An Off Year (10 page)

“Hello?” I answered, expecting that it would be for Dad or Germaine. I had gotten used to being their secretary. I didn't mind it. I liked practicing my handwriting as I took down messages.

“Hey there,” said a friendly guy's voice.

“Uh,” I said smoothly. Who the hell was this? Then my heart sped up. It was Mike.

“Hi,” he said again.

“Um, how are you?”

“Fine,” he said. “How are you?”

“Good,” I said.

“Good,” he said. I still couldn't get my head around the fact that Mike had called. He hadn't e-mailed me back after I had written him. That first week, I checked my e-mail compulsively. The week after that, I felt hideously embarrassed that I had been so foolish as to actually e-mail Mike. The week after that, I told myself to forget it, that I wasn't friends with Mike after all, and that who cared anyway. By last week, I had almost forgotten about the whole thing. Now this.

“I got your e-mail,” he said. “But honestly I didn't feel like typing everything down that's new. And I don't know what you know. So I put it off. But I'm home now. I'm going back after break in a few days. So I figured we could just talk.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You're not a real treat to talk to on the phone, do you know that?”

“I hate the phone,” I said. “A phone killed my mother.”

“Shut up,” he said. “Want to come over tonight?”

“Sure,” I said. “I'll call you later after dinner.”

“Yeah, you will,” he said, and hung up.

I turned off the TV. That thinking feeling again. I used to go over to Mike's house all the time in high school before he started seeing Wendy. It was no big deal. We'd sit in his small bedroom on the blue carpet and look up old music videos online or play records and talk, sometimes just sit there in silence and listen to whatever he put on. The door was always open, and his mom would walk by sometimes, doing laundry, occasionally stopping to chat. It felt good to be around her, too, a short-haired, rather big-butted mom who seemed fine with being a mom, not trying to impress anyone with her fabulousness. Was any of it going to be the same? Why did I feel nervous? I went to the gym and had to quit jogging after just two laps around the track because I felt like I was going to throw up.

 

 

“I'm going over to Mike's later,” I announced over dinner. Germaine looked up.

“Oh yeah?” said Dad. If I knew him, he was trying not to look surprised or excited or happy as he served himself some salad. “Tell him we miss him.”

“I don't miss him,” said Germaine.

“Tell him I miss him and Germaine doesn't,” said Dad.

“Will do,” I said. I kept pushing around the thin piece of breaded veal on my plate, trying to decide if I should change out of my ancient brown thrift-store corduroys or put on some makeup or something before I went over. I didn't do that before. I didn't know why I wanted to now. I decided that I wouldn't change anything.

I drove to Mike's house, an exactly five-minute drive as always, and parked outside. The driveway was empty, so his parents were probably out.

He opened the door before I got to it.

“Dang, you know how much I love ringing doorbells,” I said, walking up the cobblestone path, which lay in a swervy line for some reason. “Thus explaining my dream to be a door-to-door doorbell salesman.”

“Hello, Cecily,” he said, and opened his arms up wide for a hug. I wrapped my arms around his middle. He felt thicker. Not fat, but more solid. Or something? Maybe my arms were hallucinating.

“Want something to drink?” he asked as I closed the door behind me. I took off my peacoat and hung it in the hall closet. It felt like it had been forever since I used to act like his house was my own. He looked pretty damn good. He had cut his hair quite short, and it looked thick and shiny. It had been a few years since he had had short hair, and now it showed off what was almost a pretty-boy face. His dark eyebrows and light green eyes made him look sensitive, almost sad, although that wasn't the case, at least with the old Mike I knew, anyway.

“Do you guys have any hot chocolate?” I asked. “I like the hair, by the way.”

“I think so, and thanks,” he said as we walked to the kitchen. I sat at the dark gray marble counter in the middle of their snug kitchen as he rummaged through the cabinets.

“So, what have you heard?” he asked, pulling out a tin of Ghirardelli hot chocolate. Score.

“What have I heard about what?” I asked. “I've heard many things, Mike. Children laughing. Birds singing. Cars backfiring.”

“I mean how much have you heard from other people about my year thus far?” he said. “I'm sure some people have told other people.”

“Kate told me a few things,” I said. “Like how you got pregnant and they kicked you out of school. Oh Mike, how could you.”

“Ha-ha,” he said, filling up the teakettle with water. I actually wanted milk in the hot chocolate. “We're out of milk,” he said, as if he read my mind. Creepy.

“Seriously, I heard that you left Harvard to transfer to the University of Kansas to be with a girl,” I said. He looked down and smirked at the teakettle. I'd forgotten how he hung his head and smirked, letting his hair shag down around his eyebrows, when he got embarrassed. Now his hair didn't cover his eyes. “I don't know if that's true or not, though. We don't have to talk about it, you know. It's none of my business.”

“That's nice of you,” he said, and pulled a comically large mug from the cabinet overhead. “Seriously. Most people so far either act like they didn't hear about it when clearly they did, or they just ask, ‘How could you do that?' Like I murdered someone.”

“Well, I don't know what you heard about me,” I said.

“How you took the year off?” he said.

“Good news travels fast,” I said.

He sat down on the other side of the bar. I felt like we were in a coffee commercial. “So,” he said. “So what. Picking a school and just going to it is lame, right?” The kettle began to shriek.

“Hey, can we hang out in your room?” I said suddenly. “It just feels like it would be more normal.”

“I'm not going to have sex with you, Cecily, if that's what you're hoping,” he said, lowering his head and staring at me hard. We had never talked about sex before in our lives. We weren't that kind of close. It felt like I was talking to Mike's randier older brother, if he'd had one. At the very least, I wished he would stop calling me by my name.

“Fine,” I said. “I'm not having sex with you.” Maybe I was remembering it wrong, but when we were closer in high school, it felt like I did most of the joking and teasing while Mike just tolerated it.

“I'm kidding,” he said. “Fine, we'll go upstairs.” He poured three huge scoops of the cocoa mix into the mug, added some water, stirred it with a spoon, and handed it to me. I thought Mike, after being more of a quiet guy all those years, had suddenly developed a little attitude. Unless I had turned into a social idiot around him all of a sudden. It was possible both things had happened.

 

 

“All right,” he said, settling down on the floor of his room. “You happy now?”

“Almost,” I said, and grabbed our high school yearbook off his shelf. I had to have something in my hands. And the hot chocolate was still too hot. “I'm going to laugh at the things people have signed here.”

“Be my guest,” said Mike. “Hold on a second.” He was the only person I knew on the planet who bought and played LPs. He put on an old Beck album.

“Are you still playing guitar?” I asked.

“Haven't had the time,” he said. “Plus, you know, the college guy strumming alone in his dorm room thing. I don't want to be that guy.”

“Yeah, that guy would be weird,” I said. I didn't know of said guy, but I could sort of imagine it.

“It's just not my thing anymore, you know?” he said. I admired that he could say that he had a “thing” and then he didn't. I didn't even know if I had a thing to begin with, let alone not. Maybe not going to school was my thing?

“So what have you been doing so far?” Mike asked, taking a seat on the carpet. He leaned against the bed. I leaned against the opposite wall. We could have had a pretty good kicking match if we wanted to. The music was just the right mix of melodic and weird, stuff I'd never listen to on my own but was perfect for hanging out.

I sighed. “Like, nothing. I haven't even been doing any thinking.”

“I doubt that.”

“Well, I feel like I have to justify this year somehow and I haven't. So I've mostly been sitting around getting pissed at everyone.”

“Better than having everyone be pissed at you.”

“Who says they aren't?”

“Maybe we should have a fight over whose parent is more pissed at them right now—your dad or my parents,” Mike said.

“I think you'd win,” I said. “My dad is mad—well, I don't know if he's mad. I don't know what he is.”

“I still can't get over how angry my mom and dad were,” he said, rubbing his eyebrow with his ring finger. “Things are just starting to get a little more normal since we've been spending some more time around one another.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Here's what happened. In October, I told them I couldn't take being without Wendy anymore and was transferring to UK. I had already taken care of the paperwork and everything. They didn't speak to me until they were on campus three days later. They got me in their hotel room at nine A.M. and wouldn't quit yelling at me literally until nine P.M. We actually ordered room service so they wouldn't have to yell at me in public.”

“That's incredible.”

“And then Wendy and I broke up.”

“Oh really?”

“All my mom could do was laugh when I told her Wendy and I were breaking up. Not in a mean way. I mean, I had to laugh, too. It was almost like a joke when I called her. ‘Hey, Ma, you're never going to believe this.' ”

“Why did you guys break up?” I realized that I knew nothing about Wendy. I had had a few classes with her in high school. She seemed all right. Bland. She had played soccer, so she hung with the sporty-girl crowd that I didn't know very well.

 

 

This was written in huge slanty letters in bright red ink, taking up a big corner of the inside cover.

“This is going to make me sound like an asshole,” he said. “But right when I got there, I realized that it wasn't going to work out. Once I arrived, it was only about an hour before I said, ‘I transferred from
Harvard
to be here with you!' I didn't want to be a jerk, but I did feel mad, disappointed. I thought I was being a great guy and this would really change the trajectory of my life. I was excited all the way, and then that first night on campus that we spent together, I was just like, ‘Oh great.' ” Mike sighed and laughed, sat forward, and then let himself fall back against the side of the bed. “It was dumb,” he continued, after we had listened to a few seconds of music. “Really dumb. I don't know. But it's kind of funny to me, too. I don't know, what can I do, you know?” he said, looking at me and then looking back straight ahead. “I won't lie: I'm still freaked out. I'm in
Kansas
, for God's sake. But,” he said, and leaned back up, looking me in the eye again, “I'd probably do it again.”

A chill went through me. Looking at him, for a second, he seemed like a totally different person. He looked older than me; he looked like, well, a man—a young man—and not my guy friend from high school. I could imagine walking past him on the street, thinking he was older than me, not considering him my age but someone off doing more important things. It freaked me out, seeing him like that. But it was kind of thrilling, too.

“You'd really do it again? I mean, if you meet another girl at Kansas and
she
wants to transfer to the University of Hawaii, you'll go there? When will it end, Mike? Oh when will it ever, ever end?”

“Shut the eff up,” he said, kicking me. “I just mean, if I had that same chance again, I probably would have done the same thing.”

“So you seem okay with it,” I said. “Good for you.”

“I wouldn't say
good for me
,” he said. “It wasn't a bright move. I'm not, like, happy I did it. But I just don't want to freak out about it anymore. I'm still really bummed about Wendy.”

“Huh, yeah,” I said, not wanting to talk about Wendy.

“Besides,” he said, “maybe this is just the way that things were supposed to go anyway. Maybe I would be a total nothing at Harvard, but in the end I'll be a superstar at Kansas.”

“I guess it just depends on whether a superstar at Kansas is still better than a nothing at Harvard,” I said, and then regretted it. To create a distraction, I took out my elastic and redid my ponytail.

“Your hair's gotten long,” Mike said. Distraction accomplished.