And honestly, it’d be easier for me if she did.
It takes every ounce of my self-control to bring my mind back to my lecture, my students, my classroom, but I do it. I finally grasp the cheap plastic mouse, stand up, and smooth down the front of my skirt. I do so because the alternative of letting my life descend into a chaos of bad memories isn’t an option. Not for me.
Because that would mean letting her win.
Justin stays at the top of the classroom, his back against the wall, while I handle the line of students waiting to talk to me after I dismiss class. He doesn’t walk down the aisle until the room is empty.
I must give him a look, because the first thing he says is, “Is it okay that I came?”
He’s worrying his hands by rubbing them together, a nervous habit I haven’t seen before. “I hope I didn’t intrude, or make you feel. . .” he pauses, apparently searching for the right word, and then rejects the sentence altogether. “I hope I don’t seem like a stalker or anything.”
He tries to laugh at his joke, and then gives up.
I work to rearrange my face, then give a little laugh back. I thought I’d recovered from earlier, but seeing Justin up close has me feeling upended. I give a silent “fuck you” to my mother for trying to ruin another good thing in my life, even though I haven’t seen her for almost twenty years.
I’m too slow to react, and Justin goes on, growing more uncomfortable by the second.
“I’m just not doing well today, am I?” he says, chin tilted down as he talks. His bangs fall over his right eye and he absentmindedly brushes them away.
“It’s no big deal,” I finally manage to say. I give him a smile and reach to take his hand, hoisting my bag over my shoulder.
“I saw your text about your lecture today. I felt bad that I couldn’t talk when you needed me.”
That catches my attention.
All auditory hallucinations aside, showing up at my class like I’m too fragile to handle my job isn’t the coolest thing he could have done. And that text earlier. . .
“Really, I appreciate the gesture.” I give his hand a squeeze. “Next time, though. . .” I begin, but students for the following class start to pour into the room, all of them managing to walk and stare at their phones at the same time.
“What is it?” His eyes meet mine, those blue eyes like two pools I could happily drown in. He looks so earnest, like he’d do anything to make me happy—all I have to do is ask.
I decide to let it drop. I’m in no shape to pick a fight, anyway.
“It’s nothing,” I say, and we walk up the carpeted aisle, through the door, and out into the biting cold of December. Snowflakes are falling, and he offers to walk down to the student center and buy a hot chocolate for me at Starbucks. It’s a little ritual of mine after rough lecture days. A warm sweet drink after the bitter lecture topic for today is exactly what I want.
When I’m back at my office, hot chocolate in hand, and Justin headed across campus to his office, I check my phone to see the text Justin sent earlier that day during my lecture.
I’m coming, he’d written.
After the police have confiscated my phone, I’ll go back to the messages between Justin and me, replaying them over and over in my mind, and realize how they might read as something other than love.
3
Justin lives in an apartment on the second floor of an old Victorian building, just a few blocks away from campus. I live within walking distance of the campus, too, but in the opposite direction in a young professional complex, housing other junior faculty at the university. My building looks like an IKEA catalogue manifesting itself in rust-belt Ohio—all straight lines and white edges—but Justin’s apartment is different. It has, for lack of a better word, balls. There are spires and turrets, and one of the apartments on the first floor actually has a stained glass window. There are bats, literally, in the belfry. Well, technically it’s an attic, but still.
Justin showed them to me one night as they headed out for dinner from under the eaves of the roof. You can tell they’re bats, and not birds, he’d said, because they look like chaos in the sky.
The neighborhoods around Youngstown State’s buildings were once all derelict and vacant, with pigweed and thistle growing taller than me, and walking to Justin’s apartment I look for the winter carcasses of gargantuan rogue plants growing out of cracks in sidewalks and the broken asphalt of abandoned driveways. When I would run by them on the five-mile loop I followed religiously as an undergraduate at YSU, I’d have to dodge the swarms of bees that gathered around the weeds on warm days. Now, in the years since I’d left for grad school and had returned to teach here, most of the surrounding blocks have been razed and rebuilt with “luxury” student housing, new or renovated parks, and a few coffeehouses amidst other older, but renovated, apartment buildings. Likewise, my runs around the neighborhood have been replaced with a treadmill and a gym membership.
Walking the few blocks from campus to Justin’s apartment, I see recently planted saplings and the skeletons of larger trees unburdened from their leaves. The harsh lake-effect snow that swoops in from Lake Erie hits just a few times in December, only to ratchet up further come the bleak midwinter of February.
When I look down the Fifth Avenue hill that descends into the vacant spaces of downtown Youngstown, the crumbling roof of the city’s rescue mission shelter is visible, and next to it the red square tenements that makeup Youngstown’s public housing. I count from the right end of the array of crumbling structures until my eyes rest on the fifth building. I haven’t been back to my childhood home in years—not since Annie and I went searching for it during one of her visits after I started my undergraduate program at YSU, only to be met with a shifty, blissed-out twenty-something with track marks in his arm. He was sitting on the stoop claiming he didn’t live there, but was keeping an eye on the house for a friend. We didn’t stay long. Just being near it, seeing the windows where I’d peer in after school, hoping to see my mother making a sandwich, wiping the table, sitting on the couch waiting for me. Hoping to see her doing anything that told me she wanted to be my mother, but the windows were always empty when I arrived home. My mother was eternally in the back room, doing what she did best: taking care of herself.
The prick at the back of my skull comes hot and quick.
I turn around towards the way I came and decide to take the longer route to Justin’s apartment, across the bridge.
When I reach the highway overpass that crosses from campus proper into the surrounding neighborhoods, I stop and look out over the buzzing traffic below. Deep breath. My eyes focus on a crow flying against the slicing December wind and the world reassembles itself. There’s a buzzing against my leg and, when I pull my phone out of my pocket, it’s hot in my hand, Annie insistently pulsing up from the screen. Below her name is her pixie face glowing with a smile I’d snapped before she realized I was taking the picture.
I hesitate a moment before answering, even though I want to hear Annie’s voice.
“Hi there,” I say breathlessly as the icy wind that’s always whipping over the overpass for Route 680 slings itself down my throat.
“Where are you?” Annie asks, her voice slightly echoey on her side. She must have me on speaker.
“What do you mean?” I tease. “Just look me up.”
Annie insisted we both download the Find My Friends app so we could keep track of each other. “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t monitor their best friend’s booty calls,” she’d intoned like a public service announcement. I had to laugh. Not because what she said was funny or even remotely true—I’m not a one-night stand, swinging-from-a-chandelier kind of person—but because, if I didn’t laugh, we’d have to talk about why we’re really keeping an eye on each other. Or rather, why Annie needs to watch out for me.
So now we both keep track of each other.
There’s a sigh of annoyance on Annie’s side.
“Okay,
fine,” I say. “I’m just walking home—can’t you hear the wind howling over the overpass? What about you? Why am I on speaker?”
Annie lives with two other young professionals—Gloria and Paula—in order to make rent in Cleveland as she pursues her dreams (and talent—Annie is very, very talented) of being a painter.
“Don’t worry, no one’s listening in.” Annie takes a sip of something, and I hear her sniffle a bit as the bubbles catch in her nose. She’s pretty much addicted to Coke—the drink, not the drug. “So, how’s that stalker of yours?”
She doesn’t like Justin.
Annie and I met at a group home when we were both fifteen. I actually forget the group home’s name—something like Storm Shelter or Day Spring. Sometimes when Annie and I were bored we’d play child welfare mad libs, where you’d have to pick a weather phenomenon and a synonym for i) home, ii) family, or iii) healing, and combine them together into one perfect moniker. It’s amazing how many times we actually created names that turned out to really exist—afterwards we’d Google them to see if they were real.
Most of them were.
Raining Light. New Moon Transitions. Sunshine Smugglers.
Okay, that last one I made up. But still.
In group homes, you have to share a room with another ward of the state, and I was assigned to share a room with Annie. Tall, whippet-thin, with almost white-blond hair, Annie looks much younger than she actually is.
That was a problem when we were younger, because I could never seem to get her into R-rated movies unless she remembered to bring her ID, but now she can literally still get the kids’ discount when we go to the theater because she passes almost as a pre-teen. Although Annie will often tell me she wishes she had tits like me, to which I remind her that she’d then have to wear a bra every day.
Annie and I had had to share a small barracks of a room at the top of an old Victorian house that had been converted into Storm Shelter/Day Spring/Flower Rebirth. The floor sloped east, and since Annie had already been there for a few weeks by the time I arrived (her previous roommate had turned eighteen and had been unceremoniously kicked out to fend for herself the day after she blew out candles on her cake, the same as Annie and I would have to do eventually), she had the bed that was positioned at the apex of the slanting floorboards.
When I showed up, coming straight from a home where the foster mother turned out to be milking the system and was stripped of her clearances, I just had a book bag with someone else’s initials etched into it and a duffle bag with a broken zipper. Annie offered me a “Hello” when I found myself in the doorway, being shuttled in by another staff member whose face and name I’d forgotten before they’d even finished introducing themselves, and I responded by silently moving across the room and sticking my two cases of belongings under my bed.
“Aren’t you going to unpack?” Annie said, gesturing with her eyes to what looked like a military surplus desk and dresser next to the bed.
I ignored her, lay down on the bed, and closed my eyes. If I’d owned headphones, I would have put them on, but those had somehow got lost two foster homes ago. I’d just learned the word stoic in school for a unit on Greece, and had decided that that was my new approach to life. I sat there, silently wrapped in my own world, carrying the burden of life like a pubescent Atlas.
When I opened my eyes, Annie’s face was maybe two inches from mine, and I could see the inner ring of green surrounding the pupils of her eyes, flanked by an outer ring of lighter blue. Her nose touched the tip of mine as she moved her mouth to say, “So you’re one of those girls, huh?”
In our world, that was the verbal equivalent of lobbing a grenade at my head.
“I think you mean you’re one of those girls,” I snapped back, pushing the tip of my nose into hers before suddenly sitting up and forcing her to move back onto her knees. She’d been crouching next to the bed that supposedly was now mine.
“Oh really,” she said. “Let me guess—you don’t make friends; you don’t talk to people; but you probably write in a journal somewhere about how stoic you are as you navigate the system, right?”
Stoic, I thought. She had to use that word. It seared into my already burdensome chest, underneath the cheap training bra I’d grown out of last year but had yet to have replaced because I was too embarrassed to say anything.
“No, let me guess,” I say back, standing up and pointing a finger at her. “You’re the girl who makes ‘nice’ to everyone, helps clean up after dinner, always says ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and starts calling everyone ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ as soon as you arrive because you think it’ll make them keep you longer.”
I’d find out later that Annie’d been in care since she was five years old, after her parents had died from simultaneous heroin overdoses. With no grandparents living and no “kinship” care options available, mainly because nobody in her family wanted a child tainted by her parents’ addictions, Annie had already been in twelve foster homes by the time she and I met. She’d moved to the group home just a few months before I showed up.
It was not because she was a bad kid and the families couldn’t deal with her issues. Despite all her trying to be a perfect ward of the state, Annie was still a normal kid with normal problems—talking back sometimes, forgetting to do her chores, having some trouble with grades in school. Annie kept getting kicked around from home to home because of the same hard truth we both shared. When you’re in foster care, all your problems—even normal ones—become magnified until people see you as just another ticking time bomb of violence, mental illness, and promiscuity waiting to explode.
After I’d called her a “Miss Perfect,” Annie’s face went blank for a moment, and I thought I had her—I prided myself back then at being able to read people—until she burst out laughing.
“Are you kidding me?” she said. I had no clue what to do with that, so I ended up crossing my arms against my chest like a shield. Or a wall.
“You think I do those things because I think—even for one second—that it’ll help me stay put longer?” Annie’s eyes were wide and she kept moving her arms around as she talked, carving wide arcs in the air. For a second, I thought that maybe she was on coke. The drug, not the drink.
“Look, Morgan—that’s your name, right?”
To which I just nodded my head silently, trying to avoid her spazzing out on me due to the cocaine high I assumed she was under.
“I do those things because everyone—the social workers, the teachers, the police, the parents, the foster parents, the judges—they all think that we turn into animals the longer we’re in the system. And I don’t know about you. . .”
Just then, Annie turned her head to the side while a maniacal grin spread across her face. I tried to back away further, but ended up stumbling across my feet as I missed the slanting floor’s angle where it descended towards my bed. By now I was certain she was on something hard-core and twitch-inducing.
“But I’m no animal,” she shouted, and then promptly began jumping up and down, making monkey noises and scratching her armpits like you’d see a little kid do—until she broke. When Annie started giggling, it was so intense I thought the floorboards would shake loose.
That’s when I finally got the joke—Annie wasn’t high; she was just crazy. In the best possible way.
Her whole weirdo routine cracked me up out of my “new group home” funk, and the two of us stayed like that for a good long while, big bellyfuls of laughter ricocheting around the room.
When we calmed down, Annie reached out her palm to help pull me up from the bed I’d landed on after I tripped over my own feet. Her hand was soft and warm and she was wearing a butterfly ring on her right hand index finger.
Annie paused to consider me for a moment, her face soft and quizzical. We kind of had a moment.
Until she snorted like a pig. A big, noisy intake of breath that scratched at the back of her throat and filled the room. I responded by barking like a dog, with ruffs and
growls.
And then we were both laughing again so hard that we had to hold each other by the shoulders to keep the other from falling over with belly aches.
That’s how Annie and I became friends. That’s how I made the best friend I’ve ever had.
Neither Annie nor I say anything for a moment. The fact that she’s used the same word to describe Justin that he did earlier today, after he just showed up at my classroom, bothers me.
Stalker.
People throw that label around way too carelessly.
Into the silence I hear her snap the top of another can of Coke. The fizz travels over the phone so clearly that I almost feel the bubbles under my nose as she takes a big, gurgling sip.
“That stuff isn’t good for you,” I say. It’s an old argument between Annie and me.
I make artisan flat bread and quinoa salads. Annie eats Snowballs from the Unimart on the corner of her street and drinks twelve packs of Coke. I keep telling her it’s going to catch up on her—not in a jiggly flab sort of way. Neither of us really care about that. For the last several months she’s been looking pale and her eyes are red-rimmed and strained when I see her. I actually ordered a package of vitamins for her online, to which she quickly responded upon receipt by calling me and saying, “Why is my pee yellow, Morgan?” And that was the end of that. Now, whenever I visit her at her big city apartment in the Heights—which isn’t as often as we’d like, but it’s hard to get away with work and all, but still—I notice the vitamin bottles with another layer of dust added to them on the top of her fridge.
It Was Always You Page 2
