Heart the Lover (12)
‘You like to make things hard for yourself, don’t you?’
I shrug my shoulders. Here comes the judge.
‘You gave up your scholarship and took out student loans that everyone knows are hard to pay back even when you have a real profession in mind. And now you want to rack up another semester’s worth of debt—for no good reason apart from the fact that you don’t want to grow up.’
I was still in my work uniform: khakis and a teal polo shirt with a basketball decal high on the left boob. I’d worked every semester of college, and two jobs during summer. Sam had worked part-time at his father’s office in the summers and, after a trip to Europe this coming summer, that’s where he’ll work in the fall.
I look around at his free house with free utilities. I lift up the pink Easter basket by its handle and swing it between us. ‘I’m not sure you want to go toe to toe with me on growing up, Sam Bam,’ I say and get a small smile out of him.
The deadline for Sam’s and Ivan’s theses looms. Ivan got all his anxiety out early and now puts his head down and writes the thing, while Sam, who expressed no concern about it all year, is suddenly a wreck. He’s writing about Hume’s principle of contiguity, but finds himself beginning to disprove his own argument. His coffee intake triples, he starts smoking, and the only way he can fall asleep, for the few hours that he sleeps, is if he lies on his stomach while I rub his head and sing. The first song I sing to him is ‘Scarborough Fair,’ which reminds me of ‘Been Too Long at the Fair.’
‘Do you only know songs about fairs?’ His voice is muffled, his face mashed into the mattress.
‘Maybe.’
He is asleep before I can start ‘North Country Fair.’
The singing lasts for a week or two. He says I have a pretty voice and calls me Calliope. I wonder if Yash can hear me from his room. After he hands in his thesis, he slowly calms down. He asks me to help him quit smoking. Cigarettes had killed two of his grandparents and he promised his parents when he was a boy that he’d never touch them. He has to be free of them by graduation, he tells me. I make little bundles of cigarettes tied with ribbon for the next five days that reduce his consumption by three each day. On day six, no more.
A few days before graduation we go to a senior dance. Yash got up his nerve and asked Lara Mertens. We meet them there. The party is outside and there’s a band and a bar and blazing torches sunk in the ground all along the edge of an enormous garden. Lara is friendly. She kisses me on each cheek, asks me if I’ve read any more Japanese history and rolls her eyes. When Yash speaks, she is very attentive. She likes him. Yash is not himself. He has a sort of mask around other women, I’ve noticed. I thought maybe with Lara it would be different but it isn’t. Other friends come up and we get separated from them and at some point Sam tells me to stop looking at Yash and Lara.
‘I can’t tell if he’s having a good time.’
‘Of course he’s having a good time. He’s on a date with the goddess.’
I run into a couple of people from my writing classes and talk to them for a bit, then I see Sam bum two cigarettes off his friend Brent. I excuse myself and walk over and pluck them out of his pocket. He tries to grab them back but I clutch them tightly and in our struggle I get knocked hard to the ground.
It’s a semiformal. I’m on the ground in a pale green dress. I see Brent’s disgusted expression as he looks down at me. He doesn’t have time to hide it. He doesn’t offer a hand up. Sam does, but I don’t take it. I get up, brush the dirt off the back of my dress, and walk directly out to the road and the two miles home to Pye Street.
I don’t go to graduation. I work brunch and dinner at High Five and get out at midnight. My housemates are having a party. I have a beer on our porch and take their ribbing about having not actually lived there this year. Carson is the only one leaving. Starting in June I’ll pay eighty-eight dollars a month to have the room to myself. I tell them they’ll be seeing a lot more of me now. I leave Carson and Jenny making out on the porch swing, which surprises me and makes me feel the distance between us. I haven’t been around enough lately for her to tell me about this development. I go to my room and feel the floor shuddering from the music and the dancing in the living room where Mavis used to be. I stand at my window looking out at the street, watching the steady stream of students and parents come down the hill from campus toward town. The parents try hard to blend in and some of them are just as drunk and keyed up as their kids, but their bodies move differently. I wouldn’t have asked either parent to come and they wouldn’t have offered, and I see now that that would have been painful, not to have family here this weekend. I doubt I’ll stay for the ceremony in December, so I won’t have to deal with it. Not graduating now was a good decision all around.
I stand there for a long time. I recognize a few people under the streetlamps: Mark from my psych class sophomore year, Ryanne and Landry who lived on my hall last year. Then I see Brent and another friend of Sam’s named Cole—and Yash. He walks slightly behind. I haven’t seen him since the semiformal. I don’t know how it went with Lara. I think about opening up the window and yelling out to him but instead I pull back a bit. What was he like with other people, not me and Sam and Ivan? He’s never been here, probably doesn’t know which house I live in. He’s talking and the other two are laughing and I wish I could hear what he’s saying. When he’s alongside the house he looks over at the people on our porch, then directly at my window. I stay still. I don’t know what he can see. He moves on.