Finding Dell (33 page)

“Don’t talk to me like that,” I said harshly. I didn’t release my hold on his arm. “Now, tell me why you’re being such an asshole to me all of the sudden.”

“Do you really want to know?”

I blinked heavily and nodded, suddenly unsure if I wanted to hear what he had to say, after all.

“I can’t deal with the pressure from you. I’ve got enough to worry about with my classes. Architecture is a really hard major. Then suddenly you’re back and your expectations are so high. I don’t want to be responsible for hurting you again, after all I put you through in the fall. You said it yourself right now. You want everything to be perfect with us, and it’s impossible to live up to that.”

I took a step back. I was still holding onto his arm, but my grip had loosened. The lavender sky from earlier was gone, fully replaced by a dark sky glittering with tiny stars.

“I didn’t mean to pressure you,” I said quietly. “How did I pressure you?”

Will sighed and dropped his chin to his neck. “You’re pressuring me right now. You won’t let me go.” His voice was muffled as he spoke into his chest.

I released my grip on his arm. His shoulders slumped and he wouldn’t make eye contact with me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“I can’t have a girlfriend while I’m in school. I don’t have time for you, and you’ll just end up resenting me. Look at how you had to hide those pictures under your mattress, like you were burying our problems but not actually getting over them.

“You want more than I can give you. Your expectations are
so high, Dell. I feel like I’m constantly letting you down. Maybe in a few years . . . who knows? But for now, I just can’t.”

I allowed his words to sink in for a moment. A lone mosquito buzzed around my face, settling on my arm. I swatted it away in exasperation.

“Are you telling me to hold onto hope that, maybe, in a few years, you might finally have time for me? That’s the meanest, most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”

Will’s eyes widened. “I’m not being mean. I’m just trying to be honest with you.”

“Tell me what happened last summer,” I asked, shaking. “You told me we’d be together when school started again, but then you ignored me when we got back to Bridlemeade. You moved off-campus without telling me, and you had that girl sitting on your lap at Dean’s party. Why did you do that to me?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Well, you did. You broke my heart—shattered it is more like it. And you didn’t answer my question. Were you sleeping with other girls at the cabin?”

Will shook his head and looked at the ground, then in the direction of campus, and everywhere but my eyes.

“Look, Dell, you’re more into this than I am, than I’ve ever been. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I like you, but I can’t be that serious.”

My mouth clamped shut. I knew if I spoke, the tears would start to fall. Will stood, wavering, unsure if he should continue. His hands were jammed deep in the pockets of his shorts and his beer-soaked shirt clung to his chest. With the passion gone from his eyes, I saw him as he was: a castaway who craved too much solitude.

He was still studying the pavement, his head hung low, when he finally spoke. “I’m sorry.”

He started to walk away from me. I remained on the parkway and the grass tickled my ankles; he’d made it to the crosswalk when I called after him.

“Will?” My voice was unsteady.

He paused and turned, not completely, but cocked an ear.

Without raising my voice for the distance, I said, “I bought that fan for you. I know you can’t sleep without one, and I wanted you to be happy when you stayed over. But, the thing is, you looked at that fan as another reason to leave me, and now I still have it.”

I gave him everything he could want, yet he still wasn’t happy.
How do you know when trying becomes begging or when letting go is giving up?
I wondered.

With a bent knuckle to my eye, I wiped away tears. I turned in the direction of Wild Mare Woods without risking a glance back at Will.

Once I was sure I was out of sight, I sat down in front of the fountains at Beaumont Library and, numb with rejection, cried soundlessly. My hair clung to my wet cheeks. Twice I heard the doors to the library open and someone pause, no doubt wondering if I needed help or distance.

I swallowed until the lump in my throat lessened and picked up my phone. After six rings, a faraway voice answered, sounding like an echoing version of the gypsy soul who’d helped me begin to become a different person in the fall.

“Olá, Madeleine! How are you spending your evening? I’m dining on a terrace in Campo Grande, but it’s foggy and I have a limited view of the city.”

A silvery voice carried through the phone and I could imagine Bernie surrounded by a dizzying fog on the balcony of a restaurant while she sipped a glass of wine.

“I got runner-up in a design competition,” I choked into the
phone. It was the first thing to come to my mind, like I wanted her to be proud of me before I told her the truth of why I was calling.

“Of course you did. I’ve never seen someone use negative space the way you do. But that’s not why you’re calling me long-distance from five thousand miles away.”

With a trembling note in my voice, I recounted the scene with Will for her. We hadn’t spoken for months, but I trusted her intuition that she would understand the parts I wasn’t speaking. She listened patiently, and occasionally I’d hear a lilting voice speak Portuguese in the background.
Mais vinho? Sim, por favor
.

I lifted a sweaty palm to hook my hair behind my ear and waited for a response, a direction to take. I needed a tangible way to fix everything. Write a letter to Will, or get a revealing new haircut. Another tattoo, maybe.

“This is why I don’t sleep with guys,” she said finally. “What does Dean say?”

“Dean?”

“He’s your mirror. He shows you want you need to see, even if you don’t want to admit it.”

When Bernie spoke, she may have been thousands of miles away but her poetic spirit nudged at my heart as if she were sitting on the steps of the library with me.

“Don’t lose yourself trying to hold on to him,” she said.

“It’s not me I’m worried about losing. It’s him. Maybe it’s juvenile, but I don’t want to give up on someone who knows me as well as I know myself.”

“If you think that person is Will Easton, then you don’t know yourself well enough yet, stormy. Listen to me, Dell,” Bernie said. “You want him to love you till you’re you again, but he can’t fix you, because he’s the one who broke you. In the end,
you tried and you loved him as hard as you could, and that’s all anyone could ask. More than anyone can ask, really.”

“But I’m not ready for it to be the end.”

“You’ll never be ready for the end of something you thought would be unending.”

“I feel like I failed.”

“It’s not failure. It’s not rejection. It’s redirection.”

I bit my lip. “I mean, I think Alex likes me, so at least—”

“No, Dell,” Bernie interrupted. “No, no, no.”

“No?”

“Stop looking for an ‘and.’ Dell
and
Will. Dell
and
Cameron. Dell
and
Alex. Dell
and
that random football player. You’re always Dell and some guy. I want you to be Dell, period. Find out who you are when you’re just Dell. Not Dell ‘and.’ Not Hurricane Dell.”

“I don’t know how to start.”

“Stop chasing people who make you feel comfortable and do something that scares the shit out of you. It’s scarier to let go and be alone than hold on.”

“What’s the difference between holding on and letting go?”

“When he makes you cry more than he makes you smile—that’s when you need to let go. And when you tally it up, all the smiles can’t be in the past.”

A fresh wave of tears erupted. Bernie stayed on the line long enough to let the tears dry in tight streaks on my cheeks. When we hung up, I sat on the library steps until the fountains clicked off and the rush of running water disappeared from the background. I didn’t know that the Beaumont Library fountains
ever
turned off; it was just another thing I took for granted.

With a start, I scrambled off the steps and jogged down the path back to Wild Mare Point, which was lit with the hazy glow from streetlamps.

In Paso Fino, I took the stairs two at a time, the sounds of my footfalls echoing against the cinderblock walls. I was breathless by the time I fumbled with my key in the door. Even though I knew we were moving out in a few days, I was still surprised to see bare walls and boxes stacked in the center of the room.

With a winded grunt, I pulled my desk a few inches from the wall and wiggled across the surface on my belly as I reached to unplug the tabletop fan that I’d bought at the lighting store for Will. I tucked the fan under my arm and flung open the desk drawer to root for the pile of photos I’d saved after Will found them under my mattress.

The cord trailed down the hall as I hurried up the stairs to the roof. I put the photos in my mouth and clamped down my teeth to hold them while I turned the knob.

It was nighttime cool on the roof. A large air conditioning unit hummed in the corner, drowning out the sound of the wind. The lights from the basketball court below still burned brightly, giving the roof a dim radiance.

I dropped the fan with a clatter and took the photos out of my mouth. A ridge of indentations announced where my teeth held them. With a deep breath, I ripped a picture in half and sent it fluttering in the wind. I ripped another and another. Eyebrows and smiles and university T-shirts and fingernails and half-empty cups of beers floated off the roof into the night sky. I watched them catch the breeze and take off, dancing past Morgan Hall to Sugarbush, where it had all started. Some scraps floated into the brush along the lake and I wondered if a bird would build the image of Will’s hand holding mine into a nest.

When the last trace of the photos disappeared into the darkness, I picked up the fan, the metal cold in my hands. It summed up my relationship with Will—the hopeful plans and the blind compliance to his desires over mine. I didn’t even like to have
the cold, insistent air of a fan blowing on me all night, but I bought it because I wanted to make him happy.

With a few hurdling steps, I lifted the fan over my head with outstretched arms and pitched it as hard as I could off the roof. With a graceless arc, the fan tumbled into the lake, its cord trailing behind it. There was a satisfying splash as it hit the water, and a cloud of birds and ducks flew startled from the area. The cord pooled on the surface of the lake before sinking to the bottom.

As I watched it disappear, a hand touched my arm lightly. I turned.

“I thought I told you not to come up to the roof,” Levi said.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough.”

“Then you know I have no reason to come up here again.”

“Let’s go,” Levi said.

He steered me to the metal door, away from the fluttering photos and sinking fan.

CHAPTER 37

PROFESSOR LIU LEANED
forward on her elbows, shoving aside papers on the cluttered desk.

“Thanks for coming in to discuss your final project, Madeleine. I’ve had a chance to look through your portfolio and I am confident in your skills.”

She set down the stuffed binder and flipped through it.

“You use graphics and icons to enhance repetition, but I want you to trust your instincts rather than pushing something that doesn’t work,” she continued.

I smiled and leaned forward. “I’ve been taking that to heart lately, Professor Liu. I’m working on it.”

“Good.” She tapped her finger on the page. “I want you to work on branding your name and fine-tuning your portfolio over the summer. You didn’t win the design contest, but being runner-up is an accomplishment in itself. A thousand dollar prize goes a long way at your age. You’re almost there. You just need to think about your process, why you do the things you do, and it will all start to come together.”

Professor Liu handed the binder back. It sagged in my arms.

“Are you enrolled in my advanced digital art course next semester?” she asked.

“Yes, I’ll be there.”

“I’ll look forward to seeing what you can do,” she said.

She pushed away from her desk and stood. She gave me a brisk handshake and nodded, dismissing me for the summer.

As I left Professor Liu’s cramped office, I was disappointed about the contest, but I knew she was right: I could do better.

Douglas Drive was crowded with creeping cars, the first parents to appear on campus for move-out. Plastic bins and half-broken futons appeared on the sidewalk of Wild Mare Point, but the air of anticipation wasn’t there as it was in the fall; there was resignation in the slow steps to waiting cars.

I approached Paso Fino and saw the open trunk of a gray Toyota. A man turned around and wiped his brow. I recognized the familiar eyeglasses and mustache.

“Mr. Ciccone,” I called. I tucked my portfolio under an arm and hurried toward the waiting car.

“Dell, I’m glad to see you before we head out,” he said. “Natalie’s bringing down the last load now.”

I turned and saw Levi holding the glass doors open for Natalie, who huffed and blew her long hair from her eyes as she angled her shoulders through the door. Her arms were full of clothes with dangling hangers.

I set my binder on the curb and hurried toward her. I took half the load from her arms.

“Were you going to wait for me before you left? What if my meeting with my professor ran long? I might not have seen you. Were you going to drive back to San Diego for the summer without a goodbye?”

“You know I hate goodbyes, Dell,” she panted.

“Still,” I protested.

I dropped the clothes into the waiting trunk and stepped back. Natalie placed her armful on top and wiped her brow. Her dad closed the trunk and climbed behind the wheel, patiently giving us space.

“I didn’t want to cry,” she said. “Last year I cried until we hit St. Louis. My dad said he’d send me back on a plane if I planned to cry for another thirty-hour trip this year.”