The Smartest Girl in the Room (15 page)

She raised her glass as if to toast. "Putting
my education to good use."

"Even this one?"

"Don’t start that," she said, yawning. "But
thank you for letting me crash on your couch. Fortunately, I
figured out that my problem was probably more one of hydration than
hunger or even exhaustion, though I think I might take a few more
minutes to catch my breath."

"Don’t rush on my account. I was actually
hoping you could stay for dinner."

"You don’t have to feed me," she said
uncomfortably.

"I think it’s the least I can do after last
night. And I tried to make up for it this afternoon, but you only
had one bite before you fell over, so please?" The last part he
said pleadingly.

"Okay," Emily said, settling back into her
seat. "But I’m a vegetarian-"

"I don’t think I’m going to forget that. So I
bought-" he reached into his grocery bag and started pulling out
food. "Salad. Dressing. Veggie burgers. Buns. And in case you
didn’t want a veggie burger, fresh ravioli. Tomato sauce. And in
case you didn’t want tomato sauce, Alfredo sauce. And in case
you’re feeling naughty," he smiled and pulled out the last item
with exaggerated flourish, "ice cream!"

"Wow. Is anyone on the solar car team
vegetarian? I don’t think I’ll be able to eat all of that."

"Hmm. I don’t think I’ve even seen those guys
eat. But Richard has his healthy moments, so I’ll be sure to invite
him over. And there is no law that says that you have to be a
vegetarian to eat a veggie burger, right?"

"Not that I’m aware of."

"So don’t worry, no landfills will be
overflowing because of you."

"Good to hear. Well, is there anything I can
do to help?"

"Yes, actually. Are we having burgers or
pasta?"

"Hmm... pasta."

"Alfredo or tomato?"

"Oh, that’s hard, but I think I’ll go with
Alfredo. Maybe not too much of it though."

"I will put on such a small amount of sauce,
you won’t even taste it."

"Finally, someone who understands me," she
said with a smile.

After twenty minutes, everything was ready,
but Emily wasn’t hungry. She forced herself to eat half a plate of
food.

Drew looked at her reproachfully. "Too much
sauce?"

"No, no..." Emily pushed her plate away. "I
just don’t have an appetite. Give me a couple of days, and maybe I
can work my way up to one again."

Drew tilted his head. "This has been a rough
couple of months, huh?"

Emily sighed. "The last few months I have
handled with much bitching and whining, but the last two weeks...
that’s been rough."

"Finals hit you that hard?"

"Finals, idiocy with my mother..." Emily
sipped her water. She sighed. "Tell me about what happened with you
and S. Gorman."

"Sophie," he said emphatically, perhaps
afraid she might think ‘S’ stood for Simon or Sylvester.

"Tell me about Sophie Gorman."

He sighed. "Her parents are very well off.
She could have gone anywhere she wanted, but this is the best
school she got into. And there was something about wanting to be in
the city. We were both put into the same dorm as freshmen and, I
don’t know, I guess she thought I was cute or something. I tried to
be nice and play it off that we could be friendly, but she was
really forward. She’d sit right next to me in the cafeteria; force
herself into conversations with me. And I couldn’t say ‘no’ nicely,
so I didn’t say anything. One thing led to another, and then the
next thing I knew I was living with her for sophomore and middler
year."

"Was she pretty?" Emily asked, and wasn’t
sure why.

Drew shook his head, almost trembling. "No,
not at all. She was really short- like five foot one. She was a
little mouse, a very bossy, pushy little mouse. You’re..." he
smiled. "You’re pretty sophisticated and worldly by comparison." He
stopped and looked at her as if she were going to respond to
that.

"Okay, anyway. It took you two years to break
it off with someone you couldn’t stand?"

"It wasn’t... it wasn’t that I couldn’t stand
her. It was just that she didn’t do anything for me, other than
maybe provide some companionship. But that could be pretty annoying
as well. Trust me, she wasn’t the type to tease out Othello and
Iago’s motivations. Honestly, I don’t know what we did manage to
talk about, maybe because I tuned her out most of the time."

"That must have sucked, for her. Why did she
want to stay with someone who wasn’t listening to her?"

"I’ve asked myself that a bunch of times. I
think the answer, and the reason why she clung onto me so quickly,
is that she was scared of being without her family for the first
time." He looked at the wall for a moment. "Maybe that’s why I
stayed with her. But sometimes just having someone next to you
isn’t enough. You need to feel like you’re getting some kind of
spiritual connection, or whatever. You know what I mean?"

"I don’t know, is this a religious
thing?"

"No, that’s not what I mean, although Sophie
was Jewish, so that was a problem."

"I guess I should tell you that my
grandfather was Jewish-"

"Not because I have anything against anyone
being Jewish. But children would have been a problem."

Emily was tired and confused. "Was marriage
an issue? Even if you... didn’t want to be with her?"

Drew looked confused too. "It doesn’t make
sense. But when you’re with someone for that long, for so many
hours in the day, that’s what you start thinking about, isn’t
it?"

"I don’t know. I think I’d start plotting my
escape."

He sighed. "And there was some of that as
well. Like I said, it doesn’t make any sense."

"So what finally gave you the push out the
door?"

"Something stupid, I’m sure. The toothpaste
cap? The sink hose pulled out too far? I think it was all of it,
all at once. I don’t remember who started bitching about whom
first, but then we were screaming at each other, and it was about
everything. And then I walked out, and I didn’t come back until I
knew she wasn’t going to be there, and I got my stuff and I didn’t
go back."

"Have you seen her since then?"

"On the street, on campus, once at Whole
Foods. She used to look like she wanted to say something to me, but
I was too chicken to hear her out. And then the last few times, she
hasn’t bothered to make eye contact with me. It’s weird. Even
though we both kind of despised each other, especially towards the
end, she was also sort of my best friend. And now she’s not." He
shrugged. "And now that you’ve gotten my complete romantic history
for the college years- and yes, that is the complete history- don’t
you think you owe me a peak into the enigma of Emily?"

Emily laughed. No one had ever called her
enigmatic. "I don’t know. We haven’t covered high school yet."

"I promise, you tell me about college, and
I’ll tell you about high school."

"Um... okay, but college won't take long.
There was this one guy last year. He was gorgeous- totally built,
green eyed, suntanned Greek god-"

"He was Greek?"

"Um, no, I don’t think so. Actually, I think
he was Swiss or something."

"Sorry, go on."

"Anyway, I saw him at the beginning of last
Spring quarter and I kept looking out for him, and then I figured
out what he did. He was in SGC. I figured out the best way to get
to see him was to get into the SGC. And that took me all of two
days. And then I got there and I made sure I got onto his
committee. He was a VP, of course. And then I was so
disappointed."

"Why, did he have a girlfriend?"

"No. I mean, he might have, I don’t know.
Things didn’t get that far. It was just..." she laughed again. "He
talked. He spoke, and he was so underwhelming. He was totally
beautiful- I mean, I have yet to see another human being as
gorgeous as this guy- but he could not put two words together and
make any sense of them. Or so I thought. Everyone else... I don’t
know. I think they thought he was hot too, and that must have made
everything he said sound that much better. Even for the very
straight men. So I didn’t last two meetings there. But at least I
met Zainab."

Drew peered in a little closer. "That’s it?
That’s your romantic history since you’ve been here?"

"Yeah," Emily shrugged. Mitch wasn’t worth
talking about. "But you still owe me high school."

"Oh, no! You aren’t done yet, young lady.
What about high school?"

"High school was a humiliating experience I
don’t usually talk about."

"High school always sucks. Come on- you think
I liked talking about Sophie?"

Emily took a sip of water and closed her
eyes. "I got off to a very bad start in high school. In grade
school, I was the one with braces, and that stuck with me for
freshman year. I didn’t have too many friends, forget boyfriends.
That was probably more my fault than anyone else’s. And home... was
Hell. My father was already gone, thank God. But my mother couldn't
let well enough alone and replaced him with someone even worse.

"When the braces came off at the end of
freshman year, I was ready to go home with the first person who
made a pass at me. I didn't exactly do that, but I did pretty soon
after. The first guy... He was like my father and stepfather rolled
into one. He humiliated me with other people, by himself, you name
it. He finally ended it, which was ironic, because I'd wanted to
leave so many times before and he begged me to stay.

"For junior year I ended up with my dad and
his new wife because my mother was so into her husband. That was
fun, although my dad didn’t beat me up now because his new wife
didn’t know about that. Then in walked loser number two. He liked
sneaking around with me and indulged me about happily ever after.
Sci-Fi geek, would be anarchist, blah, blah, blah.

"My father found out, threatened me several
times, which I casually mentioned to a friend. Fortunately or
unfortunately, her mother was in the room, and she happened to work
at the DA’s office, and said she might have to report my dad. I
told my dad, he kicked me out, and I stayed with that friend for
the year. And sometime shortly after that loser number two dumped
me. The only good thing is that my friend's parents made my dad pay
for me while I was staying with them, and then at the end of high
school they gave me all of the money they'd saved on my behalf.

"My mother felt just terrible, so she begged
me to live with her. I said no, but I did agree to come to stay for
college. Mostly because I wasn’t stupid about how much my father
was going to pay for me to do anything. And she was so happy to
have me back that she moved into a smaller apartment and put me on
the loveseat in her office, where I have been for the last year and
a half." She finally took in the shocked expression on Drew’s face.
"Sorry. Even high school is a little short on dating."

"Wow," Drew said finally. "I guess I should
stop bitching about Harvard, huh?"

"Are you going to tell me about high school,
or not?"

"I will as soon as you’re done."

"You want more gory details? What? Number of
times I hooked up with someone?"

"I’ll pass on that. I mean the one you liked.
There must have been one guy you actually liked, who didn’t break
your heart, or I think you’d hate everyone."

She looked at her water. "Yeah, there was one
guy," she said softly.

"What was his name?"

"Charles, but everyone called him Chas.
Everyone but me that is. I always called him Charlie. He was...
beautiful. He was perfect. He was one of the most intelligent
people I've ever met, and gorgeous, witty, bitter and... really
gentle and poetic when no one was looking."

"And then what happened?"

"That was during freshman year, when the
braces were still on. There was never a chance."

"Is that why it still bothers you?"

"No…" She shook her head. "He was the blonde
golden boy with the sea blue eyes that everyone loved and I was the
dark little goblin that no one noticed or cared about, but we were
the same. There was this one moment when I realized that, and it
was one of the only moments where I was out of myself and my misery
and I just was. Not happy or scared or angry. I just was and
everything was okay because for the first time I wasn’t alone."
Emily remembered that night by the bus stop when she and Charlie
talked about the joke that was life. She saw stars when she went
home that night, and the hope that had seeped out of her came
flooding back. Oh, starlight.

"Nothing happened?"

She looked away. "I realized a few years
later that something could have happened, maybe a couple of times,
but I said no in one way or another. It wasn’t perfect, and I
wasn’t going to have the thing I wanted so badly unless it was
absolutely perfect. And of course, nothing ever is."

She jolted back to the present when Drew
grabbed her by the waist and pulled her up into a soft, wet kiss.
Right now, his strong scent didn't bother her. She pulled away and
looked at him with some surprise. "Did you notice that I have blue
eyes? Granted, no one ever said they looked like the sea, but I’ve
had a bunch of people tell me that they’re very nice. And I’m
blonde. Did I mention that?"

"I did notice."

"Oh good," Drew said, and then kissed her
again. "But I’ve also been told, in case it wasn’t clear, that I’m
pretty smart too. I’m sensing kind of a theme with you."

"Yes, you get points in the IQ department.
But Drew-" she tried to pull back, but he pulled her closer. "You
have no idea how messed up my life still is."

"So tell me," he said softly. She closed her
eyes, put her cheek on his chest and started to cry. "Hey," Drew
said, rubbing her back. "It can’t be all that bad."

She opened her eyes and he wiped away her
tears. As she looked at him closely, she thought he was handsome
when he was serious and sweet. "Why don’t you shut up and kiss me?"
Smiling, he obliged.