Again (5 page)

Kate

Two
days later, after my morning class, I tucked myself into a corner of the
student center and called my best friend Veronica. Not that I had anything
earth shattering to tell her other than people seemingly believed me and I was
living the life of a college freshman. Well, the boring parts anyway, but those
were the only parts I wanted to live, right?

A
group of girls laughed from across the room. I could tell from the openness in
their eyes, the fullness of their voices that they were freshman too. Their
vibrant puffy coats hung on their chairs like matador capes. As if they aimed
for life to barrel at them. They were teasing it, inviting whatever came their
way.

It
was easy to have that outlook when you had other people to lean on, like I’d
had Veronica in the city. But here, I didn’t have anyone.

It
was by design. A real friend would get too close. There were only so many lies
I could tell, only so much pretending I could do without actually letting
someone in. There were also my rules. Sure, there were people here who didn’t
drink, like Dawn, but temptations were everywhere, even with people who didn’t
appear at first to be temptations, like Carter.

I
clicked into Veronica’s contact on my cell. The photo I’d taken of her toasting
me with a glass of wine stared back at me, her black hair as shiny as her dark-as-night
eyes. I pushed call as the girls’ laughter shrilled, grew out and into the air
around them like something being built.

Living
without drinking and sex was one thing, but would I be able to keeping living
without friends?

I
glanced at the time: noon. If I were in the city, Veronica and I would be slipping
away from the office to gossip and eat. I kind of wished I was there instead of
here, alone.

“Kate,”
she said, when she answered, “Wait, is that still your name there?”

I
glanced at the laughing girls and felt the camaraderie stitching them together
through the phone. I still had friends even if they weren’t here.

I
still had Veronica, even if we were living totally different lives now.

“Yes,
only my age has changed,” I whispered, “and of course my hair color.”

“You’re
always changing your hair color.”

I
was. I did. David used to call me his chameleon. I guess I’d always been trying
to figure out who I wanted to be.

“Yeah,”
I continued to whisper, “but not to look younger.”

“I’m
pretty sure you were always trying to look younger,” she laughed.

True,
but not
this
much younger. Not young enough to seem like one of the
laughing girls, ready for life to sprint at them instead of having already run
them over.

 “I
guess, since you’re not on my doorstep yet, people are buying it?”

Veronica
had been there every time I got carded at the bars. She’d seen the way people
looked at me when we walked down the street together during our daily lunch
hour in our suits, like she belonged there and I was playing dress up.

“So
far,” I said, discounting Dawn. She was the only one who’d even questioned me,
but then again why would anyone expect me to be doing what I was doing?

That
only happened in movies, right?

“What’s
it like being back in college?” Veronica asked with what I would describe as a
wistful voice.

She
had good memories from her times on campus. She had finished college. Graduated
magna cum laude and all sorts of other Greek letters strung together from every
school she attended. The pieces of paper proving her intelligence hung on every
wall of her office, but she was an accountant for the Franklin Law Group, and
she hated it.

I
guess those pieces of paper didn’t make any difference if the place they led
you was hell.

The
same hell I’d been in.

“Good,”
I said. Truthfully, it was weird. It was hard to remember to consider my life
the way the laughing girls did. I might have rewound my situation, but I couldn’t
forget any of the things I knew. “My roommate looks like she sucks the blood
from baby bunnies for strength but otherwise…”

“What
does that mean?” she interrupted.

“She
wears black like she needs it to breathe,” I explained. “It’s cool, I can
handle her.”

“Only
you would go back to school and get a roommate with mental issues.”

Maybe,
but water did seek its own level. Maybe even more so now that I was only
drinking water. I took a long sip from the plastic bottle in my bag, wondering
how long I would need to be sober for water to finally have the effect of that
first sip of wine.

Wondering
how many years it took before I wouldn’t wish for numbness anymore.

“How’s
work?” I asked, a little wistful too.

“How
do you think?”

I
didn’t bother responding. I knew what it was like to be trapped, stuck, to know
the walls around you were a coffin, or eventually would be. Maybe Dawn was rubbing
off on me. Or maybe that’s what happens to everyone as they are about to turn
thirty—the threshold where their life isn’t theirs anymore. It belongs instead
to the people they sleep with, the people who pay them, and the people they
have to pay.

“So
are you studying hard?” she asked. Veronica knew about my real freshman year.
How instead of studying books I studied a bottle and any guy around once the
bottle was gone. Being back, finally being sober, I realized my first freshman
year had never ended.

That’s
what I’d been doing with David, with every sip I took to forget how much I
hated where I’d ended up.

“As
hard as I can study day three,” I replied.

“Studying
anything that’s
hard
?” she asked, I could hear her smirk through the
phone.

“Um,
no,” I said, shaking away the Carter, Professor Parker GIF loop still playing
in the darkest part of my brain.

“So
you’re seriously doing this as a nun?”

“I’m
closer to sainthood than ever,” I said. Luckily I wasn’t religious and didn’t
need to be punished for thoughts and desires.

“I
totally get why,” she said, her breathing slow, pensive, “but if I had the
chance to go back I would treat it like a candy store, like a toy store.”

“That
was my problem the first time around. Besides, you’re an accountant. I was an
office bitch.”

The
other thing Veronica and I did together was drink. A lot. If I felt like I
needed to get sober, she had to wonder what that meant for her.

“We’re
all a bitch to someone. Even the guys, even David,” she said, her voice
quieter. She knew what I knew. Your life wasn’t your own anymore after you’d
made all your decisions, after you were out on your own.

“He’s
a bitch, period,” I said, pushing the bile in my voice down.

“He
got a new assistant,” she said with a click of her tongue.

“Man
or woman?”

“Seriously?”
she laughed.

“Hot
or dumpy?”

“I’m
not even going to answer.” I could hear her head shake.

“Well
good for him, I’m glad he’s moving on.”

“I’m
sure his wife is, too,” she said. I heard her chair creak. Knew she was sitting
back, maybe putting her feet up on the desk. One of her few pleasures in a work
day; I knew lunch with me had been another.

“Sorry
I’m not there for salmon rolls today.” I always had lunch with Veronica. David
was busy with clients or other partners.

Our
time together was usually after hours, the janitorial crew working outside his
locked office door while we did a little cleaning of each other with our skin
and tongues. Sometimes we’d do it on top of his desk, but usually I was under
it, his hand on the top of my head like he was reminding me I was there for him.

He’d
never cared about my drinking when it was the two of us. Being wasted made for
hotter sex. But, when everyone saw who I really was at the company party, or
maybe when he saw who I really was through everyone else, that had been it.

I
shoved the thought away.

“Been
brown bagging it,” she said. “I’m saving so much money, I’m thinking of coming
to visit.”

“You
should.” My voice rose, loud enough so even the laughing girls noticed.

“I’ll
give you a little more time to get settled first.”  

I knew
what she meant. She probably suspected I wouldn’t last a whole semester anyway.
As much as she loved me and wanted the best for me, maybe in some ways she hoped
I wouldn’t.

I’d
had her and David at my job. But, the job itself, the grind of waking up and
being there and the hours and days becoming years, stretching out and cracking
like old leather, was suffocating, debilitating—enough to make you emotionless.

Enough
to make you jealous of anyone who had been able to escape, even if that person
was your best friend.

Maybe
David had been a distraction and drinking every night just something to do.
Most people throw themselves into sex and drugs so they don’t have to feel. I
wondered if my reasons were just the opposite.

When
we hung up I took out my newly issued student ID. I’d decided to do a duck face
for the picture. It was ridiculous, my lips like I’d been given too much Novocain
at the dentist. I glanced at the laughing girls. I was doing my best to look
like them, making the choices I thought they would make given the chance to do
it again, but I was not like them.

There
was one fundamental difference between us. I knew what a sham life was once you
left college. How nothing was ever as good as you pictured it would be.

Carter

Heading back to the dorm with Tristan, I
couldn’t stop checking my phone. I was probably going to be late.

I hated being late. It made me feel out
of control. If there was one thing I prided myself on after my freshman year,
it was being very much in control.

Ironically, it was the only thing I had
control over.

That need was part of the reason I went
to the library every night at seven. Why I woke every morning at six whether I
needed to or not. There was a calmness that came from doing everything at the
same time every day. You knew exactly what you could expect. It also made it a
lot easier not to hope for more.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not that boring,”
Tristan sighed, indicating my phone, his breath dark gray in the cold.

“You sure?” I joked, knocking him with
my elbow.

The sun was setting and transforming the
snow covered campus into an oversaturated watercolor painting, the drifts and
buildings reflecting soft oranges and pinks. It was much too beautiful to rush,
but sometimes rushing to get to the next thing was the only thing that made
sense.

“I’d ask if you have a date but I think
I know the answer,” he joked back, hitting me with his elbow a little harder
than I’d jabbed him.

We were like Laurel and Hardy, except here
everyone thought Laurel was a rapist, and Hardy liked guys.

“Dinner duty at the humane society,” I
explained. I needed to be there by five o-clock p.m. if I wanted to eat and
then be at the library by seven.

“There’s the answer,” he replied,
shaking his head, his mouth a straight line.

My sad, compartmentalized life was not
funny to him, not something to joke about.

Tristan had nothing against my
volunteering at the humane society, he even helped out sometimes. He just
didn’t like what he called my
using up all my emotions and time on furry
beings instead of human ones.

“We can’t all have underclassmen
throwing themselves at us,” I said, hitching my bag higher on my shoulder and
trying to walk faster.

“We can’t?” I heard a smirk in his voice.
He hurried behind me. “I swear you’ve got to pick a better hobby, dude, or at
least one that doesn’t have a dinner bell.”

“You know they need to get fed at five.”

“Um, yeah,” he paused, “that’s why I
said that.”

We’d had this conversation a lot, but it
didn’t stop Tristan from wanting to continue to have it, from me continuing to
defend myself.

Volunteering at the humane society was
the only thing from my freshman year I’d kept in my life besides Tristan. It
was the one good thing I’d done at this school. There was something about
animals. The way every day was a clean slate—the way they needed you and didn’t
demand anything other than that you cared for them.

“You could buy them a whole new facility
with your trust fund. Why don’t you do that so we can actually go out for
dinner tonight?” Tristan asked, using his very own puppy dog eyes.

“I could probably buy them twenty
facilities.” I had a lot of money, an obscene amount. The kind of money that made
people hate you. Made you hate yourself.

“Exactly,” he said.

I didn’t bother responding, because
doing this was not about the money. The humane society was the one place in my
life that wasn’t.

My relationship with my parents had been
all about money, even before Jeanie. If I could go back to when I was a kid on
one of those rare holidays when our staff was with their own families and my
mom was forced to make us grilled cheese she burned and my dad pretended to
like, I would have.

Things were so much simpler before I
understood they would rather pay to take care of me than actually do it
themselves.

“You could also buy them twenty
companions,” he said, because we’d had this conversation so many times.

I nodded, but I needed them, too. They
reminded me I was human—so little did after Jeanie, after everyone saw me as a
monster. The cats and dogs at the humane society only saw me as love, as help,
as someone they could count on.

“Speaking of what you should be doing,”
he smiled, “how’s Kate?”

My stomach plunged at hearing her name. “Wow,
there’s no beating around the bush with you,” I said, my cheeks burning in the
cold.

“I tend to avoid the bush.” He snickered
and made his eyes wide. “Actually, speaking of—”

“Stop,” I said, holding my hand up, “don’t
even go there.”

“What?”

“I’ve barely even talked to her, let
alone gotten close to whatever you were about to say.”

“You should probably get moving,” he
said. “Isn’t that like step one in male-female mating ritual?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s step seventeen,”
I said, our dorm finally in sight.

“Sounds like you’re doing something
wrong.”

I probably was, but what the hell was I
supposed to do? After rejecting me when I’d asked her to be my study partner, I
kind of got the hint. My freshman year had at least taught me how to take no
for an answer.

“Hello,” he said, moving his hand in
front of my face when I didn’t retort, “earth to Carter.”

“She made it pretty clear she wants me
to leave her alone.”

“How convenient for you,” he smirked.

“If it matters to you so much, why don’t
you ask her out?”

“For you?”

“Who am I, Cyrano de Bergerac?” I asked.

“Your nose is way sweeter than that,
cutie pie,” he replied, trying to give me a coochie-coo with two fingers.

I smacked his hand away.

When I didn’t respond to his joke he
continued. “It’s your last semester. Sue me if I think you deserve to have some
fun.”

Maybe I did, but being with Kate was
more than that. She deserved a lot more than a good time, though I certainly
wasn’t against showing her one.

“I saw the way she was looking at you on
moving-in day. She likes you and, considering how much you’re trying to deny it,
you must feel the same way.”

“How about we get off me and talk about
you for a change,” I said, proving his point without even meaning to.

We hit the cement porch of the dorm.
Tristan stopped. “Your romantic foibles are so much more fun, Chazzy,” he said,
playing air piano with his fingers to wave good-bye before walking inside.

I guess I couldn’t blame him. It hadn’t
been only years since I’d been with anyone, but years since he could give me
shit about it.

As my best friend, he had a lot of time to
make up for.