by Lori L. Otto
“I love this place.”
“So you’re a regular at Pulitzer.”
“I like to shut the place down–the coffee place, that is. I do my best writing at night.”
“So do I,” I tell her, holding the door open.
“Caffe Americano and whatever she wants,” I say to the barista at Ruvelyn’s Café as I look down at Coley, who stands at least a foot shorter than me.
She smiles brightly. “Caramel Macchiato and a heated blueberry muffin with two things of butter. Please and thank you.”
“Make that two muffins with two things of butter, if you don’t mind. That sounds good.”
“It’s worth the extra laps in the pool.”
“You swim?” I pay for our snacks, happy that she doesn’t even try so there’s no awkward argument to break the conversation.
“Second in state my junior and senior years.”
“Are you on the roster here?” I ask her as we find a seat.
“I didn’t make the team this year. Apparently, second in Virginia isn’t good enough for Columbia. But I’ve gotten faster on both my freestyle and backstroke, so I’ll be ready for tryouts. I know you’re on the team.”
“Of course you know,” I say with a laugh. “So, Virginia? Which part?”
“Arlington.”
“Do you have a parent in the government?”
“Dad’s in the Secret Service.” She grins.
“How much dirt do you actually have on me?”
“As far as I can tell, there’s none to be had. But trust me, I never asked him for special favors. I’m interested in journalism, so I did my own research and used my own resources.”
“And what does your mother do?”
“She’s a cop in D.C. My parents are divorced, but still friends.”
“A cop? A secret service agent and a cop? Well, what role does your dad have in the secret service administration?” It’s a big organization. He could do administrative support, for all I know.
“He’s assigned to the President and First Lady.”
“No shit?”
She laughs out loud, covering her mouth, accidentally kicking my shin as she swings her legs under the high table I’d chosen to sit in. “Oh, I’m sorry!”
“I'm such an ass! Is this table too high for you?” I ask, looking beneath the table at the expanse between her feet and the floor. “I didn’t even think… we can sit at a regular table.”
“I’m fine,” she says as she continues to giggle. “I’ve adjusted to my vertically-challenged state over my lifetime. I’m laughing because I didn’t expect to hear you cuss.”
I quirk my brow at her. “Seriously? I grew up in New York City.”
“But you went to Catholic school. Your dad is Jack Holland. He’s so perfect and proper.”
I shake my head. “You must not know many people from Catholic schools, first of all. Secondly, my dad has his faults.” I rethink my argument, because he’s pretty close to perfect and proper, and I know I disappoint him every time I curse in front of him. “Well… have you heard of my mom? If I picked up any bad habits at home, it’s more likely I picked them up from her–or Liv, of course.” My sister has never been afraid to say how she feels in whatever manner she needs to say it. She helped me have a voice many times when I was much younger.
“Your mom seems very real.”
“She is. They’re both great,” I admit. “I’m incredibly lucky.”
“So you really do get along with them as well as it looks like you do in public?”
“That’s real.”
“That’s impressive.”
“No reason to fight. I’ve had a good life, thanks to them. What about you? Do you have any siblings? Get along with your folks?”
“We’re not here to talk about me,” she says as our drinks and muffins are delivered to the table. “I have to formulate an opinion about you…” She scratches her head as if deep in thought.
“Yeah, this is kind of silly for you. First impression, my ass. Your first impression of me came, what, how many years ago?” Her tanned skin blushes about seven shades of pink before quickly returning to its normal color. She has freckles around her nose, too, that I see clearly now that my attention was drawn there. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
“Yeah, that was rude.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I was joking.”
“Okay.”
After she unfolds the foil on a pat of butter, she sets it close to the hot pastry and picks up a fork. I watch her process as she slices a tiny sliver of butter with the fork and then cuts a piece of muffin, eating all of it together in one bite.
“That’s efficient,” I tell her.
“I was fifteen.”
“And that was… how many years ago?”
“Never ask a lady her age, Trey. You are so much ruder than I thought you’d be.”
“Damn! I’m so sorry!”
“You’re so easy to get!” An airy giggle escapes her lips that makes me laugh with her. “Still joking. And now you’re blushing.”
“You don’t ever need to point it out to me. I can feel the slightest change in color from my ghostly norm,” I assure her. “Trust me.”
“Three.” She holds up three fingers, but not the three you’d expect.
“Okay.” I don’t mind her delayed responses at all. I don’t know if she expects me to forget my questions by way of her distractions, but they don’t work. I don’t work that way. “So you’re eighteen.”
“Yes.”
“Is someone close to you deaf?” I hold up the same three fingers, what I recognize to be the American Sign Language sign for the number three. She jerks back a little bit with her eyebrows raised and her eyes bright, then answers with a few signs. “Wait. I’m not,” I tell her, shaking my head. “I know letters and numbers, and that’s about it.”
“My brother. Twin brother. He ruptured both his eardrums scuba diving when we were eleven. He can hear very little now.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, but we’re not talking about him.” She points both of her index fingers at me. “You, mister.”
“So what first impression of me are you going to use?” I ask her. “The three-year-old one, or the one from today?”
“Maybe a little of both, I don’t know.”
“Hmmm,” I say, looking at her sideways, skeptical. “This already seems like biased journalism. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t think you get a say,” she says as she sticks her little button nose in the air. Oh, if only she knew. It’d be no fun to warn her, either. She takes another bite of her muffin with the fork, this time twisting the utensil upside down after she slides the cake from it.
I can’t stop watching her mouth as she cleans all the crumbs off the fork with her lips, and with a little, tiny help from her tongue and teeth. A cute pucker hides them both from me at the end of her brief performance. I shift in my chair, my jeans noticeably more uncomfortable than they were thirty seconds ago. Thank God I picked this table instead of sitting at the counter. I follow the silver tines as she sets them back down on the plate, and then I blink, moistening my eyes that are dry from staring. When I look up, she’s looking back at me curiously.
I swallow, knowing that she caught me. After clearing my throat and wishing my skin was tanned like hers, I talk to fill the awkward silence that’s about to strangle me. “Any questions you want to ask me? Anything I can do to improve your impression of me?”
“What made you interested in writing?” She smiles, acknowledging that she’s cutting me a break.
My body relaxes at her question. “My friend, Max, and I used to play together a lot–superhero things, good guy-bad guy make-believe things–and I loved making up the stories. I never really thought they were anything spectacular, but my parents would sometimes listen to us play and just revel in the creativity. I was probably eleven or twelve at the time. They suggested that I s
tart writing our plots down for fun. Those turned into short stories, which turned into slightly longer stories, which turned into a couple mediocre short books. And then I wrote a few articles for our school paper. They were so-so. Nothing spectacular. I wasn’t really feeling it… and then one of my close friends died of cancer my sophomore year. That was rough, and it hit me hard.
“Anabel was my first kiss–like, back in preschool or something. And then, just a really good friend for all the years that followed. I had a hard time coping with the emotions, but I sat down and wrote about her, and the piece was cathartic for me and really special to her parents. They used it in a memorial for her.”
I don’t intend to tear up, but it’s been awhile since I thought about my friend. I quickly change the subject.
“That was what got me started on the blogging. My parents suggested I do volunteer work over the summer and write about my experiences in an effort to get more donations for the organizations. Having empathy for the people involved and putting that into words… it’s something I’m really good at, apparently.”
“You are,” she affirms quickly.
“You follow it?” She nods. “Do you have a favorite post?”
“Hands down, A Kinder New York.” It’s my favorite, too. It was written about the non-profit anti-bullying agency my uncle Matty works for here in Manhattan. It was a very personal article for me to write because it focused on Callen and his struggle to come out to his parents, both very religious people who had always been against homosexuality. Callen was adamant about coming out so he could be with Max. My two best friends had spent the summer before our junior year apart when they’d so desperately wanted to be with one another. It was a painful thing to watch, but then a rewarding thing to witness when they finally got together. I’m still sad that it ended–and the way it did. “All of your posts are very personal, Trey, but you could tell you had a vested interest in that one. You know, that was clearly a biased piece. Any reader knew how you wanted everything to turn out.”
“That’s definitely an opportunity of mine, to learn how to be more unbiased. It’s something that Professor Aslon has talked to me about, and it’s something I’m working on.”
“Or maybe that’s not the kind of journalist you should be.”
“I want that to be my decision, though. I want to excel in all facets. I want to be great at editorial journalism, but I also want to be able to write the facts. I want to be good at both: investigative and editorial as well. I want to decide which one makes me happiest and make the call as to which one I want to pursue. Whether it’s all the time, most of the time, or a little of everything.”
“I respect that,” she says. “I think that’s a good goal to have.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to be a poet.” She’s dreamy-eyed with her pronouncement.
“And I want to be the president,” I counter with my own pipe dream.
She chuckles and shrugs her shoulders, taking another bite of her muffin. Having learned my lesson, I look away and eat a little of my own. “Realistically, I like how you write on your blog. I like that you’re an advocate for so many companies that need a voice, so I was thinking maybe I’d work for a PR firm or something like that.”
I shake my head at her, but wipe the grimace off my face as soon as I realize I’m making it.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s like advertising. It encroaches a little bit on falsehoods, don’t you think?”
“It’s no different from what you do now.”
“It’s very different,” I argue. “When you’re at a PR firm, you’re answering to people and they’re paying you for that. What I do–nobody pays me for my blog so everything I say is truth. It’s what I want to write, and there have been a few times that I volunteered and didn’t write about it because I didn’t like the way the place was run, and I told them that. I’ve written articles before without publishing them. I’ll just give them to the person I’m working with because I don’t ever go with the intention of hurting an organization. My goal is to help the people bring in more money for the causes they believe in. When I see things that don’t feel right, or I see corrupt people running things, that’s when the investigative side comes in, and I’ll call it out. Right now, I’m just a college student, though, so what I say doesn’t hold much power. In a few years, people will know me. I’ll have a voice. I’ll be able to turn my story into a news station. I’ll be able to cause problems for people and hold them accountable. That’s something I want to do.
“But for a PR firm, you’re always worried about your client’s image and you want them to look good. That’s the only thing you care about. That’s what you’re hired to do. Like, I could never work for a PR firm.”
Coley bites the inside of her cheek in thought. “Maybe we’re just different that way.”
“Maybe we are,” I agree. “It takes all kinds. Everyone needs a job and there are people skilled to do that. Maybe there are companies that hold people accountable, or PR companies that would encourage people to make changes when they see something wrong. What do I know? I’m a nineteen-year-old guy in college. I don’t know how anything works. This is just my assessment of it.”
“Right,” she says. “I don’t think all PR firms are evil.”
“I didn’t mean that they were.”
“I know.”
“I suppose you wrote in high school.”
She thinks about her answer before responding. “Yeah, a little.”
“Anything I can read?”
She crinkles her nose. “You’ll see my stuff soon enough. I mean, I was obviously good enough to get into The Wit, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“True. It’s not easy to get on the paper here. You had to impress someone in your first semester English class to get on staff. And you had to have some good samples from high school, too. I know that from experience. What course did you pick in the fall?”
“Sentimentalism,” she tells me.
“Interesting choice.” I grin at her. “We could have some interesting discussions.”
“Why, what did you take?”
“Transcendentalism.”
She shakes her head. “But, see, I already know you let your emotions guide you. You’re incredibly empathetic. You’re a scholar who likes to learn things. I respect that.”
“So they’re scholarly discussions.”
“I’m game. Name the time and place,” she says just before she takes the last bite of her muffin. As I start going through my calendar in my head, I realize what I’m doing.
“First, let’s get through this assignment. Do you think you have enough dirt on me to write something?”
“Pretty sure I’ve got this in the bag.”
“Confidence. That’s what I like to hear. Keep that up and we’re going to have a very successful semester.” I look at my watch, letting her know that it’s time to go. She looks surprised when she realizes how late it is already.
“Oh, wow. Time flew!”
“Yeah. Do you know where you are?” I tease her. “Need help finding your next class?”
“We’re already in Pulitzer Hall. I just start out here for everything and wander aimlessly until I stumble into the right building and room with people talking about things that sound interesting. Eventually, I’ll get lucky.”
My mind goes places it shouldn’t.
“As long as you have a plan.” I grab my things and stand up. “Good luck on your article. Make it good. And positive. I think I was pretty nice to you. The coffee and muffin weren’t a bribe, necessarily–unless they need to be.” She bites her lip when she laughs. “Don’t say shit about me to Professor Aslon. She thinks I’m a saint,” I tell her on my way out the door.
“I’ll make sure to set the record straight!” she hollers to me, waving goodbye.
I head back to The Wit offices to meet up with Asher since we both have an hour before our next class. H
e’d invited me to take a look at proposed layout design changes and give my input.
He brings me a bottle of water from our break area and closes the door to the graphics room.
“Wow. You hit the freshman goldmine with that one,” Asher says casually as he pulls up the pages in InDesign.
“Who, Coley?” I ask him, her name likely one of the first words to have escaped my lips no matter what he’d said because I can’t stop thinking about her.
He huffs, then mimics me. “Who, Coley? Yeah, Coley. She should be modeling… maybe Victoria’s Secret? Or something a little trashier.” I grit my teeth and scoot my chair a few inches away from him. “I’m pretty sure I saw her thong.”
“She doesn’t wear a thong.”
“Oh?” He kicks my shin lightly, goading me. “And how would you know that?”
“She’s too sweet to wear a thong.”
“I see.” He leans in and speaks softly, pointing into my chest. “You think she’s too sweet to wear a thong. That’s the best kind of girl.”
“Shut up, Asher. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Are you gonna go for that?”
“For what? The underwear that I am ninety-eight percent sure is not a thong?”
“For Coley, you jackass.”
“Oh, sorry. Because when you used the word ‘that,’ it implied you were speaking of an object and not a person. You meant ‘her,’ then.”
“You know what I meant. I’m not that way.”
“I like to think you’re not that way, but sometimes you say shit that makes me wonder.” I glare at him as he rolls his eyes. “Of course I’m not interested in her. Zaina, remember?”
“So you don’t care if I go after her?”
“You don’t need my permission,” I scoff. “I’m just her copy editor.”
“Alright, cool,” he says. “Did you get her number?”
“No.”
“I’m sure Professor Aslon has it. Maybe I can contact her on a little unofficial Witness business later.”
“You don’t think she’s a little young for you?” I ask him.
He looks over at me. “We’re both in college. I’d say anyone’s fair game.”
I nod my head. “Cool. Just asking.”
