“I want you to leave,” Tristan says.
“Now?” Nick seems surprised.
“Yes, now, you asshole. You think you’re going to stay here after you attacked Alice? What the fuck happened to you, Nick? Who are you?”
Nick doesn’t say anything. He simply gathers his things as we all stand around watching him. Somehow, in a daze, I manage to get off the couch and meander over to Juliet, who puts her arm around me. Tristan stands in front of us, in between us and Nick. Tristan throws Nick’s bag at him and escorts him toward the elevator.
“Are you okay?” Dylan asks.
I nod.
“What happened?” he asks. But I can’t bear to relive what happened. Tears pull in my eyes, and I try to hold them back. Unsuccessfully.
“Nothing, really,” I finally say.
“What the fuck did he do?” Juliet asks.
I try to open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. “I can’t,” I manage to finally whisper. I run inside our room and slam the door.
I bury my head in my pillow and try to block out the whole world. When Tristan returns, I hear him explain what had happened to Dylan and Juliet. I’m glad he does because I know I don’t have the strength to say it out loud.
The following morning, I’ve decided to skip my morning classes to lie around in bed, staring at the ceiling. Juliet left early for class and the room is awfully quiet. When the silence becomes deafening, I put in my headphones and try to push it out. Being alone with my thoughts right now is the last thing I want.
“Alice?” I hear a slight knock on the door through Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance”.
“Come in,” I say without sitting up in bed or bothering to turn down the music.
Tristan comes in. He looks tired and worried. The last time he had looked like that he had stayed up for two days straight working on his paper on Sherman and the Civil War.
“I just wanted to see how you were,” he asks. He sits down on my bed. I should get up, but all I can manage to do is to turn down the music.
“I’m okay.” I shrug. “Thank you.”
He nods.
“I mean it, really. Thank you. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you didn’t come in.” The very thought of that sends chills through my body and I curl up. He puts his hand on my back and rubs my shoulders slightly.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asks. I look up at him. I don’t know what to say. I shrug and leave it up to him.
He climbs into bed with me, on top of the covers. He wraps me up in the covers and pulls me close to him. He’s the big spoon. I’m the little one. The warmth that emanates from him fills the entire room and finally penetrates the coldness within me. Tears start to roll down my face. They’re not tears of regret or remorse. They aren’t tears of sadness. They’re tears of relief.
Adele’s “Hello” comes on. I take out one of my earphones and put it in Tristan’s ear. I turn up the music and we listen to her belt out what we both feel. He wraps his arms tighter around me as we drift off to sleep.
21
After that day, something unusual happened. I thought everything between Tristan and I would go back to normal. The new normal that we had established at school. The normal that basically consisted of us avoiding each other. Making small talk, but never delving deeper. Never getting closer. But it didn’t. Instead, that coldness that existed between us seemed to have vanished.
Tristan stayed with me in my bed the whole day as I drifted in and out of sleep. And that evening, we ordered Chinese and watched Archer on Netflix. I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants. He laughed along with me.
The following morning, I think that things between us are going to go back to being cold and distant. But, again, they don’t. I see Tristan in the kitchen and he complains about his Econ professor, calling him a know-it-all.
“He’s supposed to know it all; he’s your teacher,” I say.
“But not like this. He’s just a dick about it. He may know it all about Econ 101, but he doesn’t know it all about everything. And he acts like he does. I just hate his fucking arrogance.”
I smile and watch Tristan finish his cup of impossibly black coffee. I’ve never seen him take his coffee with sugar or milk, and his ability to down so much hot caffeine so quickly has always given me pause.
“I’ll see you tonight?” Tristan says on his way out.
“Yeah, sure.” I shrug, trying to act like he hasn’t caught me off-guard.
“Okay, see you then,” he says.
Of course we are going to see each other again. We’re roommates. But the way he said that, it sounded almost like he was looking forward to it. We haven’t spoken like that since we’ve been in New York. All of this is just too weird, I decide. It’s bound to go away by tonight.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I come home that afternoon, steaming. How could I let this happen? This was a good paper. I took a whole week to write it. I didn’t procrastinate. I re-read it three times and fixed all typos and errors. It has a clear thesis and great supporting arguments. I actually read the book, unlike some people in my class.
I throw my bag on the chair and open the refrigerator, mindlessly. I’m not hungry. I don’t know what I’m looking for. So I just stare into it as if it holds all the answers to the mysteries of the world, instead of just a packet of moldy mozzarella and a carton of expired milk.
“You okay?” Tristan asks, startling me. I nearly jump out of my shoes.
“Oh my God, you scared me,” I say. “I didn’t see you there.”
He apologizes and asks me if I’m okay, again.
“I’m fine.” I shrug. I don’t want to go into it, but then I do. “I just got a C on my first English paper.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. That sucks.”
“Yeah, especially since I was certain that it was good. I am certain.”
“Maybe it was some kind of a mistake,” Tristan offers. I shrug.
“No, really, I heard of that happening,” he says.
“I don’t think so.” I toss him the paper. “All the mistakes are in red.”
I watch him leaf through my paper. It’s got so much red ink on it, it looks like it’s bleeding.
“The thing that makes me really upset is that now I’m not so sure if I should even be pursuing English. I mean, maybe I’m not so good at it, after all. Maybe I have no business doing it if I can’t do better than a C on some freshman English class.”
It feels good to say that to Tristan. He had been my friend for a long time, way before we ever dated, and we could always talk to each other about things that were going on in our lives.
“Listen, if you think that you should give up on your passion just because of one stupid grade, then you’re insane. You’ve loved English and wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. And now, you’re, what, just going to give that up because of one grade?”
I shrug. When he puts it that way, it does sound stupid.
“It just makes me wonder if I’m any good at it. I mean, what if I’m not? What’s the point? It’s such a hard thing to do, it’s so hard to actually make money at it, then shouldn’t I be, like, extraordinary to even pursue it? And if I can’t get better than a C in my first college class then maybe I’m not so good at all.”
Tristan rolls his eyes and shakes his head.
“What?” I ask. I know that look. He has a lot to say, he’s just holding back.
“Nothing.” He shrugs. “If that’s what you think, then that’s what you think.”
“Okay, okay. What?” I know he wants me to pry it from him.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes, that’s why I’m here.” I nod.
“Well, I think it’s unfair.”
“What’s unfair?”
“That artists are measured on this ridiculous standard of success. The kind of standard that no one else is measured on.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, you are considering givin
g up becoming a writer because of one class, right?”
I nod.
“Well, I bet you that there are thousands of future accountants and economics majors, for that matter, who would never consider giving up their majors just because they got a C one of their first projects in their first college class. What’s unfair is that the whole world has this tendency to think that just because they haven’t heard of some actor, painter, or writer that the person pursing that profession is somehow a failure. The rest of us aren’t compared the same way. What I mean is that people think that if you’re not Hemingway or Picasso or Elizabeth Taylor then you’re a failure as an artist. But there are no such comparisons in accounting.”
“So what you’re really saying is that I should stick it out?” I say.
“Yes! Of course you should stick it out. It’s just one grade or one class. Who the hell cares?”
“And what makes you so sure?” I ask.
“Because I believe in you. I’ve read your stories, remember? I know how good they are. So who cares what some professor thinks of your paper on the Catcher in the Rye?”
“It was actually on The Invisible Man,” I say with a smile.
22
Tristan’s right. Of course he’s right. This is just one paper in one class. And even if it’s the whole class. Even if I get a C in the whole class (the very thought of that makes my body shiver), so what? What does that matter in the grand scheme of things?
My thoughts make sense to me on an intellectual level, but not on the innate, instinctual level, which lives somewhere in my gut.
“I know you’re right,” I say. “But...”
“Agh, the kiss of death!” Tristan jokes.
“Okay, okay, I know. But I still have these doubts, you know?”
“I know. You’ve had them since you were a kid. And you’ve wanted to be a writer since you were a kid.”
“Agh, you’re so annoying.” I throw my hands in the air. “Why do you have to know me for so long?”
Tristan smiles. “That’s right, baby. You can’t hide your true self from me. I know you too well.”
I roll my eyes. I’m secretly enjoying this. This banter. It feels like we’re in 10th grade. When we were still friends. Before we started dating and everything got so much more complicated.
“Okay, what? What was the ‘but’ all about?” he finally asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I just think that maybe I should go back to pre-med. I mean, being pre-med is a good option, right?”
“Yes, being pre-med’s a good option. The world needs more doctors,” he says with lackluster.
“But?” I fill in where I know he’s headed.
“You can definitely become a doctor. Of course you can. But, in my humble opinion, the world will miss out.”
“Miss out? Don’t doctors save lives?” I ask.
“Yes, they do,” Tristan says, leaning close to me. So close, for a moment, I feel like he’s going to kiss me. “But doctors don’t save as many lives as writers.”
“What?” I pull away.
“Alice, if there were no art, no movies, no books, what would be the point of living? What would we be all living for, exactly? Just breathing in and out isn’t enough, you know.
I smile. “Wow, is this really coming from an Econ major? And I thought you were a realist.”
Tristan tosses his hair and opens a can of soda. “A realist?” he asks with a twinkle in his eye. “Never. I’m an Economics major, darling. If the stock market isn’t an adventure in fiction and an indulgence in fantasy, I don’t know what is.”
Tristan’s words make me feel better and we hang out together all afternoon. We watch trash TV and eat junk food. We make inside jokes about people from high school that I haven’t thought about in ages.
“Oh my God, I’ve never seen you two like this,” Juliet says when she comes into the living room for some rest and relaxation after a long afternoon of breathing classes. She’s actually taking a class on breathing! Can you believe that? And, according to her, it’s actually hard. She doesn’t have to read The Invisible Man and write a 5,000-word paper on race and class struggles in 1960s America. Maybe I should major in acting!
“Like what?” I ask, still laughing about Tristan’s comment about someone from the Jerry Springer show and our 9th grade History teacher.
“Like you two actually like each other,” she says. “Dylan, have you ever seen them like this?”
Dylan looks up from his cereal bowl. “No, not really. Though Alice and Tristan as friends is a nice change of pace from Alice and Tristan as former lovers who can’t stand each other.”
“Hey! We never couldn’t stand each other,” Tristan says. “Things were just…complicated.”
“Yes, very complicated,” I say. “But we were always friends.”
Dylan and Juliet exchange looks. “With friends like that, who needs enemies,” she says.
“We weren’t that bad,” I say.
“You were impossible,” Dylan says. “But, honestly, this is much much better. Much more fun for us, at least,” he says about him and Juliet. She nods her head.
“Hey, so do you all want to go out and celebrate this new development? I was thinking drinks somewhere on Amsterdam Ave.?” Juliet suggests.
“Sounds good,” Dylan and I say at the same time and crack up laughing.
“Tristan?” Juliet asks.
“I’d love to, but I actually have a date tonight. Rain check?” he asks.
Date. Of course. I had completely forgotten about Tea. How could I’ve forgotten about Tea? Tristan was still seeing Tea. And Tea and I were still not talking. I really liked her, but I haven’t talked to her since that day that I discovered that she and Tristan were a thing. It wasn’t entirely my fault. She started sitting on the other side of the classroom and leaving immediately after class. She started working with someone else as a peer partner and everything we seemed to have vanished in an instant.
“Oh, that’s cool,” I say quickly, though I fear that it wasn’t quick enough. “Rain check? Yes, definitely.”
Again, just as I expect for things to get weird between us again, they don’t. Surprisingly. Juliet and Dylan fill in the gap in the conversation and we all break out in laughter. It’s amazing how much dark energy one laugh can suck up and morph into something else completely. I hope that Tristan and I continue to laugh together for the rest of our lives. We didn’t for more than two months and that was two months too long.
23
Okay, so I’m officially moving on with my life. Tristan’s with Tea and that’s okay. I’m really okay with it. And even if he weren’t with Tea, I’m not interested. I have a crush on someone else. How does that old saying go? The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. Well, I’m not under him yet, but I am interested.
He’s tall, dark, and handsome. I don’t know his name or anything else about him except that he likes to sketch. That’s how I first spotted him. I saw him sitting in the Quad, sketching in his notebook. Yesterday, he drew a little boy playing ball with his mom. The resemblance was uncanny. Today, he’s sketching hands. I’m not sure who they belong to, though. I’m sitting slightly behind him, under an oak. Instead of concentrating on Thomas Hobbes and what he said about the society, I keep searching for the owner of those hands. And imagining what it would be like to kiss the stranger on the bench across from me.
I’ve had this crush for close to a week, and the experience has been exhilarating. It’s such a change of pace to not dwell on Tristan anymore and to actually look forward to something. I try to remember the last time I really had a crush on someone. More than two years ago. That’s an insane amount of time to go without feeling butterflies in my stomach. The jitters of what it’s all going to be like. I’m only 18 years old for crying out loud! When did I become such an old maid? A long-term relationship in high school will do that to you.
A strong gust of wind suddenly blows in and clouds blanket the
sun. Thick raindrops start to fall from the sky. I toss my notebook and various study sheets into my bag and head toward the library. Now I will probably never know whose hands my crush was sketching. A few minutes later, I’m inside the library, fruitlessly looking around for a spot to study. The place is packed with soggy students.
“Hey, hey!” someone says. It’s him. My nameless crush.
“You dropped this,” he says. I smile. But the smile quickly vanishes when I see what he’s holding. It’s a thank you card to Nick. I wrote it while I watched him sketch, when I should’ve been concentrating on Hobbes.
“Thanks.” I take it reluctantly. I hate to admit ownership of that thing. I just hope that he didn’t read it. He turns around to leave, but then he turns around.
“You know, it’s really admirable what you wrote,” he says.
“You read it??”
“I couldn’t help it. It fell open.”
I shake my head.
“What, you don’t believe me?” he asks.
“No, not really.” I shrug. I’m about to walk away, but something stops me.
“You know, you had no right. This is private. Not for some stranger to read.”
He takes a step toward me. His dark hair falls into his unbelievably blue eyes. For a second, I can’t tell if I’m wet from the rain or melting from his gaze.
“I’m Simon,” he says.
I stare at him. I have no idea why he just told me his name.
“There, we’re not strangers anymore now that you know my name. Alice.”
How the fuck does he know my name? I’m fuming. I’m embarrassed. Of all the things that he found, why did he have to read that note? I glance at the note. It’s wet and the ink is smeared, but I can still make out all the words. I know them by heart.
Dear Nick,
Thank you. No, really. This isn’t a joke. This is a legitimate thank you note. I just can’t believe that I’m writing you this or thanking you for trying to force yourself on me. But I am. Because the thing is that, if you didn’t do what you did then Tristan and I would still be strangers. But because you did what you did, Tristan and I are friends again.
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