The Fifteenth Minute

by Sarina Bowen

  But we’re going to be really good at it, I’d teased.

  Naturally, she’d replied. But I’m not giving a free show. Come over here?

  I couldn’t do that, of course. And I didn’t want to explain. So I invited her over to my place instead. And since I needed a plausible excuse to switch the venue to my place—other than the truth, which is that I’m not allowed into her dorm—I’d added, I’ll make dinner.

  My heart palpitated after I hit send on that one. Because it sounded like a date. And I owed her a date.

  But I can’t fucking date. I can’t.

  That sounds great, she’d replied.

  That had settled it. I would make her dinner just this once. So it had better be awesome.

  My family is Italian, and I make a good lasagna. So I’d spent my morning picking up supplies at the grocery store, then making two lasagnas. My mom has a saying: never make just one lasagna. “It’s an amazing dish, but it’s a pain in the backside,” she always says. “Only a fool makes one of them. Always make two. You can eat twice for the effort of cooking once.”

  So I did. One of them I wrapped up and froze. The other is in the oven now, making the house smell awesome. Lianne is due in ten minutes, so I’m spending that time panic-cleaning. The living room looks decent enough after my attentions so I head into my room and make my bed. Lianne won’t be setting foot in my bedroom tonight, of course, but if she sticks her head in here I don’t want her to think I’m a slob.

  This year I seem to spend ninety percent of my time worrying about what other people think of me. It’s exhausting.

  From my back pocket, my phone rings. “Hello?” I answer, wishing I didn’t sound winded. I might clean my house to impress a girl, but I sure didn’t want her to know.

  “Daniel? It’s Jack.”

  Jack is the lawyer, and the last person I want to talk to right now. “It’s Saturday night,” I blurt out. Why the hell would he call now?

  “I know,” he chuckles. “But I’m having one of those weeks. I was in court all day yesterday and didn’t get a chance to tell you that the college gave us the meeting I asked for.”

  That stops me cold. “They did? The other lawyer couldn’t get them to do that.”

  Jack chuckles again. “I told them we would sue for discrimination and slander if they didn’t give you a forum to tell your side of the story.”

  Fuck. “But I don’t want to sue anyone.” I just want it to all go away.

  “I know that. But the college needed a reminder that the rest of your life hangs in the balance. And threat of a countersuit was the best way for me to make that point.”

  This whole thing is such a fucking disaster. Who sues their own college and then later holds out his hand for a diploma?

  “Daniel, look—they understand that I’m the bad guy here. My role is to be the one who agitates. They don’t think you’re sitting in your dorm room plotting a revolution.”

  “I don’t have a dorm room,” I mutter.

  “Exactly. And I’m the one whose job it is to point out that they’ve been unfair.”

  “Okay,” I say, my chest tightening with misery. I hate this, but I’ll hate being kicked out of school more.

  “They gave us February twelfth. That’s in less than a month.”

  My gut clenches. This is just like scheduling surgery. You’re supposed to be glad to get it over with, but who wants to be cut open in the first place? “June would be better,” I say. If I could just get one more semester under my belt…

  “The girl will sue if they put off her case until June.”

  Of course she will.

  “You and I need to meet next weekend. I’m going to ask you questions and give you some tips. We’re going to rehearse your testimony. I know you’re a busy guy. We can do this on either Saturday or Sunday. Which one works best for you?”

  “Uh…” I close my eyes and think of the hockey schedule. Luckily, the men’s hockey team has another road trip planned. “I guess Saturday is okay.”

  “All right—I’m putting you in for Saturday the twenty-fifth. You’ll get an email from my assistant confirming the location and time. And let me say one more thing—you need to be very careful for the next couple of weeks. Squeaky clean. No complaints against you for anything, no matter how trivial.”

  That just makes me ornery. “I never had a single complaint against me.” Just this one enormous one.

  “Of course you haven’t.” My lawyer’s voice is low and quiet. “Just be mindful that you can’t afford to be part of anything questionable. If your friends are stirring up trouble, just remove yourself from the situation.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hang in there, Daniel. This is progress.”

  Too bad progress feels like being run over by a Zamboni. “Thank you. I’ll look for that email.”

  We disconnect, and I kick one of the old armchairs that Orsen and his teammates found to furnish the house.

  I do not want to tell a room full of college administrators what happened in my bedroom on a random night last April. How I had sex with my neighbor (and lab partner) even though I wasn’t very attracted to her. Even though it was all her idea, and we weren’t drunk. It was perfectly consensual and perfectly legal and still not a moment I’m looking forward to describing.

  I’ll have to admit to the whole world that I’d been kind of a shit, even if it wasn’t the kind she’d accused me of being. In the interest of defending myself, I was still going to sound like the world’s biggest asshole. It was just a hookup. My family will be sitting there listening to me describe who removed whose clothes, and who first brought up the idea of a condom.

  Afterward, I never called this girl. Didn’t ask her out. Didn’t bring up that night again. It wasn’t my proudest moment, and everyone I love will know all about it.

  Even if I win, I’ll lose.

  My phone rings again. I take it out of my pocket warily. If it’s the lawyer, I’m not answering again. Let him leave a voicemail if there’s something he forgot to say.

  LIANNE the display reads. And goddamn, I’d forgotten she was on her way over. I’d actually forgotten. “Hello?”

  “Can you do me a favor?” She’s breathing hard like someone who’s been running. “Open your door in about sixty seconds. But don’t show your face.”

  “Why?”

  “Photographer.”

  Five seconds later my hands are on the deadbolt. I pull the door open a crack and wait.

  “Thank you,” her voice says into my ear. Then, “Go fuck yourself,” she says a little louder, to someone else.

  “You kiss your mother with that mouth?” a male voice asks.

  “My mother? Why don’t you go stalk her? She likes attention, even from assholes.”

  I want to look out the door, but she told me not to. And there’s no peep hole.

  Lianne has ended our call, but now I hear feet on the front steps. A small hand pushes the door open. She steps into the room and slams the door behind herself. “Fucker,” she grumbles.

  I try a joke. “Aw, but I think so highly of you.”

  She gives a little frustrated shriek. “Sometimes I hate my life.”

  “Sing it to me, sister.” I cross the room to the picture window. The guy outside is studying the house, but for the moment his camera hangs loosely on his chest. “What does he want?”

  Lianne shakes her head. “Just pictures. He’ll sell them to a tabloid, and they’ll write a fake story. Princess Vindi’s near-death experience. Her bout with bulimia. Her alien love child. Whatever. I’m not very interesting so they have to make their own news.”

  “Should you call the police?”

  She shakes her head. “He’s not on private property. These guys know their rights and they’re really good at making sure they can’t get into any real trouble.”

  Out the window, the photographer just stands there, a patient expression on his face. “So what do we do?”

  “We read the Scot
tish play,” Lianne says, peeling off her coat. “He’ll get bored and cold eventually.”

  “Okay. But dinner first, right? I made lasagna.”

  Lianne’s face lights up. “Is that what smells so good?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s done, too.” She follows me into the kitchen, where I peek into the oven. The cheese is bubbling everywhere, and the top has browned. “My mother made sure that my brother and I knew how to make three dishes.”

  “What are the other two?” Lianne asks, coming to stand beside me. Because of the dramatic entrance she’d made, I hadn’t gotten a good look at her yet. Every time I see Lianne she looks better than the last. Tonight she’s wearing skinny jeans that make her waist look tiny, and a sweater that feels ridiculously soft when she brushes up against me.

  I have to fight the urge to measure both the sweater’s softness and the size of her waist with my hands. “Um…” What was the question? “I make a nice frittata, and I can do roast chicken.”

  “I can’t cook at all,” she confesses. “But I suppose if you want to live off campus, it’s handy to learn.”

  I never wanted to live off campus, but I’m not going to bring that up. “Want a soda? I have Coke and diet.”

  She opens the refrigerator and grabs a can of diet. “Thanks!”

  Shot scored. I bought those just for her.

  I plate up two big squares of lasagna. There’s Caesar salad, too, though I bought it at Gino’s on my way home. I divide that onto our two plates. It’s a nice meal. I let this girl down once already, and I need her to know that it’s not personal.

  Nobody ever wants to hear, “It’s not you, baby, it’s me.” But in this case, that’s one hundred percent true.

  Our plates are ready, but now I don’t know where we should sit. The kitchen table is tiny and wedged into the corner. We rarely sit there.

  But the couch is right in front of the window, where the asshole photographer probably still waits. We don’t have curtains or blinds. My roommates walk around in their underwear all the time anyway—they just don’t care. Although there’s a curtain rod hanging at the ready. “Hang on a second, okay? I want to cover the living room window.”

  I duck into Orsen’s room. He’s got a banner tacked up to his wall. CONGRATULATIONS HARKNESS HOCKEY, CONFERENCE CHAMPS, it reads. The college hung one in each of the houses’ dining halls last spring after his team made it all the way to the national championships.

  It only takes me a second to pull it down. After carrying it into the living room, I stand on the back of the sofa and drape it over the lonely curtain rod. “There.”

  When I climb down, Lianne is watching me, her plate in her hands, her face turning red. “I’m sorry, DJ. I shouldn’t have come. This is so…” She shakes her head, and her exasperated expression makes my heart give a tug. “One wonders why I don’t have any friends, right?”

  “Come on, now,” I whisper, taking the plate out of her hands. I carry it over to the coffee table. “Forget about the asshole with the telephoto. He’s the pathetic one, right?”

  She plops down on our couch with a groan. “I guess.”

  “Eat up. We have a play to read.” I dash into the kitchen again for my own plate and a Coke. When I return, Lianne is tucking in to her dinner. “This is awesome. I didn’t eat pasta for about ten years, and now I don’t know how I survived.”

  I sit down beside her on the sofa. “You didn’t eat pasta?” Was that even possible? “My family would starve if it wasn’t for pasta.”

  “Yeah? I’ve met your brother. Are there more of you?”

  I nod my head and swallow a mouthful of lasagna. “We have a little sister, too. Still in high school.”

  “Who does she look like?” Lianne tilts her head and studies me, and warmth creeps across my face under the heat of her gaze. “You don’t look much like your brother. I mean, I can see it in the shape of your face, a little…”

  I give her a grin. “You’re seeing things then, smalls. I’m adopted.”

  “Oh, geez.” She sets her fork down on her plate. “Sorry! I’m such an idiot.”

  “Why? People have been saying that to me my whole life.”

  She’s studying me now. “You must get sick of hearing it, though.”

  I shrug it off. I don’t like anyone knowing that it gets to me. I wasn’t adopted until I was two. My adoptive parents knew my birth mother from church. She was struggling on Long Island, away from her family back in Colombia. I don’t know all the details, but she gave me up and then moved back to her country.

  I don’t remember her at all.

  Time to change the subject. “Do you have siblings?”

  “Sort of. Not really.” Lianne uses her fork to cut another bite of my lasagna. I’m happy to see that it’s disappearing from her plate.

  “Sort of? Not really?”

  “I have two half brothers. They’re in their thirties. The last time I saw them was ten years ago. I’m not even on the Christmas card list.”

  It’s my turn to stare. “Jesus. Sorry.”

  She lifts her perfect chin to took at me. “Don’t be. My father was on his fourth marriage. I was born when he was sixty-five. My brothers were teenagers before I could talk. And my mom made sure that they weren’t ever invited to be with us. She didn’t like competition of any kind.”

  “And your dad just put up with that?”

  She tilts her head to the side, considering the question. “I think he did whatever he wanted. My family was never normal. My dad had acting jobs all over the world, and my mom was a costume designer. So my parents never spent much time together in the same house. I’m pretty sure my father saw at least as much of my brothers as he saw of me…” Her eyes go soft. “He was a lot of fun, my dad. The life of the party. I always knew he was interested in me, but only up to a point. Nobody ever got more than a tiny fraction of his attention, but when it was your turn, there was nobody better.”

  “He passed away, right?” I ask.

  She nods. “I was eleven. There was some big scandal, of course. He was with some other woman when he died.” She rolls her eyes. “My mother had three memorials for him. One in France. One in Hollywood. One in New York. There’s nothing that woman won’t milk.”

  Yikes. “Your family is a little more colorful than mine.”

  “That’s a kind way to put it.” She smiles at me, and I feel it in the center of my chest. This girl’s smile is something else. All that perfection lit up. It’s powerful stuff.

  After we’ve eaten our fill, Lianne carries our plates to the kitchen and returns with two glasses of water. “Reading out loud makes you thirsty,” she says, setting down the glasses and settling onto the sofa next to me. “Just tell me if you need a break, okay? We don’t want to strain your voice.” She kicks off her shoes and tucks her slender feet beneath her body. Then she hands me one of two identical paperback copies of Macbeth. “Ready?”

  “Yeah.” I open mine and flip past the introduction. This feels more intimate than I’d expected. But of course we’d sit close together. We don’t want to shout across the room at each other. Though at this distance I can smell the sweet scent of her shampoo.

  We’re studying, asshole, I remind myself. “So how do you want this to go?” I ask, settling my thumb on Act 1, Scene 1.

  “At the beginning we’ll take turns alternating lines, regardless of who they belong to. But whenever Lady M is in a scene, I’ll do her part.”

  “Okay.”

  She purses her perfect, pink lips and begins to read the first line, which belongs to Witch #1. “When shall we three meet again? In thunder lightning or in rain?”

  Feeling slightly self-conscious, I read the second witch’s line. “When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”

  “That will be ere the set of sun,” she returns.

  It takes only a couple of minutes until I forget to feel self-conscious, because it takes a lot of concentration to pronounce Shakespeare’s ver
se. I relax into the sound of our two voices, and in the next scene I’m better able to sink into the story. Three Scotsmen recount a battle they’ve just won, and it’s exciting. “If I say sooth, I must report they were as cannons overcharged with double cracks, so they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.”

  I haven’t read Macbeth since high school English, and I’d forgotten how creepy it is. Witches. Death. Dark poetry. Whenever I finish a line, I’m rewarded with the sound of Lianne’s voice. She reads in a calm and measured tone. She isn’t acting out the parts, just stepping through the language like I am, listening to the words as they come.

  When Macbeth meets the witches, they tell him he’ll be king. But he doesn’t trust it. Then Lady Macbeth finally takes the stage, and Lianne sits up straighter beside me. The scene has her reading a letter from Macbeth, and then worrying that he’ll be afraid to seize the crown and fulfill the witches’ prophecy. “Yet I do fear thy nature; it is too full o’ the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.”

  We’ve only been reading for a few minutes when Lady Macbeth plots the king’s murder.

  I stop Lianne after we read that scene, handing her a drink of water. “Quite a part you’ve picked out, smalls. I’d forgotten that the whole thing was her idea. Mr. M doesn’t even agree to do it. Not really.”

  “He does so!” In her excitement, Lianne wiggles closer to me, flipping the pages of her book. “Here—he says, ‘We will speak further.’”

  “No way.” I laugh. “That’s just something a husband says to get rid of his wife before the hockey game comes on TV. ‘Honey, we’ll talk about it later.’ It’s not the same as saying, ‘You’re right, I need to murder the king.’”

  Lianne turns her face away and laughs, and I love the sound of it, and the weight of her knee against my thigh. She’s near enough to me that all my senses are on high alert. “You make a good point, sir.”

  Since I’d do anything to make this girl smile at me again, I make a goofy fist pump. Then I poke her in the side. “Your line, Lady Mac…”

  She moves fast, reaching up to clamp a hand over my mouth. “Don’t say it, unless you’re reading it right from the script. It’s bad luck.”