by Chris Lynch
“Well, the polls haven’t closed yet, but shit is starting to look like the consensus choice.”
I look back up into his face. “Sorry. Really sorry, sorry, sorry. There is no excuse for forgetting a guy’s name—but my excuse is that I have had . . . a messed-up, stressed-up year and that’s maybe affected my thinking sometimes, and my memory. But I did know your name, you know that. It would have come to me in another minute.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
The certainty he puts into that statement cannot be good. “It wouldn’t?”
“Uh-uh. Because on the odd occasion when you ever talked to me, you called me Kerry. Every single time.”
My chin drops so heavily to my chest that I get a pulled muscle instantly in the back of my neck.
“McAvoy!” one of the assistant coaches hollers as one of the other receivers comes limping to the sideline. He prepares to take the field, and I look up to watch him.
“Look at that,” Kelly says, slipping his helmet back on. “He knows my name, and it didn’t take him anywhere near four years to learn it.”
“Ughh . . .” If you were standing nearby with your eyes closed when I made that sound, you’d’ve thought I just took a helmet to the chest. My eyes are shut tight, and that’s how it sounded to me.
“Don’t sweat it,” Kelly says. After he gives me a big slap on the shoulder, I open my eyes to see him running backward onto the field. “That’s all in the past now, right? Ancient history.”
“Right, history,” I say, and then he turns to jog away. “You were coming here all along? Kelly? How did I not know that?”
He half turns, palms up to the big, big sky smiling down on Montana. “Don’t know, man. No idea how you could have not known that.”
What kind of a guy would not know that? You shoot your self-rocket across the sky, across the country to hit a target as small and remote as Carnegie College without knowing that a high school teammate of yours was already planning that very trip?
I would say, a stupid guy. A myopic guy. But that would be partial and obvious and letting myself off too easy. And it would never amount to anything like a good excuse.
glacial erratic
I was doing my running. Winding and climbing my way through the network of trails. The walkways that zigzagged through the Carnegie campus every which way. You could not go wrong taking a run anywhere on these grounds because you could tailor it to yourself, gentle rolling course, hill climb, flat and fast, any combination. Best place I had ever run, that was for sure, and that was even before I caught sight of the lovely Joyce coming down the big hill away from the admin building, just as I started my climb upward.
“Hi,” I said as we approached each other.
“Hi,” she said. And if there was anything other than sweetness in her tone, I couldn’t detect it.
Way too soon, we had passed each other, and with every step, I thought, we’d have put two more steps of distance between us.
So after a very, very brief climb I made a hard, looping, shameless turn back down, making airplane wings with my arms as I did it too.
“So, did you do your research? Check up on me like I said, to see if I was a ‘charmer’?”
She leaned a bit in the other direction when I jogged up and brought my testosterone musk maybe a little too close to her, and started walking. She bounced back into form quick enough. “Hey, there’s a real man, I just passed him, running properly up this hill. If you hurry, you might be able to catch him.”
“What?” I said. “A real man? Why would I ever want to run and catch one of those?”
“Yeah, I see your point. Anyway, I was lying. Even if you hurried, you’d never be able to catch him.” She went all dreamy-woozy, fanning herself with a folder and blinking a lot.
“Really?” I said. “That good, huh? Maybe I do want to catch him.”
“Ha,” she said, pointing at me for emphasis.
God, I loved this place. I reminded myself hourly of that, my great good luck on this one. All for the best, in the end, and who ever would’ve thought we could get here from there?
“So, Joyce?” I continued.
“Ah, yes, I did my due diligence, and it appears you are not remotely a charmer. And I checked, asked people in the street, checked databases, FBI files, all coming up empty. So it appears, mystery man, that you are totally clean, utterly charmless. Congratulations.” She even shifted her backpack to free her hand to give me the official shake.
Then she shook me entirely, by slanting down the footpath, to the stairs, to the library. The Andrew Carnegie Library of Carnegie College.
“That is maximum Carnegie right there,” I said, and she jumped with a fright.
“Jeez, Keir, don’t sneak up on a person like that.”
“I didn’t. I swear. I’m sorry. I didn’t sneak up because I never left. I stayed right with you, because you didn’t tell me not to. Was that all right? You didn’t, did you? Tell me to go, and I somehow didn’t get the message?”
“Oh, come on now, relax,” Joyce said, and my whole cardiovascular system powered right down in obedience to her.
“Okay,” I said, “done. Anything else?”
“No, that’ll be all,” she said with as much faux snoot as she could manage. Which was not much, because this was a girl with nothing artificial or put-on about her whatsoever.
A few seconds later it got awkward again. Well, I did, but the result was awkwardness all around.
“Um, Keir?” she said right up into the big carved walnut front door that well represented the Andrew Carnegie Library of Carnegie College. She was talking to the door because she had been talking to a wall when she told me that’ll be all.
“You weren’t thinking of coming into the library, were you?” she asked. She fidgeted a bit, because I was an oaf and hadn’t unpinned her yet. “Keir, could you back up a little bit? Please?” She was sounding agitated now, and I leaped back, just about toppling over the box hedge framing the entrance area.
“Sure,” I said, revving right back up again. “I haven’t been in the library at all yet.”
As I powered ahead to go in, she suspended patience and niceties—or I exhausted them—and stiff-armed me to a halt.
“No, you can’t come in. They have a no-sweatball policy. Another time, Keir,” she said, giving my chest a hearty slap, then dashing inside before I could do anything else disruptive.
Sweatball? How was that at all possible, since I hadn’t been running for even five minutes? I was not a sweatball, and I was going to make it my mission to get Joyce to stop seeing me as a perspiring dumbass jock and start seeing me for me.
Then, as I was about to turn, and as the heavy door slowly thunked shut, my eye was pulled by the poetry quote carved deep into the wood in letters three inches tall.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
“Pshhhh, gibberish,” I said, wiping a bit of cool clamminess from my forehead and heading away. “You’d think to get on the library door, you would at least have to be able to spell.”
• • •
Joyce had told me on that first orientation day that she would be happy to show me all the off-tour, but no less essential, ins and outs of the campus that would be home for the next four years. She gave me her contact details on the inter-Carnegie-community-bulletin-board-whatever that she knew would be a test just for me to navigate. I could have asked for her phone number to simplify things. But that felt aggressively forward, and I wasn’t nearly that confident with this situation. She could easily have said no. I couldn’t have dealt so well with the directness of no. Better if the no got dissolved in the faceless world of the community bulletin board disembodied rejection.
We had also now eliminated my casual, running-into-the-girl-somewhere-on-campus approach as being at best unreliable.
And since I always left my phone behind when I walked out of my place and into the world, requesting a phone number
could quickly lead to sensible inquiries with sensible answers that nonetheless I might not have been up to discussing. Why don’t I carry my phone with me? I don’t want to be reachable, is probably not the kind of thing to make a new person relax about you. Even though it is a perfectly reasonable position to take, in my opinion.
So, all things considered, I am pretty pleasantly surprised to check in with my Carnegie mail and find that she has replied. And that we have a date to finish that campus tour.
I am right where she told me to be, fifteen minutes before she told me to be, on the bridge spanning the duck pond. I am already considering thinking of this as our spot.
“Well,” she says, as I watch her approach, “you are punctual, which is always a pleasant surprise in a guy. Even a normal guy, so in a football star it’s kind of phenomenal.”
I am kid-like excited at the sight of her, at the graceful approach of her, regardless of the trash talk. Then she reaches the crest of the arching bridge where I stand against the railing, and she continues walking right on by.
“I haven’t even played yet,” I say, scurrying to catch up to her. “So I can’t be a star, and even then I won’t ever be a star, just because I’m not. So, as a matter of fact, I am a completely normal guy, which is all I want to be. But, yes, I am punctual and quite proud of it.”
“Okay,” she says with some finality, as if I have made my case and it has been accepted. She seals it, and shocks my socks, by taking me by the hand without breaking stride. Right by the hand.
I think for probably the whole next half hour or so, I shut up completely, concentrating on holding the lady’s slender strong hand. Meanwhile Joyce shows me the sights only a grizzled sophomore would know. Like, the mailbox. And a second mailbox. Mailboxes never even occurred to me. She shows me the campus store that is to be avoided because of the chicken wrap/salmonella scandal, and the one just on the edge of the campus that has only one brand of any item but is still honest and clean and open practically any time of day or night despite having no posted business hours. From that point, on the outer boundary of our college village, we turn back inward, weaving through man-made, Carnegie-made paths that diverge from the main road through the woodsy flank of the grounds. The footpaths are rough-cut enough to be natural but so smooth and easy to walk, even as the dusk starts settling over us, that clearly there is attentive groundskeeping at work in this fine place.
Still, Joyce leads me by the hand over the gentle terrain as if she is the only thing keeping me from the dangers of the forest.
“Thanks for this,” I finally say.
She stops and turns, bringing her face right up to mine when I fail to stop in time. Some failures aren’t so bad.
“For what?” she says.
Funny but I don’t immediately have the words for that, even though I was the one who started it.
“You mean for showing you around?” she says. “Pah, I take all the new good-looking guys into the woods. Before they get a chance to hear about me, and then that’s the end of that.”
My heart is very excited by this, by Joyce and her way of being cool and fresh and provocative. My heart wants to tell her as much and is banging on the interior walls of me so fast and hard I am already deeply embarrassed that she can undoubtedly hear it. That she can feel it, we are that close.
“Are you not going to talk now?” she asks me. “That was some pretty saucy stuff I just came out with there, and nothing. Are you horrified? Are you scared? Are you that gullible? All those things are fine. Just tell me because I am about now running out of all my boldness and am getting to feel a little bit stupid.”
“No,” I snap. “Don’t do that. I wasn’t saying anything just then, because I was struggling to keep up, I think. But while I probably am gullible some of the time, I don’t believe at all that you take the freshman guys one by one into the woods. And what I was thanking you for was just being so nice to me. Nicer than you have to be, that’s for sure. So, thanks.”
I can see, in the crinkling, mostly smiling, partly probing eyes, that she is again—or maybe still—wondering if I’m playing her somehow. I am very much looking forward to not seeing any more of that look. Every single other possible look she possesses will be welcome anytime in place of that one.
“I still don’t know if I can work you out, Keir,” she says. “Are you a wide-eyed innocent, or are you a player?”
She has not moved one inch away from me, which I have to think is a good sign. She’s not worried or anything, or she would not linger in the woods alone with me.
That thought makes me feel . . . better than anything has made me feel, about myself, about the universe, in a long time.
“I am a good guy,” I say.
She nods. It’s nothing definitive, and in fact I don’t even know for sure what it’s supposed to mean. But a nod is still better than a wide range of other possible responses. She is a cautious girl, seems really smart and like life won’t sneak up on her very easily. She seems older, in a way, older than me, of course, but older than a sophomore, too. I like this about her. I want to touch this, the smartness, the knowingness. I want to be a part of it. It’s a beautiful place to begin a new everything.
We suspend the conversation two minutes, three minutes, just being there close and gathering whatever two people can pick up from each other without words. I have no doubt that Joyce knows something about what those things might be. I’m happy just to go on breathing her in, because that is plenty of Joyce and I’m grateful to get it. If she has some gift for inhaling whatever the essence of me might be . . . well, I hope she does. It would be sweet, finally, for a girl like this to know my essence. My essence would love to be known.
Then, before I can quite register movement, we are mobile again. She is leading me by the hand once more, and with a clear sense of purpose. Five more minutes of serious striding, through woods that grow continuously denser, making the evening ever darker, and a clearing abruptly shows itself. And in the center of the clearing is a magnificent brute of a boulder, as big around as the Yurt times six, and about four Yurts tall. There are mosses and lichens, sections that have some sparkly mineral content that picks up and reflects back all the weak remaining light, making the modest bit of clearing seem luminous in contrast to everything else around.
“Wow,” I say, “I wasn’t expecting this.”
“It’s my favorite spot on the whole campus,” she says, walking up and placing two hands flat against the rock like she’s going to try to roll it. “Getting to be my favorite place on earth.”
“It doesn’t look like it even comes from earth.”
“Yes,” she says, turning to me with excited eyes glistening. “But it is, just not from this part of the earth. It’s a glacial erratic, which means it was carried and dropped here by a glacier millions of years ago. That’s why it doesn’t have the same composition as anything else in this entire region. Is that not thrilling? I think about that all the time, this massive chunk of a thing, bobbing along its icy glacial path for God knows how long, just bumping along, when all the time, it had a destination. It had a destiny almost, and that brought it right here, from thousands of miles away, away from its home, because it was somehow supposed to be here. It’s mad randomness when you think about it, if anything is ever even really random.”
I feel myself grinning hard, mirroring Joyce’s joyful broad smile. She’s irresistible, and it’s, y’know, only a rock. I could believe in this rock, though. I could believe in anything that somebody else believes in this intensely. Depending on the somebody, naturally.
“Are you laughing at me?” she says, dropping her arms to her sides just as she approaches me again. She stops about two feet short and stands rigid like some kind of glacial erratic security guard.
“Oh, Jesus, no, Joyce, not by any means would I be laughing, I swear.”
“Hmmm,” she says. “You looked like you were laughing. And there’s only me, you, and the rock here. And the rock’s not funn
y. This is special to me, I want you to know. I never bring anybody out here, and now because I think maybe I see something in you, I take a risk and I do this and . . . there, you’re doing it again. Right there.”
She takes the step forward to bring her pointing finger right up close to point at my teeth. This, of course and unfortunately, causes me to splutter out what is undeniably laughter.
Joyce’s eyes go bulgy with mortification, and she is completely justified in feeling that way, except that she could not be more mistaken.
Alarmed now myself, that she will flee the scene before I can make it right, I instinctively reach out and seize her hand out of the air between us just before she can withdraw it from me.
She stares for a confused few seconds, at my big claw hand imprisoning her fine and slender one. It is a bad and wrong moment and will be for as long as I fail to correct it.
I act. I lean in, slowly and gently. And I kiss the back of her hand. I linger, breathing in the warm skin scent and thinking this is the first hand I have ever kissed. A hand. I have never kissed a hand before, never came close, never even considered the possibility. When I look up, she is watching me intently, suspiciously. At least it feels like that.
“You are really beautiful, Joyce. And I’m not talking about your insane attractiveness to the naked eye, which you are surely sick of hearing about. I’m talking about this, the geeky rock-loving thing that is so batshit it’s breathtaking. And you just came right on out with it, which . . . I can’t even tell you why it was that wonderful to me, I’m not even sure why. But it was special, and it definitely was not me laughing at you. Okay, right, except that very end part, which I suppose was that. But still, it was the best kind of laughing.”
I am still holding on to her hand, and I am watching my hand now, as it is squeezing her hand. I should be looking at her reaction, her eyes, her face, but I can’t seem to tear away from staring at her hand, and at my desperate worried grip on it. It is a warm, well-intentioned grip just the same.
Then her fingers start wriggling, her wrist turns, she is pulling her hand away, or at least she’s trying to.