Love and Other Foreign Words (5 page)

“I'm definitely ready to be in love,” I say.

“Do I want to hear this?” Stu asks.

“Ohmigosh, be quiet. I do,” Sophie says.

It's Monday. We are in Stu's car on our way to school on yet another cold, drizzling morning this last day of March. He drives a bright yellow Subaru station wagon that he bought last summer from a woman who covered the bumper with stickers about quilting. He, Sophie, and I spent a Saturday scraping off such slogans as
I
Quilting
;
Love to Bee a Quilter
;
A Quilter is happiest when her life is in pieces.

He kept the only one that had nothing to do with quilting:
Hot Granny on Board
.

This morning, Sophie twists all the way around in the front passenger seat to face me, her eyes vivid with an excitement I don't share and can't match.

“I've worked this out,” I say.

“You can't work love out,” she says, wistfully pulling her long blond hair over one shoulder.

“I can work anything out,” I say.

“How much rat have you eaten in your life?” Stu asks via the rearview mirror.

“Fine. I can work
most
things out,” I say.

“You two stop,” Sophie says, unbuckling her seat belt and climbing over the center console to join me in the back. “Tell me everything,” she says. “What kind of guy are you looking for?”

Stu turns the radio up—some unidentifiable jazz piece.

“You really want to hear this? Because I have a list,” I say.

“I know you do,” she says, rolling her eyes and smiling at the same time, which is a look only Sophie, in all her beautiful blitheness, could master so inoffensively. “Yes. Let's hear it.”

“Okay. He has to be older than I am. And taller. Preferably handsome but not so gorgeous that he knows it. And smart in a way that makes me just want to sit and listen to him talk.”

“About what?” she asks.

“Just—everything interesting. We have to be able to have marathon conversations. But we also need to be comfortable being quiet together.”
He will appreciate the value of self-possessed silence and practice it judiciously,
I want to add, but don't.

“He should play some instrument too,” I say. “Preferably guitar or piano, but I wouldn't mind a woodwind. Bagpipes would be my first choice, but percussion is out of the question.”

“Bag—? Josie,” Sophie says.

“Well, he has to be able to do things I can't do that don't drive me crazy so that I stay interested.”

“Like walking a straight line without falling over?” Stu asks.

“Yeah. Like that,” I agree, pointing at Stu and shamming a smile.

“Stop listening to us,” Sophie orders him. “Just go back to driving.”

“You realize I haven't stopped driving,” he says.

“Be quiet,” she says. To me, she asks, “What else?”

There's more. There's lots more.

He will never ask me to eat gray, slimy, gelatinous food nor will he tousle my hair. Not that he could tousle it since I wear it daily in a neat and tidy ponytail, but there are times—showering, blow-drying—when my hair is, in fact, tousle-able. I'd prefer it if he just never touches my head or touches it only with my permission, which I will grant on special occasions such as Arbor Day, poor, neglected holiday that it is, but never on my birthday.

He will not collect white crud in the corners of his eyes or mouth. He will be athletic, but his interest in sporting events will stop well before obsession. He will understand the difference between:

• coincidence and irony

• smart and gifted

• ticks and things that are interesting

He will agree that the single greatest musical talent of our times is Dennis DeYoung, whose picture we will enshrine in the foyer of our first home together. He will never criticize my mother's cooking or my parents' house but will, instead, fit seamlessly into the Sheridan family dynamic. And his name will easily lend itself to a silent
p
.

He will be Pperfect.

But I don't say any of this to Sophie. Instead, I ask, “What else do you want to know?”

“Well, is there anyone at school you like?”

“I don't think so,” I say.

“Not even Stefan?”

“Homecoming?” I say by way of reminder.

“Yeah,” she says, producing an entirely too cheerful cringe.

Stu pulls up to the high school, and Sophie grabs her backpack.

“Okay, so this afternoon, come find me, and I'll let you know what I find out,” she says of her new mission. Stu watches me in the rearview mirror, his lips parted and frozen halfway between a smile and a laugh. I slouch in my seat a little and ride the rest of the way to Cap like this, impatient and pessimistic about the future of love in my life.

• • •

Cap is the nickname for Capital University, a small liberal arts university of old brick buildings on lush green grass, about a mile from Bexley High School and two miles from my house. This semester at Cap, Stu and I are finishing up our freshman year.

We're in our high school's Early College Program, slightly tweaked. Usually, it's only for seniors, but Stu and I were accepted into the program last year as sophomores.

We should have graduated high school last year, but my dad refused on our behalf. His specialty is creating educational programs for highly gifted teens that also meet social and psychological needs. He insisted on this division between high school and college for what he calls age-appropriate socialization.

To him, we're like a couple of kittens in training before we leave the birthing box and explore the real world. If improperly socialized, he fears we could become skittish and strange our whole lives, peeing in potted plants and hissing at people who just want to pet us.

So in the spirit of socialized cats, I am not allowed to go away to college until I am eighteen, by which time I'll be a senior at Cap, so I figure I'll graduate from there and go away to graduate school. Unless, of course, my dad catches me urinating in one of Mom's Boston ferns. I should do it someday, with a camera handy just to capture his expression.

“So what about this Geoff guy?” Stu asks when we exit his car.

I pop up my umbrella even before I get out since rain and eyeglasses do not mix. “Kate is not going to marry him,” I say.

“Oh, really?”

“Really. It's a phase. It's an engagement phase.”

We've parked a couple blocks from the campus because Stu won't spring for a student parking pass. On nice days, we park near the high school and walk.

“But she'll come to her senses soon and call it off,” I add. “Also, I'm not exactly sure what he looks like, but I'm pretty sure he's not gorgeous.”

“You don't know what he looks like?”

“Well, I can't trust my memory of him at the moment. I remember his words, and I really disliked every single one of them, so now when I try to remember him, I'm remembering that I don't like him, and that's corrupting my mental image of him. So I need to try to remember him separate from my feelings, which is no easy task.”

“So he could be an okay-looking guy?”

“No. I just have to remember the degree of his hideousness distinct from his degree of boringness.”

“Let me know when you do.”

“And he did this,” I say, making air quotes. “In reference to me.”

Stu smiles some.

“And he snapped his fingers at me too,” I say. “Then he disparaged IQ testing right before he asked me what mine is. He was completely rude.”

“Not necessarily,” Stu says. We are nearing the corner of Drexel and Main just opposite the campus, which also marks the beginning of Bexley's little downtown of boutiques, cool restaurants, coffee shops, and condos. “Given your dad's work and you, I can see how the topic would come up.”

“Kate brought it up.”

“She's proud of you.”

We stop at the corner to wait for the light.

“No, she brought it up in reference to Geoff, who then referred to himself as an intellectual.”

“Well,” Stu says, raising his shoulders and stretching his mouth to the sides in a kind of hesitant smile, as he does when deciding whether or not to speak his mind.

“Say it,” I demand.

“Yeah, I think if you are one, you don't have to announce it. As for IQ, I don't know. I appreciate the research, but—” He shrugs again. “I know people like this Geoff guy who don't.”

Stu's IQ is one hundred fifty-one—eleven points above genius on some scales. Mine is three points higher than his. Now, I mean these as statements of fact, not bragging, because we came this way with these IQs, this blond hair—mine's a little darker than Stu's—these eyes, these fingers, this height, these flat chests, and so on. We had nothing to do with it.

I like to think of human beings as coming from a divine vending machine, like the ones in hotel game rooms and old gas stations where you press a letter and a number and watch your item drop to the bottom.

B-3 you get Sigmund Freud.

D-12 is Beyoncé.

C-7 is me.

A-8 you get Twix.

Stu and I part ways in the center of campus. He heads off for a history class. I head off to algebra. I'll see him again later this morning for a lit class called Modern Drama. Then we'll walk to Fair Grounds, our favorite coffee shop a couple blocks east of campus, for what I consider lunch and what Stu considers a brief reprieve from starvation. He eats like a furnace and never gains weight. Actually, I think he's growing. Lately I've noticed his shoulders are just a little higher than mine.

• • •

We split every day between the two schools—mornings at Cap, afternoons back at Bexley High. Showing my high school ID at the door feels a little like going through customs at an airport. Every school day is like this, consisting of two different cultures, requiring two languages different from my own mother tongue.

The language of high school could be called Ohmig*d since just about everyone says it a hundred times a day. But I can't say it, even as a name, because I think it's so unfair to G-d. It's not like He's sitting around Heaven spitting out ohmijosie every time He loses his keys or His computer crashes.

It's only in Ohmig*d where
shut up
means
thank you, hot
is either
wildly
popular
or
sexy,
chill
means
relaxed,
and
cool
and
sweet
are synonymous. In college, it's Ohmig*d 2.0—with some shared vocabulary and some different. I'm a high school
girl
but a college
woman
. I mature and regress all on the same day depending only on my location.

I like studying languages. At Cap, I've already declared Romance Languages as my major, but I don't know yet what I want to do with the degree. I don't know that I'm wildly ambitious beyond the things I like to study, and pretty stubborn about the courses I dislike, doing the bare-bones minimum for the grade and not for the knowledge itself. I only know I want to do something that keeps me engaged, and the puzzle of foreign languages and the tangle that is sometimes English do that. Like Ohmig*d and Ohmig*d 2.0, there are a lot more foreign languages in the world than the ones identified by national or international boundaries.

• • •

I find Sophie at her locker a little after three this afternoon. She's engrossed in conversation with a couple of her friends from Art Club, and I'm headed to track practice, so I say, “I'll just call you later.” But she grips my wrist, and tells her friends, “Hang on a minute. This is important.

“I put some feelers out,” she says when she turns to me. “I'm doing this slowly. Trying to be really subtle, you know.”

“Well, I prefer subtlety to a sign on my locker that says, ‘Help, I'm desperate for a prom date.'”