Most women like office supplies. But I like office supplies more than most women do.
It began when I was thirteen years old. My older brother was spinning a pencil around on his desk while doing homework. Ever the pest, I sat on his beanbag chair, singing about his girlfriend of the week. Suddenly, something on his desk caught the corner of my eye.
A chunky lime green eraser, worn down and smudged, fitted snugly onto the end of an orange-yellow Ticonderoga pencil.
I was transfixed.
How the pencil gleamed as it spun. How the gray point sat like a king upon its wooden throne. How the bright green eraser would feel between my fingers, soft yet firm, supple yet solid.
My brother snapped his fingers. “You alive, freakshow?” he grinned.
I jumped, jolted out of my reverie. “Don’t call me that, idiot,” I grumbled, shoving him as I walked off. Before I left his room, I snuck a quick glance back at the object that had hypnotized me a few moments before.
I thought of nothing else for the rest of the day.
That night, I returned to my brother’s room to retrieve the pencil. It was easy to get into his room. Dad made him keep the door unlocked for fear of drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll.
The irony.
There it was, shrouded in moonlight on my brother’s desk. With trembling hands, I picked up the pencil between my thumb and forefinger.
I brought it up to my lips and let them rest against its smooth angles. The orange-yellow coolness felt soothing against my mouth, but there was something more—something different. A strange sensation of twitching muscles and flesh tingled in my flannel pajama pants, which suddenly felt very warm. The air from my lungs caught in my throat.
Was this what people meant by being “turned on”?
I had so many questions, not least of all being, “What the fuck?” and “Why hadn’t I done this sooner?”
Back in my room, I touched the tip of the lime green eraser to my teeth and nibbled on it, softly at first and then with greater vigor. The eraser resisted my teeth, bouncing back before slowly splitting under the pressure of my incisors. Using my tongue, I pushed the piece to the back of my mouth and reveled in the eraser squelching between my teeth as I chewed. The sensation made me feel weak in some way I didn’t understand. I swallowed the morsel of eraser and shivered as it scraped down my throat. I liked the idea of it being inside me, part of me.
I’m not sure how much time passed as I ate the whole eraser, stopping often to nuzzle the pencil between my neck and shoulders. I ran my fingers up and down its glossy length, now slick with my spit. The wood felt ragged on my lips when I dared to kiss the graphite point.
I kept my pencil pouch next to my bed for the next five years.
***
After the green eraser, I dressed in my brother’s old sweats and didn’t speak much. My teachers thought I was strange but smart, so they left me alone. Thanks to the razor-sharp acuity of teenage intuition, my peers also realized something was askew, and maintained their distance.
I’d had blinders on my entire life, only to have them ripped off at once by some cosmic entity. The world suddenly had a soft yellow film over it, making everything seem happier and hazier than it really was. Food tasted better, music was sweeter. Sounds, smells, and textures were all enhanced, and the resultant sensory feast was nothing short of an aphrodisiac.
How could anyone else experience that with me?
Many people use drugs in search of transcendence. What did office supplies do if not allow me to transcend the ordinary in search of the extraordinary? Was my search for heaven somehow tainted because it was sexual? Was my drug less pure than marijuana or cocaine?
I wanted to be attracted to other people, to experience the same butterflies other girls did when they saw a cute guy or thought about sex. But the thought of a man’s penis pumping in and out of me like a piston, or even of a woman’s sloppy tongue probing my clitoris, filled me with the same dull sense of distaste as rice without soy sauce.
But desire triumphs every time. Though I was vaguely ashamed of my proclivities, they only grew stronger and more demanding.
***
At some point during high school, I learned of the name for my condition: objectophilia. It felt good to put a label to it. Some people avoid labels, but I embraced mine. It made me feel like less of a pervert. At the very least, the fact that such a term existed was an acknowledgment that my specific type of perversion was a real phenomenon experienced by people across the world. Most importantly, it wasn’t hurting anyone.
I felt free to explore all the office supplies I pleased.
Pencil grips were a big one for me. I suppose that seeing a pencil wrapped in a spongy purple grip made me feel akin to how other girls felt when they saw some Ken doll guy wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. Or a dude holding his giant cock with a big, veiny hand.
I liked journals, too. The more colorful, the better. I would spill my soul into them nightly, my tears dropping like stones on the pages. They were gentle lovers, listening to my anxieties and fears without asking anything in return but for me to soak their pages with the hot syrup of my snatch. Which, of course, I happily obliged.
I did not love all office supplies equally. Some I liked more than others, and some I avoided entirely. Some were “it’s complicated” situations.
Sticky notes, for instance. I loved them because of the way it felt when I peeled them off me, my cheeks in particular. The way my skin clung to them just a little, mourning them for a short time before releasing them. It signaled a type of rebirth to me. Even the faint squishing sound they made, audible only to me, sounded like a baby exiting its mother.
I hated sticky notes, though, because of their sharp corners. I preferred my paper with round corners, and trust that you will understand why.
I was mildly disgusted by wastepaper baskets and filing cabinets, primarily because the former was filthy and the latter hard and unforgiving.
But there were so many fun uses for just about everything else.
Running the pearly beads of my nipples all over a keyboard, reveling in the feeling of the keys tugging on them. Painting my breasts with white-out, my areolas shriveling at the cold white slime. Slathering myself with hand sanitizer from head to toe. Waxing my legs with glue. Spanking my ass with a ruler. Lightly snapping rubber bands against my breasts.
But pencils were still my favorite.
I loved them for philosophical reasons as well as physical ones. An eraser holds the power to take back the past, to control the narrative its writer wants to tell. It has the ability to start over again. Similar to a backspace key, except the connection between mind, hand, pencil, and paper is much more physical and intense. Intimate.
The writing end of a pencil is the perfect companion for the eraser. While the eraser removes what has been laid down, the pencil point is the direct conduit between a person’s mind and the paper. It is the vessel through which human thoughts flow like electricity through a wire. The pencil point transforms abstract thought into something concrete. It becomes part of recorded human history.
I had a collection of forty-three pencils of all different sizes, colors, and conditions, and kept an Excel spreadsheet ranking them all.
***
On my first day of college, my roommate ran up and embraced me before I stepped foot in our room.
“I’m so glad you’re here!” she exclaimed. My smile wobbled as I tried to match her energy level, acutely aware that we’d be sharing a 228-square-foot cell for the next nine months.
“Me too,” I said.
“Everything okay?” she asked, caught off guard by the brevity of my reply.
“Oh yeah. For sure,” I mumbled. “Just want to get my desk set up.” I smiled and shrugged, hoping to seem casual.
“Okay,” my roommate said—not without a hint of attitude, I thought—and resumed the enviable job of taping up her posters. One of them featured an old Abercrombie & Fitch ad that I’d seen before. The black-and-white image showed a man and a woman lying on the beach with the surf rolling in. The man was lying on top of the woman, but it was clear she was topless. Her face was hidden. The point of the poster, I knew, was to project yourself onto that anonymous girl with the man on top of her, to imagine how his dick might feel pressing insistently through the dark jeans around his hips.
Instead, I looked at the tape holding up the poster and imagined wrapping it around my entire torso, then peeling it off.
As I lined up my office supplies on my desk (a lovely thing in its own right: chestnut colored, old, solid), I snuck small glances at my roommate’s belongings: scrunchies so plentiful that I suspected if one fell on the floor, three would sprout in its place. She’d brought her own silverware for some reason, an act that seemed strange even to me, but you know what they say about glass houses and stones. Several bags of kale chips, which made me wonder how they’d sound when she ate them. A maroon dance team pendant from high school. I’d never owned a pendant in my life.
And, of course, there were her school supplies.
I’d never seen such good taste in my life.
A rose-gold laptop lay partially open on her bed, taunting me with what I couldn’t see. Her planner was a feast for the eyes, the cover emblazoned with neon airplanes and palm trees. Gold paperclips shone in a porcelain dish. A taupe desk organizer—real leather, I thought—held the rest of her supplies like a chalice holds holy wine.
And then I saw it, half-hidden behind the desk organizer: a spinning top, like I used to play with when I was little. But this was not a child’s toy. Gold overlaid with a slight patina, like a bad dream you have while sleeping on the beach, and adorned with scratches that might have been ugly if they signified anything other than the owner’s adoration.
I was thirteen again, looking at the green eraser, so bright in my memory’s eye.
I cleared my throat. “Hey,” I said, “I like your top. Your spinning top, I mean. On your desk.”
My roommate, in the middle of taping up a Dirty Dancing poster, looked at me over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah,” she said, softening a little. “My granddad gave that to me before he died. He was a psychiatrist and he kept it in his office for patients to spin. I guess it helped calm them down.” She turned back to her poster.
“Well,” I said. “It’s really beautiful. Do you…spin it often?”
Looking back at me, an edge to her voice, she said, “Yeah, actually, I spin it when I feel anxious. I get really anxious over grades and shit.” She turned back, harder this time, as though placing an enormous period at the end of a sentence I didn’t realize was over.
“May I spin it?” I asked.
A faint slapping sound caught our attention. A corner of her Audrey Hepburn poster had fallen down. The poster might have been sexy, I thought, if only Audrey Hepburn wasn’t on it.
She went over to fix it. “I don’t care,” she said.
I walked over to her desk and stared at the object. Then reached out and twisted its golden knob like my life depended on it. I watched as the top twirled soundlessly in place.
For the second time in my life, I was in love.
***
It was October, and my roommate was at a sorority function. Some sort of drink-and-study marathon. She’d “rushed” several sororities at the beginning of the school year and had been offered her third choice. After sulking for two weeks straight, spending an hour at a time staring at her long chestnut waves and tear-streaked face in the mirror, she seemed to accept her terrible fate, purchasing five sweatshirts in various pastels featuring the Greek letters of her sorority. I could never remember the name of it.
My roommate’s neuroses and vague cruelties made my nerves itch. After growing up with one sibling who was five years older, I was now expected to share my most sacred space with someone who needed two puffs of her inhaler when she received a 95% on a test. “Almost every med student I know has higher than a 4.0,” she’d sob to her friends, her mom, her boyfriend over the phone. “How will I ever become an anesthesiologist?”
Thankfully, tonight the dorm was free of the toxic sludge she called a personality. Only her beautiful office supplies remained, lounging on her desk like ladies in a brothel.
I had stared at them many times when I was supposed to be studying, when I was eating in my room, when I was trying to fall asleep. Their beauty paralyzed me. I had never worked up the nerve to actually touch them, let alone use them for my pleasure. But tonight, that would change.
I wedged a chair under the door handle, just in case.
**
I’d saved the best for last.
Collapsed on my sweaty sheets, surrounded by my roommate’s school supplies, I reached for the top. Its warm weight gave me goosebumps.
I brought it closer, parting my labia with the other hand, and tentatively rested the base of the top against myself. Then I pressed onward, the solid gold parting my lips further.
Then my vagina got greedy, and sucked it in.
I shuddered and clenched the muscles of my pelvic floor, pushing the top further inside me, then squeezed my thighs together and arched my back.
The walls of my dorm room fell away to reveal a black expanse scattered with stars. Planets spun on invisible axes, swirling with colors I’d never seen before. Nebulae pointed slender fingers into infinity. I saw the earth below me and realized that my home planet had never felt like home.
But as I rode that cosmic river of ecstasy, I knew I had finally found it.
The concept of time lost meaning as my mind explored the universe. I have no recollection of how long I spent in that warm darkness. After traveling for what seemed like years, I began my descent back to earth, heart slowing and muscles ceasing to spasm. Out of breath, I reached up into myself to retrieve my beloved object…
And felt nothing.
My fingers probed further. This had happened before, too many times and with various kinds of office supplies (usually erasers). All I needed to do was be patient, crook my finger just so, relax my pelvic muscles, and fish out the item.
The tip of my finger brushed against something hard. I pressed on, trying to hook my finger around the object’s curves.
It slid right off.
I tried a few more times and paused, panting on the bed. My vagina throbbed from the hours of abuse I’d subjected it to.
My fun was over. I had to get the top out.
Aching, I rolled off the bed and did some jumping jacks, a few squats. Nothing.
One thing that sets primates apart from less intelligent animals is our ability to use tools, my high school anthropology teacher’s voice said in my mind. That’s it. I was an intelligent animal. I could use tools to solve this problem.
A pen or pencil might do the trick, I thought. If I could just wedge it up alongside the top, and then push down…
But neither pen nor pencil worked in any position I tried.
I looked at the craft scissors on my roommate’s desk.
The top was in me upside down. I could try to pinch the golden knob with scissors, pull it out of me that way.
The top had to come out somehow. I hobbled over to my roommate’s desk and picked up the scissors. Supporting one leg on her chair, I worked the blades inside, advancing them until I felt resistance. No, that was just the side of my vaginal canal. Fuck. I decided to try one more time. I pushed the scissors up, up, up, until they met something that felt metallic.
Ever so slightly, I opened the blades.
“SHIT!” My roommate’s voice came through the door. “Now the door’s stuck!”
At the sound of her voice, I flinched. A bolt of pain ripped through my body, followed by a sensation of hot wetness between my thighs.
“I know you’re in there!” she yelled. “I left my A&P book in there. Some of us need to study, you know.”
“I’m hurt,” I said, barely able to form the words.
“What?” My roommate yelled.
“I’m hurt,” I managed to yell back.
“Can you open the door?” she asked.
“I’ll try.”
I walked over to the door slowly, hunched over, every step stabbing somewhere deep in my core. The scissors lay in a small pool of blood on the rug. When I moved the chair from the door, the pain roared so loudly I grew lightheaded.
The door flew open.
“What the ACTUAL fuck?!” my roommate screamed. The scene before her was one to behold: Scissors on the bloody rug, her naked roommate smeared red. Her office supplies scattered all over my bed.
Her office supplies scattered all over my bed.
“What happened?” she cried. “Are you okay? Why are you bleeding?”
“I don’t—I know this sounds—I can’t really expl—”
“Did you get your period?” she asked. “Is that what this is?”
“Um…yeah. I hurt myself trying to get out a tampon…”
She was already walking over to my bed, a mess of office supplies and blood. “This is nasty! What were you doing with all this?”
I slumped to the floor, feeling faint. Through a hazy curtain, I saw her surveying her school supplies. Looking for something.
Then, shrilly: “WHERE’S MY FUCKING TOP?”
“I can explain…let me just use the restroom first…” I tried to get up but weakness overtook me, and I slid back down the wall.
She was directly in front of me now. She bent at the waist so her face was level with mine. “Where’s. My. Fucking. Top,” she hissed.
My mind went white, erasing all sense. At that moment, I couldn’t have lied to her even if she’d been threatening me with a letter opener.
I tried to get up again. My roommate blocked my way.
“Where is it? I’m not letting you up until you tell me.” Her hand rose to her throat. “God damn it, now my asthma’s acting up! You fucking freak!” She took a few steps backward toward her desk, never taking her eyes off me. Her hand blindly groped for her inhaler in the drawer.
“It’s inside me,” I said, very quietly.
“What?”
“It’s inside me,” I repeated.
“Where, inside you? What are you talking about?”
“It’s stuck inside my vagina.”
She stared at me.
“And I cut myself trying to get it out with scissors.”
My roommate looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time. Maybe she was.
Suddenly, a high-pitched wheeze escaped from her throat, followed closely by another. Her eyes grew so wide she looked like a cartoon character. “Where’s. My. Inhaler.” she sputtered, indiscriminately tossing items behind her as she panic-rummaged through her drawer.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t been the most cautious while going through her drawers and removing the school supplies I’d wanted. I might have tossed her inhaler on her desk; maybe a notebook pushed it just enough for it to fall off the back of the desk and onto the floor. It was possible, and possible meant everything at that moment.
“I’ll check behind your desk,” I said, summoning the strength to stand up.
My roommate looked up at me with wild eyes. Her hair was glued all over her face. “You did this,” she choked, jabbing her finger in my direction. “You.”
“Let me just try to find your inhal—”
My roommate hurled herself at me. But her foot slipped in a pool of blood, and the next instant she was crashing down, forehead smacking the corner of her desk as she hurtled to the floor. Her head hit the tile with a dull crack.
I looked down at my roommate. It was hard to tell which blood came from whom. Through the graying edges of my vision, I could make out the forms of the other dorm residents who had gathered around our doorway. Many were holding their phones, some calling 911, others recording the show.
The show, meaning the end of my life as I knew it.
I was more grateful than afraid as my knees buckled beneath me, and I collapsed.
***
A cool hand on my forehead. Whose hand? I opened my eyes and saw the floating face of my brother.
What was my brother doing in my dorm room?
“I’m so glad you’re awake,” he said.
My voice like sand: “How long was I sleeping?”
“Three days.”
As my eyes adjusted to the room, I noticed the monitors around me. Stickers with wires attached to them were glued to my stomach and chest. Something was squeezing my legs.
“Where are Mom and Dad?”
“At home.”
Images of recent events flooded my mind. I saw the navy carpet with its white trellis design stained in blood. I saw the crimson teeth of the scissors, open and gleaming. And I saw my roommate’s forehead split open as her head made contact with the corner of her desk.
“What about—is she?”
“She’s alive,” he said. “But she won’t ever be an anesthesiologist.”
“How did you know about that?”
“That’s all her parents keep saying.”
I lowered my eyes, understanding now.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Mom and Dad didn’t want to come,” I said.
My brother looked at his feet and shook his head slowly. Solemnly.
“But you’re here,” I said.
He caught my eye and smiled. He had our father’s mouth, but his smile was warmer than Dad’s ever was.
“So my sister screws office supplies,” he said, chuckling. “I always knew you were a weirdo.”
“A freakshow,” I corrected.
“When did it start?” my brother asked. “Like did you go to Office Depot one day and some highlighter changed your life forever?”
“Well,” I said, “It wasn’t a highlighter. It was an eraser. I was hanging out in your room when I first noticed it.”
“How old were you?” he asked.
“Thirteen,” I said.
“Damn.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you more. That’s some heavy shit to deal with, especially when you’re a teenager.”
“You don’t think it’s weird?” I asked. My voice came out smaller than I intended.
“Nope. And,” he added, “I don’t have to worry about someone getting my little sister pregnant. Maybe I can convince Dad that your kink is okay by using that argument on him.”
I laughed. The sound seemed foreign to my ears, like a native language I’d forgotten.
“So,” my brother said. “Tell me more about what your life has been like these past five years.”
And I did.