Believer

         I've got a friend of a friend of a friend story to tell. There's not a lot I know because I am neither the friend nor the friend of the friend. But she was a Buddhist and meditated all day, cleansing herself into nothingness or oneness, whatever applies in this situation.
         Her favorite thing about her new Old World religion was the idea of reincarnation. She knew she would come back as a non-human because she was a convert.
         Sitting on her modest purple mat and admiring her hanging paper lamps, she focused all day on her future life as an animal. She mostly thought about mammals. Ticking her highlighter-colored nails against the lunch table, she told me she would like to come back as a dolphin.
         "Why?" I yelped. I took a drag of my chocolate milk. She gave me a severe look and a rueful smile.
         "They are the only animals who have sex for fun."
         I continued, fascinated by my enlightened classmate. What if she didn't return as a dolphin? What would she want to be instead?
         "A pig," she laughed. "They have fifteen-minute long orgasms," "In the mud!"
         After lunch I wondered if it was appropriate to want to come back as highly sexed animals. I let the thought leave my head as I filled in Punnett squares on my Biology test. Black Black Black Gray, Black White Gray Gray.
         I started tearing the jagged edges of my loose leaf. My curiosity was getting the best of me.

         "Where is Kara today?" I asked my other friend of a friend, Jeanne.
         "Didn't you hear?" Jeanne answered in a snort, rubbing her shiny graphite finger on her jeans.
         "No," I gaped, imagining some midnight motorcycle ride through the cemetery, maybe ending in grounding. Or maybe she had completely vanished, skyrocketed into the air by Buddha himself. She was floating in outer space as a dolphin or a pig, a reincarnated sex goddess.
         "She's going to go back to living with her mom. Remember? She went to school across town before, in Thornton. Plus, she's been snorting those crushed up Altoids again."
         "Oh," I fumbled with my pencil, and looked back to my test. I wasn't cheating, I swear.
         After finishing my test I began drawing little piggies with curly-cue tails on their butts. I wrote "Kara M." under them, thinking of her dedication to her religion. She was a believer for the sake of pleasure.

by mindy roth