Where I End and You Begin (13 page)

I just shrug and pick up a kolache. The dough is flaky and buttery, and when I bite into it, it’s still warm.

“So...” Daniel says. “You aren’t mad at me?”

I think about this for a moment while I let the heavenly little pastry melt in my mouth. “No,” I say at last, “but for a guy studying to be a priest, you sure do have a habit of making things seem like dates.”

“What?” He sounds half-aghast, and half-guilty, as though they were dates and he didn’t want to admit it...but that’s stupid. Priest, remember? His face is cherry red by now and I laugh at him again. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.

“‘I’m going to take you out for dinner,’“ I say. “‘Here, eat this picnic breakfast with me on the roof.’ A girl could totally get the wrong idea.” I give him a little smirk, and his color deepens. A guy who blushes. Good grief. I should have seen the signs.

“I wanted...er...I mean, I didn’t give you the wrong idea, did I?” he says.

“I didn’t want to fuck you anyway,” I tell him, which is only half a lie. “You aren’t my type.”

“Ouch.”

“Don’t worry, that’s a compliment. You don’t treat me like trash. Obviously I could never be attracted to you.”

“You
like
guys who treat you like trash?” He seems utterly taken aback.

“I wouldn’t say I
like
them, but I sure as hell sleep with a lot of them.”

To my chagrin, his face sort of falls. “Why would you do that to yourself?” he asks.

I stare at him. He really
doesn’t
understand much. “Are you sure you’ve had a background in counseling?” I return.

He has the decency to look away. “Pastoral counseling,” he says.

I shake my head. “I am way out of your league, man. You have training wheels on. I’m a rocket of crazy headed straight toward the sun.” It’s weird, but now that I know he doesn’t have magic answers, that I don’t have to keep
hoping,
I am relaxing around him. I can never be open with someone trying to help. I’ve done it enough times to know it doesn’t work. I couldn’t stand getting my hopes up again just to be let down.

With a smile, I sip some coffee. It’s good, though I usually like a ton of sugar and cream. Black coffee is for people who aren’t bitter enough. I always need to be sweetened.

“So... do you want to keep meeting?”

I purse my lips. “I would like to be friends,” I say. “I don’t want a counselor. I really don’t. I do need a friend who doesn’t drink, or do drugs, or sleep with a lot of guys.” A thought strikes me. “You don’t sleep with a lot of guys, do you?”

His expression is priceless.

“Just asking.”

Daniel stares down at the campus for a moment, the wind playing with his sandy hair.

A thought occurs to me. “It’s not, like, inappropriate for us to be friends, is it?”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s not inappropriate.”

“Good,” I say. “Go exploring with me next weekend.”

Daniel frowns. “Why me?”

“Because you take good pictures and Alice and Jibril are a team. I don’t want to ask someone else to go because it would just be weird. We’ve already done it. Let’s go find somewhere else.”

A faint smile crosses his face. “You sure you’d never done it before Friday? It seems like a natural pastime for a history major.”

I shrug. “I’m sure I’d never gone before Friday, but I’m not sure why. I mean, when I was little and got into something that I wasn’t supposed to I’d get whooped, so maybe that fear kind of held over. I’d drive Jibril and Alice to their locations and sometimes I’d sit and watch out for cops and sometimes I’d just wander off and go get coffee or something, but I never felt like I should actually do it myself.”

“But you like it?”

I take another sip of coffee. “I do, yeah. It’s kind of soothing.”

The corner of his mouth turns up. “Soothing?”

“There’s no one else there but you and me, and you know when to shut up.”

Tilting his head, Daniel appears to think about this.

“That’s a compliment,” I tell him. “Knowing when to shut up is like the most important thing anyone can ever learn.”

“I know that,” he says. “I was wondering if
you
knew when shut up.”

I scowl at him, but he’s smiling. “I don’t have to shut up,” I say. “Every word from my mouth is like an apple of gold.”

“Useless?”

I crumple up the napkin I’d almost used on his nose and throw it at him, but before it even gets halfway there the wind picks up and carries it away.

He just grins at me. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll go. It’s a not-date.”

I grin back. “A not-date.”

“And a new start?”

I think about it. “A new start,” I agree.

He extends his hand and we shake on it. His hand is so warm that for a moment I have a lovely vision of shrinking down and curling up in his palm like a kitten, sleeping away my worries, but then the contact breaks and I’m stuck being me again.

The rest of our not-date is spent shoving pastries into our mouths and shutting up for a while, and I feel peace start to steal in, as quietly as the cold.

N
ew starts are rare in this life, and they become rarer the older you get. When you are little and everything is before you, you can become anything, anything at all, but as you get older, you calcify, get stiffer, less able to stretch and bend. Before you even realize it, your personality is a habit. Your mistakes are habits. Everything about you is a habit, and the chances to break them are slimmer and slimmer.

I’m in the habit of being a slut. A drunk. A coward. I’m in the habit of running away, of lashing out, of hurting the hand that feeds. I’m in the habit of self-destruction. Fucking it all up comes as easily to me as breathing. Like a ghost caught in its final moments, everything I do is already ordained, a path with no branches. All my bad decisions have already been made. I’ve jumped from the cliff, and the outcome is as inevitable as the sea below.

Some days I wake up and think,
today, I will be someone new. I will fake amnesia. I will start over with all the people I love. I will be smart and sweet and kind. I will hold my friends up. I will face the future without a past.

But I never do. The memories come back, whether I want them or not. They will always haunt me, will always come through in all I do or say. They will always catch me, and give me away.

D
aniel spends another few hours with me in the student lounge on Sunday, quizzing me with the lists of important names and dates I wrote down yesterday. Then he has to leave and I take a nap—the most comfortable nap I’ve had in ages—and keep studying into the night. I sleep with my textbooks and notes under my pillow.

On Monday, I am nervous, biting my nails, unable to keep anything down, and not because of any sort of alcoholic indiscretions. I have no tests on Monday, and even though I speak briefly on the phone with Daniel, his calm, quiet demeanor is not enough to anchor me, not with my fate hanging in the balance. I can’t skip my Monday classes, so I go, but I’m such a frazzled mess, jumping at every little sound, that I hardly absorb anything.

On Tuesday I take my Holocaust midterm—the easiest for me, since it requires thoughts on morality and religion and the nature of evil. Afterwards I stumble out to the quad, sit under a tree, and try not to hyperventilate.

No one seems to notice me, or maybe I really am a ghost to the people passing by, so I call Daniel on my phone, and when he picks up I want to sob, though whether I want to cry with relief or despair I don’t know. I don’t cry, anyway.

“Bianca?”

“I just took my midterm in my Holocaust class,” I say.

“How do you think you did?”

My breath hitches. “I have no idea!”

He is quiet for a moment. “Did you study on Saturday?” he asks me.

I frown. “You know I did. You were there.”

“On Sunday?”

“You were there then, too.”

“How about on Monday?”

“Yes! What does studying have to do with doing well on a test? One does not guarantee the other!”

I almost hear him smiling at me. “No,” he says. “But you did what you could. That’s enough, right?”

“But what if what I
could
do wasn’t what I
should
do?”

He is quiet about that. “Tell you what,” he says to me. “You did your best, the final is what’s really important, and in between now and then there are a hundred things you can do to fix your GPA. I know lots of tricks about that.”

Now it’s my turn to smile. “Tricks?” I say. “That doesn’t sound like a very holy thing to know.”

“Photographers and Art students are pretty far from holy,” he replies. “I know some good ways through the system from undergrad. If you do bomb your tests, I’ll help you in whatever way I can to bring those grades up. Does that make you feel better?”

I think about it, and, weirdly enough, it does make me feel better. Less panicked. “Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”

“Good. Now don’t go turning me into a sinner by failing your midterms.”

On Wednesday I bang out a ten page paper on the structural supports of the Nazi party in Vichy France. Thursday I sit in my Myth and Life class and write an essay comparing origin myth types and their social impacts. Friday I take a quiz on enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophers and their various stupidass ideas. My only lucky break is that Dr. Schuster, who teaches my Environmental Archeology class, is too lazy to come up with a midterm for us. I know this will bite me in the ass later because it means everything rests on the final, but when at last I stumble home at three in the afternoon I am too fried to care.

I open the door and a tennis ball goes flying past my face, ricochets off the wall and then bounces back into the living room. Quiet hours in the dorm have been rescinded, and everyone must be getting it out, letting their anxiety flow out of their fingers like sand.

“That was pathetic,” Marc says from the living room. “Pathetic.”

“Prepare to be de-balled,” Mason replies.

Ah. The guys are playing crotchball. I have no idea how this game was ever conceived, but it’s simultaneously stupid and hilarious. The freshmen boys this year came in all knowing each other from high school, and their favorite game to unwind is sort of like a cross between golf and playing chicken with a train, except it’s a tennis ball aimed at your nuts courtesy of your bosom buddies. I drag myself into the living room where Mason, Marc, Justin, and two other guys from a different dorm, whose faces I recognize but whose names I can’t remember, are sitting in a circle with their legs splayed open. I walk in just in time to see Mason take aim and bounce the tennis ball against the ground.

It arcs through the air, falls to the floor, then bounces up in a perfect parabola. It lands squarely on Marc’s testicles. He screams and doubles over and everyone in the room laughs.

I can’t help but laugh, too. I wonder what my Anthro professors would say about this game. It’s almost as though the participants are vying for the right to mate, but at the risk of voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool. It’s no Maasai lion-hunting, but it surely comes from the same place.

“You guys are idiots,” Lana says. She’s sitting at the piano, tinkling out a melody that I don’t recognize.

“Idiots, maybe,” Mason says. “But not ball-less idiots. It takes balls to play crotchball.”

Lana just shakes her head and keeps plunking away. At the table in the corner a couple people are playing Bullshit, and upstairs someone is blaring music. It’s poppy Euro-trash garbage, so it’s probably Christine. I tease her all the time about her terrible taste in music, but I never tell her to turn it down. I kind of like it.

“Hey, girl,” Lana says as I wander over. “How were midterms?” She found me studying in the lounge on Monday and joined me for a few hours. She also has an espresso maker in her room, so she kept me supplied with coffee during some of the more crucial hours.

I plop down next to her on the piano bench. “Fine,” I say. “Glad they’re over.”

“Me, too,” she says. “Music theory bent me over a bench and spanked me.”

“Sounds kinky.”

“Not the way I got spanked,” she says. “My brain is mush.”

“You got spanked silly.”

She rolls her eyes and her hands fly over the keys in a sudden roll of harmony and melody. “Doing anything tonight?” she asks.

“Listening to you play piano?”

She rolls her eyes again, this time so hard I think she’s going to fall over. “What’s with you and your hard-on for my elite piano skills?”

“My dad used to play piano,” I say. “I took lessons but I was total shit at it. I just like it.”

“Well I’m not playing all night for you unless you pay me. So tell me what’s going on on this campus? Anything good?”

I shake my head. “I don’t even know where any parties are happening. I’ve been studying like the end of the world is coming.”

“If the end of the world were coming, I wouldn’t study at all.”

“What would you do?”

She frowns, as though she hasn’t thought of this before. “I think I’d just play the piano,” she says. “Or the violin.”

“Really?”

“Fiddle while Rome burns? Play on while the Titanic sinks? I’d like to be that person. I’ll provide the soundtrack for the apocalypse. You bring the drinks. We’ll all go dancing at the end of the world.”

I stare at her and she smiles. Another cascade of notes falls from her fingers, pealing through the air and drowning out the screams of agony as Justin gets clipped.

“Why wait till the end of the world?” I ask.

“Indeed,” she says. “Why
should
we wait?”

I honestly can’t think of an answer, and then someone’s hands are on my eyes.

“Tanya,” I say.

She takes her hands away and sits on the other side of Lana. “We’re going to go get dinner tonight and go to a movie. Are you in?”

“You only love me for my car,” I say.

“And your sunny disposition.”

I scowl at her but she just grins back. “Come on, I’ll spot you.” She knows how little money I have. I hate being her charity case, but I know there’s nothing in her that feels good or superior about it. She just wants me to come with her.

I heave a sigh, as though this is a huge imposition. “Fine. I
suppose.”

“Good,” she says.

In my pocket, my phone buzzes, and I pull it out. It’s a text from Daniel.

Exploring tomorrow?

I type back:
Yes. Come pick me up at one.

“Who’s that?” Tanya asks.

“Daniel.”

“He likes you, eh?”

I have to laugh at that, and Lana frowns and stops playing. “What’s so funny?” she says.

“She thinks that no guy could ever like her,” Tanya says.

I shake my head. “It’s not that. He’s studying to be a priest.”

“Oh,” Tanya says. “That’s
hot.”

“That’s the opposite of hot,” Lana tells her. “That’s gross. Are you trying to corrupt a priest?”

“I’d like to corrupt this priest,” Tanya says. “He’s hot as hell.”

“Ah.” Lana nods. “A Father Whatawaste. Still super gross.”

I shake my head. Daniel’s hot, yes, but the fact that he’s studying to be a priest is such a relief. No pressure. No issues. No stupid hormones getting in the way. I’d thank God, but I hate that guy, so I’ll just be happy with the way things have shaken out.

“It’s not like that,” I say. “We’re just friends. It’s really nice to have a guy friend and not worry about whether or not they’re just secretly hoping to get in your pants. Not that any of my guy friends want to get into my pants.” I’m not that vain.

“Whatever,” Lana says. “What’s this about a movie? You going to invite me?”

“I thought you were already going,” Tanya says.

“This is how I get left out of everything. No one ever thinks about me,” Lana complains.

“I think about you,” Tanya says. “I think, ‘God, I hate that Lana bitch, I hope she doesn’t ask to come,’“

Lana tries to smack her on the arm, but Tanya leaps up and dances away, laughing. “Oh come
on,”
she says. “No one thinks that. Come with us.”

“What movie?”

It’s some new superhero movie. It had never even occurred to me to ask what movie it was. I just wanted to go.

By the time six o’clock rolls around, the party has ballooned to nineteen people, and when we get to the restaurant the staff has to push something like eight tables together to accommodate us. I get lucky and get to sit in the middle, able to flip between one conversation and the other at will. On one side, the conversation is about the nature of consciousness. On the other side, they’re playing twenty questions, the answer to which turns out to be, eventually, ‘a Gaussian surface in the shape of a giraffe.’ I don’t even know what a Gaussian surface
is.
Goddamn CS students.

When at last we pile into the cars and head to the theater, everyone is full of good food and already almost exhausted from laughing, and I realize with a jolt that this is the first time I’ve hung out with the house in a long time. I’m not even lightly wasted. My first Friday in a long time that I’ve managed to refrain.

Wait. No. Last Friday. Last Friday I was fine, too.

I don’t know if I’ll be fine in the future, but for now, I’m fine, and I have to smile as I drive my overly-full car through the mall parking lot, slapping Marc’s hands away from my radio dials.

We head into the movie, find an empty row, and pile in, propping our feet up on the row in front of us, like a bunch of college jackasses, and I can’t even bring myself to care. We chat and laugh until the lights dim, and when the teasers roll everyone holds their thumbs up or thumbs down at the end of each one, and someone will say something cruel and funny and true, and we all laugh, and I want to hang on to this moment so badly it’s a physical pain in my chest.

I want to stay here forever, fold myself inside Marchand House and make it my home. I want to go to classes every day. I want to worry about grades all the time. I want to watch people play crotchball and argue about Marxism. I’ll graduate some day, or get kicked out, but for a wild moment, there in the theater, I tell myself that I won’t leave.

No matter what happens. I don’t want to leave. I’ll stay behind. No one will have to know. I’ll hide in the attic, rattle my chains, watching life unroll below me. Even if I can’t be a part of it, I want to be here. Even if something keeps me separate from everyone else, some deep flaw in my soul, I can’t stand the thought of leaving.

The movie starts and the fear inside me, that I will be kicked out, that I will have to leave a place that has been more home than my own home has been for years, blooms again, a cold pit of dread deep in my stomach.

My fingers itch to reach out and capture this time as it flies by, this intermediate state. I don’t want to move forward. I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here forever, in this place where I could still become anything, where there are people who know me and love me even though I don’t deserve them.

My longing is so fierce, I taste it in my mouth. Bitter, metallic. A desire that can never be fulfilled. Time moves on. All things change, and as the movie starts and everyone’s attention is fixed to the screen, I let the lump in my throat dissolve, flow up and out and down my face in silent tears.

Don’t look at me,
I think.

And no one does.