Aeneas sat next to Dido in Contracts. She liked his smell, of salt and clean dirt, as if he’d been wading through floodwaters. She liked his hair, buzzed down to a velvet cap. How all of his questions came out like answers.
On Tuesday, Aeneas asked Dido to come to a yoga class with him. They met outside, humidity like a stagnant puddle, the setting sun a sailor’s delight. Aeneas took Dido’s mat from her and rolled it out next to his. During Warrior Two, Aeneas led with the wrong foot and Dido’s nose came within inches of his, the pores there like exquisite tide pools.
In his car, in front of her apartment, Aeneas told her about the storm. Aeneas said that his building hadn’t been evacuated until much later than it should have been, and that he had been stuck in gridlock out of the city for hours. That didn’t seem so bad to Dido – nothing like the squalor of the Hippodrome or being shot at by police – but Aeneas’s voice shook when he told her about it. Idling in a humid van with other scared law students. Missing meetings of law review.
When he tired of her soothing, Aeneas played a song from a CD he slid out of a cloth folder of them, stashed between her feet. The song was about a young man who fell in love with a simple, beautiful girl. Unfortunately for the girl, the young man’s destiny propelled him far above her, into the stars, where the outline of his body would form a constellation.
When the song was over, Aeneas told her about his own destiny: running the family business back in California, marrying the daughter of a television star. Aeneas’s assuredness about his smooth, warm stream of a life, the song’s acoustic guitar, and the yoga-induced relaxation in Dido’s hips, led to the next part.
*
After that, Aeneas stopped coming to school. Not next to her in Contracts. Not under the hunchbacked sabal palm where Dido had first seen him, playing hacky sack with the other Tulane kids, his distressed Levi’s low on his slim waist.
Dido checked the student lounge, where snack machines lined the walls and students highlighted in their thick, leather-bound books. She pulled out her phone, again. One missed call, but just from her dad.
*
The summer Dido turned twelve, she and her dad drove up to Maine, to a rental cabin across a highway from the ocean. Exploring alone, Dido found a tall pile of rocks that formed a cave against the windward side of a dune. On its sandy floor, against dark brown walls dripping with saltwater, Dido dreamed, cross-legged.
When she heard the boys’ voices, Dido was singing a love song from the radio. She shut her mouth when their shadows blocked their entrance. She pulled her knees up to her chest when one of the boys, an older, local boy with angry freckles, squeezed against the rock, lapping towards her, like the first wave marking the beginning of high tide.
But Dido, for all of her cowering, knew the gods, and she remembered them then. She gripped her good name in one hand, her pearly throne in the other, and Dido roared from within, impelling the boy backward with the force of her scream.
Back in the cabin, with knees scratched and gritted with sand, her dad looked into her eyes and said, “You are a queen.”
*
Friday: Contracts again. Again, no Aeneas. From her seat up high in the amphitheater, Dido could see the briny heads of the Tulane girls. While everyone was packing up, Dido lingered until she was behind one of them, within tapping distance.
“Did Aeneas go back to New Orleans?”
The girl flicked her eyes at Dido, then towards the sky. “No, no one’s gone back to New Orleans. His mom came, actually. From California.”
With her back straight, in case the girl was watching, Dido marched into the student lounge. At an empty place she unzipped her backpack and took out her own leather-bound book. She read about option contracts, the fine details blurring away Aeneas until he was simply a boy pretending to be king.
Dido was no pretender. “You are a queen,” she said out loud, pressing a neon yellow stripe deep into the thin pages of her textbook.
(Note: This story was published in Landlocked Magazine 4.1 in 2022. Unfortunately, the journal is no longer with us, so I decided to preserve the story as published by posting it here)