Time of Our Lives

by Emily Wibberley

  After storming out of their room and into mine, I grab my suitcase from the bed and head for the stairs. I carry the box in my other hand. There’s no way I’m trusting my family with it while I’m gone. With incredible fortune, I dodge Tía as I book it to the front door and into the evening cold.

  I don’t like the cold. I don’t like the memories that come with watching those little billows of breath in the air. Or the perpetual gray of the sky, or the way winter turns everyone’s yards brown. Fall is my favorite, not only because of school starting, but for the way the tree in front of our porch bursts into flame. The leaves have long fallen now, and only dried husks remain in the hedge from the door to the driveway.

  Dad, in his Yankees sweatshirt, is standing next to the car, opening the passenger door. He’s holding—my college binder. I’m comforted by the very sight of the turquoise plastic and the perfectly hole-punched pages between the covers. Pages containing the details of the coming week, the seven days I’ll spend driving to the University of Virginia, with stops in Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York, and D.C. on the way. I could have easily spent two weeks on this trip if it weren’t for the cost of hotels and needing to be home in time for Matt’s mom Shanna’s birthday. I did my best to maximize schools and cities in the time we have.

  Hearing me close the front door, Dad glances up, and his eyes find mine. He holds up the binder. “The girls were eyeing it. I figured it would be safer if I—” No doubt noticing my watering eyes, he places the binder in the back seat and closes the car door. “Go,” he says gently, knowing exactly what I need right now. “Before Tía comes out and finds you,” he adds with a wink.

  I place the box on the roof of the car, then walk into his arms. The fabric of his sweatshirt is soft, and he smells like the mountain-scented deodorant Mom once said she liked and he’s worn ever since. I exhale into his chest. “Sometimes I feel like there isn’t enough room for me in that house, you know?”

  He holds me closer. “For this mind”—he traces his thumb along my forehead—“there isn’t room enough in the whole world.”

  I hug back, hard. I don’t know what I’d do if it weren’t for him.

  Hearing footsteps, I pull away and find Matt coming up the driveway. His house is ten minutes from mine, and he walks over here often for movie nights and family dinners. I feel the familiar flutter in my heart I get whenever I’m with him. He’s tall, with broad shoulders from baseball, sandy hair, and a chin Michelangelo would’ve given his left hand to carve. His smile is wide enough to fit the universe.

  He’s carrying a duffel bag, and he waves to me and my dad. “I was serious about you getting out of here,” Dad says. “Sofi’s on the warpath. Don’t worry, I’ll cover for you.” He winks again and walks forward to meet Matt. “Don’t do any stupid shit on this trip, got it?” he says, shaking my boyfriend’s hand.

  Matt swallows. “Of course, sir.”

  Dad claps him on the shoulder. My dad and Matt have a relationship of their own born of baseball and Die Hard movies, even if Dad likes to pull his “intimidating father” act every now and again. “Tell Mom bye for me,” I say, opening the rear door while the guys load the luggage into the trunk.

  Instantly, I’m hit with an unmistakable smell, the smell of every Christmas since we moved to Springfield. Memories of Abuela blindside me until I push them away. I notice a foil-covered platter on the back seat.

  “Tía,” I groan.

  I stow the box on the floor behind the driver’s seat and close the door, waving to my dad as I get into the front. Matt gets in the passenger seat, and we pull out of the driveway.

  “Whoa,” Matt says, eager curiosity crossing his perfect features. “What’s that smell?”

  I nod to the back seat. “Tía’s stubbornness. Also known as tamales.”

  Matt reaches between our seats and pulls out the platter. He opens the glove compartment where—of course—he finds a plastic fork. I roll my eyes. Tía’s thought of everything. Matt takes a bite of tamale and groans in ecstasy. “Oh my god,” he moans through a mouthful, “I love your family. When can I marry into them again?” he asks casually, giving me a sideways look.

  I feel my eyes widen. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  Matt shrugs. “Seventy percent,” he says.

  I shake my head, silently scolding. Yet I can’t help stealing a glance in his direction. He’s wearing his Springfield High baseball T-shirt. I remember how, when they went to the state playoffs, the whole team threw a huge house party. But even though he was co-captain, Matt told me he wanted to celebrate by going to get ice cream with me.

  The best thing about Matt isn’t his smile or his shoulders (a close second). It’s the way our memories make me feel. They make me feel like me.

  I nod at the plate of tamales. “I’m relying on you to finish them before we get to Boston.”

  Matt raises his fork like a conquering hero on a hilltop. “Challenge accepted.” I feel his eyes on me from the passenger seat. “Hey, it’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” he continues, his voice gentler. “This is really happening. We’re really going.”

  I fix my eyes on the road, on the future, on places where I won’t be constrained by the expectations of my family. Where I’ll have the distance to discover who I want to be.

  “It is.”

  Fitz

  ON THE MBTA bus to Boston University, I text Mom.

  Tell me where you and Dad met?

  I get the reply I was expecting.

  Fitzgerald . . .

  I wait. A couple of moments later, the typing bubble appears, and then her reply.

  We were both doing our postdocs. He was studying French literature, and I was focusing on American. I was coming up the steps of the university’s administration building, carrying a cup of coffee, and he was coming down the steps. I ran right into him, dumping the entire contents of my coffee down the front of his shirt. He opened his mouth to yell and instead asked me to dinner.

  It was an epic move on Dad’s part, honestly. He could give classes in Advanced Getting-Spilled-On. I’ve heard the story before, but that wasn’t the point. I send her a “thanks” and put my headphones in. With the Shins playing, I watch out the window. Boston’s a nice city, even though I have no intention of coming here for college. People bustle on every corner. In the gaps between streets of coffee shops and Chinese restaurants, I catch glimpses of the Charles River, a frozen sheet spanned by stone bridges. Every sidewalk is coated in exhaust, a newspaper bin on each corner.

  I thought I understood why Lewis decided to go to Boston, even though he never talked about college with me. He’s interested in finance, and Boston is a hub for consulting and banking, and yada yada yada. Once Lewis had started at BU, I was convinced he chose Boston because he remembered the days Dad would bring us into the city for Italian food and cannoli in the North End.

  Until Lewis’s calls home became less and less frequent. Until Dad asked one Christmas if Lewis ever went to Mike’s for cannoli, and Lewis didn’t remember the place, or pretended not to. Dad’s pretty hard to offend, but I caught the hurt in his eyes then. I decided I must have been wrong—it was dumb to guess Lewis chose a college for family.

  I get out when I reach my stop, then walk the blocks between Boston University buildings toward the towers on the riverbank. Lewis lives in a building called StuVi2. While I walk, I watch people on the street, students spilling out of university dorms and lecture halls. I wonder what they’re doing, what they’re passionate about. What they worry about. I watch a group of guys in coats and ties come out of a brick building and cross the street toward an Indian restaurant. I wonder if one of them will collide with a fellow postdoc holding a cup of coffee.

  When I reach the curb in front of what my phone tells me is StuVi2, I double-check the directions. This couldn’t possibly be right. The building on the riverbank w
ould fit right into downtown Boston or New York or Chicago. It’s a modern high-rise, twenty floors or more—a conservative estimate. Walls of brick and window soar into the night sky. It’s nothing like the college dorms I’ve found while halfheartedly paging through pamphlets Mom leaves on my desk. It’s definitely a far cry from my two-story home in New Hampshire.

  I walk in with a group of students. In the lobby I pause, watching kids in BU sweatshirts studying in the chairs and couches in the common area. For a moment, I imagine myself in one of those chairs, or in one of the groups laughing by the elevators, before the thought is gone.

  I ride the elevator to the twenty-third floor, confirming I wasn’t far off in my estimate. The doors ping open onto a carpeted and well-lit hallway. I’ve known that Dad pays for Lewis’s dorm and a good portion of his tuition—I didn’t know he’d sprung for this. I’ve hardly ever stayed in hotels this nice, not that I’m some experienced traveler. With mom’s single-parent salary from the university, we’ve only gone out of town once or twice in the past few years. In Maine, I liked the scenery but discovered I couldn’t keep lobster down. In New York, Lewis was busted for trying to push a penny over the edge of the Empire State Building. I don’t love family trips.

  I step into the hall, my fingers reflexively finding my phone in my pocket. It’s instinct to worry how Mom’s doing, even though I only texted her twenty minutes ago. It’d be different if she weren’t on her own in the house, if she and my dad hadn’t divorced. But he decided to pack up for Canada when Lewis was in high school, before Mom took the test. The test that changed our lives forever.

  Forcing my nerves to calm, I knock on the door of room 2303. I’m guessing Lewis is back now. It ended up taking three hours to get from Tilton to Boston and onto the MBTA bus, not counting the delay of returning home after my original departure. I don’t think college exams extend this late into the evening, though I guess I’d have no idea if they did.

  The door opens. Instead of Lewis or one of his roommates, it’s a girl.

  Wearing nothing but an oversized T-shirt.

  I blink. I know I’m blushing, and for a moment I wonder if I went to the wrong room. Or if I dozed off before my bus careened into the river, and heaven is a Boston University dorm populated with hot girls.

  “You’re not Becky,” she says, betraying no consciousness of the series of complex emotions sending my blood roaring in my ears. “You didn’t happen to see a short blonde girl with a physics book, did you? I am seriously screwed for the exam if—” She stops, something like recognition entering her eyes. “Fitz?”

  None of the unique words in my vocabulary is helping me form a coherent sentence. Now I feel like the girl definitely notices, because her lips begin to curve upward. Her criminally pouty lips. I might be socially inept, but I’m not blind. And I am a teenage boy. I force my eyes not to glance down to her smooth brown thighs peeking out from under the shirt’s hem.

  Instead, I focus on her face and realize she looks familiar. I know her from Lewis’s Instagram. It’s the purple-stone nose piercing that helps me make the connection. Hers is the face in the selfie from Lewis’s summer trip to Miami and in the photo from a couple months ago Lewis captioned, “Regatta.”

  “Wait,” I hear myself say before I’ve thought it through, “you’re Lewis’s ex.” For a horrible moment, I wonder if she’s gotten with one of his roommates in the weeks since Lewis called home and mentioned the breakup.

  The girl only laughs, throwing her long black hair behind her back. It’s as stupidly perfect a laugh as everything about her. She’s objectively gorgeous, with her black nail polish, her wrist tattoo, the stone in her piercing glittering in the light.

  “Did Lewis tell you we broke up?” she asks. She speaks with the hint of an Indian accent, unlike Lewis, who was adopted from Bengaluru before he could talk. When he got to college, he got involved in Indian and South Asian clubs and organizations, or so I gathered from his Facebook. I think he mentioned Prisha running one of them.

  I open my mouth, unsure what to say.

  “To be fair, we did break up,” I hear my brother’s voice from inside. The girl opens the door wider, revealing Lewis walking into the room. He’s wearing only jeans and pulling a T-shirt over his head. I flush when I realize what I obviously just interrupted, feeling very much like the younger brother.

  The girl walks into the room Lewis just came out of and returns with a pair of leggings. I try not to watch her pull them up. “Then we un-broke up,” she says. “I know it’s only for a couple more months, but you could have told your brother we’re still together, Lewis.” She playfully swats him.

  “Fine.” Lewis sighs. “Fitz, this is Prisha, my girlfriend until spring break. Prisha, this is my brother, Fitzgerald. Happy now?”

  Prisha gives Lewis a quick kiss on the cheek on her way to the door. “Very. Have a good trip, you two. Fitz, college is great. What I learned when I visited BU was to hang out with the students. Stay away from anywhere you find guys like Lewis.” She winks at him, steps into a pair of boots, and walks—sashays, really—out the door.

  Lewis nods in my direction. “Come on in. I have to send a couple of emails before dinner.” He waves me in. I’m shocked he waited this late to eat with me. I wonder if he got pressured by Mom, or maybe nine p.m. is a perfectly normal time to have dinner in college. Realistically, he was probably too distracted by Prisha to notice the hour.

  I follow and can’t help pausing to admire the room. It’s like an apartment—a nice, well-furnished apartment, with colorful chairs and a wooden coffee table overlooking the nearly floor-to-ceiling window opposite the door. There’s even a kitchen table, and on the TV stand sits the widescreen Dad bought Lewis when he began his freshman year. Lewis and his three roommates, of course, have done their best to worsen their living conditions. Beer bottles line the windowsills. Open on the coffee table is a jar of peanut butter with a knife stuck inside. The room smells like socks and sweat.

  But nothing can detract from the view. Right out the window, the frozen river winds through the city, with trees on both banks and a small bridge reaching between them. In the distance, the Boston skyline glitters brightly. The glow reflects dimly on the ice of the Charles.

  It takes my breath away.

  Lewis sits down at the kitchen table and opens his laptop. I notice stickers for Khatarnak and India Club on the case. Since going to college, he’s been learning about and embracing his cultural heritage. It’s a reminder of how, while we’re both adopted, I can never completely understand his experience of being adopted from Indian biological parents into a white American family.

  “Good trip down?” he asks after a beat. We both know what happened on my way down—I’m certain Mom texted him the reason for the delay. He doesn’t glance up from his computer, and I don’t know if he’s consciously avoiding my eyes.

  I know Lewis considers me not just a younger brother, but a baby brother. When he was going to parties in high school, I was reading and playing computer games. When he was bringing girls home, I was reading and playing computer games. It’s not that I don’t have a life. I just don’t think Lewis thinks I have a life. Admittedly, I’m no future prom king, and I volunteer at the library every Friday and have B horror movie marathons with my friends. But while Lewis is planning spring break with his frat brothers, I’m home with Mom, worrying. Worrying is my primary recreational activity.

  I nod, saying nothing more. Uncomfortable, we both wait for the other to speak. Finally, I do. “Why’s Prisha only your girlfriend until spring break?”

  Lewis shrugs with half a laugh. “She got a job in San Francisco, and I want to be in New York. Neither of us wants to do long-distance since nothing’s going to change geographically in probably three years or so. We picked a date to end it, and we’re just hanging until then.”

  I watch Lewis as he works on his emails. He doesn’t appear bo
thered by this in the least. But that’s Lewis. He got his even temper—equanimity—from our dad’s parenting. The day Lewis dumped his high-school girlfriend, the day he brought home a C in chemistry, the parties he threw and the fights he picked with our parents, he couldn’t be bothered with guilt or concern.

  If we had the kind of relationship where we could talk about things, real, serious things, I might ask him. I might want to know for myself. It’s not like I enjoy worrying this much every day. It’s that I don’t know how not to.

  But we don’t have that relationship, so I don’t ask.

  I drop into one of the chairs facing the window. Lewis speaks up again. “How about you? Any girlfriends yet?”

  I hate this question coming from Lewis. It doesn’t bother me when it comes from Mom—which it does every time I give a girl a ride home from school or work with one on a group project—or even when it’s Ben and Cooper ribbing me at lunch. From Lewis, though, I understand the question for what it is. Judgment. It’s the disdain and comedy with which Lewis has long viewed my choices. My whole personality, really.

  I do my finest impression of my brother’s nonchalance. “No.”

  “What about girls in general? You got your eye on someone?”

  “Not really.” I shift uncomfortably in my chair.

  I don’t mention I pretty nearly did have a girlfriend once, four years ago. Cara Bergen. I talk to her every now and again. It’s not awkward. No way, not awkward at all. I asked Cara to the winter dance when we were in eighth grade. I knew her from English, and we’d gotten to be friends once I noticed the Walt Whitman collection she was reading outside of class. She said yes, and we had what was honestly one of the happiest nights of my life. We hung out often after that, and I kept noticing new things about her. How clever she was, how unbelievable her charcoal sketches were, how her nose would wrinkle up at the very mention of cilantro.