by Daniels, Viv
This was the part where he opened his checkbook and gave me money for textbooks. This was the part where he started acting like a real dad, one who was proud that his daughter got a merit scholarship at his alma mater.
Except I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to accept another dime from him if it came with strings, with rules, with reminders that I was his daughter and Hannah was his daughter and I wanted Hannah’s boyfriend and Hannah was sick, sick, sick…
I reached out and covered my father’s hand with my own. His skin felt dry and I noticed, for the first time, the way the hair on the back of his hands had gotten darker and more wiry with age. His face had aged too. There were lines in the corner of his eyes and mouth, and white strands of hair mixed in with the dark blond on his head. You didn’t see it unless you were up close. Was it really so rare that I got up close to him?
Whatever else we’ve been forced to do… As much as I hated to admit this, I understood why Dad had made the choices he did. I understood that he thought he could better provide for his families if he kept his reputation and his business intact. Divorce would have cost a bundle, and the scandal resulting from exposure of his dirty family secret might have cost him his entire career. I understood why we had the rules; I understood why I had to live my life like I didn’t have a father.
But maybe my mom was right, too. I’d spent so much time thinking about how much it sucked for me, I hadn’t really thought about how it sucked for him, too. For what must have been the hundredth time today, I wondered what our lives would be like if Hannah was my sister for real, out in the open, and when she’d told her family about what she was facing today, she’d told me, too. That when Dad needed some company to chase away his worries, he had a kid who would give him a hug and tell him—
“It’s going to be okay, Dad. I promise.”
He raised his eyes to mine, those indeterminate, every-color eyes that so mirrored my own, and for a second I thought maybe he knew exactly what I was talking about. Not our fight, not our disagreements over Canton and our secrets, but Hannah—Hannah, whom we both loved, though I barely knew her. Hannah, who was sick and scared and probably needed her father to stay home with her instead of running away here, where his other family was safe and sound, where his other daughter’s biggest concern—in his mind, at least—was how long her waitressing shifts were.
“You know you’re still my girl, don’t you?” he said. “You’re still my daughter, and I love you and I’m proud of you.”
Unbidden, tears filled my eyes.
“And one day, Tess, one day this will all be behind us.”
I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. Did Dad imagine a future where the rules no longer applied? Where after long last, he left his wife and married my mom and I could live openly, if not as his daughter, at least as his stepdaughter? Where I could know Hannah? Could that reality ever exist?
A bone-deep yearning lit up my soul. I didn’t even know if I wanted that anymore. And after years of watching him dangle that possibility over my mother’s head, I found it hard to imagine. It hadn’t happened when Hannah had finally grown up and gone to college, which was the usual time when broken marriages officially failed. He hadn’t divorced his wife, and Hannah was a junior, like me. Even Mom seemed to have relinquished the prospect of being anything other than Steven Swift’s mistress years ago.
But apparently, some small part of me hadn’t given up, the same part of me that yelled at Sylvia for threatening to put nuts in Hannah’s salad, that wondered if she’d tell me when to hide my eyes at horror movies, that wanted to burst into tears when Dylan had told me Hannah was sick, that wanted to put my arms around my dad and tell him that whatever happened with his other daughter, we’d face it together. If Hannah needed bone marrow, we would find some way to give her mine without anyone knowing why I might be a match.
Even if I did want her boyfriend, she was still my sister.
It was funny, in a way. I had never dared ask Dad about Hannah all these years. He got too mad. And I didn’t dare ask Dylan, either. He knew her better than anyone, I supposed. Knew which of those horror movies her Facebook profile said she loved were her favorite. Knew what made her laugh, her favorite color, her favorite flower, exactly what scared her most about whatever was happening to her. He knew those things, and I wanted to know them so badly right now. I wanted to know, I wanted to help.
“Dad, I know…” What? I knew Hannah told him she might be sick. How did I know that? I knew because I very nearly boinked her boyfriend the other day. I knew because I broke the rules.
I couldn’t risk ruining whatever was happening here and now over telling him that.
“I know you love me,” I finished lamely.
This week, two men had told me they loved me. But in the end, they both belonged to Hannah.
FOURTEEN
Dylan skipped Transport class again on Thursday morning, and I spent most of the hour with my head buried in my notebook, face flushed, trying to figure out if he couldn’t face me or if he was accompanying Hannah to her biopsy. He hadn’t texted to tell me what was going on, and from what I remembered of the “class participation” section of the syllabus, we only got three unexcused absences per semester.
Maybe it was because I was alone again, but Elaine approached me at the end of class.
“Hey,” she said, clutching her books to her chest. “I wanted to apologize for my behavior last week.”
“Okay.” I flipped the cover of my notebook closed. “Apologize.”
“It’s not an excuse, I know that, but I was getting a little overwhelmed with midterms and stuff. My Photonics project crashed and burned, Transport is my only chance, and…I freaked out about the symposium. And Dylan and I have this competitive thing going on and he scoops up the new girl before anyone knows anything, and…well, I took my frustrations out on you. I shouldn’t have. I’m just scared I can’t hack Bio-E.”
I stood up. “Is this your way of saying you’re switching to the English department and giving us our lab times back?”
She sucked air through her teeth. “No. I mean, not the English department part, at least. But yeah, I guess we can split the lab slots if you want.”
I gave her a long, hard look. How was I supposed to trust her? Dylan certainly didn’t.
“I’m really sorry,” Elaine went on. “I absolutely know I was in the wrong before. You’re new here and I really didn’t give you a nice welcome. And as much as I hate to say it, Dylan’s right. I want to beat you fair and square.” She looked pointedly at the empty seat next to me. “That is, if he didn’t drop.”
“He didn’t drop. He’s got some personal matters to attend to.” Wait, did that sound bad? “We’re still going to kick your ass.”
“We’ll see about that.” She was silent again for a second. “Anyway, I know it’s probably too late to be friends, but—could we start with lunch?”
Something inside me relaxed. Okay, so she was crazy competitive and not too fond of the man I loved. That didn’t make her evil. And maybe if she saw I wasn’t evil either, she could relax some. “I hope it’s not too late,” I said. “I’ve been here for two months and I don’t know anyone, really.”
“Dylan,” Elaine pointed out.
I grinned at her. “Yeah, but you don’t think I should be hanging out with him.”
Elaine rolled her eyes. “Well, I say that to a lot of people. They never listen.”
***
We ended up having lunch at the cafe in the biology tower with her roommate, Melanie. The one Dylan had slept with freshman year. I seemed doomed to cross paths with Dylan’s entire playbook. Melanie was a tiny pixie of a girl with short, spiky hair bleached nearly white in places and streaked with blue and teal. Her nose and eyebrow were pierced, and she had a tattoo covering most of her right arm.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was expecting from Dylan’s first post-me conquest, but the punk rock look was certainly not it.
“
Tess, Melanie. Melanie, Tess,” Elaine said, setting down her tray. “Tess is Dylan’s latest flavor-of-the-month.”
“Oh, no,” I corrected. “We’re not dating. He has a girlfriend.”
“I think I heard about that,” Melanie said, twirling some pasta on her fork. “Don’t worry, Tess, I don’t share my roommate’s disdain for Mr. Kingsley. She thinks I should still be mad at him for not calling me, like, three years ago. But sometimes you do crazy things freshman year. Mine was him.” She smiled a secret smile. “I like to think I was his, too.”
“It’s not just that,” said Elaine. “I don’t like his attitude.”
“‘His attitude,’” Melanie replied, making quote marks with her fingers, “meaning that he wouldn’t be your lab partner last year?”
Well, that also explained why she was so bitter. He beat her freshman year, then wouldn’t help her out last year… A lot of history for those two.
Elaine pursed her lips. “I probably could have done without you telling Tess that. She’s just going to go tell Dylan.”
Oh, trust me, Elaine. There are plenty of things I’m perfectly fine not ever telling Dylan.
I desperately wanted to change the subject, especially considering that if everything worked out as I hoped, I would be dating the guy soon enough. “So, Elaine tells me you’re a botany concentration? I worked at a botany lab at State. What are you studying?”
Melanie threw back her head and laughed. “Oh my God, you sound like you’re still at your entrance interview. Elaine, is it, like, a requirement that you Bio-E people all have boring, one-track minds?”
“I’ve heard you make that claim before, yes,” said Elaine. “But I figure since you can’t keep a thought in your head for more than five minutes, it works out well.” She was smiling for what seemed like the first time ever. It was nice to see this side of her.
Melanie lobbed a pea at her. “Fair enough. Tess, don’t listen to this bitch. I hear she went crazy last week and stole some poor people’s lab space.”
“I apologized!” Elaine cried. “What do you want me to do, commit seppuku?”
“Maybe you should just buy Tess lunch?” Melanie suggested.
I laughed. These two and their way of talking reminded me of Sylvia and Annabel. They teased and ribbed each other, but there was clearly love behind it all. And yet, unlike the Warrens, Melanie and Elaine weren’t sisters. They’d only met when they’d been assigned to live together freshman year.
I wondered how Hannah was doing, and then, just as quickly, pushed the thought from my mind. Hannah and I would never be roommates, would never be sisters. We were nothing.
Perhaps I’d missed out on too much, always living alone, off-campus—first at State and now here at the apartment where I’d grown up. Being with Cristina that summer at Cornell had been fun, and we still emailed and texted a lot. She’d hated her actual freshman-year roommate, but she’d moved in with a friend off campus by sophomore year and, according to all reports, they were still having a blast.
“Have any plans for the weekend?” Melanie was asking now.
“I usually work weekends,” I explained. “I’m a waitress at Verde.”
“Weird, I must have totally seen you there. I go there all the time.”
Well, folks never noticed their waitress.
“Are you working tonight?”
“No.” I glanced meaningfully at Elaine. “I’m supposed to be in the lab tonight.”
“I’m never going to live this down, am I?” she asked.
“No,” said Melanie. “And you deserve it. But in this case, it all worked out. If you were waiting tables tonight, you couldn’t come with us to a party.”
“Oh,” I said. “I can’t go to a party—”
“Yes you can,” said Elaine. “Nothing is really going to start until ten.”
“Do you have a test on Friday?” Melanie asked.
“No.”
“A hot date?”
I felt my face heat. “No.”
“Some kind of religious or moral objection to people having fun?” Elaine suggested.
“No. I just…” I shrugged. “A Canton party? That kind of takes me back to high school. We used to try to crash them, you know.”
“Spoken like a true townie,” said Melanie with a laugh.
“You’re not crashing this time,” Elaine added. “And please do come. It can be part of my apology. I always say the girls in Bio-E need to stick together and I’ve pretty much been doing the opposite of that.”
I turned to her. “You do know I think you’re trying to get info about Dylan and my project off me?”
“Of course I am,” she replied and took a sip of her drink, “but we can still have fun.”
***
After my last class of the day, I drove home to eat dinner and get a head start on homework. Mom was out at a gallery show for a friend of hers, but the crisper was full of vegetables. As I waited for my pasta to boil, I texted Dylan.
We’re still on for lab work tonight?
His answer came back right away.
Yes. I’d love your notes from this morning if you have them. Took H to doctor’s office.
Yeah, Dylan, I’d figured.
I also figured that I wouldn’t return home between lab and the party, so I might as well get dressed now. After dinner I took a quick shower, then blow-dried my hair with a round brush so it fell in full, bouncy brown waves around my shoulders. My memories of Canton parties were that they were slightly more fashionable occasions than the occasional kegger I’d attended at State, so I chose a pair of skinny jeans and a gray knit top shot through with threads of silver that sparkled when they caught the light. I snatched a pair of high-heeled boots from my mom’s closet that I figured I’d probably regret by the end of my lab session, but they gave me an extra two inches and looked really nice with my pants. As I was doing my makeup, the phone buzzed on the counter. I checked the screen: Cristina. A pang of guilt coursed through me—I hadn’t kept my friend abreast of anything that had happened since I’d transferred.
I turned on the speakerphone so I could finish my eyeliner. “Hey, stranger!”
“Hi!” came the voice of my old friend. “I realized I haven’t called you to ask how Canton is going, so I’m doing that now.”
“It’s crazy busy here, too,” I replied. “I’m working insane hours just to make ends meet, but I’m also entering this symposium next month with a five-thousand-dollar prize, so…wish me luck.”
“Awesome! What’s your project?”
I told her, taking care to leave out the part where I was doing the project with Dylan.
“That sounds a bit like that thing you did with Dylan up here a few years ago.”
“Mmm.” I lined my lips a rosy red.
“Did you tell him?”
“I didn’t have to,” I replied sheepishly. “He’s my partner.”
Silence reigned on the other end of the phone. After a second, Cristina’s screams bounced off the walls of my bathroom. “What the hell, McMann?” she asked. “How could you not tell me you two had hooked up again?”
“Because we hadn’t?” I said. “We were just partners.”
“Were just partners?” She pounced. “Spill. What’s going on? What happened? What does he look like these days? Are his pants still too short?”
I hesitated, my lip pencil dangling in the air above my mouth. “He looks really good,” I said at last. That was neutral, right? “And his pants are perfect.”
But Cristina wasn’t about to let me get away with it. “Are you in his pants?”
I sighed, then admitted, “Not all the way in.”
She squealed again. “Oh my God, I knew it. The second you told me you were going to Canton, I was like, Dylan and Tess, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s—”
“He…has a girlfriend,” I said, interrupting her annoying little song.
“You man-stealing slut,” she joked. “That is awesome.”
I bi
t my freshly painted lip and looked in the mirror. “Please don’t call me that.”
“Oh, Tess—you know I don’t mean ‘slut’ in a bad way,” she said, sounding contrite. “I totally think women should own their personal sexuality and have as much sex as they want to…”
I let Cristina go on her Women’s Studies-induced rant about taking back ownership of the word slut without saying anything else. Because, honestly, it hadn’t even registered. The part that bothered me had been man-stealing. I didn’t want to be a man-stealing anything—not slut, not bitch, and certainly not sister. Dylan swore to me that it wasn’t about me, that it was about him, and I wanted to believe him.
But it would all be so much easier if he hadn’t been dating her when we’d met again, if he hadn’t been dating her when he’d lifted me up on his countertop and stuck his tongue down my throat.
“Tess?” Cristina’s voice crackled out of my speakerphone, bouncing tinnily around the bathroom. “You’re not mad, are you?”
“No,” I said, and finished applying my lipstick. Not at Cristina, anyway.
Just myself.
***
Dylan was already in the lab when I arrived, going over our notes and setting up our workspace. He seemed tired, with noticeable lines under his blue eyes and hair that looked like he’d run his fingers through it a few too many times. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. His Tess glasses. I swallowed. Maybe this was all a mistake.
Ugh, that’s idiotic, Tess. Don’t read too much into a pair of freaking glasses.
“I’ve got great news,” I said as brightly as I could. “I talked to Elaine this afternoon, and she said we can split the lab times Monday through Wednesday.”
“You’re kidding! How’d you work that miracle?”
I started unbuttoning my coat. “I did nothing. Apparently she had some kind of…stressed-out nervous episode the other week, and she deeply regrets her behavior and said we can have our lab slots back if we want.”
“That’s…great. So you actually had a civil conversation with her? That’s possible?”
I chuckled. “You two should learn to bury the hatchet. She’s not so bad. I even went to lunch with her and her roommate.”
