Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  “I’m so happy for all your good fortune.”

  Miles snickered; he was a smart guy.

  But even my insincere good wishes seemed like a betrayal of Brandon, and slammed me with nausea. The blinking in my left eye was pronounced—the zebra stripes fattening, morphing into electric rectangles. I casually put up my hand to shield the eye. Still, I could make out Sylvia Plath in the poetry section—her matte red lipstick and pearls, winter white coat over an angora sweater and pencil skirt—standing across the aisle from my fellow Kansan, Langston Hughes, in polished wing tips, with his immaculate gray wool suit. Both poets looked so elegant in their furious griefs, all daddy you bastard and the dream deferred.

  “Caitlin? Hey. Is your eye bothering you?”

  I had the terrible memory of how kind Miles had been when I’d shattered my hand: Oh, the carrying of books, the sending of flowers. Of course I had warmed to him. The first time Nancy saw me walking with Miles on campus, she looked annoyed: We (Nancy, Brandon, and I) were meeting for lunch at V & T, and I was running late. The second time was at the library, where Miles was telling me a story about his brother Evan, who was in rehab, and how his mother cried whenever she got off the phone with him. I was engrossed in his tale when Nancy walked past, giving me the wariest grin. I managed to wave, but I had my head tilted close to Miles, amazed at the equalizing power of meth. Who were the madmen behind America’s best marketing campaign? Try Meth! It’s not just for poor Midwesterners working at fast-food restaurants! Who knew meth could mess you up even if your dad managed a hedge fund and your mom was the principal cellist in the New York Philharmonic?

  The third time Nancy saw Miles—Dear Reader, cue the biblical symbolism of betrayal, the cock crowing in the distance!—would break Nancy’s soft freshman heart, and mine, too.

  “Miles McPherson?” A crazy woman (I know: glass houses, but at least I wasn’t wearing a long, matted raccoon tail clipped to the back of my coat and a knit Christmas tree hat) approached Miles and struck up a determined conversation about The Sorrows of Young Tate.

  He gave me an apologetic look as she continued to corner him, and I remembered his politeness, but little else. Miles seemed vague, somehow, undefined: How could Miles ever have competed with Brandon? How could I even, now, mention them in the same sentence? Oh, I was such a fool, because the moment that I held the vase of violets that Miles had sent me, I’d walked right out of my personal Garden of Eden.

  Alright, so the Garden of Eden had been a dorm room shared with Nancy and with Brandon, who spent most of his morning and early afternoon slumped on a twin bed, watching movies on my laptop, pausing to get up, stretch like an indulged cat, drink a Heineken if there was one left from the previous night’s six-pack (not usually), and eat a handful of Wheat Thins. He had to be careful, as he wasn’t an official roommate, and we shared a bathroom with our suitemates, Amanda from Louisville and Leah from Des Moines. I assumed they were geniuses, to make it to Columbia from their backwater states: Yes, Dear Reader, fanciful thinking for someone from Kansas. One morning my first week at school, Amanda had lightly knocked on the door from the bathroom side. It was so odd to answer the bathroom door instead of the door to the hallway. Also, I was the only one in the room, another rarity.

  She was in a fluffy white bathrobe, asking could she borrow my CHI iron? Hers had conked out.

  “Oh, of course! I probably left it plugged in anyway.”

  Amanda laughed. “You always do! I’m like Fire Marshall Bob, switching it off every morning. I knew it was yours. I figured it wasn’t Nancy’s!”

  I touched the ends of my long, fake-straight hair, feeling self-conscious about my natural frizz and curls, and also vaguely uncomfortable to be reminded of Nancy’s naturally straight black hair, a gift of her Chinese ancestors. The most casual observation about race or ethnicity gave me Midwestern nervousness.

  Amanda thanked me and pulled the door half-shut before she opened it again. “Where’s Anne Frank?”

  “What?”

  “You know of what I speak.” She made her voice tragically throaty, as if narrating a History Channel documentary. “The hidden roommate.”

  I had no words.

  “Leah and I hear someone pissing like a racehorse in the middle of the night; it’s not a girly stream. Also, pret-ty sure you and Nancy don’t leave the toilet seat up.” Amanda was still laughing when she closed the bathroom door.

  Dear Reader, I sat on my bed and fumed for a full five minutes. Sure, I was surprised because I thought we had been so careful, so quiet, and yet obviously our suitemates knew Brandon was living on the other side of the bathroom door. Mostly I couldn’t believe Amanda’s casual anti-Semitism. Because, really, equating a boyfriend crashing at the dorm with Anne Frank’s situation? It was beyond callous: It was sickening.

  After my thoughts had stewed into a frenzy, I yanked open the bathroom door and proceeded to bitch Amanda out while she calmly flat-ironed her hair in the mirror. But when I was done ranting, she gave it right back to me.

  “Hey, Caitlin? First of all, I am not making a joke out of Anne Frank. I think you are making a joke out of her: turning her into a handy-dandy poignant symbol of injustice. Also? It’s totally reductive to think that Anne Frank wouldn’t have had a sense of humor, to think she was something other than a regular girl, smart and funny, with a crooked smile and a side barrette, who liked to write in her diary, who had something terrible happen to her because people went about their day, la de da, probably issuing a lot of platitudes: Let’s not rock the boat! Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill! And the majority of people looked the other way and let something crazy-terrible happen. But don’t make Anne Frank into the manic pixie dream girl of suffering. She was just a random Jewish girl like me, but she was like you, too, my crinkly-haired Catholic sister. Ouch!”

  A dramatic end to her soliloquy: Amanda had burned her forehead with the CHI iron. I was peeved about being called out for my bland, unjustified Midwestern self-righteousness, but she was doing such a horrible job straightening the back of her hair that I went ahead and did it for her—my good hand using the iron, my casted hand sectioning her hair—while we hotly debated the meaning of the CHI acronym: Cultural Hatred Industry? Conquer Humidity Intensely? Amanda also wondered if there was a hashtag for a Catholic trying to school her suitemate, whom she hadn’t known was a Jew, on Anne Frank and anti-Semitism.

  The crazy lady was jabbering away, still hanging on to Miles. She had her hand on his coat sleeve; grime showed under her thick yellow fingernails, which were of differing, jagged lengths and flecked with the distant remains of sparkly blue nail polish. Miles was a neat freak so I had to smile when he looked down at her DIY manicure in such close proximity to his own scrubbed hand.

  He noticed me smiling and smiled back, and I remembered how I had once felt about him. Dear Reader, I didn’t understand the trajectory of romance, of life. Brandon had been my first love and when we’d moved to New York together I thought he would be my only love. Oh, but my wild heart had briefly given way to Miles, it had, and I hadn’t understood that romance was mostly a whimsical game of charades, that you could switch partners to experience the mysterious and the unique over and over—Your phrases are pure magic! I love it when you tease out my hidden meaning—but that a pattern would form, nonetheless, and you would soon grow bored with your partner’s quirky allegiance to Rockabilly or Middlemarch or KFC hot wings.

  The first time Miles kissed me, we were standing in a deserted hallway in John Jay Hall: a new mouth on mine, his body so close I could feel his heart beating through his T-shirt. October had come in like a lion, cool air and already the crunch of leaves. We pulled apart, lowered our eyes, and kissed again, pressing our jacketless bodies together a little harder. Miles was basically the same size as me, perhaps a little thinner, while Brandon was much taller, and muscular—comparatively, it was all so interesting. Miles seemed so pleased to be kissing me, to be lightly rubbing my thumb that jutted
out of my orange cast, and oh the deep, shameful truth: It wasn’t so much kissing Miles that felt exciting, but the act of betrayal itself.

  When I got back to the dorm room, Nancy was stretched out on her bed, playing Scrabble on her iPhone.

  “Hey. Where’s Brandon?”

  “Taking a walk. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I snapped.

  Nancy laughed. “Okay.”

  “Sorry.”

  Nancy smiled at me and went back to her game. She was a very pleasant person to live with.

  I looked at the cafeteria menu taped to the wall, checking out the evening’s dismal entrees. Nancy and I were pretty much wasting our meal plan and loading up our credit cards with takeout, because it seemed sad for Brandon to eat alone and sadder still to smuggle food from the cafeteria for him, as if he were an adorable, forbidden puppy we were sheltering from the storm.

  Nancy stared into her phone. “A Q and an X, so a potential high score. But no vowels, so how can I possibly make a word?”

  “It’s feast or famine,” I agreed, for I, too, was an iPhone Scrabbler. “The vowels are always a problem.”

  I held my hurt hand in front of me like an apple and brushed my lips over the rough cast. “So, you know that guy Miles?”

  Nancy frowned, still looking at the phone, trying to solve the vowel conundrum. “The short guy with the swoopy hair?”

  “He’s not that short! And he’s pretty charming, actually. He could be George Clooney’s son. He’s got that smile, that whole easy, self-deprecating vibe.”

  “You think?”

  “Nancy, come on. You seriously don’t see any resemblance between Miles and George Clooney?”

  “They both have arms and legs.”

  “Well, apparently, the multi-limbed Miles has developed”—I added a syrupy twang to my next words—“fe-aylings for me.”

  “What?” Nancy looked up from her phone, grimacing. “Gross. How do you know?”

  Well. The gross was a little off-putting. I leaned back on my bed and laid my head on my pillow, which smelled of floral hair gels and Chanel Chance perfume and Brandon. My hand injury and personal drama prevented me from going to the Laundromat in a timely fashion. I rolled over so I was facing the wall—it was so hard to get comfortable, the surgical rods aligning my fingers radiating a frozen, metallic pain—and carefully bolstered my comforter around my hurt hand.

  “Miles told me. Pretty directly.”

  “Oh my God. Cait!” Nancy tossed her iPhone on her bed; she walked—it was all of three steps and really more of a leap—over and sat on the edge of my bed. “Does he not know about Brandon?”

  “Oh, he knows. I told him my boyfriend from home was living in my dorm room. He finds it unthinkably bizarre, you know, that Brandon wouldn’t have gone to college himself; that he’s just hanging around here. The good news? Miles has pronounced you a saint for putting up with the whole situation.”

  “He’s never even met me. Uggh. Why would he frame my life as a situation to ‘put up with,’ or condescend to me by pronouncing my sainthood?”

  “So says Our Lady of Dormitory Endurance and Kindness!”

  “Well, he sounds like a complete asshole.”

  I turned to look at her. “Nancy, you’re a saint that speaks the language of the people. No lofty Latin or holy hosannas for you!”

  “How is it his business? Brandon is awesome. And he’s not hanging around doing nothing. He takes long walks around the city, and he thinks about things, he has so many unusual perspectives, and he likes to talk—”

  “I kissed him. Miles. I kissed Miles.”

  “Caitlin?” Her hurt-bird voice sounded full of wonder, for she had not known I could be such a jerk.

  I turned back to the wall and punished myself by thinking of a good person who never did anything stupid or unkind, a high school friend, Kelson Garcia: She was spending a gap year with Jesuit Core, working with homeless families in Miami. I envisioned Kelson walking down the beach, wearing a white eyelet sundress and a crown of daisies while I drifted on the ocean, a passenger on a barge of sludge, flies buzzing around my filthy face.

  “Why would you ever kiss someone that … wasn’t Brandon?” Nancy shielded her eyes with her hands, as if it was all too much, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail, securing it with one of the black rubber bands she wore on her wrist like a bracelet. “Are you going to tell him?”

  “God, no!”

  I couldn’t judge Nancy’s silence: Did she think I was kind for sparing Brandon’s feelings, or a liar—via the old sin of omission—on top of being a cheater?

  “It’s just all getting … kind of old. He hasn’t found a job. He’s using my debit card to buy food and, of course, beer.”

  I waved my hand to indicate all the Heineken bottles, which, despite his lax schedule, Brandon couldn’t find time to recycle. Afternoon sunlight rectangling in through the dorm window illuminated the bottles: They sparkled in the metal trash can like candy-green sea glass. But not really. Not quite.

  Nancy shrunk back, horrified that I would allude to something so pedestrian as a cache of beer bottles or my alarming debit card activity. But earlier that week I had picked up her copy of The Second Sex and was absently reading a page when I saw a series of ghostly B’s in the margin, a few swollen, circular hearts.

  “I just don’t get it! Why would you kiss Miles?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. The kiss itself was a bit mediocre.”

  Nancy snorted. “Shocking.”

  “Really?” I thought Miles was sort of fetching.

  “That guy? He’s just like any ambitious, entitled guy I went to high school with. I know his deal just by looking at him.”

  “That might be a touch reductive.”

  “Trust me, Caitlin. Miles? Every other guy you meet here, or maybe for the rest your life, will be his emotional, intellectual doppelgänger.”

  “Oh, thank you,” I whispered, as if overcome by gratitude. “Thank you ever so much, Dr. Phil.”

  Nancy was sitting cross-legged on the edge of my bed and nervously jiggling her foot, creating a vibration that made my hand hurt. I touched her knee, and she stopped.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just with Brandon, I’m always driving the bus, you know?”

  She didn’t. She looked at me as puzzled as if I were wearing a New York City Transit Authority shirt.

  I stared at the wall again, taking comfort in the swirled pattern of the ecru paint, and began a self-serving soliloquy:

  “In high school, you know, we were a thing. I was the super-smart girl, which, trust me, is a lot easier to be in Kansas than here—and he was gorgeous, the captain of the football team, and everyone was like: Those two? And I lived in the leafy suburb of McMansions with granite countertops, reverse-osmosis water filters, and Merry Maids and Chem-Lawn service, and he lived in a meth-y neighborhood with super-junky houses, the front yards full of jacked-up Camaros—primer gray, and always waiting for that elusive paint job—and ancient plastic toys and staked pit bulls and … Oh my God, Nancy. Just saying this out loud makes me realize how I was so invested in the hokey idea of it all, my self-aggrandizing idea of romance.” I lowered my voice and added in the dramatic cadence of a miniseries voice-over: “He was poor, but handsome, with modest intellectual skills. She was upper, upper-middle class, and bitchy, and possessed an uncanny ability to pencil in the correct ovals on all manner of achievement tests.”

  Nancy forced a chuckle, though it was saturated with disgust: “Heh.”

  “But now, being with Brandon here … I’m just seeing how much work it all is.”

  “Caitlin!” Nancy gasped.

  And I didn’t stop there.

  “I love Brandon but I don’t know … will he just live with me forever and never do anything? Do I have to be responsible for both of us, forever and ever, Amen? I mean, it’s not like I don’t wish things could be easier for him. His dyslexia is so bad that
he can’t really enjoy a book, and he transposes letters whenever he writes. He’s just not like us. The only thing he’s ever excelled at is playing football, but he’s not good enough to play for a four-year school, not even a hokey little Catholic university in Kansas. He got scholarships from two community colleges but he passed; he passed on playing football to come to Columbia with me.”

  “That’s amazing. Brandon loves you so much. He sacrificed something for you, Caitlin.”

  “I guess. But then again, it’s not like Notre Dame was calling.”

  “Well, God.”

  “I know I’m being harsh. But to be honest, the present tense is kind of a drag. I need some distance from him. I do.”

  “But Caitlin, how’s that going to work when you’re sharing half a room with someone? With someone who loves you? He loves you.”

  “I want to go out with Miles.”

  Nancy sucked in her breath.

  “He’s someone I wouldn’t have to worry about; he has his own thing going on; in fact he’s quite self-involved. But I’m stuck. What would Brandon do if I broke up with him? He has no place to go. God, I can’t let him sleep in the park. He doesn’t even have the money to get himself home. I would have to—my parents would have to—fund the break-up.”

  After saying something so nakedly crappy, I tried to joke: “Love and capitalism, am I right, ladies?”

  But Nancy didn’t laugh. She was silent, and in the silence, I heard the softest metallic click.

  When I turned over and looked at Nancy—tears in her eyes, her quivering mouth—she looked at the door. “He was here!”

  Dear Reader, it was my turn to gasp. “Brandon?”

  Nancy nodded. “He was outside, by the door. It was open just an inch or two. I thought maybe he had his headphones on. But then he shut the door.”