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Supplementary: Poster seen in the window of Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine. Photo by Bill Roorbach
CHAPTER SIX - FORBIDDEN FRUIT
Nothing of note happens over those ten, long days, except the change of season-August to September-and the cold that comes with it, a sudden descent, sweeping over campus like a blight. Weather is always out of whack in Gotham, but it doesn't faze Sierra who, on the first day of term, has dressed to impress. Whether she's dressed appropriately to battle the cold is another question, one Sierra doesn't care to answer: she wears her miniskirt and knee-high boots regardless, throws on a puffer jacket and braids her hair back. She does her makeup, full-coverage as always, and everything coordinates, her lipstick and her nails (done in the city about five days before school starts, at Sierra's favourite East End salon) the exact same shade of cherry red.
Everything about her is cherries, actually. Her nails, lips, cheeks. Even her perfume-ever versatile, she switches between Tom Ford's trifecta of cherries, Lost Cherry, Electric Cherry, and Cherry Smoke. They're all deeply, truly, outrageously expensive (Sierra's last bottle of Lost Cherry was nearly $600) and even naming the label makes her feel like Patrick Bateman, thick and syrupy with consumerism. But she adores it. She wears Lost today-Cherry suffix dropped, the most expensive shorthand ever-which, along with its siblings, the other Cherries and various equally-pricey eau de parfums she keeps in the back of her wardrobe.
Lost Cherry is an acquired taste. It begins artificially, superficially, with cherries (as its name would suggest), the glacé kind, sweet and creamy and all things velvet. It's shadowed with dark notes of plum, balsam, cinnamon spice. Eventually the cherry recedes (it is Lost, after all, with a capital L) leaving behind an ineffable vanilla, simple and linear but undercut with bitter almond liqueur. Amaretto, one of Sierra's New York men identified. Condescended, really, because he was a cunt, but Sierra couldn't un-smell it after that, the little bitter.
She sprays the perfume on her throat, her wrists, and behind her knees. Cherries and ice cream, cinnamon and plum. Bitter almond liqueur and vanilla. Sierra swipes her already-dark lips once over with her Clinique Black Honey, tucks a rebel strand of hair behind her ear, shoulders her backpack, and steps out into the cold.
✽ ✽ ✽
Introduction to Criminology and Criminal Justice is inconsequential, as one would expect of a first-year, foundational course. The broadness is in the name. Sierra sits in the first row, because it felt cliché to sit in the back; she upholds herself to this useless belief for the rest of her classes. She's of the second half of Intro students, Intro B as the online Microsoft Teams is so aptly named. Not particularly curious about her fellow BCrimJus students, Sierra sticks to herself and her front row, nosebleed seats. Unfortunately, it's not a shared sentiment-though Sierra, foolishly, expected the cohort to be concerned with things a little more important than celebrity such as, oh, she didn't know, crime, she was unable to escape the attention that being herself brought. Intro B had a girl tap her on the shoulder from behind, ask her two equally inane questions: are you Sierra Reva, yes, I am, and are you sure you're in the right class, yes, random Criminology girl who I now hate forever and ever, I am.
