Read Fucking Daphne for Free Online

ranch that had already expanded across the living room carpet. “Bye, baby,” I whispered. And I was out. I headed down the hill for the first meeting of my evening class, clutching my story draft like a newborn.
    See, I was a twenty-one-year-old welfare mom undergrad, feeling extra special since I’d been accepted into the graduate writing seminar. You had to get instructor approval, and I’d wowed
that hippie adjunct with a surrealist birth narrative. I planned to present the same story that night in the workshop. The grad students will never believe I’m only a sophomore .
    As I stepped over the threshold into the little classroom, I thought, My life as a writer begins now.
    I recognized the lungless poet right away. She had a goofy face and buck teeth. I took the seat next to her but tried not to make eye contact. I’d been finding out little things about her, sort of secretly, since that first time I’d seen her. Just asking around, really; doing some research. A grad student. She rented porn videos on East 14th Street next to the food stamps office. She collected dead bugs, pinned them to silk, and etched their Latin names in black Sharpie.
    The other grad students trickled in, chattering absent summer hellos. They were old, some of them, maybe thirty or even forty.
    I wondered if they knew I didn’t belong.
    At last the instructor floated in.
    I belong because she said I belonged. I smiled up at her.
    â€œFor those of you who don’t know me yet—you may call me Demeter,” she announced. She pretended not to notice me, but I knew: She was looking forward to the other girls hearing my narrative. Women, actually. At Mills, we called each other “women.”
    One by one, they read their stories. Their phrases flowed like rivers, but I couldn’t seem to follow their course. They complimented each other on metaphors and meaning.
    I wanted a cigarette.
    Instead, I sat there mute and jonesing.
    â€œAriel? Did you bring something to share?” Demeter finally asked.
    â€œUm. Yes?”

    My hands shook as I read. I sucked my words from the paper and spat them out, a story of forcing life from life under fluorescent hospital lights. I set the pages down in front of me, triumphant-scared.
    Silence.
    I looked out the window, but it had gotten dark. My tree view had been replaced by the reflection of the poet’s hip.
    â€œI’m so fucking glad I got an abortion,” someone finally blurted. “Birth is so . . . ” She bit her lip. “ Seventies.”
    â€œNow, Diane,” the instructor smirked. “You are being very bad.” Demeter turned to me. The yellow barrette in her gray hair was shaped like a lily. “Your descriptions are vivid, Ariel, but what I think Diane is responding to is the lack of conflict in your piece.”
    I never wanted her to be born, I thought. She was safe inside me.
    â€œIt’s lack of context , really,” another woman piped up. “Don’t you think? I mean, why should we care about this? Babies are born every day.”
    Care, I thought. Why?
    The buck-toothed poet didn’t come to my defense, exactly, but when it was all over and the women gathered their notebooks and swished their skirts and continued conversations I imagined they’d begun a year earlier, she leaned over and whispered sultrily in my ear: “I think the world of your work.”
    I guess I’ve always been a sucker for flattery.
    She thinks the world of my work.
    The other girls at Mills never knew quite what to make of me. I brought my daughter to morning classes, breastfed during lectures. I stole food from the dining halls. I annoyed them, but they didn’t have the nerve to call me on my shit. In PC feminist identity
politics, teenage welfare mother trumps whatever you’ve got. They calculated, mentally, the cost of each tuna sandwich I pocketed, then invited the two of us to their tea parties to show us