Love and Other Foreign Words (11 page)

Text from Stu, 10:44 a.m.

Sophie told me you broke up with Stefan. U OK?

Text to Stu, 10:45 a.m.

Sad but fine. Thx.

Text from Stu, 10:45 a.m.

Sorry. Break-ups are hard.

Text to Stu, 10:46 a.m.

Unless U R U.

Text from Stu, 10:46 a.m.

No. Even then. Not my favorite thing.

Text to Stu, 10:47 a.m.

What is?

Text from Stu, 10:48 a.m.

Watching monkeys groom each other. U?

Text to Stu, 10:49 a.m.

Same.

Text from Stu, 10:50 a.m.

Cheer up, Josie. It'll get better. I promise.

I do have one thing to look forward to that cheers me considerably. Kate is moving home at the beginning of August, when the lease on her condo is up. Her old room connects to mine via a bathroom, and already I'm filled with the happy anticipation of late-night chats or just calling good night through the open doors.

• • •

I spend July helping her pack. I spend the weekend before she moves home cleaning the bathroom where she brushed, to perfection, my hair nearly every morning for years. Until college took her away but summers, and now an alleged wedding, brought her back. I'm considering feelings of gratitude toward Geoff for that. But I'd be significantly more grateful if he called off the wedding and she stayed forever. Then I can go away to grad school and return in the summer, and she can have her turn waiting eagerly for me.

But first comes August fifth, the day Kate moves home. She fails to notice the sparkling comfort and memories of her old room and instead moves her things into Maggie's at the far end of the house. “For space and privacy,” she says. Between work and her evenings out with friends or the fiancé she seems determined to marry, I rarely see her.

She's too far away to call good night to. Stupid large and excessive house.

Ironically, my favorite nights are Sundays now when Geoff comes for dinner. At least I can count on seeing Kate with weekly regularity. Lately, I've been requesting spaghetti on Sundays and always help Mother set the table and always manage to jiggle the plates past Geoff. I know just how much of a tremor it takes to make him nervous.

• • •

Kate and I set the table on the patio for dinner on this muggy mid-August night. Across the way, Geoff and my dad man the grill. Geoff is pantomiming how to place and flip burgers, and my dad is copying the gestures with theatrical enthusiasm.

“Oh, Josie, I'm sorry,” Kate says, producing such a pained expression that I forget about Geoff and Dad for a second. “I forgot. I completely forgot. I have a meeting with the florist tomorrow.” She had promised to take me clothes shopping for school, which starts Wednesday, the 27
th
, which I entered into my phone's calendar with far less enthusiasm than I entered
shopping w/Kate
for tomorrow.

“It's not going to take all day, is it?” I ask.

“Who knows? There's so much to plan. So”—she stretches an embarrassed smile across her lips—“can we do it next Saturday? I promise you are the only thing on my schedule.”

“Sure,” I say, and she hugs me and calls me
the best
and remembers to tell me the following Friday night that she and Geoff have to meet with the church organist tomorrow to pick out music.

She pledges to be back by two but isn't and doesn't even remember to call or text.

Mother takes me shopping instead. We zip through a few stores at Easton, examine colors, rub T-shirts and denim between our fingers, underwear too, and tell every salesperson who approaches us, “No, thank you. We're just looking.” We keep lists, and later at home we sit in front of her computer in the kitchen and order my size and color choices online.

At home, my dad asks, “How was your shopping excursion today?”

“Interesting,” my mother says.

“Successful,” I say.

“Excellent,” he says.

But I still prefer going with Kate.

• • •

I wake this morning as a senior in high school and greet the muggy day with a shrug. Kate has been telling me all summer—on those rare occasions anymore when she isn't talking about her fast-approaching wedding—that her senior year was the best, and she predicts mine will be the same. I predict it will be tragic if she insists on going through with this farce come November, which, by the look of things, she does. I'm going to spend part of this year dreading the thing and the rest of this year mourning it. Thanks a lot, Kate.

Most of Kate's bridesmaids think
a lot
is one word.

Text from Jen Auerbach, 7:04 a.m.

OMG!! WE R SENIORS!!!!

In the kitchen, I say a quick hello-good-bye to my dad, who dashes out for work, and find Kate sitting at the table cultivating a ridiculous smile she somehow manages to maintain through two sips of coffee.

“Yyeeess?” I ask, by which I mean
Why are you up, and why are you staring at me like that?

“It's your senior year, Josie,” she says as she rises and hugs me. “I had to see you before you left. Let me get a picture,” she says.

“No.”

“Oh, come on. Just one.”

“No,” I say as I begin my morning routine.

Kate takes her seat across from me as I flip through the paper, scanning grim headlines that betoken the end of the world.

KATE SHERIDAN DETERMINED TO RUIN SISTER'S LIFE

BY GOING THROUGH WITH NOVEMBER WEDDING

Less ominous headlines report hurricanes and bank failures.

The minute Mother enters the kitchen, I say, without looking up, “Mother, please tell Kate it's rude to stare.”

“Tell her yourself,” she says before she kisses my cheek, then Kate's.

“I just want a picture, Josie. You are so cute. Doesn't Mom take a first-day-of-school photo every year?”

“Ask her yourself,” I say, and glance sideways in time to see my mother grin a bit.

“I do,” Mother says.

“Well, I want to be in it this year. Come on.” Kate hops up and super-induces me to pose with her by saying, “This will be one worth framing.”

We choose a spot near the kitchen fireplace and get comfortable with our arms around each other while Mother retrieves her camera. She clicks off two shots and sighs contentedly as she examines the images. I'd have quietly giggled a little longer if Kate hadn't said: “A couple more. Only this time, Josie, take your glasses off.”

“Why?”

“We're practicing for the wedding,” Kate says, resuming her pose with her arm around me.

“What?” I ask

“We really have to do something about your glasses soon,” she says as I break the pose and end the photo shoot, leaving Kate to call after me, “I mean, they're fine for every day, but not for special events.” Then she sighs at me as if she's eighty and says, “I remember the first day of my senior year. Oh, it was so much fun.”

I wash my cereal bowl and glass and place them in the drying rack before texting Stu and Sophie. As I gather my things and drop my phone in my backpack, Kate turns to Mother and asks, “Don't you think it's about time Josie got contacts?”

“Ask her yourself,” Mother says, but I am out the door before she can.

Across the street, Auntie Pat greets me with, “Seafood Delite or Chopped Chicken and Kidneys?”

She shows me a can of cat food in each hand.

“It feels like a Seafood Delite kind of morning,” I say, and add, “I'll do it.”

“Thanks, hon. You're a doll.”

I spoon the stinky stuff onto a plate and place it before Moses, who waits for a good head-scratching before tucking into his breakfast. He's finally letting me pet him again.

“Okay if I run up to Sophie's room?” I ask.

“Of course. Tell her if she doesn't beat her brother downstairs, she's getting the chicken and kidneys for breakfast.”

On the stairs, I see Stu before he sees me. He's yawning, scratching his left shoulder, and wearing the T-shirt and shorts he likely slept in.

After his time in Colorado, he came home much too tan and got the melanoma lecture from me. Over the summer, he filled out some and let his hair grow into a short, wavy ponytail, and now he has a soft patchy beard a couple shades darker blond than his hair. On his first day home, he said he just got out of the habit of shaving. When I asked if he got out of the habit of peeing indoors, he just smiled at me as he ate a huge powdered donut in two bites.

“Seafood Delite for breakfast,” I say.

“That's why I'm up early.”

I'm at the top of the stairs. He's at the bottom when he says, “Oh, I got your text and no.”

I smile.

It was:
Kate wants me 2 B excited about 1st day of school. I'm not. U?

• • •

I knock on Sophie's door and hear, “Anyone other than Stu, come in.”

When I enter, I find her sitting at her desk, holding her phone, which she promptly clicks off.

“I was just texting you back,” she says. “And, yes. I'm excited to see everyone. But I'd be more excited if I were you.”

“Why me?”

“Senior year? Oh, I can't
wait
until next year. Senior year is always the best.”

“Why?”

“Everyone says so,” she says. “But this year is starting off with pretty good potential.”

“Any developments?”

“Not yet.” She grins.

She broke up with Adam Gibson at the end of July and promptly produced a stunningly dreary painting of a deserted beach. Very lately she's been determined to fall in love with Josh Brandstetter—the cute guy in my class who smells good—once
he
falls in love with
her
. She's never the first to say it.

“He's—” she begins but stops herself, squints critically at me, and asks with some urgency, “What's wrong?”

I drop myself onto the corner of her bed as I ask, “Don't you think Kate's making a huge mistake marrying Geoff?”

“No, I don't, and I can't believe you're starting off your senior year still worrying about
this
.”

“I worry about this daily.”

“Well, stop it. I can't wait for her wedding. Oh, hey, tell her to put
and guest
on my invitation, okay?” She tries not to smile as she says, “Maybe I'll bring Josh. Wouldn't that be great? Falling in love at someone else's wedding.”

“I'm not going.”

“It's Kate. Of course you're going.”

“It's number five on my list of things I refuse to do in my life—right after having the calluses on my feet exfoliated by flesh-eating doctor-fish in Turkey.”

“What are one through three?”

“They all involve crime and body fluids.”

“Josie,” Sophie says, sighing at me with a kind of patient smile on her lips.

“And what is so wrong with my glasses?”

“Nothing. I love your glasses.” She should. She picked them out.

“Kate says I can't wear them at the wedding.”

“She just doesn't want a glare in her photos,” Sophie says. “She wants everything to be perfect.”

“Then she definitely shouldn't marry Geoff.”

“Josie, stop. I keep telling you. Kate's in love. And that's the greatest thing in the world. And she's going to have a gorgeous wedding, and it's going to be so romantic, and you're going to go, and you need to be happy for her.”

“Well, I'm not. I don't like Geoff, and I'm not happy she's marrying him.”

“Josie.”

“Hopefully, I can find some way to prevent the whole thing.”

“You can't. They're in love, and love conquers everything,” she says, flopping back on her bed so that her hair pools around her and slowly exhaling at something only she can see. “That's one of the things I love about love.”

Her phone beeps.

“It's Josh,” she says, beaming a smile at her phone. “I have to get this.”

I walk back downstairs and try to ignore the burgeoning concern I have that this may, in fact, be my worst year yet. It doesn't help to be reminded at almost every turn that I am not in love, never have been in love, and would be significantly more excited about senior year if I were. Especially since I'm told senior year is the best.

Classes started yesterday at Cap, where I am now a sophomore. My Exercise Physiology class this summer tipped me over by one credit, which my parents celebrated with a card with a pony on it. Inside my dad wrote, “Graduate with honors and we'll buy you one for real.”

He knows I'd rather have a goat.

Stu broke up with Amanda Meyers, whom he started dating two weeks after Sarah Selman broke up with him. Amanda asked him not to go away for eight weeks. They fought. She accused him of not caring enough about her, and he said, “If proof of my caring is that I stay here instead of take this great class in Colorado, then I don't care. But I disagree with your definition of
caring
.” And, oh, the Facebook fireworks after that.

Now he's contemplating someone else from our class. He won't tell me who, but I think it's Jen Auerbach. He's a bit too adamant that it is not.

“You have to tell me who it is,” I say. “I promise I won't interfere.”

He stares sideways at me a full five seconds, letting his incredulous expression answer for him.

“I won't,” I say. “Unless it becomes necessary.”

“Which it will, I'm sure you think.”

“Of course it will. I like Jen, and if you start going out with her now, you won't be together by Halloween, and she should know this up front. But actually she already does. I told her last year.” He says nothing, so I add, “So I have no reason to interfere. So now you can tell me.”

But he doesn't.

It's a nice morning, so we park at the high school and walk to Cap for our first Wednesday classes. This year, like last, we're taking two classes apart from each other and one together, a sociology class called Sociolinguistics, which I've been dying to take since I read about it but had to slog through some lower level soc classes first.

From the course description:
Soc. 310 is an introduction to sociolinguistics, specifically the social use of language. In this course students will examine the origins and evolution of language by modern speakers, paying particular attention to how language identifies social groups and changes in both emphasis and meaning from group to group.

This class was designed for me. And it is the only thing I am happily anticipating at the moment.

“So, what about Stefan?” Stu asks. “Seen him? Heard from him?”

I shake my head and say, “Neither.”

“You'll probably see him today. You ready for that?”

“I'm dreading that,” I say. “But I've rehearsed several possible exchanges.”

“Which aren't going to happen,” Stu says, followed by a big shrug.

“I know. So I figured I would just present him with a big, warm smile and an equally friendly hello.”

“Show me.”

“I can't show you. I'm not in the moment. It'll look stupid.”

“Come on, Josie,” he says, nudging my elbow.

“Okay,” I say, and we stop walking. I draw a breath, smile slowly and say, “Hello.”

“Yeah,” Stu says, nodding. “You're really not in the moment. That was definitely stupid.”

I slap his shoulder. “I told you. I'll do it right when I see him.”

“Just say hi.”

“I will,” I say. “I just want to do it in a way that lets him know I still like him as a friend even if he doesn't like me all that much anymore.”

“Good luck with that one,” Stu says in a tone that actually means
not going to happen
.

I just refuse to give up a friendship so easily or to believe that love and hate are remotely close on any emotional spectrum. I like Stefan and have every reason to believe I always will.

And then I walk into my sociology class and everything changes.

Their eyes met across a crowded room . . .

I've read this dozens of different ways, and never thought it could happen outside fictionalized Victorian England. But it's happening. To me. Right now.

I see him—Him Whom I've Never Met—the one in glasses, beautiful brown frames that match his beautiful brown hair. Suddenly, in a split second, a palpable force, like a seismic wave, hits me, but instead of knocking me over, it wraps itself around me before rushing into my body, where it twists my stomach, squeezes my lungs, and thumps on my heart. Sounds diminish to indistinct murmurs. The whole peripheral world fades. I cannot move, and, at the same time, I think I might be able to fly. And now—feet anchored to Earth, wings starting to sprout—he looks at me, directly at me, with those eyes the color of sky, and he smiles. And he nods, just once—an elegant, sophisticated, and entirely personal acknowledgment, between him and me alone.

I couldn't say hello to Stefan Kott like this if I practiced for a year.

What is this?

Heart pounding. Breath quickening. None of it within my control. I manage to free one foot enough to take a step toward him when I am stopped by less cosmic energy.

“Pick a seat,” Stu says to me, spreading his arms wide.

I stand for a few seconds in front of three chairs slightly to the right of center and make my sensory assessment. No draft, no glare, no foul odor, and no strange sound coming from anywhere. If the person sitting next to me whistles through his nose or smells of pickles or something equally edible, I have to move. Immediately.

“These are good,” I say, and we encamp.

Since class doesn't start for another few minutes, I decide I should probably meet the guy who caused such a peculiar—almost supernatural—reaction in me, get the introductions over, find out who he is and what this is all about. Mr. Brown Hair and Glasses must be eager for it too, because he's glanced at me twice more since the moment our eyes first met. Glanced and smiled.

He's standing with four people I know from previous classes, so I wander over to say hi to them.

A girl named Samantha, a friendly if reserved junior who always stands with her arms folded across her chest, greets me with a nod and, “Hey, Josie. How was your summer?”

“Nice, thanks. How was yours?”

“Good, thanks. I was just talking about this internship I did, and it turns out he's from Chicago,” she says, nodding toward—
heart pounds
—Him.

“I'm Ethan,” he says in a warm, confident voice as he extends a hand to me.

Very sophisticated.

“I'm Josie.”

“Very nice to meet you, Josie.”

“You too.”
Ethan,
I say to myself and manage to refrain from sighing heavily. “I haven't seen you on campus before. Are you new here?” I ask.

“I am. New to Cap and to Columbus.”

“You'll like them both. The people are really nice.”

“So I'm finding out,” he says, gesturing toward Samantha and me, and Samantha, still wrapped up tight in her arms, says, “The people here are great.”

“Okay, then,” Ethan says, looking at his watch. His watch? “I think we should get started.”

Get started?

“Excuse me, Josie,” he says, gently touching my shoulder before he steps to the front of the room and says authoritatively, “Okay, everyone take your seats, and we'll get started. Welcome to Sociology 310: Introduction to Sociolinguistics. I'm Ethan Glaser, and I will be your instructor for the next fifteen weeks.”