Page 81 of Office Hours
She considers this, then walks back, sits beside me again. Our thighs touch, just barely, but the contact is a live wire.
“What do we do now?” she says.
I take her hand, feel the tremor in her fingers. “We can talk. We can read. We can eat more oranges. Or we can do nothing, and you can leave whenever you want.”
She holds on, then lets go, stands up and walks to the bookcase. She scans the titles with more intention this time, then pulls one out and tosses it to me. It’s Rilke,Letters to a Young Poet.
“Read me something,” she says, “but don’t make it a love poem.”
I flip to a page at random, and the words fall out like they’ve been waiting for us:
“We must accept our existence in as wide a sense as can be; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. That is the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”
I look up. She’s smiling, a little, for real this time.
“That’s good,” she says. “Keep going.”
So I read to her, until the light fades and the house feels less like a gallery of right angles and more like a home, if only for the afternoon.
When she gets up to leave, she kisses me on the cheek—light, almost apologetic.
At the door, she says, “I’ll see you in class, Professor.”
I smile. “You don’t have to call me that anymore.”
“Maybe I want to,” she says with a saucy smile.
Then, the gorgeous blonde leaves, footsteps echoing down the walk.
I stand there, holding the book, the words still ringing in my head.
I don’t know what happens next.
But I know I’ll never again try to manufacture control where there should only be hope, goodness, and the kind of honesty that leaves you raw but alive.
And I know that, for once, I’ll grade Simone only on what she puts on the page.
The rest—whatever it is—is up to us both.
19
A CRISIS OF FAITH
SIMONE
My desk lamp hums, a tiny blue sun burning a hole in the center of my forehead. There are five—no, six—empty coffee cups orbiting the base, some gone cold, some growing new life. The surface of the desk is a shame spiral of highlighted notes, torn-out notebook pages, fat textbooks wedged open to the same chapter, their spines cracked and splayed like broken birds. Finals week is a slasher movie, and I’m the first girl to hear a noise in the basement.
I’ve been sitting here for three hours. My right leg is numb, pins and needles marching up my thigh, but I haven’t moved because I keep telling myself that if I stay perfectly still, I’ll be able to finish this review packet before my brain turns to oatmeal. I keep telling myself that if I read the same paragraph from American Literature one more time, it’ll imprint on my retinas and I’ll have something to offer at the altar of tomorrow’s exam.
But all I can think about is him.
This is supposed to be a Simone’s New Leaf Moment. I swore to myself that after everything with Liam—after the apology,the confession, the psychoanalysis and the weirdly tender recitations of Rilke—I would focus. I would get my shit together, ace my finals, and decide what kind of person I wanted to be, independent of anybody’s expectations. I would not become a cliche: the girl who self-immolates over a man. I would not, I repeat, not lose my scholarship or my self-respect or my mind.
But then there’s this: the lamp casting a shadow so stark it splits my face in half, the words on the page wriggling away from me, my phone blinking from its exiled spot on the windowsill, begging me to pick it up and spiral. There is nothing in this room that doesn’t remind me of Liam. Not the battered paperback ofThe Scarlet Letter(his favorite), not the borrowed sweatshirt draped over my chair like a dead thing, not even the scratchy desk chair that he once said made my ass look “ripe and swollen.” Where does he even get this stuff? The comment made me giggle and then soon, we were tearing at each other’s clothes.
I shift, stretch my neck until it cracks. I can hear Andie somewhere in the hall, her voice rising and falling with someone on speaker. Her laughter sounds close, then far, as if the whole building is shrinking and expanding around me.
The page in front of me is splattered with yellow highlighter. The topic is Hawthorne, and the note I’ve scrawled in the margin reads, in all caps: “PURITANISM = SHAME AS SOCIAL CONTROL.” Next to that, a little doodle of a woman in a whale-bone bodice, her mouth twisted in a scream. Liam once made me do a close reading of that novel and told me I had a mind “as sharp as a guillotine.” He said it in bed, with his hand curled around the back of my neck, and I wanted so badly to believe it was true.
