by Mary Adkins
“So? Who cares if you’re twenty-three?”
“Twenty-three is old to still be in college.”
Stayja let out a loud laugh. “I’m twenty-three and have two years left to go for my associate’s in nursing, so you get no sympathy here.”
Suddenly sheepish, he said, “Well, I’m not saying it’s something that bothers me. I’m saying it makes my dad gleeful and smug.” He paused and then said, “You’re gonna be a nurse?”
“If I can ever finish school,” said Stayja. “I’m two years in, but I keep having to drop classes. . . . It’s a long story.”
He raised his eyebrows and waited.
She took a breath. “I’ve been working at Carter since I graduated high school, first at the QuikMart, then at the coffee shop. Three years ago I decided to go into nursing and started saving—I have seventy-six credits to get through at WCC—um, that’s Wake Community College. Those are $490—but every time I manage to save up a chunk, something goes wrong. The roof on the carport caved in. Then one time I had to go to the ER when a cyst on my ovary burst and I thought it was my appendix. There was nothing to be done but wait for it to heal itself, but it still cost me $1,700. So I had to drop anatomy three weeks into the semester and never got the tuition back.”
Donna had encouraged her to just not pay the bill, but Donna didn’t mind creditors calling all the time. Stayja would rather pay a debt every time than have to live with the barrage of calls about it that left her feeling like a failure, full of shame.
“So I’ll take the three classes I need in the spring to knock out the two classes I need in the summer, which will keep me on track to graduate two years from now.”
When she was done, he said, “And I thought I had it rough.”
“It’s okay,” she said, suddenly self-conscious. “I wasn’t telling you to get sympathy.”
“Hey,” he said, bemused. “Smile for me.”
Caught off guard, she offered a closed-lip smile.
“No, like this.” He demonstrated.
Shyly she parted her lips.
“Your teeth are cute,” he said.
“Shut up,” she said. “I get it. They’re crooked. Asshole.”
“I’m serious. I’m not making fun. I like them.”
She smiled. A real one.
CHETSON “CHET” BLUM, Esquire, as he was called on the billboard, looked to be around forty-five years old. The hair on his crown was slicked back, the sides cut short. He hardly looked at Nicole and Stayja before turning to his computer screen and typing something on his keyboard.
“Last name,” he said.
“Rankin—” Nicole answered.
“Spelling,” he interrupted.
“What?” Nicole asked.
“Spell it,” he said. Stayja couldn’t see the screen, but she could tell something new had flashed onto it. Chet Blum, DUI attorney, studied it for a moment.
“Twelve hundred.”
“What?” Nicole said.
“Up-front as a retainer. I’ll take it from there.”
Stayja asked if that meant the whole bill was twelve hundred or if that was only the first part.
“Should be it, minus costs and fees,” he said distractedly.
“How much are those?” Stayja asked.
“Depends. If I can get it dismissed before a hearing and we just have one filing fee, thirty bucks.”
“I may not have to go to court?” Nicole asked hopefully.
“Depends. Maybe not,” said Chet.
“Do we need to pay it now?” Stayja asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Chet, checking his email. “Money order or debit only. Or cash, of course.”
Stayja and Nicole looked at each other.
“We don’t have the cash right now,” Nicole said in her most girlish voice. “Would you be willing to do us a big one and let us owe you? I can’t even tell you how grateful I’d be.”
Her tone caught his attention. For the first time since they walked in, Chet Blum looked hard at Nicole, who was now leaning against his desk, her hips pressing into it.
“No,” said Chet after a long pause. “Cash or debit only.” He turned back to his monitor.
“We’ll be back soon,” Stayja said. “Thanks.”
As they walked back to the car, Nicole fumbled in her purse and pulled out a hot pink Post-it pad speckled with crumbs and fuzz.
“Pen?” she said.
Stayja reached into her own bag and pulled out a green highlighter. “Just this,” she said, then watched as her cousin wrote Nicole, followed by her number and a heart. She approached a BMW parked in the reserved spot closest to the entrance and slid it under the front-door handle.
“Nicole! What the . . . ?”
“Don’t worry, it’s his! Check the plate,” said Nicole. The car’s front license plate read: CB ESQ.
“No,” Stayja said. She marched over to the door and yanked the Post-it from where Nicole had lodged it beneath the handle. She balled it up and began walking toward their car. “You cannot be serious.”
“Stayja! What the fuck?” Nicole followed her cousin across the parking lot to the Corolla, which was now hidden by a monster truck that had arrived while they were inside. “He totally wants me, and this way we don’t have to pay him, because he’s not allowed to sleep with his clients. So after we sleep together, I’ll just say that I’m going to report him unless he gives back the twelve hundred dollars. Plus fees.”
Stayja spun around. LA was waiting for them in the car, and she didn’t want to continue this conversation in front of him.
“You’re not his client yet, Nicole. Are you retarded?”
Nicole crossed her arms. “No. I’m not. But thanks for being so mean. And you’re not allowed to use that word anymore.”
“I’m the one who told you that!”
“I know! So you can’t use it, especially!”
Stayja took a deep breath. “What you are describing, I believe, is blackmail. Or extortion or something. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”
“I don’t know why you feel so free to judge me,” said Nicole, trying to dump a cigarette into her palm and accidentally releasing four. Three rolled across the pavement, one hitting Stayja’s toe. She picked it up and gestured to her cousin for a light. Nicole lit her own, then handed back the lighter. “You’re the one who thinks you’re going to date some Carter guy.”
“What are you talking about?” It had been three days since Stayja and the blond guy, whose name she hadn’t gotten, had spent almost an hour on the curb talking. (Thank God this hadn’t gotten back to Frank, at least not yet.)
LA had gotten out of the car and was listening. “Who?” he said.
“No one,” Stayja said.
“Some guy Stayja met whom she almost got fired for so they could canoodle in the parking lot.”
“He goes to Carter?”
“This has nothing to do with you, LA,” Stayja said.
“Is he Jewish?” LA asked.
“What on earth?” Stayja said.
“You can’t say that word,” Nicole said.
“You can say the word Jewish, Nicole!” Stayja said.
“You really want to be with some Carter loser? Who can’t even change a fucking tire?”
Stayja shushed him.
“Stop shushing me. It’s not that Muslim guy, is it?”
The last time LA had professed his love—a biannual event—had been in the spring, while she was at work at the coffee shop. Stayja had made a mistake. Thinking that if she gave LA a concrete foe, he would finally drop his bid for her love, she’d told him the name of her crush-from-afar: Eric Gourdazi.
Eric was olive-skinned and lanky. He parted his thick, straight black hair on the side and wore khaki pants, even to class, a habit Stayja knew was dorky even by Carter standards but that she found inexplicably endearing. He seemed, to her, ideal: sophisticated, nerdy, and respectful. He ordered a black coffee every time he came in and always smiled and th
anked her while looking her in the eye, something few students bothered to do. He’d never asked her name, but she knew his from his student ID. Over the summer, she’d looked forward to seeing him once school was in session, but since her encounter with the blond guy three days earlier, she hadn’t thought about Eric once.
She’d realized her error immediately when LA, raising his voice, had said, “Since when do you like ethnic types?”
“Stop it,” she’d mouthed and, thinking quickly, poured milk into a canister to steam, desperate to drown him out.
“I hate Jews,” said LA now. “Everyone at that school is Jewish.”
“You don’t even know any Jews, LA,” said Stayja, walking toward the car. “Can we just go?”
“Hell yeah, I do. Guy who fucked over my dad was a Jew.” Stayja struggled for a moment to remember what he was referencing—his father had worked at a tobacco plant outside town until it closed down a few years earlier. Now he worked at Lowe’s in the gardening department. “Remember? Some big-wig Jew from Charlotte. Moved the plant overseas and fucked everybody over. Greedy son of a bitch.”
“That didn’t happen because the guy is Jewish,” Stayja said. “Jesus.”
“Oh, there’s one, Nicole!” LA said. “Twins: Jesus and Jewish.”
Nicole was staring at Stayja. “You know he is never going to date you,” she said.
“Did I say I wanted to date him?” Stayja asked. “Did I say that? Because I don’t think I said that.”
Nicole’s face softened, almost as if she pitied Stayja.
“You don’t have to,” she said and put out her cigarette even though she’d only smoked a third of it. “Jesus and Jewish isn’t bad, LA. You’re in second place now.”
7
Annie
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
I have a date with Tyler Brand. The sentence played over and over in my mind as I struggled to focus on the piece of music before me, a Halloween medley we would be performing over Parents’ Weekend in October. I have a date with Tyler Brand.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t a date-date, but it wasn’t not one either. He’d invited me to PiKa’s first party of the year, the Blue Party—everyone was to wear blue—featuring a popular local band called Something McGee. I’d never heard of Something McGee, and when Tyler texted me that they’d be performing, I hurriedly looked them up on YouTube so I wouldn’t be lying when I texted back cheering hands.
Saturday arrived, forecast to be the city’s hottest September 2 in a half century. Becoming increasingly anxious with each hour, I ate a mini lemon poppy muffin and churned out a four-page paper for Poli Sci on the impact of voter turnout on elections. Then I went to the gym, where I forced myself to stay on the elliptical until I’d finished my Abnormal Psych reading.
Rehearsal was from noon to three. As the trumpets sounded the end of “Monster Mash,” my reed snapped against my tooth. I fumbled for my spare, wondering if I had time for a mani-pedi before the evening.
“All right, ‘October Sky,’ everyone. ‘October Sky’ from the top.” Juan-Pablo lifted his baton.
I moistened the new reed with my tongue. For the first time since rehearsal began, I found myself present in the room, eager not to miss anything. In the week since I’d first heard the theme to October Sky, I’d fallen in love with it. I’d been in orchestras for four years, played hundreds of pieces in dozens of styles, and few pieces of music had moved me as much as this song.
Like Bach’s prelude to Suite no. 1 in G Major for cello, which I first heard as a nine-year-old at my cousin’s wedding. At nine I hadn’t yet experienced any real trauma—three more years would pass before the fire, and my acquaintance with death was limited to my grandma’s, the saddest part of which had been witnessing my mother’s tears. But that prelude on cello summoned in me, out of nowhere, a consuming grief, a sense of melancholy with no origin. After the ceremony I’d approached the organist and asked for the name of the piece. How was it that music could stir such emotion?
It turned out that the prelude moved a lot of people. I’d come to hear it at every wedding and funeral I attended over the next decade, alongside Pachelbel’s Canon and Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Gradually, I stopped hearing it in the same way. Rather than a symbol of the power of music to transport, it became for me a symbol of how a magical work of art can be corrupted by overuse.
Still, that first experience of the prelude, that taste, was the bite that turned me into a musician. From then on, I lived in search of music that trembled in the pit of my being, encountering it only occasionally, relishing it when I did—“Nessun dorma,” some of Max Richter’s compositions, the theme to October Sky.
As I followed along, measure by measure, my reed not quite wet enough, the feeling the piece evoked was unexpected: hope. I felt an opening in my rib cage, a prying.
Energized from practice and tingly with anticipation, I arrived at Beauty Snail around 3:20 to discover there was a forty-five-minute wait. The only salon within walking distance of campus, the Snail was perpetually packed, particularly on weekends. I scribbled my name and “mani-pedi,” and then, because the day had turned out not to be unbearably hot, only beautiful, I decided to go for a stroll and give my mom a call. She’d been fighting bronchitis the last time we’d spoken three days earlier.
“Yo.” My younger brother, Cory, picked up when I dialed her cell. I was surprised to hear his voice.
“Hey! You don’t have football today?” I took my sunglasses out of my bag and put them on, taking long strides in the sun. If I walked briskly, I could make a full loop around South Campus before they reached my name at Beauty Snail.
“Mom made me quit,” he grumbled. “She saw some documentary about how it causes brain damage.”
“Oh, no,” I said, trying to disguise my satisfaction. I wasn’t about to tell Cory that I’d been the one to recommend the documentary to our mother. “How do you feel about that?”
“Fine.” It made little sense that he actually did sound fine with it until he said, “She said she’d buy me an Xbox One.”
“She bribed you to quit football with video games?”
“Pretty much.”
I could hear my mother in the background ordering him to tell me something but couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“What’re you guys doing?” I asked.
“She’s driving. We’re going to Target. I will! I am right now! She says to ask you if you’re wearing your new shorts.”
“Tell her I am.”
“Mom, does it matter? Which ones?”
“The jean ones. Is she feeling better?” The track team sped by in matching Carter shirts.
“She says she is. She says have you worn the skirt?”
“Let me talk to her!” I could hear my mom pleading.
“No!” Cory snapped. Then to me he said, “Since I’m not allowed to play football, she’s not allowed to talk or text while she drives.” Every now and then, my brother exhibited exceptional maturity. “Mom, the light! Dammit!” he cried.
“Don’t curse!” she yelled.
Then she was mumbling something, and Cory said, “Mom says to ask if you’re going to be careful on your date tonight.”
Not only was it a date in my head, but I’d also told my mother it was one. Parents needed terms like that.
“Tell her I’ll try as hard as I can not to be careful.”
“She says she saw a 20/20 show about alcohol poisoning on college campuses that you should watch. Also remember you have to work tomorrow.”
My mother treated my afternoon Sunday shift at the campus bookstore as sacrosanct and as if I were always on the verge of being fired. She’d text me during it How is work going?, to check that I was there—as if I’d just not show up for work.
“Bye, Cory,” I said, aware of my mother still talking in the background.
“Later,” he said.
Looking back, I can’t help but see us as a family that sought to save one another from ourse
lves. We aspired to be safer than we were.
I’D DECIDED TO wear a blue tube top and my turquoise leather skirt. Worried about bloat, I served myself a bowl of miso soup in the dining hall and took a hundred-calorie pack of Cheez-Its from the snack stash in my dorm kitchen before heading over to PiKa.
The dorm that housed PiKa, like my own dorm, was on the main quad but on the opposite side of the yard. There were no concrete paths connecting our buildings, so to cross the grass in heels, I had to teeter on the balls of my feet, lest I arrive in mud-coated stilettos. By the time I reached his building, my shoes were unsoiled but my calves burned. I followed a group of girls through the door, which was propped open with concrete bricks. Since he hadn’t told me the exact location of his room, I set about finding it. The girls before me were giddy and slumped, and I inferred that they must be first-years given how nervous they seemed. Like an amoeba, all flat-ironed and high-heeled and clean-shaven, we moved down the first-floor hall, peeking into rooms in search of our respective hosts. After they found theirs amid a whirl of squeals, I was alone in the hallway. It was dark, lit only by the squares of light from bedroom doors left ajar. Inside them, groups of people sat and stood under sloppily hung blue streamers, sipping cans of beer. None of them was Tyler. Finally, behind the second-to-last door at the hall’s distant end, I spotted him seated on a brown leather sofa behind a coffee table, where playing cards were scattered. Three other guys, who looked like PiKa members, along with a rail-thin girl in a gold tank and jeans, sat in chairs facing the couch.
“Annie,” he said, standing. “This is Blake. Andrew. Sam. And Ellen.”
“Hi,” I said to their flurry of greetings as Tyler sat back down on the sofa, slightly farther to the right, which I interpreted as an invitation to sit next to him. I slid past Blake and lowered myself onto the couch, careful to keep my knees together in my skirt, which suddenly felt shorter and tighter than it had in my room. I was grateful for the dim light, conscious of my legs.
“Have you played Kings before?” Tyler asked, cracking open a PBR and placing it in front of me.
Ellen leaned forward. “Do you want the punch? It’s Everclear and Crystal Light.” She smiled. I smiled back.
