Lessons in Love (16 page)

“It is my contention,” Dalton says, beginning to stack his plate and the plates near him even though it’s not his job, “That Love is the kind of person who gets fixated on an idea and then has trouble letting go.”

“Don’t we all do that?” Chaucer asks.

“Sure. But…” Dalton looks at me while he scrapes manicotti remains, tidying up the table while the grateful freshman waits so she can clear. “But Love likes the conflict. That tugging you get inside over which way to turn.” He looks at me and I’m completely sucked into what he’s saying. “Lucy Honeychurch’s struggle between two guys can be reduced to a cliché — the thinking guy and the passionate one. But Love, and people like her, live not for the decision over whom to choose, but for the struggle itself.” He takes a breath and helps the freshman with the bowl of fruit salad she’s brought for dessert.

My appetite is instantly gone, my stomach twisting. My story is probably wrinkled from being sat on (I figured this was better than the alternative — being on the table and getting splashed with tomato sauce), and I’m deeply puzzled. “What makes you think you even know me?” My jaw is set forward in disbelief. Not that what Dalton said is bad, necessarily, but that it’s true.

“It’s just a hunch,” he says and scoops strawberries, blueberries, and chunks of cantaloupe into small white bowls, usurping Mr. Chaucer’s job.

The rest of the meal continues with talk of classes and the heat. “I can’t take it much longer,” Mr. Chaucer says. “I’m from Canada — we don’t get this kind of humidity.”

I half-listen, feeling the pages of my story underneath, the pangs of knowing that Dalton was at least partly correct. I do like that struggle — those
what ifs
. They make me feel human and alive. The fruit in front of me is of no interest — in fact, my stomach feels seriously crampy suddenly — not in a menstrual way, probably just nerves. My hands are clammy. My head aches. Then again, I’ve had too much crammed into my brain space for my own well-being.

Mr. Chaucer leans down the table toward me and asks, “So, you’ve got something for me?”

“Yeah,” I say, sighing. “I wanted to tell you before but I kept getting…”

“It was intentional.” Chaucer sticks out a hand and I place my pages in his grasp. There’s a moment where he has yet to cinch his fist around the story, when I could still yank it away and have all that anxiety around it disappear. Tear it up and go back to senior fall without the tempting writing class. But I don’t. I let him take it, fold it, and tuck it into his brown leather briefcase.

“Intentional?” I ask, still feeling slightly sick. Inside, there’s not just cramping but actual pain. I press my hands into my abdomen under the table, hoping this will help.

Other tables begin to empty, students standing, stretching, dreading going back out in to the heat and up to chapel where it’ll only be worse.

“You wanted to sit here,” Chaucer points to the chair currently occupied by someone else. “But I knew if you did —”

“She’d just end up explaining the story, right?” Dalton stands up.

I look at him. “How do you know?”

“Because we all did that.” He brushes his hands through his hair. The closest color is the brown of a Chesapeake Bay retriever, like the one who lives in Whitcomb House. In the dining hall sunlight, the brown of Dalton’s hair is flecked with reddish hues and his eyes are the palest of blue. Unusual.

“Dalton’s correct, Love.” Mr. Chaucer stands up and most of our table does, too. “It’s not that I don’t want to hear about your story. Actually, that’s exactly what I don’t want. I only want to read it. If you have to tell me about it to prove it’s good, then it might not be. Or if you have to explain what happens verbally, then you need to go back to the narrative and see what isn’t translating. A lot of the time when writers are getting started…” he looks at me and tilts his head, going for peacekeeping. “I know you’re not totally new to writing, but still — oftentimes writers feel the need to explain their work, when the best explanation should come from the writing itself. Does that make sense?”

I nod, knowing they’re probably right, only wishing I had one more chance to reread my story. I think about how it ends, the last two lines:

Out past the mooring lines, Amelia could see the dipping and rising of the waves. And further, something darker than the water itself, lurking underneath.

I can’t explain what I want there to be lurking underneath, or that Nick Cooper (the fictional one, not the real one I know from London — and from whom I expect a letter any day) may or may not have loved her, and that she may or may not be harboring some secret. All I can do is say, “Well, I hope you like it.” Then, with a sigh I add, “God, that sounds dumb.”

“It’s never dumb to hope that people like your work,” Dalton says. He has his hands on the back of the chair he sat in, waiting for Jacob to eat the last of his fruit. “Dude, you spearing them individually or what?”

Jacob glances up at Dalton. “I like to take my time with food — what can I say?”

“Unlike with other things…” Dalton and Jacob share a guy moment, but I take it in. Then Jacob sees me watching and kicks Dalton under the table — which I know only because Dalton flinches.

“I’ll get to this tonight, Love.” Mr. Chaucer thumbs to my story which is now housed in his bag. “I promise. And I know it wasn’t an easy task — coming up with a whole story that quickly.” He looks at me with a certain degree of pity which I take to mean I have no shot in hell of getting in.

“It would mean a lot,” I say. “Not that you want me to explain — again — why I need to be that class. But it’s just….”

Mr. Chaucer whips the story pages form his bag and waves them. “This has to do the talking for you. Okay?”

I watch him leave, see other faces I know marching toward the heat, and then have a view of my father, in his blazer despite the temps, holding the door open with his long arm. I decide what I want most is to see him, maybe even deal with multiple body odors in chapel and sit with Dad up front. So I wipe my mouth a final time on my napkin, and decide to make a move toward Dad, which is when two things happen at once.

One: As I go to stand up, pushing my chair out from the table with the back of my thighs, Jacob picks the exact same moment to stand up. Across the table, his green eyes shift from his now empty bowl to my face, and suddenly it’s perfectly clear: he heard. He nods to give me confirmation of what I suspect, then lets his gaze rests on me a few seconds longer than it should which is when

Two: I fall over.

Not in the tripped and fell way, but in the holy shit now I’m on the floor way and I don’t know why.

“I’ll walk her up to the health center,” Jacob’s saying to Mr. Chaucer when I rejoin the world.

“Yes, that sounds good — you can just —” Mr. Chaucer is interrupted by the sudden appearance of my father.

“Daddy!” I say and don’t care how I sound. He comes over and relieves Jacob from his next-to-me position.

“I take it from your pallor that you didn’t just trip and fall,” Dad crouches down next to the chair someone — Jacob? — placed me in.

“My stomach feels terrible,” I say. My hands are clammy, and I’m sweating even though I feel cold.

“Maybe she has food poisoning,” someone offers from the side.

“Why don’t we let the kind people at the health center figure that out,” Dad says.

Then I get it. He hasn’t hugged me. Hasn’t swooped me up and said take her home. He hasn’t acted parental, he’s acted like a concerned administrator. And because of this, and the stress of the story, and that Jacob heard, and that Charlie had dinner with Lindsay even though it meant nothing, and because I’m boarding, and because I have to apply to colleges and Mrs. Dandy-Patinko said my map sucks, and because I still don’t know what Sweep Potato means, I start to cry.

My father stands, looming large above me, his hands braced at his sides.

“No.”

It’s not the answer I wanted to hear. “But, Dad, I’m…” I flop back onto the pillow and give a moan worthy of at least an Oscar nod, if not an actual award. I’m not usually over-dramatic, but in this case I feel I have to be. Stuck in the infirmary — AKA the Health Center — is bad enough. But exiled from there when there’s no room at the inn is unbearable. “Dad, please!” I sit up and look around at the bodies splayed out everywhere. The heat has taken its toll with exhaustion (like mine) and true heat stroke (worse).

“All the beds are filled, the floor space is, too, and I just don’t see that keeping you here is an option.” Dad’s tone is administrative, the same one he’s been using to filed phone calls form parents demanding air-conditioning for their kids. You’d think with an endowment like Hadley has, the dorms would have been upgraded years ago, but they weren’t. It remains one of Hadley’s quaint charms. While other prep schools are building out and up and resembling cookie-cutter high-end chain hotels, Hadley is still vision of New England it once was. But the sleeping conditions bite.

“But you’re saying I can’t go home. So what can I do?” I put my hands on my forehead, feeling dizzy and wishing he’d just let me rest in my own bed. I’d recoup, read, lounge in my boxers and ratty t-shirt, watch some reruns and have Chris bring me homework and gossip. It sounds like a spa in comparison to right now.

Dad reaches for my hand and helps me up from my temporary cot which is immediately claimed by another near-fainting person. “Look,” his voice is hushed, his tone now conspiratorial, “I have a crisis situation here. The board of trustees is about to mutiny, the parent league is in an uproar, and I have to get things under control.”

“And where does your sick daughter fit into this?” I rest my hand on his arm for balance but wish I didn’t have to. “It seems so simple — why not just shove me back at home and deal with the rest of the stuff you have to do.”

“Love, you’ve read the handbook, haven’t you? Just because your parents — or, parent…” he stops, singularizing himself so as not to bring my mother, Gala, into the picture, “Just because I live on campus doesn’t mean you can just flee home whenever you feel like it.”

“I hardly think that this —”

“Right now, sure, there’s a viable excuse. But what about the next time, when it’s not sickness but…”

I sigh and let do of his arm, steadying myself on the cool white walls. Through the doorway I can see a nurse checking someone’s blood pressure and a line of students waiting to be seen by the on-call physician. It is packed. “You don’t want me confusing issues, is what you’re saying.”

Dad nods. “Exactly.”

“So then what?”

He pulls me to the front door, giving a nod to the nurse, and then we’re back outside on the Health Center porch. At one point, this was the headmaster’s house, a cottage with a hearth and cups of tea. Now it’s got none of those charms save for the porch, which calls to mind rocking chairs and homemade lemonade.

“Uhhh,” I say, feeling nauseated in the heat all over again.

The chapel bell rings. “Here’s what we do.” Dad smacks one of his hands into the other like he’s planning a military mission. “I go to chapel as planned. You will not stay here, and you can’t go home, but I will give written permission for you to remain in the dorms tonight during chapel and then during the day tomorrow.”

“So you’re saying it’s better for me to be unattended at Fruckner than to be home in my own bed?”

“You won’t be unattended,” Dad says. He waves his arm, signaling across the street. “You’ll have Mrs. Ray there to check up on you. Heat exhaustion doesn’t last long. You’ll feel better in a day or so.” He brushes his hands. That takes care of that, I guess. He clears his throat the way he does when there’s more he hasn’t said.

“What, Dad?” The heat prickles my skin, sending tingling waves down my arms.

Dad furrows his brow. “I wanted to let you know that in a couple of weeks…”

“Yeah?” I wait for him to say something — like he’s going to ask his girlfriend, Louisa to marry him, or that he feels the need to accompany me to Harvard, that he’s going to check on me at the dorms and let me come home.

“I’m going to look at colleges,” he says.

Even in the heat with feeling sick I have to speak up. “Oh, you know, I really think I want to…”

“Not with you.” Dad holds onto the porch railing and tilts his head up, keeping a steady watch on the last students and faculty heading into the arched chapel doorway. “With Sadie.” He looks for my reaction. “All summer you came to terms with Gala, and I’m sure you’ll continue to explore that relationship…but I had news, too.”

“I know,” I say, sure of how new and confusing it must be for him to suddenly be parent to more than one child. More than just me. “It’s a good thing. You’re right to do it.”

“Phew.” Dad swipes his hand across his brow. “Not that this is optimum timing for telling you, but I just thought you might wonder where I was, and — well, anyway, I’m going to meet her in Michigan. Try to get to know her a bit.”

“With the college tour as a pleasant backdrop just in case the conversation stalls?” I give him a weary look and then sigh. I wish I could just go home. “So when is this again?”

“A couple weekends from now.”

From across the street, away from the masses already huddled into chapel, I see who my dad waved to.

“Hey!” Jacob comes bounding across the road and up the five steps to the shady porch. Sweat drips from his forehead. His
hey
brings me right back to Friday night, and how surprised he seemed then.

Dad gives me a perfunctory hug and hands Jacob a set of keys connected to a Hadley Hall chain. “Mr. Coleman…” Dad doesn’t say anything else but Jacob nods — clearly they’ve made prior arrangements.

I lean on the porch railing as my father makes his way over toward chapel. He’s clearly dealing with major stress about the weather — one of the only things on campus he can’t control — and with other, more internal issues, that I’m not a part of. I don’t need to be, but it’s bizarre nonetheless. We’re usually so in tune.

“So,” Jacob gestures with keys. “Wait here.”

He leaves me in the heat of the evening, wondering if he’ll comeback, and disappears in the direction of back campus where the utility buildings are.