Segments of Flight [Kayla].

from '100,000 Years in Detention'

When I started college in New York I didn’t know anybody. I met Kayla my first or second day on campus and just loved her immediately. I needed a phone to talk to my ex-girlfriend Melissa, so the day I met Kayla she gave me an extra one from her room that had a Care Bears sticker or three on it. She was a great friend every day and had a tattoo of some lyrics by A Perfect Circle on her lower back, and she hated this ex-boyfriend of hers who I think cheated on her with another girl, just before all three of them arrived at the same New York university.

This other girl, in the three months I knew her, spent a session of our Honors English course laughing in contempt at the professor; invited me to her dorm to look at pictures of her wearing only masking tape; and fell asleep on my bed for 10 hours in the middle of me helping her write her term paper.

Kayla was all smiles, though. She had a shaved head, save for her green bangs and a bit of fuzz on the rest of her head.

“It’s called a Chelsea,” she told me one day, at lunch, her metal fork poking and prodding some lukewarm starch in a tiny bowl.

“Why?”

“Chelsea was a French prostitute who sold her hair to a wigmaker. He shaved it all except her bangs, and she wore a kerchief around her head so all you could see was what was left, like this.” She demonstrated with a pride that matched the tone in her voice, and it looked like she had a full head of hair.

“See, the men wouldn’t sleep with a bald woman, so she had to make it look like she had a full head of hair. She made a fortune…well, as much as you could, I guess.”

The harder I try to remember our first days in college, the more exaggerated and cartoonish my image of her becomes; by now in my mind she wears multiple rings per finger and an impossible rainbow of colors in her hair.

I helped her get over her ex-boyfriend and she helped me deal with trying to understand and please Melissa. My relationship with Melissa was rocky at best; I felt under her thumb and in my place more often than not. Kayla and I spent a lot of late nights together full of hugs and junk food and personal chatter. As soon as I bought the game Silent Hill 2, I called Kayla up to come play with me. We played for half an hour and turned it off; we were so scared that we’re still traumatized by – and addicted to – Silent Hill games to this day.

Melissa lived upstate from our school and decided one night not to come down to go to dinner with me. Instead she stayed at home and went to the movies with her friends. Kayla walked into the cafeteria at lunch after leaving a class early and found me with my head on the table, the brisk autumn winds outside still chilling my hands after my meal.

“What’s wrong?”

“Melissa’s ditching me today.

“It’s our anniversary.”

“Jonny, I’m sorry.”

She put a hand on mine – somehow it was warm, impossibly warm – and the blood rushed to my head.

“You know what we can do?” she said.

“What?”

“We can go out on a date,” she said.

“I can’t. I’ve got Melissa and – “

“I’m not talking about anything like that; just…get ready and meet me at 8.”

I couldn’t say no. The rest of the day I was a sight – I thought at a million miles an hour, my palms sweat, my throat ran dry, and I tried to keep myself focused on things like monogamy and Jerry Springer to stay virtuously sound.

I met Kayla at her dorm at 8. She wore a mini t-shirt and a plaid miniskirt with knee-high black leather boots that were swarmed with straps and buckles and zippers and eyelets. She had dyed her Chelsea a brilliant blue-purple. We had dinner together, held hands all night, saw a movie, and talked about everything: comics, heavy metal, exes, family – everything. That night I knew for the first time what it was like to share a life with a beautiful, wonderful girl who respected me for who I was – and who I wasn’t. It was like a momentary epiphany, being healthy two days between sicknesses, a segment of flight in an otherwise grounded matriculation. I wiped tears from my eyes many times.

“What’s wrong?”

“Allergies,” I lied.

When I was walking her home, Colin, my bassist at the time, ran into us and I asked him to accompany us the rest of the way back to her dorm. Frankly, I didn’t know if I could keep my moral compass pointed North without Colin and what I assumed was the threat of reporting an infidelity or discretion of my relationship to Melissa.

Kayla’s door shut gently and I leaned back against it from the outside and sighed deeply. I shut my eyes and and she danced behind my lids, a 5’9” pillar of leather and buckles, of fearlessness and individuality, and I knew deep in my heart that she was just on the other side of that door, her back leaned against it, hesitating.

And I went home.