow she might pass for alluring.
Everyone at Hemmings wondered how Mousy Girl paid her bills. Mousy Girl grew up in a "coal holler" in Appalachia. She talked constantly about how dirt poor her family was. At her grandma's house you still used an outhouse, not a proper toilet. Her father drank a bit and moved from job to job hustling to keep food on the table. Mousy Girl talked matter-of-factly that if things were really tough, you could always trap a rabbit or find some other game to put a meal on a table. But at Hemmings, Mousy Girl was never short of cash, was always wearing cute clothes, and always seemed to find a buck or two to take outrageous road trips. After her first year Mousy Girl moved out of the dorms-but most Hemmings' students moved off-grounds after their first year.
Mousy Girl and I became fast friends during her first semester at Hemmings. After the first meeting of my freshman honors aesthetics seminar Mousy Girl appeared almost mystically in my office.
"Professor Wheatfield," she began matter of factly, "I want to talk." She closed the office door and sprawled over the chair in front of my desk. I caught a glimpse of black lace panty I guessed not by accident.
"Professor Wheatfield, you and I understand each other." Mousy Girl continued.
I had no clue what she was talking about. I had just finished a class where we had talked about Elliot's Prufrock. I had teased a preppie trust fund chick about the look and taste of a "peach." "Dare I eat a peach," is how Prufrock goes, and I asked the preppie chick, Dabney Hunter, to write a description of a peach that would make us want to eat her peach. I planned to sleep with Dabney Hunter, or was it Hunter Dabney, I never quite got that right, and I had used most of the first session of class to make her feel out of sorts, if not naked in front of her peers. It was clear to the entire class, I had hoped, that we were talking about Dabney's red haired muff . . . though I was talking in actual words about Prufrock's peach. Dabney Hunter had no clue what had hit her.
"Usually I begin at $250, or most often just $1000 for the night," Mousy Girl continued.
"Excuse me," I replied.
"Like I was saying," Mousy Girl continued in her Appalachian coal holler twang, "Usually what I am offering would be at minimum $250, most likely more . . . after watching you in class today it is clear that you plan to get into a freshman girl's pants. I am pointing out that getting into my pants usually carries a price, but that I am willing to negotiate."
This was a very smart and perceptive chick. I liked her instantly.
"I saw what you were doing to that red head," Mousy Girl continued. "I am sure the child is a virgin. Though she may seem to love those designer show off the body duds, in the dorm she is frigid chick. She lives in a single. She talks with the rest of us barely, but she is like a woman on a mission. She has one of those calendars from hell with every minute organized. Just thought you might want to know those facts."
I wasn't sure how to respond.
"I have seen her in the shower." Mousy Girl continued.
Hemmings used to be a boys college. Its dorms had big open shower rooms. Not much privacy. Just a big square room with half a dozen showerheads on the wall. The rooms shocked the girls when the school went co-ed, but for whatever reasons nothing ever was done to put in curtains. All the private once a month things girls did to keep clean were done in a big square room where everyone could watch. All the shaving, trimming, tweaking whatever else was done on public display.
"She has a bushy red 'peach,' was that your word in class...?" Mousy Girl said. "This girl could not wear a thong on the beach without embarrassing everyone....unless someone took a razor to that forest she has growing between her legs."
I finally spoke.
