Triple Love Score (3 page)

Ronan coughed the kind of cough you get from a multiyear cigarette habit. Miranda turned her head slightly, catching his eye to make sure he was okay. He pointed with his pencil toward Clementine who had drawn herself up into a ball. The hem of her skirt opened around her like tulip petals. Miranda saw the torn and ripped crotch of her tights. Tad angled himself for a better view, completely ignoring the blank paper and pen in front of him.

“Don’t forget time of year, now. Are these flowers natural? Tad? Your thoughts?”

“I don’t know,” Tad stammered, still not taking his off Clementine.

Miranda strode across the room and placed a hand on Clementine’s shoulder, pretending to look over her work. She stood there a bit too long, just enough to make the girl shift uncomfortably.

“Good, good,” Miranda said. She hadn’t read a word from the girl’s page, but it probably was good, usually was good. And frankly it was just an exercise, what did it matter anyway?

The twenty-minute timer sounded, and all six promptly put down their pens, breathing a sigh of relief.

“You know,” Miranda said, “we should probably wrap up. That is if you all don’t mind. I know a lot of you are probably leaving town, maybe even have plans to go out tonight.”

A few nodded; no one offered any complaints or protests about the early dismissal.

“I’ll collect the exercises and read them over break.”

They handed her the papers and left the room as quietly as they had come in.

“Ronan, could you stay a second?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said in a way that came out more like marm, which somehow made it less insulting than being called ma’am.

“Thank you,” she said. “About, you know, before.”

“Thank you?” he asked. He took a few steps closer to her. He smelled like pine trees and Ivory soap. Miranda fought the urge to inhale deeply; it wouldn’t be professional.

“With Clementine. And Tad.”

“Oh, him. Yes, well, anything to help a lady.”

“That’s nice of you, Ronan.”

“It’s not just nice. I mean it. Anything to help a lady.”

Miranda set the stack of papers down and caught his gaze. He locked his blue eyes on her, a regular Irish Rob Lowe.

“Anything,” he said again.

Her cheeks flushed; bowing her head, she rifled through the papers, pretending to organize them. “Oh,” she squeaked out. She wished herself some ingénue in a BBC production of Jane Austen or one of the Bronte sisters with flaxen hair neatly arranged instead of perpetually slipping from a ponytail. “Well, have a good Thanksgiving.”

“You, too, Miranda,” he said. He stood there for a minute, but she fought the urge to look up. After a few awkward moments, he turned and left the room, leaving her with her stack of poems to be graded.

“Good,” she thought to herself, “work for the weekend.” She would be able to whip them out of her bag and walk off into another room. “I have papers to grade,” she imagined calling out over her shoulder. “I really, simply must get this work done to enjoy the break properly.”

Her father would nod mutely. Bunny and Linden would understand. A family of lawyers expected people to work all the time. As for Scott, if he did magically re-appear, well, she didn’t know what Scott thought, at least not anymore, and frankly, she wished she didn’t care.

T
HAT NIGHT INSTEAD OF PACKING, Miranda opened a bottle of wine and pulled out the Scrabble board and her cell phone. It was the same board that Scott had left some six years earlier, but she didn’t really think about that. Well, she did, but only in the back of her mind. Tonight’s agenda was work. Serious stuff. Before granting her Ph.D., her committee chair admonished her to play with form. “Be creative and less stiff. Fight the rigidity,” he said, the vodka and tonic sloshing over the rim of his noon refreshment. He approved the committee’s recommendation to pass her, but added, “To publish, you must be more than what you are.” This stung.

At least she graduated, she reasoned with herself, just as she had planned. And she would teach. Also as she had planned. One couldn’t expect magic; couldn’t expect for someone like her, someone rigid, or as the chair said, stiff, to become a Poet with a capital P, an important person of arts and letters. Just finding poetry would have to be magic enough.

Her poems could be about broken coffee cups on ceramic tile floors, and no one needed to know the shattered mug had been her mother’s favorite. When she included an allusion to the dance of the seven veils, chemotherapy danced for death instead of Salome for Herod. But no one else needed to know that—at least not until her drunken committee chair member pushed the issue. He was right; as much as she revealed herself on the page, she also held back, using the metaphors and images to hide her bruised insides.

After earning her doctorate, Miranda didn’t touch poetry. She wrote articles on teaching poetry. Started groups that put snippets of poetry in unexpected places like bus station restrooms and interstate rest stops. She read her students’ work because she had to. She read her colleagues’ work because she had to, but she didn’t let poetry seep into her. She didn’t let it touch her soul. With her advisor’s words, poetry joined the long list of things that failed her, things that couldn’t be trusted to remain the same.

When she moved into this new apartment in May, she struggled to stow this Scrabble board in the top of the closet. The box, after years of benign neglect and being transported to six different yet equally squalid apartments, now ripped, and board and letters tumbled to the floor.

She bent to pick up the letters and was startled to find the p, o, e, and m tiles lined up next to her left foot. She lifted them up carefully and placed them on the board. From the m, she added a “y.” From that y, she add an “s”; above the “o” an “n.” Poem, My, Yes, No. The board spoke for itself. Or rather it spoke for her. Instead of shoving the box up high behind her tennis racquet and indoor soccer shoes, she left it out on the coffee table.

The next night and the night after that, she played with arranging the letters into little free verse poems. Strings of words built together to show something. Each day, she pushed herself. Then the stroke of genius came. Photograph the results. Using Instagram on her phone, she played around with documenting both the words on the board and the feel by messing with the filters. They were uploaded under the screen name, Blocked Poet. Joy, actual kick-up-her-heels joy, filled her. She raced home each day to play again with the words on the board and the picture. The years of tempering her expectations fell away, leaving her just the pleasure of creating something and sending it out into the world.

She even gained a few followers on the site, those people who attached themselves to any and every early adopter. After a few weeks, they started sharing her word sculptures. Then she linked the Instagram account to Twitter, and her numbers of followers and fans grew even more.

During the first week of the summer term, she looked over Amanda’s shoulder as she was supposedly reading Christine’s poem on self-harm and shockingly saw her own poem right there on a Facebook wall. Amanda quickly clicked on like and then returned to Christine’s work.

Her concentration abandoned her for the rest of that class. She wanted to get online and see exactly where her word sculptures had travelled.

That night, after a hasty dinner consisting of a slice of cold pizza, Miranda logged into the email address for Blocked Poet. She hadn’t used her school email address to sign up for Instagram and Twitter—too many horror stories about people being denied tenure or otherwise just embarrassing themselves with pictures online.

She never expected Blocked Poet to turn up among people she knew in real life. The posts were just for fun; some of them might even be embarrassing. But the only way she could see what the people in her life saw was to rejoin Facebook. When she earned her Master’s degree, she deleted her Facebook account and all memories of Stephan, the man-boy hybrid she had shacked up with during her last year there.

So she bit the techno-bullet and signed up, as her real self, and walked through all the steps. She even let the computer search her email contacts for friends she might “know.” A smattering of current and former students came up, like Amanda and Christine, her father’s law firm, and some classmates from high school who kept trying to organize off-year reunions. She hovered the mouse pointer over each one, deciding each time to click. It would be pathetic to have a Facebook account and no friends. She flipped through several screens of these people she may know until she saw it—Scott’s picture beaming up at her.

She didn’t hover for very long. Friend request sent.

Five months later, and he never clicked on accept. The others accepted, though. And from what Miranda could see, many people she actually knew on Facebook found her Blocked Poet sculptures from Instagram or Twitter and shared them. After the fear of embarrassment wore off, watching them spread across the internet brought her great pleasure; how many poets can watch their works being read in real time? How many poets get their work read at all? Sure, they weren’t Nobel Prize-winning caliber confections of words and emotions, but people liked them and shared them with their grandmothers and boyfriends and best friends alike. And for Miranda, that worked better than ignoring poetry altogether. Plus no one ever made the connection between her and the Blocked Poet; she could post whatever sappy word sculptures she wanted without fear.

Miranda took another sip of her wine and began rooting through the tiles. Friend, she laid down, with request off the r. Then sent off the t in request. Waiting, she added from the n in friend. And still from i as the final touch. She photographed it and added a black and white effect before posting.

If Scott wasn’t going to respond to her friend request, maybe there would be someone else in the universe who would.

J
UST ON THE OTHER SIDE of New Haven, the traffic broke up. Miranda’s phone kept binging, almost in time to the Christmas music they inexplicably start playing on all the radio stations the day before Thanksgiving. Every time someone shared one of Blocked Poet’s sculptures her phone chimed in notification, or as Miranda liked to think, appreciation. Thank you, she said, thank you for making me feel like something I do matters to someone, whoever you are, bluefroggie_2112. She resisted the urge to pick up the phone and look at the recent list.