Dream of You (2 page)

             
Sharing a bathroom was something all five Walker kids had learned to cope with at an early age, and they’d learned to work around one another almost scientifically. Jordan threw a towel up over the shower curtain bar, climbed in and sealed himself behind the opaque curtain before he stepped out of his shorts and slung them over the bar too.

             
“Hey, your sister said I had to leave like an hour early if I wanted a parking place,” Tam said right before Jordan cut on the water.

             
He liked his showers cold – as close a replacement to ice therapy as he could get – and stepped under the spray right off. “Dude, that boat you drive will never fit into a spot today.” It had been Jo’s turn to grocery shop, and she’d bought some kind of Olay, moisturizing soap. Jordan picked it up off the corner of the tub with a frown. “Just ride with me. I’ve got a faculty parking pass.”

             
“Isn’t there some kind of regulation against fraternizing with students or something?”

             
There probably was, but he hadn’t read the handbook. Oops. “Nah. It’s a ride, not test answers.”

             
“You sure?”

             
“Dude, quit being a chick.”

             
Half a second later, Jo’s big paddle hairbrush came sailing over the top of the curtain and struck him just above the eye before landing with a clatter of plastic on fiberglass at his feet. Because he was not easily irritated – being the youngest of three brothers had left him immune to any and all forms of ribbing – he recognized his spurt of aggravation over the brush assault for what it was: nerves. Because he also wasn’t nervous by nature, the notion was unsettling.

             
Rather than soothe, the shower had no effect on said nerves, and afterward, as he shaved and attempted to tame the curliness of his hair in front of the mirror, he realized he was scowling at his reflection. He’d never been enthusiastic about school…but this was work. This was a job with better hours than bartending, and he should have been delighted.

             
“Jordie!” Beth called from the foot of the stairs and he sighed. One last tweak of his hair – it wasn’t in ringlets now, just messy cowlicks above his ears – and he went to his room to dress. A white polo shirt, blue track pants, clean white Nikes, and then he headed down to breakfast.

             
And it was going to be a spectacle; that much was apparent upon crossing the threshold.

             
Mom had laid out a feast: waffles, bacon, eggs, fruit and two kinds of juice. For a family that started every day with cold cereal and/or Pop-tarts,
overkill
was too delicate a word. Beth stood beside the table, hands clasped together, watching Tam eat. Her eyes flashed up and landed on Jordan as he entered and she waved him closer. Jo held a half-eaten waffle between her teeth and had her camera raised to her face, finger at the ready.

             
“Well this looks necessary.”

             
“Come sit down, come sit down,” Beth said. “I want my boys to have brain food on their first day.”

             
“The first day means nothing,” Jordan said, but he took wooden steps to the table and fell into his chair. A plate full of steaming, greasy food was set in front of him and his stomach gave a little lurch – he usually had protein for lunch, but not this early in the day. “You don’t need brain power to review the syllabus and cut out thirty minutes early.”

             
“You’re the professor,” Beth countered, “you can’t cut out early.”

             
“Coach, Mom. You have to be good at something to be a professor.”

             
She pursed her lips, giving him that disgruntled, universal mother look. Jordan glanced sideways at Tam and caught his expression of bothered patience. He figured Tam, of all people, no matter how uncomfortable with being fussed over, no matter how unworthy he felt, enjoyed the attention. Deep down. He’d gone years and years with no one to fuss over him, a truth that made Jordan feel guilty, just a little anyway.

             
“Both of you,” Beth said, building toward a lecturing tone, “are doing something that the vast majority of people in this world don’t ever get to do: get a degree and get a good job. I can celebrate that with some - ” she was almost flustered now “ – bacon and eggs if I want to!”

             
Jo reached up and grabbed the waffle that was held between her teeth, tearing off a bite in the process. “Let her have her Mom moment,” she chastised. “And say ‘cheese’.”

             
“You know, baby,” Tam said in the sweetest voice as the flash went off and blinded both of them. “If you get any closer, I’m gonna break that goddamn camera.”

             
“Language!” Beth reprimanded with a hiss.

             
“That friggin’ camera.”

             
“I’d like to see you try,” Jo said, just as sweetly, and the flash bombed them again.

             
“You’re not a mom, you don’t get to have a ‘Mom moment’.”

             
“Nope.” She lowered the camera and grinned. “I’m a wife, and wife moments trump everything, so…” She snapped another picture.

             
Beth snorted. “She’s got you on that one.”

             
Jordan reached for the syrup in the middle of the table and proceeded to drench his waffles. “Yay, school,” he said under his breath. “Just like Christmas.”

2

Now

             
“
W
here’d you leave the powdered sugar?”

             
“In the cabinet where it belongs!” Ellie called down the stairs as she headed toward the washing machine with an armful of whites. It was housed behind a louvered door in the hall alongside the dryer and across from the house’s one full bathroom. As usual, Paige had been the last one to wash a load and the doors were pushed back on their tracks, the Tide bottle was sitting on top of the dryer and the Rubbermaid baskets on the shelf above were vomiting out tube socks and shirt sleeves. Ellie was convinced living in a frat house would have been less work: no one could have been more difficult to clean up after than Paige.

             
“I don’t see it!” A yell that was becoming more of a wail issued from the first floor, followed by a flurry of cabinet doors slamming. “Oh, wait, nevermind! Here it is. Hey, did you make the delivery yet?”

             
Noelle Grayson, despite all those withering, long-nosed, lowered-lids looks from her mother, was nothing if not efficient. She’d been up with the charm of gold finches outside her bedroom window, the floorboards cool beneath her feet, sleep still thick in her eyes. Though the house was being encroached upon by an ever-growing, trendy portion of Kennesaw, it was still an old relic, and the water had taken five good minutes to heat for her shower. In the pre-dawn glow – the most peaceful time of day, when the earth stood right on the edge of letting its breath loose into a new morning – she’d packed all eight of the cakes Paige had baked the night before into the trunk of her Honda and taken them the three miles down to the corner of all the Due Wests and dropped them off at the back door of Wildflour bakery with Sam who opened every morning.

             
Then it had been back to the house for a hand-painted china cup of instant coffee and half a bagel in the windowsill of her bedroom, laptop open across her thighs, words flying off the ends of her fingers onto a Word document while the sun finished coming up. Paige had awakened the whole house, the whole street it seemed, when her radio cut on and she made her way like a snuffling bear down the hall to the shower, Green Day screaming from her open bedroom door.

             
Now, as Ellie dumped her load in the wash and measured out detergent, she felt a flutter of butterfly wings against her sternum. It was the first day of school, and it didn’t matter that she was eighteen and on her own – mostly, anyway – or that college was not the clique-and-gossip world of high school, she was still saddled with a certain amount of dread. In some ways, she loved school – after all, it was the place where she’d met Ivanhoe and Elizabeth Bennet, where she’d sailed on the
African Queen
and gone riding through the woods after dark with Ichabod Crane. At some point amid not being picked for basketball and dropping her lunch tray all over the cutest boy in her class, she’d found a haven between the pages of books. And more than that, she’d found a star to reach for. A dream. A career to pen into the little slot left blank in every one of those
in five years I will…
worksheets she’d filled out when applying for college. 

             
But school was also where popular girls whispered and where football jerk-offs pretended to flirt with bookworms as if it were some sort of sport.

             
Footsteps pounded up the stairs as the washer began to fill with water. Ellie closed the lid and turned to see Paige at the top of the landing, her blonde and pink hair pulled up in dual ponytails on the very top of her head, her eye shadow so dark she looked like she’d been punched. Almost as skinny as the tube socks that were pulled up to her knees and banded at the top with pink, in a plaid skirt and white knotted top, she looked a bit like the punk version of a naughty Catholic school girl. Her eyes were big as half dollars.

             
“What happened to my rubber spatulas? The orange ones?”

             
“They’re in the pitcher by the stove,” Ellie said, “and maybe you should be worried about your bag. Your folders.” She earned a blank look. “You know, for the first day of
school
that begins in an hour?”

             
Paige gasped, and then tried to cover it with a shake of her flapping pink ponytails. “Right. Whatever. I’m ready.” And then she moved past Ellie, pretending not to rush, toward her bedroom, presumably to brush the crumbs off a slightly used composition notebook and toss it into her purse.

             
Ellie left it to her, going downstairs to see how much damage had been done to the kitchen. The house had belonged to her grandmother up until six months ago when Abigail had been moved into what her parents had referred to delicately as a “retirement village.” It was ancient, full of solid, strong hardwood, her grandmother’s dainty tea party furniture and severely outdated appliances. The kitchen was cavernous, laid with hearty ceramic tiles and white cabinets. The white tile countertops were cluttered with pans and mixing bowls. The big island in the center, which served as the staging area for finished cakes, was stacked with empty, ready-to-be-used boxes, ribbons and tags. Ellie poured two travel mugs of coffee, switched off the machine, and was ready, purse and school bag slung over one shoulder, light hoodie in case of cold classrooms draped over her arm, the coffees and lunches for the both of them waiting when Paige came galloping down the stairs like a girl three times her size.

             
“Ready!” she called, and Ellie followed, as dutifully as any mother.

**

              Freshman orientation – and all its slideshows, free KSU Owls t-shirts, laminated booklets and guest speakers – had not prepared Tam for the chaos that was campus that morning. The parking decks were closed with orange traffic cones, students were double and triple parked on sidewalks and in loading zones. Even in the reserved faculty area of the lot across the street from campus, Jordan’s Jeep Wrangler had proved essential because they’d been forced to park up on a median full of bark chips. The campus was as busy as a kicked anthill, students clustering and then shifting in groups, the tumbling din of voices nothing like he remembered from visiting Jordan and Jo at school when they’d attended this place. Vans from a local hip-hop radio station were parked along the sidewalk in front of the fitness center and tents were going up on the green. Campus police on bikes and in golf carts were patrolling for violations, pretending they were fighting actual crime.

             
“This is…”

             
“It gets better in a couple weeks,” Jordan said as they waded through sidewalk traffic. “All the slackers quit coming to class.”

             
“…fucking insane.” It was no less hectic than a high school, only there were a half a dozen miles worth of sidewalk separating his destinations. Jo had always said it was “such a pretty campus,” but all he saw now were the teeming throngs of humanity. “This is gonna suck, isn’t it?”

             
“Pretty much.” Jordan thumped him on the back and began to move away. “See you at two.”

             
“Yeah.” Tam sighed, pretending he was not at all bothered to be left alone in a sea of students –
fellow
students.
Nut up, Wales
, he told himself, and reached over his shoulder to pull his skateboard out of the open top of his backpack.

He’d had the thing since he was twelve and he was proud of the scarred, weathered look of it, the dozens of peeling stickers on the underside. Jo had bought him new wheels for it two weeks ago
, bright red, and the clapping sound of them hitting the sidewalk caused a passing trio of girls to jump in surprise. It also sent a sharp jolt of memories racing through him – the middle and high school years he’d spent on the thing, all those afternoons he’d taken the two mile trek to the Walkers’ house. He’d never been a stunt kind of guy, but he’d loved that skateboard. Beth had always joked that she thought it was permanently attached to the soles of his sneakers. Over the last few years, it had gone the way of his tongue ring, but putting his Converse-shod feet on it today made him feel more like someone on the way to class and less like the adult loser he was.

             
It took him fifteen minutes to get to class, twelve of which he wasted before realizing he was in the English building and not the business building. Then it was up a mountain of concrete steps only to realize he was supposed to be on the first floor instead of the second and that there was a side entrance to said business building through which he could have avoided the stairs. His calculus class was in 106, which was a miniature version of some of the larger amphitheater classrooms. A dozen students were scattered along the tiered rows of long tables and chairs and Jo’s words popped into his head. “
Suck-ups and older students sit in the front, drop-outs and kids with laptops sit in the back and check Facebook.”

             
Eight years ago he would have headed straight for the back row. Today, he was thinking about Mike’s promise of a job and took the last available seat on the front row, right at the end, where his skateboard could stick out and trip someone, most likely the professor.

             
And then the doubt came creeping back into his mind, like a spider that had only been hiding.

             
Two girls in the row behind him were talking about someone named David in hushed, giggly voices. Someone was listening to an iPod with the volume up so loud Tam could hear the warbled, nonsensical static of the ear buds from across the room. The air smelled like burned bread and coffee from the bagel shop out in the atrium, voices and the scuff of shoes on the tile bouncing off all the empty space afforded by the four stories worth of open air.

             
Tam drummed his palms on the table top in an unconscious gesture, his wedding ring clacking against its surface. He’d never noticed he did that until the ring had come along, and suddenly he was this asshole who drummed his hands on things.
Maybe
, he thought,
I didn’t do it prior to the ring
. Maybe the ring had magical powers of responsibility and stress.
I bet that’s it…

             
His cell chimed in his pocket, reminding him that he needed to set it to vibrate, and he pulled it out to do so and check his new text message. It was from Jo and it brought a smile to his lips.

             
Be a suckup and sit in front! U’ll do great Luv u!!!!

             
“You married?” a voice to his right asked.

             
His neighbor – now that he was taking a real look at the guy – was not, surprisingly, part of the eighteen-and-under crowd. Black, probably mid-thirties with the supershort hair, goatee, heavily muscled build and tucked-in polo shirt look of a man who appreciated order and authority in his life, Tam pegged him as a cop. If he wasn’t, he’d missed a damn good chance of playing one in a movie.

             
“Yeah,” he said as he pocketed his phone again.

             
“I thought I was gonna be the only one in here who was.”

             
Tam glanced over his shoulder. The rest of the class was filing in and all of them looked painfully young; pimply faces and iPods and hair flips from the girls. “You almost were. I sat in a Shakespeare class for five minutes before I realized I was in the wrong building.”

             
The guy chuckled. “My wife went here years ago, but it’s changed a lot.”

             
“Mine did too. But I never got further than the dorms.”

             
Mike, last weekend during family dinner, had taken it upon himself – the eternal middle child, fad-follower and knower-of-all-things – to pull Tam aside for a glass of scotch and the “rundown” of college etiquette. (Apparently, marrying the guy’s younger sister had dropped Tam’s IQ in his estimation and he needed more life guidance).
“Introduce yourself to the first person you meet who doesn’t look like a total fucking idiot and boom, automatic study partner.”

             
Tam could say, with complete truth, that he’d always been a better student than Mike, so he wasn’t worried about having a study partner. But learning that he wasn’t the only married male over twenty in the room was a strange comfort.

             
“I’m Tam.” He extended his hand for a shake.

             
“James.”

**

              “Here, eat the rest of these. I don’t want ‘em.” Paige waved her package of peanut butter crackers in front of Ellie’s nose.

             
At five till two, they were sitting in the carpeted hall in the bottom level of the convocation center, listening to the basketball game that was being played above their heads and waiting for their professor to show up and unlock the door. Most of the rest of their class was lined up along the wall around them, subdued; before class was very different from after class chatting.