The Distance from A to Z (13 page)

I snicker. “Well, they made a rule about swearing. They're much older than me, so by the time I came around they knew
all the bad words. Especially given all the sports games they attended. There was always some drunk idiot who didn't have an issue shouting curses regardless of the small kids in front of him. And so apparently in second grade, I also started swearing. And at first it was funny because here was this cute little pint-size me, swearing like a sailor when I couldn't find the book I wanted to read. But then it started coming out at school. And one day, in class.”

I pause, because we're now in front of the dorm and I don't know what to make of the fact that Zeke is still holding my hand. He's holding my hand and we didn't talk about Friday night and we didn't talk about who was on the phone and how awkward things were all weekend. But he's still holding my hand, still looking at me like he's waiting for me to finish the story.

“Apparently,” I start again, my cheeks warming because they're no longer hidden by the alleyways and deserted walkways of Huntington. “Apparently the teacher got an odd look on her face when I dropped the f-bomb in class, and asked me what it meant. So I said: ‘It's what you say when you get really, really mad. Like when the bases are loaded and the batter strikes out on a pitch that any fucking moron with half a brain could hit with his eyes closed.'”

Zeke guffaws a laugh that's so enormous, I'm shocked he's able to continue holding my hand through it. “Tell me you're
exaggerating.”

I press my lips together, and in the process hold his hand a little more securely. Because all my muscles are connected. And then I shake my head. Slowly.

“So, wait, what happened?”

“Well, my parents got a call and had to come in for a meeting, and I needed to be taught that I wasn't allowed to swear. And they tried for months but it had become a really bad habit and plus, it made everyone laugh. But finally they came up with a solution. I can't remember if it was Si or Jed, but the new rule was that if I used the f-word, I would be ‘punished' by having to wear all White Sox clothing.”

Zeke laughs and it's an easy, happy laugh, loose and filling. Real. “I love that story,” he says, and only then does he drop my hand.

And I want to weep with gratitude that we didn't talk about Friday night. Even if it means no sweets for a year.

AND SLOWLY, VERY SLOWLY, LIFE
returns to normal. It's been three weeks since I arrived in Merritt, three weeks that feel like three months, and my old life feels like something that took place years ago. The life in Chicago, with the Cubs and my brothers, Lake Michigan instead of the pond. The life that I lived at home instead of eating in the cafeteria, hanging out at campus eateries, buying groceries with Alice to keep in our minifridge.

A life when I dreamed about learning French instead of practicing all day, every day, studying until I begin to dream in French. A life before Alice and Colin. A life before Zeke.

On Friday night, Colin sits with me and Alice at the poetry slam even though she isn't ready to go onstage. It takes a full ten minutes of hanging out near the cafe before Alice is ready to go in, and that only occurs after Colin stakes it out and assures her it's practically empty. We all make like
it's no big deal, like we were eager for the fresh air (blended with the scent of pot—thank you, New Hampshire).

Saturday we go back to last week's brunch location and spend the day outside on the patio, reading and drinking so much coffee that by the end I'm so jumpy I don't need to go for a run. I'm burning off energy just standing.

Colin's back on Sunday, at my door with a pile of movies under his arm and a giant container of popcorn.

And while Colin is clearly talented as an artist, his ability to reenact a variety of classic movies is killer. And he does so apparently without any hint of embarrassment in public. Like walking down Main Street. Or in the middle of a park on campus. Or in the common room. He can single-handedly re-create entire swaths of dialogue from
The Princess Bride
to
Harry Potter
to some movie from the 1980s about misfits in high school.

He's the perfect nonboyfriend: always there, always remembering what's going on in my life, always ready to try something new.

And so even though there's no kissing and no potential for kissing, there's also no anxiety, which is a bonus.

Zeke and I don't talk about what's going on between us. He still disappears every afternoon, though I've mostly abandoned the drug dealer idea since he doesn't seem to have
lots of new expensive crap. I work on the extra assignments and stare at pictures of Paris when my brain turns to mush. I conjugate French verbs, memorize Marianne's vocabulary lists, read articles, watch French television shows.

But when Zeke is around? It's a whole different world. We dedicate entire evenings to talking about all the places we've visited, the spots we want to see someday. Zeke tells me more about his grandmother Emmaline in Paris, how she moved there after his parents got married, after her own divorce. He paints a picture so vivid, so clear, that I feel like she's walking with us, telling us her own stories. He shows me photos on his phone of her house, her backyard garden, the tall and distinguished-looking Algerian man she's lived with for the last twenty years, a man a full decade younger than her.

“You'd love her,” Zeke says, and there's such a wistfulness to his voice that I almost want to stop, to put my arms around him. “She's exactly your kind of person. She says what's on her mind, all the time. She told me once that she spent so long trying to be the person she thought others wanted her to be that she didn't want to waste another moment not being true to herself.”

Is that what he believes about me? That I'm true to myself? That I say what's on my mind? Because I don't. If I did, I'd beg him to tell me where he goes all those afternoons, plead
with him to let me into his real life, not just the fairy tale we create in French. I'd tell him how much it hurts my heart that I don't have the courage to lean into him, brush my lips back against his like on that Friday night at Chutes and Lattes, feel his arms encircle me, his hands at the small of my back. I am so desperate for that I want to scream. But not desperate enough to risk what we have now. Because this is priceless.

So I turn the conversation around, hoping my voice is steady. “When will you get to see her next?”

And I hope it's sometime in the spring, when I'll (hopefully) also be in Paris. Because Paris with Zeke? It's more than anything I can imagine.

It's that image, the two of us strolling down the Champs-Elysées, that keeps me going when he calls moments before we're supposed to go out on Wednesday night and says he's stuck in Boston. Thankfully, we didn't have a whole evening planned; we were just going to listen to old French folk songs and decode them.

“Can I call you when I'm driving back?” Zeke asks, and I want to say no. I want to stop myself from playing the familiar game of waiting up and having him maybe call or maybe not call. But then he says, “Please,” in a quiet voice, and I relent.

“Did you take the CDs or did you download the music?”

“Both. I'll try to listen to them first and then maybe we can talk about the vocabulary together,” he says, and once again I hear the clattering of dishes and the sound of a restaurant in the background. I'm about to ask him where he is when he promises to call me in a couple of hours. Promises.

He doesn't call until almost eleven. I'm already in bed, reading, convinced he was going to stand me up again.

“I'm so sorry,” he says as soon as I say hello, the dinging seat belt indicator in the background.

“Are you still in Boston?” I ask, trying to swallow the yawn that overtakes me.

“I left a little while ago. I just stopped to grab some coffee,” he says, his voice pretending to be upbeat when really he sounds completely exhausted.

“Are you okay to drive?”

There's a pause, and I wonder if I lost the call, but then I hear the GPS voice, and I know he's still there.

“Zeke?”

“I'm okay,” he says, but he's not certain. And that scares me. “Are you in bed already?” he asks. “We can talk in the morning.”

“No, no,” I say. Alice is fast asleep, and I know that as long as I keep my voice down, she'll sleep through everything. I point my desk lamp to the wall to mute the light and sit up.
“I'm here.”

“You don't have to—”

“I'm here,” I repeat. I don't say: I'm afraid of you falling asleep driving. “Do you want to go through the songs?”

“Sure,” he says. “I listened to them a bit on the ride down but then I got a call—”

A call. Always a call. What's with the calls?

But I don't say anything; instead I pull out the papers on which I've created vocabulary lists for each song. “Let's go.”

We talk for almost an hour as French music plays in the background. We discuss each of the songs on the list, from the ultra heavy metal to the slow folky songs my parents might have once listened to, if they were those kind of parents. Which they're not.

We review the vocabulary words, Zeke testing me on the ones he can remember, me reviewing the rest over and over until he can almost predict which I'll say next. And even though I'm in the safety of my warm bed with the sounds of Alice sleeping across the room, and Zeke is alone on a dark highway, the French words draw us together. They make me feel like it's just us up in the middle of the night, a world of only us. I want to snuggle down into that world, let it lull me to sleep, but I'm responsible for making sure that Zeke doesn't do the same, and the thought keeps me sitting upright, keeps my voice from getting wispy.

“You must be exhausted,” he says when we've gone one more time through all the words and neither of us even pauses.
Épuisée
, exhausted.

The clock reads midnight, and I wish I were the type to stay up until whenever, to get my second wind, but apparently I'm more the type to be able to sleep through anything, because I don't even remember what we were talking about.

“It's okay,” I mumble, stifling a yawn.

“Merde, tu va me faire bailler.”

You're going to make me . . . yawn?

“How did you know—”

“Your voice changes when you yawn. And it makes me picture your mouth going long, like an oval, the way you scrunch your eyes together when you finish.”

He can see me in his mind. . . . He remembers—

I don't know what to say. I want to be in the car next to him so I can see his eyes, so I can tell if this is just a thing that Zeke notices or something . . .

“I should probably let you go to sleep.” Zeke's voice is quiet, smooth like caramel, and I don't want to lose this Zeke. I don't want to let him slip away, to see him tomorrow morning in the cafeteria laughing with some girl, see the way his arm so casually rests around her shoulders.

I want us to slip into this universe of darkness outside, the two of us alone in this make-believe world.

“Where are you now?”

I hear the catch of his breath and he's right: I can picture him yawning, the way he thrusts out his chest a little, the way his chin comes down to his clavicle. I know what he looks like yawning.

“I'm about twenty minutes away.”

“I'll stay with you, then—”

“You don't need to. I'll be okay.”

“I know. I want to.”

I don't say that it doesn't matter how far away he is, that he could have been slipping his key into the front door of the dorm, walking up the stairs, and I'd still want to stay on the phone with him. That I won't give up this . . . this whatever it is . . . until I absolutely need to.

There's a pause, and I don't know what he's going to say.

“What do you do when you go to Boston anyway?”

Zeke's exhale is loud enough for me to hear, and I know he's about to shut me down, get off the phone, tell me it's none of my business. My fingers grip the hot phone to my ear and I scrunch my eyes shut. I want to know. Even though it might involve another girl. Or drugs. Or money laundering. Or—

“I'm seeing doctors there. For my shoulder.”

Oh. Apparently I watch too much television.

“What happened to your shoulder?”

There's a chuckle but it isn't laughter; it's discomfort all
rolled up into a filthy little ball. “I was in a car accident. It wasn't serious but the way the seat belt pulled across my shoulder and the way I jerked forward caused significant injury. That, and I sprained my ankle. It's all mostly healed, but I've been doing rehab in Boston, trying to make sure my shoulder isn't . . . permanently affected.”

“Oh. Are you going there alone?”

When I banged up my wrist in volleyball during gym class, either Si or Jed came with me to every appointment if Mom or Dad were at the store. Which was ninety percent of the time.

I couldn't imagine doing those painful exercises on my own, never mind having to drive back and forth more than an hour before and after.

“Uh, I have a friend who meets me there. A friend of the family.”

There's an odd squeak in his voice when he speaks these words, like he isn't altogether comfortable saying them, like they balance on a sharp blade and he isn't positive where they'll land.

Like he's lying. Like my suspicions are correct and he's involved in something nefarious.

Except that wouldn't make sense. Zeke would have no reason to lie to me.

It must be the exhaustion.

But before I have a chance to really think it through, he's changed the topic to favorite comfort food to eat when you're on the road (me: licorice, him: chips; me: caramels, him: candy corn; me: Coke, him: coffee). And while there's something niggling at the back of my mind, it's quickly replaced by the realization that Zeke has terrible taste in snacks.