Chapter 4: Houseguest

We had Monday and Tuesday classes Thanksgiving week. That meant Fay had only one day of class since she had no classes on Mondays. Annette kissed me at the door of Lib Arts and I went in to sit beside Kendra. We didn’t even hesitate anymore. If I got to class first, Kendra just walked over and sat beside me. If she was there, I sat beside her. And it wasn’t always in the same place. Other students in our class usually arrived after us and decided which seats to take if we were in ‘their’ seats. An occasional glare would make us giggle.

“That’s new,” I said pointing at the ring in her nose. She’d had a little dot on the side of her nose, but the ring was a new addition.

“I got bored this weekend and had my septum pierced. No telling what kind of trouble I’ll get into over the break this week.”

“Aren’t you going home for Thanksgiving?”

“Arthur, I live on the other side of the fucking country. I’ll go home over Christmas. That’s it,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Why would I?”

“Well...” I knew what I should do. I could talk to Kendra okay. I still had trouble in class, but Kendra was my friend. “You ... come ... stay with us,” I blurted out. “For Thanksgiving.”

“I’m not looking for a handout, Arthur. I’ll be fine,” she said.

“No. Our friend ... my friend ... please.” I was struggling. Word bubbles kept entering my throat and then popping. “I’ll paint your portrait!” That was it. That was what she wanted and I’d promised. Thanksgiving was a perfect time. Kendra’s head snapped around to look at me.

“Really?” she whispered. I nodded. “Will it be okay? With Annette and Morgan?” I nodded again. “I’m not going to sleep with you.” This time my head snapped around. What?

“No! I ... didn’t ... wouldn’t ... guestroom!” I was panicked. I needed Annette to get a proper invitation out. This wasn’t going well. Then Kendra smiled. My breathing slowed down.

“I was teasing, Arthur,” she whispered. “Don’t panic. If Annette and Morgan and your parents all say it’s okay, I’d be happy to visit over the long weekend. Really. Thank you for being my friend.”

Lady and Fay were easy.

“I can’t believe we didn’t think of this before!” Annette said at lunch. “Of course you should spend the weekend with us. Art honey, that was so good of you to think of our friend. I just assumed that you were local like us.” Annette kissed me so hard I started squirming in my chair and thinking about not going to afternoon classes.

“Ahem,” Kendra said. She rolled her eyes at us. “I told Arthur I wouldn’t sleep with him. That goes for you and your girlfriend, too.” She looked all serious at Annette and I was glad to see that Annette’s response wasn’t much different than mine. She started spluttering.

“Kendra! We wouldn’t do that to you! That’s not why we want you to stay with us. We don’t ... We’re just...” I’d never seen Annette unable to finish a sentence. Unless she was orgasming. Kendra grinned and we both snorted before we started laughing. Annette glared at us. “You scared me! I thought we’d done something wrong.”

Annette called Morgan and she quickly agreed, but over the phone Kendra really couldn’t prank her like she had Annette and me.

Convincing our parents wasn’t difficult, but they didn’t just nod their heads, either.

“How did you get to know this girl?” Mom asked. “Is she nice?”

“In my classes,” I said. “She’s my friend. Helps me a lot.”

“Art was always sketching in his notes for class,” Morgan said. “Like we arranged. When Kendra realized he was drawing people in class, she started posing for him. She finally followed him to lunch and asked if she could be our friend.”

“Art promised to paint her portrait,” Annette said. “We thought the break would be a good time to do it, especially since she can’t go home to Connecticut until Christmas.”

“It’s so hard for the kids on campus who can’t go home for the holiday,” Dad said. “Annette, you need to speak to your mother, as well. She’s hosting Thanksgiving Dinner this year, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sure she’ll be fine with an extra guest, but I’ll call her right away. It’s not quite the same as having a houseguest for the week.”

“Speaking of which,” Mom sighed. “Sleeping arrangements.”

“Guestroom!” we all three shouted. Mom and Dad snorted as they looked at us.

“I was going to say that it needs to be cleaned and prepared for a guest,” Mom said. “I didn’t mean to panic you. But since you have brought it up, what is your relationship with this girl? The fact that you have a successful ménage à trois does not mean it could simply adopt a fourth person without severe complications. Not the least of which would be whether the rest of your housemates...” she waved back and forth between Dad and herself, “were as willing to have another person on a long-term basis.”

“Mom, she’s our friend,” Morgan explained. “I think we can tell the difference between a friend and a lover.”

“I’ll help,” I said. Everyone looked at me like they didn’t understand. “Clean the guestroom,” I explained. I guess I was a little behind the conversation.

Tuesday afternoon after my drawing class, Kendra took me to her dorm room. Lots of people were hustling around and I was scarcely noticed as a boy in the girls’ dorm wing. There were whole families running around as students packed up to leave for the break with their parents. When we got to her room, Kendra’s roommate had already left.

The room was pretty basic. It was almost as big as our bedroom at home, but instead of one big bed against the end wall, there was a single bed on either side of the one window with a desk between them. A wardrobe partially shielded the beds from direct view from the door. Kendra pulled her suitcase from under her bed and started pulling things out of the wardrobe. On the left side of the room, behind the door, a second desk was tucked in. You had to hope your roommate didn’t crash the door open too far if you were sitting there. There was a sink and counter on the other side of the room, just beside the door.

“Will I need fancy clothes for dinner?” Kendra asked.

“We usually dress up a little,” I said, “but not suit and tie fancy. Just be comfortable.”

“What do you think about this?” she asked. She held up a nice pair of wool slacks and a long-sleeved blouse.

“That’s beautiful,” I said. “Maybe that’s what I should do your portrait in.”

“You mean instead of my sweatshirt? I suppose. Um...” She sat next to her suitcase on the bed with the blouse still in her hands. “Arthur ... um ... I’m a little ... body shy. It’s not like I’m a virgin or I’ve never been naked or I’m religious. It’s just that people tend to be so judgmental. When you do my portrait ... um ... just remember that, okay?”

“Sure, Kendra. I know you’re a pretty girl. But I’m not asking you to pose nude or anything.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

Kendra finished packing about the time Morgan got to the room.

“Hey, this is just like mine last year!” Morgan exclaimed. “I like what you’ve done with it.” Kendra looked around and snorted. There was a whole string of sketches hung above her roommate’s bed, but Kendra’s wall was bare. Morgan, though, went straight to the desk between the beds. “Did you do this, Kendra?” A horse’s head was emerging from a block of clay.

“Oh. Yeah. It’s nothing. That’s like my doodle pad. I just scratch things out on it while I’m thinking of something else or while I’m reading. It keeps my hands busy.”

“This is good!”

“Naw. The proportions are all off and there isn’t enough clay to finish the body.” Kendra reached over and grabbed the clay, smashing it down as Morgan gasped. She shoved the clay into a plastic bag and tossed it into her suitcase along with a set of plastic modeling tools wrapped in a piece of terrycloth. “It’s like Arthur and his sketchbooks. Sometimes I just need to have my fingers busy and a girl can’t masturbate all the time.” Morgan squeaked and looked at Kendra. Kendra had a surprised look on her face with her hands raised. I tripped as I grabbed my sketchbook and started scribbling madly on a fresh sheet. Kendra saw what I was doing and just held the pose until I was finished.

“You do that so well,” Morgan said.

“Masturbate?”

“No!” Both girls laughed. “I mean you freeze in position when Art starts drawing and just hold it until he’s finished. The facial expression and everything. How do you do it? I’m constantly squirming around and shifting positions when he’s trying to draw me. When he did my nipple, I thought I’d die.”

“He ... um ... what?”

“Oops! I guess you’ll see it when we get home. Let me just say, it took a long time and I’m not a patient model.”

“O-kay then. I’ll wait for that explanation.”

“So how did you learn to pose?”

“Weird, really,” Kendra said. “Have you ever played the game ‘statue’?”

“You mean where everyone runs around and goofs off until someone yells ‘statue’ and everyone freezes?”

“Yeah. Well, I had a bunch of strange friends in high school. We played the game a little differently. There were six of us and when we got high, we’d play statue. We had a jar filled with slips of paper. Each paper had a famous pose on it. Like ‘Venus de Milo’ or ‘Aphrodite Rising’ or ‘The Discus Thrower’. We’d each draw a pose. If we weren’t sure about it, we had picture books where we marked them all. Once we were all ready, we’d stand in a circle facing each other and someone would call out, ‘Statue!’ We’d all pose. It was a contest to see who could hold the pose the longest. I was champion.”

“Wow!” I said. “You are a good model.”

“Thank you.”

“Hey, it’s time for Annette to get out of class,” Morgan said. “Let’s get rolling.”

Conversation at family dinner Tuesday night was too fast for me to keep up. I laughed a lot, though. Mom looked hard at Kendra and then lifted her sunglasses to look a little more. She’d gotten used to Morgan, Annette, and me, but she usually had her shades on when there were guests. After she’d looked at Kendra, she set her dark glasses aside.

“Move along now. Nothing to see here,” Kendra said as she grinned at Mom. “Just kind of dull orange, flecked with a little purple and gold. Mostly what you see when people aren’t being passionate and are just going about daily activities. Neither happy nor sad. Creative and not caring about it. Not hot or cold. Nothing really to see. A perfectly ordinary person.” We all laughed. Kendra tended to talk a lot, but did she just tell Mom what kind of aura she had?

“How much do you know about auras, Kendra?” Mom asked. We were all asking the question inside. “Can you read them?”

“Oh, heavens, no! You’d think that if I could see them I’d have one that was more exciting,” she laughed.

“Like Mom’s,” Morgan whispered. I glanced at her. What?

“Just an artist’s interpretation?” Dad asked.

“Oh. Memorized. Verbatim. What an aura reader in Greenwich Village told me last year. He started out with dark glasses on, like you did, and then when he looked at me he took them off and shook his head,” Kendra said. “He said I was just a perfectly ordinary person. When you took off your sunglasses, which had never really been needed in the light of this room in the first place, I figured you must protect yourself against bright auras like he did. I bet these three give you fits, don’t they?”

“Occasionally,” Mom laughed. “I’ve gotten used to them.”

“That or go blind,” Kendra answered. “You don’t need to read auras to see how they light up when they are near each other. I wish I could see them. Here’s what I think. If I could actually see auras, I could model them. People are three-dimensional. We act as if auras are two-dimensional. Supposedly there is an outline around the body. But what part of the body? The body isn’t flat. You can’t outline it. So, if I was working in clay and could see the aura, I should be able to mold the shape of the aura.” Kendra was really getting into it. We were all staring at her. I hardly noticed Morgan nodding.