Nathan looked at me. “It wasn’t stupid,” he said. “I’m glad you called.”
“Yeah, but there’s not really a whole lot that you can do,” I said. “I mean, unless you have three hundred dollars to loan me. Then we could go pick up my car and I could drive home for Thanksgiving like I’d planned.”
“To Arizona? In the same car with the amazing disappearing starter that vibrates out as you drive?”
Of course that was something Andrew would’ve told Nathan. “I know,” I said. “She was only four hundred dollars when we bought her, and it seems ridiculous to pay almost that much just to get her back now. But Gretchen is special to me, and anyway, the starter problem has been totally fixed—”
Nathan laughed, shaking his head. “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I just meant, it’s not exactly safe to take her on a road trip. Don’t you think?”
He was right, of course. My parents hadn’t been thrilled, either, particularly my father, but I convinced them that I would get a tune-up and be supercareful on the roads. In the end, my mom fell back on her classic “If it’s important to you, Leigh, then it’s important to us.” Sometimes my parents are so cool.
“I know,” I said, my shoulders slumping. “I just really wanted to go home for Thanksgiving.”
“Well,” he said. “You still can.”
“No, I can’t,” I said. “I can’t even afford to get my car out of the impound lot, much less airfare for a last-minute flight on a holiday weekend.”
“I’ll drive you,” he said. “If you want.”
Okay, this was crazier than the time he’d told me I could stay in his room all night and finish my paper. “Sedona is, like, seven hours away,” I protested. “And it’s Thanksgiving weekend. You can’t possibly drive me all the way there.”
Nathan shrugged, as though the prospect of a seven-hour drive was as worthy of consideration as a drive to the gas station on the corner. “Why not?”
I gaped at him like that girl in Ami’s carpool. “But, you’ve got plans of your own.”
“Not really,” he said. “But I’d be okay to crash yours. I mean, if you wouldn’t mind.”
I thought about it. “No,” I said slowly. “No, I wouldn’t mind.”
“It’s settled, then,” he said, smiling at me. “To Arizona.”
“To Arizona,” I repeated dazedly. And before I could really think about what I’d just agreed to, he slung my duffel bag over his shoulder and started walking toward his car. For a few moments I just stood there, as if rooted to the spot. Nathan reached his car, but instead of tossing the duffel bag in the backseat, he turned. His eyes were still covered by the sunglasses, but it looked almost as though he were asking my permission—as though he were willing me to follow.
So I took a deep breath, and I did.
MERE EXPOSURE HYPOTHESIS: A theory that repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to enhanced liking for it
THEY say you can tell a lot about a person by the way he drives. I don’t know who “they” are exactly, but I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere.
Or maybe I just made it up after I spent a couple of hours watching Nathan drive.
Nathan was one of those effortless drivers, his left hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, the other on top of the column shift. His Chevy Cavalier was automatic, but you could tell he was more comfortable driving a stick shift, from the way his hand lingered there, as if ready to shift into the next gear at any minute. He maintained a speed just moderately over the limit, using the pinkie finger of his left hand to flick his signal light when he needed to pass someone going a little slower. And if he ended up getting stuck behind one of those people, he didn’t curse and drum his fingers on the steering wheel the way I always did. He just dropped back a little, following at speed until he had the chance to pass them.
Mostly I stared out the window, but occasionally (okay, a little more than occasionally) I snuck a glance at Nathan from the corner of my eye. At one point he turned his head and caught my gaze, and I quickly looked away.
But if he noticed that I had spent the last hour sneaking peeks, he didn’t say anything. “Do you want to put on some music?” he asked instead. “My CD book is in the backseat.”
I had to unbuckle to reach back there, but finally I grabbed his mammoth book of CDs. I also noticed his guitar, lying across the scuffed leather of the seat. “Do you take that everywhere you go?” I asked.
It must have been the way the sun was slanting harshly through the window, but Nathan’s skin briefly took on a red tint. “Sometimes,” was all he said.
There was more there, I could tell, but I didn’t feel comfortable prying. So I just flipped through his book, trying to find a CD to listen to. I was debating between Elvis Costello and Jonathan Richman when I came across a burned CD that looked far more interesting.
“Nathan’s Summer Mix,” I read, sliding it out of its pocket. “It’s not summer, but this should be good.”
“Hey, no—” Nathan said, reaching for the CD, but it was already in the player. His hand dropped away even as the first foot-stomping, hand-clapping beat of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” filled the car.
“What—” I started to ask, but then I just cracked up laughing. “‘Hollaback Girl’? Really?”
If Nathan had looked a little uncomfortable before, now he looked downright embarrassed. “My sister made it for me, okay?” he said.
“Whatever you say,” I said, holding up my hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “I’m sure she made you dress up and play tea party with her, too.”
Nathan grinned. “Not really. As long as she let me wear the pearls, I was pretty willing.”
I smiled, marveling at how easy this was. Maybe now that I wasn’t a threat to his roommate, Nathan didn’t hate me anymore. Or maybe we just had a camaraderie based on us both having been screwed over. Whatever it was, I was starting to feel like, crazy as it seemed, we could even be…friends.
I’d take No Doubt over Gwen Stefani’s solo stuff any day, but I had to admit the song was catchy, and I found myself quietly singing along to the parts I knew and fudging the parts I didn’t. I’m not exactly blessed with Jessica Simpson’s voice—or even Ashlee Simpson’s, for that matter—but I’m not the worst singer in the world, either. That distinction belongs to my dad.
To my surprise, Nathan started singing along. And even more surprisingly…he sounded really, really good. His voice was low and warm, wrapping around each word and somehow making “Hollaback Girl” sound like something an old crooner could have sung.
Well, until he sang along to the whole “B-A-N-A-N-A-S” part. Even Chris Isaak couldn’t make that sexy.
My tongue tripped over one of the most obvious lines in the chorus. Sexy? What was I thinking?
So okay, he had a nice voice. And possibly an even nicer chest. And although he was a little possessive about his cereal and was a math major, which has to indicate some kind of pathology, he seemed an overall nice guy. Nicer than I had given him credit for, anyway.
But sexy?
It was the dream. It had to be. I was still associating real-life Nathan with über-romantic dream Nathan, and I’m sure even the lead singer of Nickelback could appear attractive in a dream.
Well, maybe not. But I had to figure out a way to stop this line of thinking. It was not only stupid, it was…well, diagnosably delusional.
The song ended, and Nathan reached over to turn down the volume. “Do you want to stop for something to eat?” he asked. “We need to get gas, anyway.”
He took the next exit and pulled into a gas station where, after considerable debate, he finally allowed me to pay for the gas. Or maybe I shouldn’t say allowed so much as acquiesced after I swiped my debit card into the machine, playfully shoving him out of the way before he could even get out his wallet. To give him his due, he was gracious in defeat. Meanwhile, I was oddly triumphant for someone who had just elected to spend an obscene amount of money for twelve ga
llons of gasoline.
While I waited for the gas to pump, I leaned against Nathan’s car. “I know you said you didn’t have any plans,” I said. “But I’m sorry for calling you out here and ruining your Thanksgiving weekend.”
He moved next to me, so close that the sleeve of his T-shirt brushed my shoulder. “You didn’t ruin it,” he said.
“Yeah, but…you were probably just going to stay back and catch up on a lot of work,” I said. “And your parents must be disappointed that you’re going to see someone else’s family instead of your own.”
“Actually, it’s just my mom,” he said, and my face immediately flooded with guilt. Of course, I had forgotten about his dad’s death. “And now that my sister’s in college, my mom and her boyfriend decided to take this weekend to go on a cruise they’ve been planning for a while.”
That was the second time he’d mentioned his sister. I realized I didn’t know a lot about him, not even the things that I should have known by virtue of being his roommate’s girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend now. Andrew hadn’t told me a whole lot, and I’d never bothered asking.
I wanted to press him more, but then the gas stopped pumping and Nathan suggested that we head to the diner next door to get some food. I had been leaning toward just grabbing some Sno-Balls in the gas station, but he insisted that no road trip was complete without a meal in some greasy local diner.
It never took much convincing to get me to go anywhere with french fries, and so just a few minutes later I was sliding into the vinyl seat of a booth, Nathan taking the seat across from me. In restaurants with booths, Andrew would always sit beside me instead of across. I know this is a very couple-y thing to do, and I’ll even admit to feeling envious of other couples sitting side by side prior to my relationship with Andrew.
But in actuality, it’s very uncomfortable. You spend all of dinner turning to look at the other person, and it’s an even bigger issue when one of you is left-handed. Not that either of us is, but it’s the principle of the thing. Andrew would also drape his arm around my shoulders and then leave it there. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a thirteen-year-old girl inside of me who thrills at the fact that a boy is actually putting his arm around her. But there’s also an eighteen-year-old (soon to be nineteen) who just thinks, hello, it’s called personal space. When the food comes, that’s pretty much the cue to remove the arm.
I wondered what Nathan was like in a relationship. Did he sit beside or across? Somehow I imagined he would get the whole personal space thing—and not just because I noticed that he was left-handed.
The waitress came, and Nathan ordered a large fountain Coke and a BLT. I ordered the same thing—not because I’m one of those girls who giggles and says, “Make that two”—as though that’s the reason a guy will want to be with you, because you order the same food that he does—but because I tend to get very jealous about people’s food once it arrives. So, unless it’s, like, a tuna melt, which I will never, ever covet, I often find that it’s best just to coordinate my order with the other person, so I don’t suffer from a food identity crisis later on.
“I hope I have money to pay for this,” I said after the waitress left, digging through my purse.
“You got gas,” he said. “I’ll get this.”
I ignored him, continuing my scavenger hunt. I’m not superorganized with my purse, and most of my money tends to look like it spent a few solid days wadded up in some kid’s pocket while waiting to be exchanged for quarters at the arcade. I started removing receipts and pieces of paper, piling them on the table as I sifted out viable money.
Nathan watched me the way most guys react to a girl and her purse—with the awed expression of someone observing alien life-forms in their native environment. He picked up one crumpled piece of paper. “What is this?” he asked.
I only noticed what it was after he had already flattened it out and begun to read the first few items. “Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank,” he read. “Number one…I like to read incredibly unrealistic and badly written romance novels.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, and I blushed. Ami wasn’t exactly LeBron James (or his WNBA equivalent, whoever that was), and the assignment she’d tried to toss in the garbage had been sitting in an untouched ball on our linoleum floor for about two months. I only came across it in the post-Andrew desperation to organize the room and thus, symbolically, my life. At the time, I’d felt a weird compulsion to keep it, and so I’d put the whole paper—still crumpled up—in my purse with all my other junk, figuring that one day it would come in handy.
“Hey, give that back,” I said, reaching for it.
“You bought Avril’s first album?” Nathan asked incredulously, bending over the paper as though he fully intended to read the whole thing.
“You listen to peppy hip-hop dance music?” I shot back, leaning over the table to snatch it from him.
I half expected him to try to get it back, but he didn’t. Instead he just sat there, looking at me with eyes that were no longer smiling. “When did you fill this out?” he asked.
I didn’t have to ask what he meant. “Before,” I said, and then added unnecessarily, “A few months ago, the time Andrew and I later went out for Thai food.”
“Ah,” he said, as though he actually knew the date I was referring to, which would have been completely ridiculous. It wasn’t like he’d been keeping tabs. “That night, aka the eight-hundred-forty-sixth time Andrew was a complete ass.”
I laughed, more out of surprise than humor. “Do you mean, in his life? Because I think you might have to add another, like, two billion to that number.”
“I meant with you,” Nathan said. “But you’re probably right.”
So I knew that Nathan and Andrew weren’t exactly bosom buddies anymore, but Nathan’s words were still a little jarring. It almost sounded like he hadn’t hated me for not being good enough for Andrew. After months of believing that absolutely, I wondered now if, just maybe, it hadn’t been…well, the opposite.
Not that I had imagined Nathan’s less-than-thrilled attitude toward me over the past few months, but I was starting to see it in a different light. Maybe he had disliked me, not because he felt I wasn’t good enough for his roommate, but because he thought I was one of those stupid girls who’s with a jerk and doesn’t do anything about it.
Nathan said something that I didn’t catch, too immersed in my own head to follow the conversation. “What?” I asked.
“I said it surprised me that you filled that out before the breakup,” Nathan repeated. It was the first time I had really heard someone else say it so baldly—the breakup.
“Why?” I asked. “Because it’s weird that I would still have a paper from two months ago in my purse?”
Nathan laughed. “No—you could have a lost treasure map to Atlantis in there and it wouldn’t be a huge shocker. It’s more because of the thing about your happiest time…you said you couldn’t remember. It just seems to me like, if you were still with Andrew, you might have remembered something with him.”
I scowled. “Do you know how hard it is to come up with answers for that off the top of your head? I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, but I can remember many happy times. The stupid question is inherently unanswerable—it asks about the happiest time. And who knows that?”
Nathan shrugged. “Off the top of my head? My happiest time was when I saw They Might Be Giants in concert two years ago. The show was amazing and a lot of fun, and afterward I got to meet both the Johns backstage.” He raised his eyebrows at me, as if in a challenge. “Of course, there’s no objective measurement to tell me if that’s my absolute happiest time, but it’s what immediately pops into my head. What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah,” he said. “What was your happiest time?”
I’m no Pollyanna. I don’t play the glad game, and I’m not going to earn any gold star for positive attitude anytime soon. But it’s not like I’m a Joy Division song away from slitting my
wrists, either. So surely I should be able to come up with something, right? What was my happiest time?
It had been fun at the awards ceremony, giggling with Ami about the ludicrousness of Li’s impromptu poetry reading. But I couldn’t even think of that moment without it being tainted with what had happened afterward—the stupid confetti globe, the fight with Andrew…the breakup.
The waitress brought our sandwiches, plunking the plates down in front of each of us and leaving without any further conversation. Nathan gave me a wry smile, as if telling me he recognized my hope for a stay of execution with the arrival of the food. But it also told me I wouldn’t evade the subject that easily.
“Technically, the question is the happiest time,” I said, “not necessarily my happiest time. So I would have to say…the happiest time is being surrounded by friends and family with good conversation.”
Nathan nodded, taking a bite from one of the halves of his sandwich and effectively dropping the subject. But I knew my answer was a cop-out, and what’s more, I knew that he knew it, too. For some reason, I felt the need to justify myself.
“Honestly, that’s what came into my head,” I insisted. “And you’re supposed to answer as quickly as possible, without thinking about how it’s going to look or what it means about your personality. So I’m under no obligation to dredge up some memory of my happiest time and parade it in front of you—not that I’m under any obligation to you in the first place.”
Of course, I was. What with the whole driving-me-to-Arizona thing. But that didn’t give Nathan access to my inner thoughts and desires, right? It’s not like I sold my soul.
Nathan put the sandwich down. “I never said you were,” he said. “I just think it’s interesting that you feel you have to ‘dredge’ it up in the first place.”
Did he have a minor in psychology or something? Because I had to admit, he was pretty good at this. A little more hard-hitting Albert Ellis than feel-good Carl Rogers, but good nonetheless.
I was still considering my response when Nathan surprised me by reaching across the table, grabbing my hand. “Listen, forget about it,” he said. “It’s none of my business, anyway.”
Psych Major Syndrome Page 18
