Page 10 of That's Not a Thing

I felt my eyes stinging as she talked. I knew she was right. She had been my best friend since second grade, when she’d shown up at Hillside Elementary wearing the same sneakers as me and then announced the address of her new house, which was three doors down from my own. She knew my mom almost as well as I did, and I was pretty certain that my mother would wholeheartedly agree with what Daphne had just said. More than anything, my mom wanted to see me content, to know that I would end up settled, with or without her. I wiped at my eyes before any tears spilled out, wondering how I could trust my emotions when I was in a constant state of fear, carrying perpetual preemptive grief.

“Stop second-guessing yourself,” Daphne ordered as she rose from the bed. She tossed the remainder of her food into the trash bin and walked to my closet. “And let’s figure out what you’re going to wear.” Standing with her back to me, she flipped through the hangers. “Now, what here says ‘soup kitchen–to-library date’? We may have to layer.” She pulled out a teal lace-up peasant sweater that I loved, but then shook her head and returned it to its spot. “Too complicated with the laces. We need something that he can peel right off you.”

“Stop making me out to be such a tramp.” I said, laughing. “If I like the guy, aren’t I supposed to make him wait for it?” That was the general philosophy I followed, aRulesgirl at heart and all, but I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t like the intention I saw in his eyes when he scoped me out earlier, that I didn’t want him to turn his thoughts into action. I licked my lips, a little ashamed at myself for how quickly I was able to push away the thoughts about my mother.

For tonight, at least, I was going to try to be carefree. I climbed out from under my covers and joined Daphne at the closet so I could help find the right outfit to bring Wesley to his knees.

Chapter Five

January 2008

The January night air was unforgiving, biting at my face as I hoofed it across campus, nearly ten minutes late to meet Wesley at the library. I had made the mistake of calling my father on my way back from Community Kitchen, and we’d gotten into another intense debate about the ugliness of my parents’ situation. Mainly, we were arguing about my dad’s insistence on spearheading my mom’s cancer care, despite their impending divorce.

A mere six days before my mom discovered she had cancer, my parents had announced to Noble and me that they were planning to split up. To say that I’d been blindsided would be a colossal understatement. I’d always thought we had the perfect life—the Altmans of Livingston, with our model family tucked safely away in a big suburban colonial.

My brother, Noble, hadn’t been as devastated by the news, probably because he was older and already married, already settled into a new life down in Atlanta. What I realized from my parents’ decision was that all those years of shared weeknight dinners, family treks to the Jersey shore, and boisterous Jewish holiday celebrations, they had all been a mirage, a farce that my parents had perpetrated on me, trying to maintain the lie until I left for college. They had apparently been waiting all these years for me to vacate the premises so they could get on with some other, more desirable version of their lives.

I barely had time for a few savage outbursts about the injustice of it all before my mother’s routine mammogram showed that we had a more dire problem. I may have been angry at my mom about the divorce, all the years of fake family bliss, but I certainly didn’t want her todie.Even if everything else had been pretend, the connection I had to my mother was real.

My father insisted on sticking around for the duration of the illness, and he immediately began directing my mom’s treatment. I couldn’t imagine what that was like for her, letting him spoon-feed her chicken broth or carry her back to bed after she vomited, knowing all the while that their relationship was already over. I offered to defer college so I could take care of her, but when I did, my dad went ballistic. He spewed all this bullshit about how I was supposed to live my life, become independent of the two of them. Maybe that was true, but really, all I could think about during my first semester was whether I was missing the last days I might ever spend with my mother.

The blowout with my father tonight started when I told him I wanted to take Mom to her procedure on Friday. He kept saying I should focus on my studies, continue doing my work, and it sent me into a rage. I had been earning straight A’s since middle school. I’d graduated second in my class from an enormous high school in Jersey, and I had yet to meet a class I couldn’t master. That is not to say I was a genius, but I was a hard-as-shit worker. For my father to try to ban me from my mother’s care on the theory that it might negatively impact my grades was bull-crap, and we both knew it. So either it was as simple as it sounded, and my father actually just did not want me around, or my mother’s condition was even worse than they were letting on and he was trying to keep me in the dark. I finally decided I would just show up on Friday, whether he wanted me there or not.

As I reached Butler, I saw groups of students congregating near the doors, huddled together beneath the building’s stately, cream-colored columns. I adjusted my backpack on my shoulder and scanned the small clusters of undergrads until I finally spotted Wesley. He was surrounded by several athletic-looking guys I didn’t recognize, all of whom seemed to be talking at the same time, creating a boisterous but opaque kind of chatter. Wesley saw me approaching and separated himself from the others, handing off a crumpled paper bag to someone in the bunch as he walked away.

“Thanks, Latner!” one of the guys called after him. The others in the group all started grabbing for whatever was in the bag, like a pack of wolves competing in the dark. Wesley just walked on, approaching me as if I was the only person standing outside the library on that frigid night.

“Hey.” He slowed his pace as reached me. “Ready to let your inner nerd out?” I could barely see his face with the golden light of the library coming from behind him in the dark night, but I could hear the playful smirk in his voice.

“I hate to ruin your image of me, Sailor, but my nerd is totally out all the time. Nerd pride.” I pounded on my chest twice with my fist. I figured Wesley ought to know what kind of lady he was dealing with here. So many times throughout my years of school, my mother had reminded me not to rush, not to give my work “a lick and a promise.” Eventually, I’d internalized the message and gone all-out nerd on my own.

“Well, then we better not waste another second. Come on.” He started walking into the library, and I followed. “You good to set up on the fourth floor, somewhere food’s allowed?” He looked back at me. “I brought goodies.” He held up another paper bag, like the one he’d handed off to his friends, and I caught a whiff of something criminally sweet.

As we swiped our IDs to enter the library, I wondered how I was going to focus on my schoolwork with this dazzling representative of the male species sharing a table with me. I had tried to make the responsible choice by suggesting a library date, but I would probably have to redo any assignment I attempted to complete while we were together. Still, I was thinking the extra study time would be worth it if it meant I got to drink in Wesley’s broad shoulders and sculpted profile for a while, not to mention whatever sweet treats he was toting.

We chose a nearly empty room on the fourth floor. There were two girls quietly discussing some sort of 3-D architectural model at the table closest to the entrance, so we maneuvered to the back of the room, and I started unloading my textbooks. No reason not to at least pretend I would be getting work done. Wesley picked up the first book I laid on the table and barked out a laugh.

“Science and Technology Studies? For real? I wouldn’t have pegged you as the type.”

I bristled at his words, thinking perhaps he hadn’t shown his true colors during our adventure the night before, that maybe he was actually just another sexist schmuck. As a woman interested in the sciences, I encountered more assholes than I would have expected, so my guard was always up.

“Why, because I’m blond?” I snipped. “Or too cute to have a brain?”

“None of the above,” he answered, as I rooted for him to disabuse me of my negative suspicion. “First of all”—he grinned as he pulled out a chair and dropped into the seat—“you’re a lot more than cute.” Matching dimples appeared like parentheses on his cheeks, and I wondered why I hadn’t focused on their hypnotic effect sooner. “And second of all, no, it’s just that you were so adamant last night about your inability to bake, and seeing as how baking is just simple science, I guess I assumed you weren’t a science person.”

“Baking isnotsimple,” I retorted, relieved that he hadn’t been thinking girls were too dim-witted for science. I opened my laptop and plugged the cord into the outlet on the table.

“Sure it is.” He smiled again as he pulled a cardboard container out of the paper bag he’d brought. The scent of sugar and chocolate filled my airways, pulling me toward whatever was inside that mystery box. “See, to make these churros,” he began as he opened the box, “I just engineered a series of calculated chemical reactions between water, sugar, some flour, and oil.” He shrugged and lifted one of the pastries out of the container. As he passed it to me, bits of granulated sugar fell like confetti onto the table between us.

Faithless as I was that scientists should automatically be capable bakers, I accepted the churro, which I was surprised to feel was still warm. Stickiness seeped onto my fingers as I studied the pastry’s perfectly symmetrical piping lines. “I’m sorry, you just expertly whipped up some churros in your spare time? I call bullshit. This is a far cry from baking simple cookies.” I took a bite and was delighted to discover that the churro was filled with a rich hazelnut chocolate, which I was sure now lingered in an unflattering display on my lips.

Wesley reached back into the bag and handed me a napkin. “No, I work at a Spanish restaurant on the Upper West Side. Not usually on Wednesdays, but they needed fill-in help for an hour tonight. Thought you might like to sample the merchandise.”

“So, you’re saying that in addition to the cookie place and the construction stuff, you also work at a restaurant? How many jobs do you have? Are you even really a college student?”

“Only the jobs you listed. Except you forgot the RA gig. I’m very efficient with my time.” He shrugged. “Also, I need the hours in commercial kitchens to get into CIA next year.”

“CIA? Like, international spies CIA?” I was starting to think this guy was really full of it, but that didn’t stop me from taking another bite of the sugary churro.