Love Show (24 page)

I didn't see Jack again until May.

He texted me occasionally late at
night when I was sure he had been drinking and I ignored him until they stopped.
And I fought the urge to text him during the day, when I was sober and
clear-headed.

I spent time with David and Justin.
They were good together. They worked. They made sense.

When I saw Jack in May, he was at
the library. He was leaned over a book, his fingers curled around a Starbucks
cup. He whispered to a girl with golden hair and smiled occasionally.

So, someone else had gotten him to
the library.

I decided not to say hi, not
wanting to worry if he'd told her about me or if maybe she was just a girl from
an English class or if maybe she wasn't anybody at all. Maybe they'd just met.

I got away without him seeing me. I
couldn't decide whether or not that was a victory though, by the time he was
out of view.

"...and now she's sending emails at 5 AM about Oxford
commas. I mean, she's got to get a grip..."

I closed the door to our apartment
and dropped my bag on the floor. "Who’s talking about Oxford commas?"

Justin fell silent.

"She does look kind of cracked
out,” David commented.

I glared at him ferociously.

David looked right back at me.
"Justin thinks you might be spiraling."

"Spiraling?"

"Into despair," he added.

"I didn't say that,"
Justin said quickly.

"Is this about the
email?"

"It's like five pages long.
Single-spaced. About grammar,” David said.

“You read it?” I asked. “That was
only for the newspaper staff.”

"Justin forwarded it to
me."

"Okay. You're totally
unreliable," Justin said, looking at David. “I told you not to bring up
the email.”

"I just don't understand why
everyone is confused about Oxford commas," I took a sip of my Red Bull.
"They're sloppy and it's May and people should know these things by now.
The
Northwestern Daily News
does not use Oxford Commas. Is that really
that complicated? No. It’s not complicated at all.”

"You shouldn't be sending
emails at five in the morning. Especially not about commas. It's
disturbed," David said.

"I didn't say you were
spiraling," Justin added. "Just to be clear."

"Well, I think you're spiraling,”
David chimed in.

"And disturbed," I said.
"Got it."

"We're going to the bar to
have a beer and celebrate basically being done with college."

"You and Justin?"

"No, Justin is a freshman. His
GPA still matters. He has things to learn. You and me. It's pub crawl."

“I have things to do."

"Like what?" David asked.
“Writing an email about apostrophes?”

"Just things."

"You've got nothing to do.
C'mon. I won't make you brush your hair," he said. "Andrew will be
there."

"So?"

"These are people you've gone
to school with for four years. We don’t have that much time left to spend with
them, Hadley."

“Fine,” I said.

I went to my room and slipped into
a sundress, cowboy boots, and a soft blue cardigan. I sat with David and had a
glass of wine. It was nice, I realized. It was nice to relax.

I hadn't had a drink in a long
time. I sipped slowly and the wine made me sleepy more than anything. I was
yawning while we walked to the bar.

"I would rather take a
nap," I said, looking at the line.

He grabbed my wrist. "One beer.
Then we go. You go. Whatever."

We were both too sober for the
place. People seemed pretty emotional actually. We only had a few weeks left,
and the bittersweet realization we were nearing the end had infiltrated the
bar.

I had known I'd see Jack when we'd
walked over.

I missed him. I'd missed him badly
at first, but now it was more like a dull ache. Bearable. Completely bearable.
Yet, I wanted it to go away and worried it never would.

When I saw him, the ache was
sharper. But it also felt good. It felt like standing on the doorstep of my
grandmother's house when I was a kid.

He was with the same girl. The one
I’d seen in the library.

I bit my lip, watching him. His
hair was a bit longer, he had a few day's stubble, and he'd rolled up the
sleeves of a flannel shirt that I hadn't seen before.

He caught me looking. Smiled.
Looked back at her.

Jesus. That was the worst.

I looked over my shoulder at them
twice. He was introducing her to people. Some of them she knew. She shoved
Nate's shoulder like they were old friends, laughing.

"Go say hi."

"No way."

"Well, then stop
staring," David ordered. "You want a beer?"

I shook my head. "Ginger
ale."

"That's so boring."

I smiled. "I don't want to get
drunk and go over there and say something stupid."

David looked over. "She looks
like she's twelve."

"She does not," I said.

"She does. He ordered a child
bride from Russia online."

I laughed.

"You did the right thing in
getting out when you did. You would've ended up like one of those clueless
women married to the total psychopath on SVU with the child bride in the
basement."

"Groovy."

"I'll have a Corona,"
David said to Xander, when we reached the bar.

Xander looked at me for a long
minute. He looked at me like I really pissed him off.

"What about you, Hadley?"
he asked. He sounded overly polite. Cold, if I was being honest.

"Ginger ale would be great,
thanks." I smiled as warmly as I could. "How are you?"

"Fine,” he said shortly.

Xander filled a cup with ice and
ginger ale. He looked at me with frozen eyes and pushed the glass across the
bar. He handed David a beer.

"On the house," he said
icily.

"What's with him?" David
asked as we watched him walk away.

I shrugged, sipping my ginger ale.
"I think I wanted vodka."

"Now, you're being
sensible."

"Let's guess the name of the
child bride," I said.

"Tatiana."

"Svetlana," I countered.

"Anastasia."

"Too 19th century."

He chuckled. "Let's not think
about Jack or Jack's child bride."

"Fine," I said. I looked
around. "Should we nap?"

David disagreed with and
disapproved of my suggestion. He snorted and dragged me over to the seniors in
the GSA he had rekindled his friendships with.

People were getting drunk, David
included. Jack definitely included. I kept looking over to see if he was still
around. He was never looking at me when I checked.

"I'm going to go," I
said, suddenly sick of it.

"You sure?" David asked
with concern.

I nodded. "I'm tired."

"Thank you for coming,"
he said. "I know you didn't want to."

"Hey, it was fun. I’m glad I
came," I hugged him. "See you at home?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

I left alone, shouldering out the
door into the warm evening.

I felt alone, I realized. Which was
strange. I'd just been in a crowded room of people, but I felt disengaged from
it, detached completely, profoundly unlinked to the people with whom I had so
much in common.

 I had felt like this all the time
before I started seeing Jack. It hadn’t bothered me then. But now that I had
been in crowded rooms with him and known what it was like to feel like the
person next to you was, in some unique way, the exact same thing that you were,
I missed it. And I hated feeling so detached. I wondered if I would always hate
it now, or just when I saw Jack.

I looked back at the door,
wondering if I should give it one last shot. But I shook my head. I'd be graduating
in two weeks. I’d gotten a lot out of college, I told myself. I didn’t need to
ask for anything more. I had a degree, a friend named David who I would do
anything for, and the job I had always wanted.

All good things.

But I felt like I'd missed out on
some essential part of being young. I felt older than my classmates. I knew
that was my fault.

I turned back towards the road.

I heard a familiar laugh and I
turned to see Jack, and the pretty new girl, and it took a moment for him to
see me.

He stopped laughing. I started
walking.

"Hey!" he called. I
didn't turn around. I didn't want to meet the girl or talk to the boy or do any
of the post-not-breaking up stuff.

I heard his footsteps as he ran
after me.

"Hold up."

"I'm going home."

He looked at me. He looked like he
was going to say something.

"Jack!" she called.

His face fell while he was looking
at me. "You look good."

I smiled. "Thanks. I'll see
you around."

"Let us drop you off."

"That's okay. Really." I
nodded. "It's a five minute walk. I'll be back before the cab's
here."

He looked resigned to that.
"Shit, Hadley."

"Jack! What's the address of
this place?" she called.

Jack closed his eyes briefly.
"Hadley."

"Jack, it's around the
corner," I laughed. I pushed his shoulder playfully, but he locked his
feet in place so I just ended up with my hand resting on his shoulder. I
dropped it to my side.

He looked deadly serious. I was the
one who should've been annoyed and jealous, and I was, but it wasn't fair. Of
course he was with another girl. Of course she was pretty. Of course I was
alone.

"I'll see you around," I
said.

He didn't follow me and he didn't
say anything but when I reached the corner, I snuck a glance over my shoulder
at him. He was still watching.

It was the feeling of detachment that prompted me to forgo
the last weekend of festivities before graduation to apartment hunt with my
father in New York.

My mother and Solomon had both
called to offer me Solomon's Greenwich Village apartment, but I didn't want
that. I wanted a place of my own, where I paid the rent, and wouldn't be
suddenly evicted when my mother's marriage fell apart.

My dad needed to be in New York
that weekend and said he'd look with me. I knew he'd be more practical about
what I needed and what I'd be able to afford.

"I still think this is a bad
idea," my dad said when I met him at the hotel for lunch.

I rolled my eyes.

"Your boyfriend agreed with
me," he pointed out.

"He's not my boyfriend."

"You broke up?”

"We were never dating."

He sipped his water. "Your generation
has some messed up ideas about normal relationships. You know that?"

I inhaled sharply.

"That boy likes you," he
said.

"Dad."

"And you like that boy."

"Dad."

"Screwy ideas," he said.

"Shut up."

He smiled, extracting a piece of
bread from the basket before him. "You want to see what New York looks
like on a journalist's salary?"

I raised my eyebrows.

He ripped the bread in half and
took a bite. "It might be scarier than Syria."

It wasn't scary. But it sure was
small and overpriced.

My father didn't gloat though. He
let me ask the broker most questions—rent, security deposit, transport—and he
chimed in with things I wouldn’t have thought of—whether the building was
responsible for fixing appliances, if the security deposit was fully refundable,
if there was someone I could call if I ever lost my keys.

My dad told me he thought I had a
suicide gene when I told him I liked the place on 116th Street best.

"Why?" I asked.

He smiled. "This is Spanish
Harlem. It has the highest crime rate in New York.”

"Well, it has high ceilings,"
I said. And it was clean and the neighborhood wasn't nearly as bad as my father
made it out to be. I liked the idea of having a little bit more space up here
instead of a closet and a bathroom further downtown.

My dad cosigned the lease
grudgingly and we went to dinner; tired but infinitely relieved that we
wouldn’t have to spend the next day tramping around walk-ups.

We ate at a famous restaurant in
Harlem that my dad somehow knew somebody at. He was the opposite of me in that
way—I didn't know people in places where I should. He knew people everywhere,
even in places where he shouldn't.

My dad started in on Jack again
after we ordered wine.

"You met him for five minutes.
He stormed out of dinner," I said.

"The only people worth keeping
around are the ones who drive you crazy." He nodded. "If I figured
that out when I was twenty-five, I'd probably have never left your
mother."

"You slept with a
secretary."

He shrugged. "It was
complicated. So, why'd you dump him?"

"How do you know he's not the
one who dumped me?"

"I saw how he looked at you.”

"Well, you must have been
hallucinating because he ended things,” I said.

My dad studied me for a second and
nodded, like he wasn’t sure he believe me. "Your mother is in a state
about you going to Syria."

I exhaled. "It's not like I
enlisted."

"No," he said. "I
don't think you'd much like thinking about David going over there though."
He paused. "Or Jack."

"That's over."

He cleared his throat, annoyed.
"Listen, Hadley. All I'm asking is that you acknowledge our concern. You
think you're doing something selfless and noble, and you are, but it's selfish to
refuse to see how it affects the people who care about you."

I bristled. "Oh, you think
I'm
being selfish?" I demanded. "Well, about time, don't you think? You
know how many times we moved? You know how many different stepsisters and
stepbrothers I grew up with that I don't talk to anymore? That mom told me were
family members before she changed her mind?"

The restaurant wasn't noisy enough
to drown out my voice. The diners at the table next to us glanced over at me,
seemingly perplexed.

I lowered my voice, embarrassed.
"I know it's selfish. Okay? It's for my career. But, I'm twenty-two. And
you were never there. That was selfish. And instead of just getting on with
things, Mom went looking for love. Over and over and over, no matter who we had
to leave or where we had to go. That was selfish."

“Alright.” He held up his hands in
surrender. "Fair enough."

"I know it affects you and I know
I pretend not to see it," I continued. "I feel like that's probably
what you did when you came to visit, right? You pretended not to see how
freaked out I was?" He didn't meet my eyes, looking down at a menu. I
shrugged. "It might be different if you had ever given me the courtesy of
acknowledging how things affected me.”

He rested his chin on his hand and
cleared his throat. "I thought you'd be better off with your mother.”

"I'm sure you convinced
yourself," I said. "But you're a smart guy. You don't get to run a company
without noticing a few things. You knew I wouldn't be. You just wished I
would."

He leaned back and looked me in the
eye. "I worked. Your mother didn't. I thought you'd be neglected if you
lived with me. You would've been. I was working sixteen-hour days six days a
week. I would’ve had to hire someone to raise you." He met my eyes.
"I'm not saying it was perfect—life with your mother. I know it wasn’t. I
know that. But I did believe it was better. I didn't talk myself into thinking
that. Maybe I was wrong, but I wasn't deceiving myself. The thing you learn
when you grow up is how to make do with the choices you have.”

I hadn't expected an apology, but I
didn't want an explanation either. "The point, Dad, is that you chose your
career. And Mom chose romance. And neither of you chose me. So, the fact that
I’m choosing my career is something you should respect.”

"It is, Hadley."

I nodded. “Well, good.”

He was quieter at dinner then. He
told me about the tech company in Europe they'd been looking into, about how
much savvier the young associates at work were, and about how he couldn't
believe I was graduating from college.