Chemistry Lessons

by Meredith Goldstein

  Whit rubbed the back of his neck the way my dad does when he pays bills.

  “Technically, I’ve known her all year, in my program, just as a friend. Nothing’s happened; she knows I’ve had a girlfriend who’s still in high school. But over the year, we grew closer, and I tried to set boundaries, but . . . you can’t force them. We’re both in these summer classes now, and we’ll be together all the time. It’s just harder to ignore.”

  I shivered, not knowing whether it was because the temperature was dropping with the sun or because I was so upset that I was experiencing some sort of arrhythmia.

  Two girls who looked a few years younger than us walked past the house, singing a song I recognized from the radio. Something about the heart wanting what it wants.

  “Have you had sex with her?” I asked loud enough for the girls to hear. I needed some witnesses to prove this was happening. The girls stopped walking and singing and turned to stare at Whit, waiting for an answer, pleased to be part of the drama.

  “Jeez, Maya. No,” he said. “I just told you—nothing’s happened.”

  “Nothing’s happened!” Whit shouted again in the direction of the girls, one of whom yelled back, “Whatever, man,” before they continued on their path.

  I thought of the past few weeks with Whit and whether I had missed any signs. It seemed impossible that I wouldn’t see this coming.

  “We love each other,” I whispered, more to myself. “There’s been no evidence to suggest that anything has changed.”

  “Evidence,” Whit repeated, shaking his head. “That’s part of the issue, Maya. I think on some level I’m finally admitting to myself that you and I are just too different. You breezed through calculus, even though you were the youngest person in the class. You know the exact percent chance I’ll have kids with red hair. You care about metastatic tumors and . . . zebrafish, or whatever. And I love that about you. You’re brilliant, Maya. But I have to admit that being with Andrea—​this other person—​it’s just . . . easy. It’s been kind of nice to hang out with someone who gets what I do. She and I can talk about screenplays for hours. I mean, don’t you want to be with someone who gets what you do? Someone more like you?”

  “No,” I said, my voice strong again. “I just want you.”

  “You haven’t even started college, Maya. You don’t know what you want.”

  My head snapped back. He’d never been so dismissive.

  I sat still and silent then and focused on the pace of my breathing while Whit explained that he had fallen for a film student named Andrea Berger. Like him, she was going to be a sophomore at Boston University. They had signed up for the same summer-session writing classes, and he was helping her make a short film. He was excited about it.

  “You should go,” I told him once he stopped talking, my voice flat, my legs too gelatinous to stand.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “We can talk some more if you want. I know there’s a lot to say.”

  “No, there’s not.”

  He nodded and rose, towering above me as I wrapped my fingers around the rusty metal railing of the stairs for support.

  He didn’t try to help me up.

  2

  I phoned Bryan from the top of the steps.

  “You’ve reached the Mother of Dragons,” Bryan said.

  “He broke up with me.”

  “Hmm?” Bryan was only half listening. I could hear Hamilton on in the background. “Hold on; let me turn the volume down. What did you say?”

  “He broke up with me,” I repeated.

  “Who broke up with you?”

  “Whit,” I snapped. “Who else could break up with me?”

  “Right. Good point,” he said, now focused on my trembling voice. “Wow. Okay. Tell me where you are right now. Just stay on the phone. I’ll come to you.”

  “I’m home on the front steps. He just left.”

  I didn’t realize I was crying until I had to wipe my eyes because I couldn’t see.

  “He’s a clever little coward,” Bryan muttered as I heard him shuffle around his room, probably gathering a bag for the night. “Of course he’d do this right before you took off for Plymouth for a long weekend. He knew you’d disappear and be someone else’s problem for the next few days.”

  His assessment stung, but I was used to Bryan’s lack of filter. It’s why I trusted him so much.

  “Bryan,” I said, but nothing else came out. The ivy covering the house looked sinister all of a sudden, like it might be the result of a fairy-tale curse. Before it could trap me, I turned around and went inside. My breaths felt shallow and strained, my legs heavy.

  “What’s happening now?” Bryan asked.

  “Now I’m inside. I just closed the front door.”

  “Good,” he said. “Just hold on, Maya.”

  I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. Then I slowly climbed the stairs and found my dad in his room packing a suitcase for our long weekend with Aunt Cindy and Pam.

  I forced back new tears and tried to compose myself. My phone was still in my hand at my side; I didn’t even know whether Bryan was still on the line.

  “Cindy says bring a swimsuit,” my dad said without looking up when he noticed me in the door frame. “Do you and Whit need dinner? We have coupons for Thai.”

  “Whit’s not here.”

  “Oh, I thought I heard him outside,” Dad said.

  “He left.”

  “That was a quick visit.”

  I told him then, my tongue feeling too big for my mouth as I said the words.

  His head shot up.

  “What do you mean he met someone else?” my dad squeaked.

  He froze in the center of the bedroom he used to share with my mom, mirroring my pose as his arms fell to his sides. He held a pair of boxer-briefs and a toothbrush in his left hand.

  The stunned look on his face was some validation. At least he hadn’t seen it coming either.

  “Sweetie, I’m sorry,” he said after I explained. “Maybe he just needs some space.”

  “Space with Andrea Berger,” I snapped.

  My dad flinched.

  Before he could respond, the front door banged open below us and Bryan charged through. He lived two houses away and had his own set of keys.

  “Okay,” Bryan said, after discovering us standing frozen like mannequins next to my dad’s king-size bed, which was only ever messy on one side.

  Bryan surveyed the room, preparing to triage.

  “Kirk,” he said to my dad, whose eyes were as glassy as mine, “why don’t you go downstairs and make us some of that special grape fizzy water. Get that SodaStream going. You can finish packing later.”

  My dad nodded but didn’t move. Bryan walked to him, took the underwear and toothbrush out of his hand, and patted him on the shoulder, prompting him to march like a robot out the door.

  “Bryan!” I snapped as I caught my best friend running his thumb over the waistband of my dad’s boxer-briefs.

  “Sorry,” he whispered. “For the record, I always imagined that he wore boxer-briefs, but gray, not black.”

  “Bryan,” I said, exhaling as my voice broke, “how is this happening right now?”

  He shook his head, dropped the underwear and toothbrush into my dad’s suitcase, and crossed the room so he could put his arm around my shoulders. “It just is. Come on. Let’s talk it through.”

  Bryan slept at my house a few times a week, so he didn’t have to bring a toothbrush when he stayed over. He was the youngest of five—​a surprise to his then-forty-something Catholic parents who thought they were done having kids after his sister arrived ten years earlier. He was like an only child when we met, a kid living alone with two adults who had little interest in playing with toys and going to his school concerts. By the end of middle school, Bryan was sleeping at my house every weekend. His parents sometimes sent him over with baked goods, their small acknowledgment that he was being raised part-time in our home.

  We
went into my room, and I shuddered, noticing that Whit was all over it. The framed prom picture that sat on my desk, the copy of the Oliver Sacks book that he’d borrowed from my mom’s bookshelf and left on the small white nightstand. On top of the wicker hamper in the corner was the T-shirt he bought me for Valentine’s Day that said YOU ARE HERE next to an illustration of the Milky Way. I imagined that if you shined a black light in the room, you’d see Whit’s fingerprints on everything.

  My first instinct was to google Andrea Berger, but Bryan wouldn’t let me and pulled my phone from my hand. “No phone tonight,” he said. “The internet is not your friend right now.”

  Once we were both tucked under my light purple comforter, though, he agreed to find some pictures of her and describe her to me so that my imagination wouldn’t make it worse than it was.

  “She’s attractive, I guess,” Bryan said, his phone glowing in the dark as I lay next to him in my oversize MIT pajamas. “You know, she kind of looks like one of the people from Pretty Little Liars. The one with the lighter brown hair.”

  “What does that mean? Like someone from the show Pretty Little Liars?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The show is called ‘Pretty’ Little Liars, Bryan. Those actresses are pretty. That’s the point. Is she that attractive? Like, television attractive?” I asked, betrayed by the desperation in my voice. I wanted to put myself on mute.

  Bryan waved his hand to dismiss my concern. “No, not TV attractive. I guess she’s not a pretty little liar; she’s more like an average-looking little liar. She looks more like—​actually, she looks a lot like Genevieve Moran,” he said, referring to our class’s girls’ soccer captain, whom I’d tutored in math.

  “She has red hair?” I said, thinking of Genevieve’s pretty auburn mane, which was just a few shades darker than Whit’s.

  “Almost a ginger. More like a brownish red. She looks like she could model a fall coat.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “Well,” Bryan said, hesitating as he considered what details to share, “according to one social media account—​that you are not allowed to check—​she likes hiking and the band M83. It also looks like she had a boyfriend up until a few weeks ago. Before then, it’s all shots of her and some guy—​and then he just disappears.”

  “Are there pictures of her and Whit?”

  “Not yet,” Bryan said, his voice soft. He stroked my head, which was tucked into a pillow next to his chest.

  Speechless, I nodded.

  “I was going to have sex with him in four weeks, Bryan.” My voice was so hoarse.

  “Don’t make it about that,” Bryan said. “This whole ‘losing my virginity’ thing is a heteronormative concept anyway. You’re too smart to buy into it.”

  I turned onto my stomach. “My point is that we were together. There were no plans to not be together.”

  “I know,” Bryan said.

  The room felt too hot, but I didn’t want to get out from under the covers. I felt safe there.

  “Bryan,” I whispered, “were you ever this upset about Matt? I don’t remember you ever being like this after you broke up. Or did I miss it?”

  “Ending it with Matt—​that was up to me. It was different.”

  “Oh.”

  I had no memory of falling asleep, but when I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, it was still dark, all the bedding was on the floor, and my head was resting against a wet spot made by snot and tears on Bryan’s T-shirt.

  * * *

  “There are no M83 songs on this playlist,” Bryan said the next morning as he handed me my phone. We stood in the driveway, where my dad was stuffing our suitcases into the back of the green Subaru.

  Bryan loaded my phone with new playlists every few weeks because he said it was his responsibility to make sure I had some pop culture in my life to keep me well-rounded. He was thoughtful about the music, carefully curating the collections of songs to match themes, such as “Women of the ’90s,” or “Songs with Boys’ Names in Them,” or, after I told him about my plans for sex with Whit, “Summer Awakening,” which featured various songs meant to put me in the mood.

  “This mix is very different,” Bryan explained as I gazed at the phone in my palm. Bryan pushed his pale brown hair to the side and tucked it behind his ear. Now that it was getting longer, he did that about twenty times a day.

  “Maya,” Bryan said, trying to keep my focus as I got myself into the passenger’s seat and shut the door. He knelt so that his face was level with mine through the open window.

  “This playlist is the mix that will pull you out of this mess. Because you are bigger than this breakup. You are bigger than Whit Akin. The songs are in order, so do not hit shuffle or it loses its meaning. You have to go from one to two hundred, one song at a time. And when you’re done, the grieving is over. It’s a deadline.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Two hundred songs. I wondered how he had found time to put it together.

  “You fell asleep at eleven, but I was up until one,” he said, answering my unspoken question.

  I smiled, exhausted by the effort.

  “What are you going to do while I’m gone?” I asked.

  “I have lines to memorize. Not as many as I’d like, but enough to keep me busy.

  “Take care of her, Kirk,” Bryan added, glancing over at my dad in the driver’s seat.

  “Sure thing, B,” Dad said.

  As we backed out of the driveway and began the hour-plus drive to Aunt Cindy’s house, I connected the phone to the car adapter.

  “Do you mind if we play Bryan’s mix?”

  “I’d never say no to a Bryan soundtrack,” my dad answered with a stiff voice, looking a little scared of me.

  The first track was a Justin Timberlake song I’d never heard before: “Drink You Away.” My dad tapped his thumb on the steering wheel to the beat.

  I thought of drinking then, of the wine that Whit once stole from his parents’ liquor cabinet so we could share it on one of our first real dates. We had carried it in water bottles to the lawn in front of the Cambridge Public Library, where he surprised me with a picnic dinner. It felt like something that might happen to a girl on television.

  My dad’s thumb-drumming got louder as the song hit a climax. I felt my stomach burn as Justin whined the same lyric over and over, on top of a rhythmic guitar. “Tell me, baby, don’t they make a medicine for heartbreak?”

  They should, I thought.

  I put the track on repeat and closed my eyes.

  3

  Pam, my aunt Cindy’s partner of more than twenty years, was outside with one of the dogs when we pulled up to their house, a four-bedroom colonial not far from the Plymouth town center. Pam called it Very Old Manor because when they bought the place ten years ago, their next-door neighbor told them a million times that even though it was “very old”—​built in 1880—​it wasn’t technically a historic property like her home, which was built in the 1700s and had one of those gold plaques confirming its age over the door. “Your house is just very old,” the neighbor kept repeating, as if “very old,” as opposed to “historic,” meant that Cindy and Pam had basically moved into a Chipotle.

  “If it was built after 1799, you might as well be living in a goddamned strip mall,” Pam often said of the neighborhood, which prided itself on its colonial everything.

  Pam had a Boston accent so thick it always sounded like she was angry about something. The constant swearing didn’t help; most adjectives were preceded by a “fahckin” or a “gawhddamned,” even when she was content. Her sound was so authentically local that she’d once been drafted for a Boston crime movie.

  The story—​told too frequently—​was that Pam had been ordering coffee at a Starbucks in Quincy when a movie producer, who was in line behind her, overheard her accent, pulled her aside, and asked her to come to the local set. She wound up being paid eight hundred dollars to spend an entire day in a tight r
ed dress repeating the line “He’s at Williams Tavern.” Everyone in our family had at least two copies of the DVD.

  I could see Pam’s blond bangs obstructing her eyes as she bent over and rubbed the tummy of the dog, trying to snap it out of its funk. Poor Johnny, a retrieverish-looking mutt, was so old that he no longer barked and ran toward guests. He just wanted to sleep and be left alone.

  “Wake up!” Pam yelled as my dad turned off the car, her volume prompting the dog to pull itself to its feet. “Say hi, Johnny! Say hi to Cousin Maya!”

  My aunts named their two now-thirteen-year-old rescue dogs after their first crushes, Johnny Gill and Ralph Tresvant from New Edition, a boy band from Boston that was famous in the 1980s. When my aunts first started dating, they discovered that they’d both been obsessed with New Edition when they were young, so it became a running theme in their relationship. The group’s hit “Can You Stand the Rain” was Cindy and Pam’s wedding song. I barely remember the event, but I was told it happened not long after gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, and there’s a picture of me as a toddler in a flower crown holding a sign that says LEGALLY WED hanging in their living room.

  Cindy and Pam adopted the dogs a few years after the wedding. The story was that Johnny and Ralph adored each other as puppies, but that their relationship went sour when they hit canine puberty and it became clear that both animals were alphas. After several weeks of fights that led to a scratched cornea and a ruined love seat, Aunt Cindy and Pam admitted that their pets could no longer be in the same room. They couldn’t even look at each other through windows or doorways. Just the sight of the other dog caused each to leap into battle for a turf war.

  My mom begged the women to give one of the dogs to another loving home, but Cindy and Pam couldn’t bear the thought of letting either one go. So for more than a decade, my aunts’ lives have been a choreographed dance around the house, punctuated by announcements of each dog’s whereabouts.

  “Ralph coming up!” Cindy will shout from the living room, to which Pam will respond, “Wait one sec . . . Johnny secured!” That means that Johnny is in the bathroom with the door shut and Ralph can roam free. Once Ralph has made rounds and has been locked in the bedroom, Pam will yell, “Johnny coming down!” so that Johnny can have free rein of the house for a few hours.