How Not To Fall (2 page)

H
e sees me right away when he comes in the door. I wave. He puts a hand up in return while he pulls off his hat—it's still cold for March—then he points between me and the counter, eyebrows raised. Do I want a coffee? I raise my cup and mouth,
I'm good.

See, he's
thoughtful,
as well as a dreamboat.

I try not to watch him too closely as he orders his usual flat white—steamed milk and
four
shots of espresso!
How is that healthy?
He is totally unaware of me, though, so I kind of stare. I stare at the line of his jaw, the curve of his bottom lip, the movement of his larynx when he orders. There are laugh lines just beginning to be visible around his eyes—I can't really see them from here, but I imagine I can, behind his glasses. He's wearing his shitty beige duffle coat, his hat stuffed halfway into the pocket. The ducklings have decided among ourselves that his coat used to be the color of baby puke, but years of neglect have left it somewhere between the color of baby puke and rainwater in a ditch.

But I'm telling you, it is a mercy to the world that the man doesn't try to look good, because even with his shitty beige duffle coat, eyes are turning to watch him. It happens every time. Does he know this goes on? Does he hide it on purpose?

We ducklings have speculated that under the shitty beige duffle coat and inevitable—and inevitably wrinkled—blue Oxford shirt is the body of a Greek god. We're pretty sure this is true. We have no evidence, but we're pretty sure.

When he gets to my table, he puts his stuff down, hangs his coat over the back of his chair (revealing the wrinkled blue Oxford shirt—it's the stripy one today), and sits down opposite me.

“Sorry I'm late. You know how Diana gets. How are you, Annie?”

Of course I know it's just polite to ask someone, “How are you?” at the start of a conversation. I do
know
that. It's just, when Charles asks you how you are, he's really asking. My pulse accelerates by about fifty beats per minute, I fight off a stupid grin, and I debate just spilling my guts right then.
As a matter of fact, Charles, lustbucket of my loins, I have been masturbating to fantasies of you for a year and a half, and if I graduate without at least trying to actually be naked in a bed with you, I will live with that regret for the rest of my life.

But with my heart now pounding audibly in my head, I opt for the slightly more conventional, “I'm good. How are you?”

I am a conversational goddess, weaving a magical spell. No, I'm not. Headdesk.

“Good, good,” he answers. “You're having difficulty with your data?”

So we're getting right to it, are we, Charles? No gentle buildup, just straight to the data I don't need to talk about?

And this is the moment. This is when . . . I chicken out completely.

Instead of confidently propositioning him, I pull out my laptop and mumble something about variance to cover the awkwardness as I open a spreadsheet full of correlations.

“Uhhhh . . .” I say persuasively. “Not so much difficulty as I'm just feeling uncertain about whether I saw everything there was to see. I'd just like another pair of eyes to go over it and see if maybe there was something I missed.” I'm making this up as I go.

“Sure, glad to.” He pulls my laptop to his side of the table and runs his eyes down the columns. “Not like you, eh? Usually you dot every
i
and cross every
t
and never look back to consider whether one might have slipped past you.”

“Well”—I shrug into my coffee—“they kinda never do slip past.” This is not arrogance; it's just true. I am detail-oriented. Even Professor Smith says so.

What a shame that skill is of no help to me in asking a man to have sex with me.

He grins. “True enough. The pink cells are the .001 significance?”

“And the yellow are .01, yep.” I nod. I am an abject coward. I am a groveling little troll. Ass balls fuck.

He says, “Hm. This is interesting.... How much time have you got?”

“I have class at three,” I say.

“Well, it won't take that long, but let me . . .” He's copying an array from the raw data and pasting it into a new spreadsheet. He saves it to our shared Dropbox (we share a Dropbox, he and I. No big deal), then pulls out his own computer and opens the file there with the statistical software. “This'll take a moment,” he says. As he labels variables, he says, “Feeling a little unsure about the thesis?”

“No, not really,” I say, and it's true.

He raises an eyebrow at me, skeptical. “You're looking a little rough around the edges, if you'll forgive me for mentioning it. It's normal to feel anxious about a big project. I was a wreck when I was writing my senior thesis.”

He's being so nice, I can hardly stand it.

“Dude, you were, like, twelve when you were writing your senior thesis.”

“Eighteen,” he grins at his screen.

“Same difference! Everything causes anxiety when you're eighteen.”

“As opposed to the confident, striding age of twenty-two. So, not the thesis then. Personal? Should I not ask? Boy troubles?”

“Um, not as such,” I say.

“Girl troubles, then?”

That makes me laugh. And then I decide to tell the truth—most of it. “It's a man, not a boy, and it's not so much trouble as . . . a profound
lack
of trouble, when I would like very much for there to be trouble.”

“You're not going to tell me you've got a crush on a professor, are you?” he says, teasing.

And there it is. My window of opportunity. I can let it pass, or I can step through into possibility.

With my throat thick and my heart racing, I step through.

I look right at him, lick my dry lips, and say, “Not a professor.”

He looks up from his screen and blinks. As my meaning settles into his brain, he flushes pink, the way he does when anyone compliments him or thanks him for anything.

“I . . .” he says.

“You . . . er,” he continues.

“That is . . .” he concludes.

Oh, this is way worse than I expected. So. Much. Worse. But what
did
I expect? Was there any point at which I really imagined him saying no? Saying yes? Saying anything? Or did I only think as far as the asking?

I shake my head and wave the subject away. “Don't worry about it. Forget it.”

“Okay,” he says with immediate and mortifying relief, and he looks back down at the screen, where new analyses are running.

And I think to myself,
But . . . just ask and let him say no. You'll never regret asking, and you'll always regret not knowing for sure what could have happened
.

So I say, “It's just . . .”

He looks up again with the expression of a man facing a firing squad.

“You don't want to hear this, so I'll just say it fast and get it over with and then we can forget it. The thing is, I think you and I have A Thing, and I know if I don't at least put it on the table, I'll always wonder ‘what if,' and so I'm just . . . putting it on the table, you know, and leaving it there. Like bread. For sharing.”

“Bread?” he asks, looking no happier.

I give him some side eye and say tentatively, “I'm talking about sex?”

He's nearly fuchsia now. “Jesus,” he says weakly.

“Feel free to say no! Honestly! I won't take it personally—I mean, even if you mean it personally, I'll just chalk it up to a boss-student thing.”

“Exactly,” he agrees. “A boss-student thing. So. No. Er. Thanks.”

And that was my window.

It has closed.

It is officially time to let go.

But instead I say, “If it's a boss-student thing, once I'm not a student, that's not a thing anymore, and I'll be in Bloomington until early June....” But his eyes are on his screen.

“You did miss something,” he says abruptly.

“What?”

“In your data. I can't tell for sure what it means yet, but I think it might actually be quite important. Do you want me to show you, or do you want to find it yourself?”

“
What?
” And by
What?
I mean:
Fuck you, Charles Douglas!
I am done with the analysis! I am writing up my results and discussion! I am presenting these data at a conference in three months! You just turned down sex with me, and now you're finding
errors in my analysis?
I repeat:
Fuck you, Dr. Charles fucking Douglas!

“I'll save the SPSS file to our Dropbox so you can see how I found it,” he says. “But it's there to find in your spreadsheet. Look at it by stimulus.”

I take my computer back, and I look. It takes me a few minutes, and Charles sits, patiently drinking coffee while I search ... but then I see it—the pattern I missed.

Oh fuck.

“Oh fuck!” I say, looking up at him in horror and despair.

“Sorry,” he answers, and he really does seem sorry.

But then. Then he fights a grin and loses. I watch a smile spread across his face, and it's like watching a glass of red wine fall, in slow motion, and spill all over a tablecloth.

“I am sorry, truly!” he says. “It's just that this may be the most awkward conversation I've ever had—and I'm British, so that's saying something.”

I smile too, but as his eases to a warm little smile directed right at my humiliation, my chin wobbles dangerously, and my eyes fill with tears.

“Shit,” I whisper.

He looks at me sympathetically, but he doesn't tell me not to cry or not to worry about it. He says, “I cried almost every day for the last month of my undergraduate work. I'd lock myself in the lab overnight and alternate between data analysis and weeping.”

“Did you fuck up this badly?”

“No,” he says, but kindly. “Next time ask for a second pair of eyes sooner. Nobody sees everything.”

I nod, causing one tear to drip down my cheek, and it just makes me angry.

“Well, I guess I've got some work to do,” I say gruffly. “I better get back to the lab.” I shove my stuff into my backpack. Charles starts packing up too.

“Me too. Want me to wait here and let you have some time on your own, or may I walk with you?”

“No, we might as well show up together.” I start toward the door, and we make our way out into the cold March sunshine as I add, “That way when they see I've been crying, they'll think it's your fault instead of mine. ‘Charles, what did you do to Annie?' And you can be like, ‘I pointed out an obvious error in her analysis, but only after turning down her highly inappropriate offer of sex.' And Professor Smith'll be like, ‘Oh, well, that explains that.'”

He laughs. “As offers of sex go, I'd say it was as appropriate as it could be. Which is to say, not at all, but at least you made an effort not to sexually harass me.”

As we cross Indiana Avenue onto campus I whine, “Man, what am I gonna do?”

“About your data or about sex?” he asks. He's teasing me now, and I respond by
thwapping
him on the arm with the back of my hand. “You'll work your arse off and get the work done,” he says easily. “I hope you didn't have plans for spring break.”

I had planned to go home.

That is not going to happen.

 

When I get back to the apartment that night, I lie on Margaret's bedroom floor and tell her the whole story. She listens sympathetically as she tries on outfits for tonight, nodding and furrowing her brow as appropriate, with the occasional “No, you didn't!” and “Oh my god, Annie.”

“And now not only am I not going to get laid, I've embarrassed Charles,
and
I have a fuck ton of new work to do.”

She doesn't say anything; she just gives me a hug.

“Is it because I'm not cute?” I whimper.

“You're totally cute,” she contradicts. “You know, for an androgynous white girl.”

Margaret's girlfriend, Reshma, is Indian and femme, and Margaret is in love, so anyone who isn't South Asian and into dresses and makeup doesn't look cute to Margaret anymore. Margaret herself is Thai American and also femme, and when the three of us go out, it's like Kelly Kapoor from
The Office
hooked up with London Tipton from
The Suite Life of Zack & Cody
. . . and they're being followed around by Bobby frickin' Brady. I stopped feeling cute a long time ago.

I ask, “Is there some book I could have read that teaches you how to find out if someone would like to have sex with you without completely embarrassing yourself and them?”

“Probably.”

“It's not even the rejection I feel bad about, it's how uncomfortable I made poor Charles. He doesn't deserve that. I should have thought of that.”

“What was it he said about sexual harassment?”

“He said at least I made an effort not to sexually harass him. I think he meant it was better that I was just like,
Hey, you wanna?
instead of trying to flirt with him or something.”

“Annie, you are many things, but a seductress is not one of them.”

I wrap my arms around my head. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”

A
month passes.

I'd tell you all about it, but here's what it would sound like:

I wake up, go to class, go to the lab, teach my dance class at the community center, go back to the lab, go home, and go to bed. Then I wake up, go to class, go to the lab, teach . . .

Except the weekends. Here's how the weekends go:

I wake up, go to the lab, go to the library, and then I go home and go to bed.

Occasionally I don't even make it home but just fall asleep in the lab, and Charles or whoever will find me there in the morning, passed out on the couch in the ducklings' office, my face pillowed on an open book. A few times Margaret and I manage to hang out—as my roommate and fellow duckling, she would usually hang out with me every day, but she's not writing a thesis. She has a job lined up at a pharmaceutical company in Indianapolis starting in May, and until then she's basically coasting. She's
enjoying
her last couple of months in school, socializing, doing all the things we love doing, one last time before we go.

Not me. I'm the thesis-writing, doesn't-understand-her-data zombie who wanders in at night, stares at the TV for ten minutes, and drops into bed without even taking off her clothes. And then I'm out of the apartment in the morning before Margaret wakes up.

So a month passes.

On one of the last go-back-to-the-lab nights, I'm sitting on the ducklings' couch, reading a psychophysiology paper. I've been here for about ten hours, and everyone has come and gone for the day. There's no one else in the lab—probably no one else in the building, since it's Friday night. So when the door opens, I startle and gasp.

It's only Charles.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he says. “What are you working on?”

“Noncoherence in anger,” I answer, taking off my glasses. I put the paper down and wipe my hands over my eyes. “Anger as an approach motivation, sure, but at which levels of analysis? Basically just anger. From a theoretical point of view, anger is a complete mystery to me.” I put my glasses back on. “Still.”

And he says,

I look at him. “Huh?”

“Nicholas Rowe,” he says. And then in a soft, high voice, he adds,

And before I can react, he pulls a white paper bag from his satchel and says, “I brought food. Take a break?”

“Oh! You didn't have to do that—that's so nice!” He hands me a bottle of water and a warm, foil-wrapped sandwich that smells like a cheeseburger. I take it with a smile but don't unwrap it.

He sits at the far end of the couch, puts another foil-wrapped sandwich on the empty cushion next to him, and then starts rummaging through his bag as he says, “Annie,” and then clears his throat. After a pause he continues, “I wanted to say how impressed I've been with you these last few weeks. At first I was impressed at how well you took my criticism. You didn't argue; you just looked at the data and saw the truth.” He pulls a bag of miniature Snickers out of his satchel. “But I've been even more impressed since then because your original analysis wasn't wrong, it was only incomplete. You could have kept it as it was, and only you and I would have known the difference. But you weren't satisfied with that; you're committed to understanding your results more thoroughly.”

“Thank you,” I say. I roll and unroll the corner of the foil between my fingers.

“And I want to tell you that I think the world is going to be a much better place because you are in it and doing good work,” he says. He rips open the bag of candy and drops it on my side of the empty cushion. Then and only then does he address his own burger. “But I'd like to present you with another criticism, and I hope you'll take it as well as you took the last one, even though I don't have any data to back it up.”

“Okay . . .” I say.

“The world can only be a better place because you are in it, if you are in fact actually
in it
. If you keel over from lack of food, sleep, sunlight, and basic human contact, all of us miss out.” And he looks directly at me for the first time. “Will you please eat that burger?” he says.

I raise my eyebrows apologetically and say, “I don't eat red meat.”

He presses his lips together, takes the burger back, and says, “Neither do I,” and he hands me his own sandwich. “Veggie burger.”

“I can't take your dinner.”

“So help me, god, I will brace your mouth open like it's
A Clockwork Orange
and jam the bloody thing in if I have to. Eat.”

I take it, and he pulls fries out of the bag and starts eating those, so I feel less guilty about taking his food. I unwrap the veggie burger and take a bite—and suddenly I am ravenous. When is the last time I ate? Did I have lunch today? Breakfast? I remember now: I had coffee, and I decided that putting cream in it counted as a meal. Dinner last night? Not that I recall. Lunch yesterday? Nope.

My mother would have my head if she knew.

“Have you read Carver?” Charles says in his I'm-giving-you-a-hint voice.

“Boy, have I read Carver,” I answer through a face full of food.

Charles chews thoughtfully on some fries. I take another huge bite.

“What time is it?” I say, realizing all at once that it's fully dark outside.

“After nine,” he says.

“Fuck. I should go home.”

“Yes, you should,” he says, nodding and chewing. “But you should finish that before you go.”

Obediently, I take yet another huge bite.

“Thanks,” I say again, mouth full.

“Least I could do,” he says. “I've felt rather guilty about it, in fact.”

I shake my head and swallow slightly too much veggie burger. “I'm glad you caught it. Imagine how I would have felt if I had caught it later and didn't have time to fix it.”

Through another mouthful of fries, he says, “There aren't many like you, Annie.”

I don't know what to say to that, so I just say, “Can I have some fries?”

He hands me the container and says, “Have the rest. I had dinner out. I was only eating to be polite.”

To make conversation I ask, “Where'd you go?”

“Nick's,” he says. “The ‘English Hut.'”

He says the last words with irony. Nick's is neither English nor a hut. So I ask the obvious question. “Why?”

“There was a graduate student get-together there. I thought I'd spend some time with my own sort.”

I nod and eat.

He clears his throat and shifts in his seat. “But the whole time, I kept thinking, ‘These aren't my sort. My sort is still at the lab.' And so I stopped at Kilroy's for the food and came to the lab on the off chance you were here.” He turns his face to me. “And you are.”

He holds my gaze for a second, and the corners of my mouth lift.

“There you go,” he says. “Haven't seen that in a while.”

I look down. I have a little veggie burger left, but I don't feel as hungry now. As I wrap up the last of it in its foil, I say, “Thanks for this.”

“My pleasure,” he says. I meet his eyes again, and he says quietly, “No one has what you have. The drive. The curiosity. The powerful intelligence. Diana is lucky to have you in her lab. I'm lucky. We don't tell you often enough.”

I'm exhausted. I'm full. And, oh yes, I'm
exhausted
. I feel the burning behind my eyes and say, “Don't make me cry again. You'd have to live with that forever, you know, the guy who made Annie Coffey cry
twice
.” I open the bottle of water and take a long drink.

“Do you think we could be friends, Annie?” he says. “I've known you for a year and a half, and I hardly know anything about you, except that you're very bright—and, apparently, wanted to go to bed with me, which, I'll be honest, seem like mutually exclusive facts. Though I expect that second thing isn't even true anymore, now that I've ruined your semester, eh? Ah well. These things do happen.”

I choke a little on the water. “I'd like to be friends.”

“Let's go climbing,” he says. “Why don't you take tomorrow off, get some sleep, and then we'll go rock climbing Sunday.”

I shake my head. “I already took yesterday afternoon off for the prairie vole talk, I can't spare two whole days—”

“You can; you
should
. You'll come back to it thinking more clearly. You're stuck because you're sleep deprived. Look, trust me on this one. I spent two weeks banging my head against a wall over a design flaw in the blood pump.” (He invented a medical thing. I don't quite understand what it does, but I love what he calls it: the blood pump.) “Then I spent one weekend in the woods, and I woke up with the solution.”

“Yeah. You're probably right. Okay.” Rock climbing. Absolutely. Fear of heights notwithstanding. Whatevs. It's fine.

I put the remainder of the veggie burger into my bag, and Charles says, “Take the candy, too.”

“Thanks,” I say, and drop the bag of Snickers on top of everything else.

“How are you getting home?”

“Walking—or there's probably a bus.”

“I've got my car. Let me give you a lift.” He takes my bag from me—and drops it to the floor. “Jesus Christ, what have you got in here?”

“Seven medical textbooks,” I say apologetically. “I'll carry it.” But he keeps it, and we go out to his car. It's only a couple of miles, but it feels luxurious just to sit there and let a combustion engine do all the work. In a few quiet minutes of inattentiveness, my brain is growing bleary.

As he drops me off, he says, “Get sleep. I'll pick you up at two on Sunday.”

“Okay, see you then. Bye—and thanks again.”

I notice through the deepening haze that he doesn't drive away until I've opened the front door and stepped inside.

As I close the front door behind me, I hear music playing upstairs. Margaret is getting ready to go out. I haul myself up the stairs and poke my head into the bathroom, where she's putting on eyeliner.

“Annie!” she says brightly, and then, “Oh my god, Annabelle, you look like hell.” She turns off the music.

“I feel like hell. I'm going to bed. Have fun tonight.”

“Wait, have you eaten today? There's pizza.”

“Yeah, Charles brought me Kilroy's, actually.”

She blinks. “That was nice of him.”

“It was. He was very nice to me.” I blink slowly, my exhaustion growing. “He seemed to blame himself for me having to, like, redo six months' work in one month.”

“Aw!” Margaret says, but I'm already on my way to my room.

I barely get my shoes off before I fall into bed.

 

Over the next thirty-six hours, I sleep for twenty-four of them.

I go for a run, too, I take a shower, and I spend a little time with Margaret—she tells me about her girlfriend, about her apartment hunting in Indy, about her fun and exciting life.

I used to have a life. Now I have a thesis.

By Sunday, though, I feel a lot better. Better enough to recognize I'm having Some Feelings about rock climbing with my, um, new friend.

When Margaret makes her way out of bed and into the kitchen around eleven Sunday morning, I am making pancakes.

“Coffee,” she grumbles, her hair in her face. It's nice to be the alert one for once.

“French press,” I say, mimicking her tone and pointing to the pot on the table.

“Rock star,” she answers in the same voice.

“Yes, I am,” I grumble back.

She sits at the table and pours coffee into a waiting mug, then sits sipping it while I flip pancakes. It's a little like watching a person-size balloon inflate, seeing Margaret caffeinate herself in the morning. By the time she gets to the bottom of her first cup, she's almost human.

“Are there pancakes for me, too?” she asks.

“Pancakes for everyone!” I announce, like it's my campaign promise.

She pours a second cup and says, “You seem lots better.”

“I am! My brain feels so much less foggy.”

“Tell me you're not working today. Can you hang out?”

“Actually,” I say, “I'm going rock climbing with Charles at two.”

Her eyebrows go up.

“I know!” I say. “I want to talk to you about this development.” As I feed her pancakes, I report everything I remember from Friday night—the veggie burger, the nice things he said, the way he asked to be friends and said all he knew about me is that I'm smart and wanted to have sex with him. “Actually, he said he figured the second part wasn't true anymore because he ruined my semester.”

“I think this must mean he's over The Bread Fiasco,” Margaret says as she cuts a stack of pancakes into squares. This is what we're calling it: The Bread Fiasco. Putting myself on the table, like bread. For sharing. Seriously, how can I be so good at organic chemistry and so bad at hooking up?

Margaret's good at
both
.