Been Here All Along

by Sandy Hall

  “Are you going to talk to her?”

  “How do you know I don’t already talk to her? Maybe she’s outside waiting for me in a pimped-out Lamborghini and we’re going to ride off into the sunset.”

  I raise my eyebrows at him. “You would never buy a Lamborghini. Who even owns Lamborghinis anymore?”

  “All right, you caught me,” he says, putting his hands up in surrender. “I haven’t talked to her. Not really. I kind of mumbled sorry when I kicked her bag, but we haven’t exactly conversed.”

  “You should probably converse.”

  “Maybe. Could also be fun to like her from afar and make up stories about her in my head and pretend that we’re dating.”

  “So, stalk her?”

  “You call it whatever you need to call it,” he says with a straight face.

  “Listen, I don’t want to go all big brother on you,” I start.

  “By the way, please refrain from mentioning this to my ‘big brother,’ “ he says, using air quotes. “I’d rather not have to deal with Sam about this yet. He’ll totally make fun of me. Or worse, he’ll tell our mom and she’ll start picking out floral arrangements for the wedding.”

  “Fine, but it’ll be tough seeing as I share a room with him.”

  Gabe stares at Sam’s empty bed. “He’s not coming back anytime soon, is he?”

  “Nah, he has work or something.”

  “All right, so what’s the brotherly advice?”

  “Just that she needs to know you exist and that you like her, if you want anything to happen. If you don’t want anything to happen, then it doesn’t matter. But you probably shouldn’t stalk her.”

  “That’s reasonable. Thank you,” he says, and then changes the subject.

  Maxine (a waitress)

  People always ask me, “Maxine, how are you still waitressing at the diner this far into your seventies?” What I tell them is that it keeps me young. What I don’t tell them is that I’m already eighty. Working in a college town like this, kids in and out all hours of the night, always hungry, always saying, “Hey, Maxine!” when they see me. I feel like I have a million grandkids without all the trouble of regular kids.

  It’s a nice, quiet Friday night for coming toward the end of September. That first month of school always flies by. It’s busy, people in and out all the time. But things are calm tonight.

  There’s a group of girls in one booth, and a group of boys in another. I know some of them, particularly the boys. They’re all on the baseball team together, and they can get a bit rowdy at times, but they’re good boys, nice manners. They’re the kind of boys who girls don’t mind being around.

  Maybe next time I’ll have to accidentally sit them all together. I’ve done that in the past and it always worked out. But my boss doesn’t like it much. Says I can’t go messing around, playing with table seatings like that. And to him I say, “Ptooie! This ain’t Buckingham Palace!”

  Both groups are so polite, which warms my cold heart. Lots of “pleases” and “thank yous.” I even get a couple of “ma’ams,” which is nearly unheard of these days. Back in my day, it was a pretty standard thing. I had it drilled into me.

  But I digress.

  I notice two of these cutie pies in particular, because they’re making moon eyes at each other every time they don’t think anyone’s paying attention. And as soon as the other notices, they look away.

  It’s all so darling I don’t know what to do with myself.

  So I bring them free pie and hope that’s enough to bring them back here again.

  Yes, indeed, I hope they come back around here soon.

  Danny (Lea’s friend)

  “What’s up, buttercup?” I ask, coming up behind Lea and patting her ass.

  “Danno!” she cries, turning around and hugging me long and hard. “I missed you so darn much.”

  “Why did it take us weeks to have time to get together?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We take a seat on the nearest bench, both carefully avoiding the dried bird crap. We’re on our way to meet up with high school friends for dinner, but we have some time to waste before the meetup. Lea and I did a lot of theater together back then and I was thrilled to hear she was going to the same university as me. We’ve seen each other a few times since I graduated, but it’s always pleasant to have a little Lea time.

  “So, how’s life?”

  “Good,” she says, smiling wide.

  “You look like eighty-five million dollars,” I tell her.

  “This old thing?” she asks, swishing around the cardigan she got on super sale with me at Old Navy last winter.

  I laugh.

  “How about you? How’s the life of an upperclassman?” she asks.

  “Good. I don’t know that junior year is going to be much different than all the other years. You know, new semester, new classes, all that crap,” I say, letting my eyes roam. “Oh my God!” I yell, clutching her arm.

  “What is it? A bug? A rat? A cockroach?”

  “No,” I whisper, leaning close. “The boy of my dreams.” I take her head and turn her in the direction he’s walking.

  “Gabe Cabrera is the boy of your dreams?” she asks.

  “Oh, totally. He’s amazing. One of my housemates lived on the same floor as him freshman year and sometimes we end up at similar gatherings. One time he totally flirted with me,” I brag.

  “Wow.”

  “He’s so charming and one of those like sneak-attack gay guys. Like you don’t know he’s gay and then he sneaks up on you, and GAY!”

  “I didn’t know he was gay.”

  “Oh, for sure,” I tell her. “One time he complimented my jeans.”

  She looks like she’s taking this fact in. “In addition to the time he flirted with you?”

  “Yes, I’m very lucky.”

  “You obviously are.”

  “Come on,” I say, pulling her up.

  “But we’re meeting people …” she says, pointing in the opposite direction.

  “And we will, but first we should stalk Gabe for a little while. We have at least twenty minutes until we need to be at the restaurant.”

  “All right, let’s do it.”

  He hasn’t gotten very far, just barely onto the sidewalk that leads off the green toward the other end of campus.

  “Tell me about Gabe,” she says as we walk. “He’s in my creative writing class.”

  “Creative writing, be still my heart,” I say.

  “Cute, right?” She threads her arm through mine and leans in closer.

  “Totally. I thought he was majoring in something else, like teaching phys ed or something. And he’s on the baseball team, or maybe he was on the baseball team? Anyway. I used to see him around all the time and then last semester he disappeared, fell right off the face of the Earth, so I haven’t seen him in almost a year. I was starting to worry that he graduated or transferred or flunked out.”

  “Don’t talk so loud,” she mumbles. “I think he can hear you.”

  She’s right, I should be more discreet. “I get so darn excited about him though. He’s like this perfect mystery boy to me.”

  “He’s a perfect mystery boy to almost everyone.”

  “He is. I think I like to keep him that way. That’s gotta be the only reason I have yet to make a proper approach.”

  She nods in understanding.

  “I can’t believe I haven’t asked you,” I say, loathe to change the subject, but aware that I need to bring this up before I forget. “How’s the roommate?”

  “She’s good! Her name is Maribel. She’s really funny but not in a mean way. She has incredible hair. I just want to touch it all the time.”

  “You have nice hair,” I say, batting at her short, straight bob.

  “Not like Maribel.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “She wants to get us fake IDs.” Lea crinkles up her nose at the thought.

  “That’s a great idea
. Then you can come out with me all the time! Or at least, you could when I finally turn twenty-one next month.”

  “You don’t have a fake?”

  I shrug. “It didn’t seem worth it. Most clubs are eighteen and up, and I don’t mind not drinking. And with an October birthday I’m the oldest of all my friends anyway.”

  She smiles.

  “Now, getting back to the matter at hand, no one really knows where Gabe was all that time. I’m sure that his friends do, but I like to imagine that he was overseas or taking care of a dying relative or something romantic like that.”

  “Isn’t this basically the plot to 10 Things I Hate About You?”

  “Rest in peace, Heath,” I say automatically. “But yeah. It’s probably something dull like his parents didn’t have enough money, or he briefly transferred somewhere else and hated it.”

  “We should pretend that he was overseas.”

  I think about that. “But if he went abroad it wouldn’t have been a secret.”

  “How do you know it was a secret as opposed to something you personally just don’t know?”

  “Well, my housemate Maureen, you’ll meet her, she’s the one who lived on the same floor as him, and while they didn’t all keep in close touch, she knows people who still know him and are friends with him, but they were always vague about where he was.”

  Lea looks doubtful. “So people would come out and ask his friends directly where he was and they wouldn’t answer?”

  “Well, I don’t know if Mo-Mo ever asked directly. But I guess so?”

  “Maybe he was in rehab,” she says.

  “He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who does drugs. Although, if he was on the baseball team maybe he was on steroids or something.”

  “Or maybe it was for painkillers. Or NyQuil.”

  “You can’t go to rehab for NyQuil.”

  “You do realize that sometimes you’re no fun to joke around with and you take my silliness far too seriously.”

  I throw my head back and laugh.

  “Maybe it was crystal meth. Or sex addiction!” I say in a dramatic whisper.

  “I mean, really, Dan. If he’s half the man of mystery that you claim he is, he was probably working abroad as a tattoo artist for the queen of England or something.”

  “Which begs the question, what kind of tattoo would the queen of England get?”

  “A corgi in a crown,” she says, not missing a beat. “What kind of tattoo would Gabe get?”

  He’s several blocks away from us now; we’ve been walking at a slothlike pace and need to take the next turn, but we can still see his red T-shirt in the distance.

  “A ‘Mom’ tattoo,” I say with a grin.

  “Definitely, on his bicep.”

  “Totally.”

  “You’re sure he’s gay?” she asks, making a sad little face.

  “I’m pretty sure,” I say, scratching my head. “I mean, my gaydar could be on the fritz, but that doesn’t happen often.”

  She smiles. “Well then, our mission will be to get you guys together. And to find out what his mysterious disappearance was about last semester.”

  “Yes, agreed.” I extend my hand to shake with her to seal the deal. Then we head over to dollar tacos at Casa del Sol.

  Pam (Inga’s wife)

  “Now that we’re a few weeks into classes, I have to know, who is your couple of the semester?” I ask as we sit down to dinner Friday night. It’s rare that we both sit down at the table to eat, but if it happens it’s going to happen on a Friday night.

  “I can’t believe I haven’t told you,” Inga says, her eyes lighting up. “They’re a boy and a girl this time, Gabe and Lea. When I tell you they’re adorable, I mean they are adorable.”

  “That’s what you say about all of them,” I say, leaning back and sipping my wine.

  She rolls her eyes. “They are all adorable, but there’s something special about these two. I feel like I would have picked them out anywhere, not just in class.”

  “I’ve heard you say that before.”

  “I know! But they’ve been giving me some great material. She read a short assignment in class the other day and I think he definitely drooled.”

  “Maybe he just got back from the dentist.”

  “Why do you insist on teasing me?” she asks, glaring at me. “They have a story. I’m telling you, there’s no way they don’t have a story. They have this chemistry that’s impossible to ignore. I don’t even know what it is. But I’m going to do whatever I can to get them together.”

  I shake my head even though I can’t help but smile. My girl has a passion for matchmaking.

  “Or to at least talk to each other.”

  “At the very least,” I agree, teasing her. She doesn’t even notice and just keeps on going.

  “They sit next to each other almost every class. Or sometimes Victor sits between them,” she says, making a face.

  “Curse you, Victor!” I say, thrusting my fist in the air. “Who’s Victor?”

  “He’s one of those kids who have to take the class for a requirement.”

  “Oh, one of those.”

  “He had the balls to come see me at office hours and request that I change something on the syllabus because of his own personal timetable. I wanted to smack him.”

  “There’s always one.”

  “He kind of reminds me of that Indian kid from Mean Girls.…”

  “Kevin G.,” I say without missing a beat.

  “Yes! Except scarier, because this kid is not happy about being in this class. I’m a little bit worried he’s going to set something on fire. He’s like a cesspool in the midst of my creative writing oasis.”

  “I know the type.”

  “Anyway, sometimes they do that thing. Where one of them looks over at the other like they’re going to say something and then looks away just as the other senses someone’s looking at them so they look up.”

  “Ugh, the bad timing thing.”

  “It’s the worst. But Gabe and Lea will fall in love, mark my words,” she says, tapping her finger on the table to punctuate her statement.

  “These words, they are marked.”

  We’re quiet while we eat for a few minutes.

  “So what’s new in the world of astrophysics?” she asks.

  “We’ve been married for five years and you still have no real concept of what I do with my days.”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  Chapter 1

  Jane Connelly needed a job, and she needed it fast.

  Her mother was knocking on her bedroom door, calling through it, to tell her about the “great” unpaid internship she’d found for Jane at the university where she was an adjunct.

  “It’s in the American Studies department. They need some help with filing. You’d get fantastic experience, Janie,” she said through Jane’s locked door. “You’ll need that for your college applications.”

  “I know, Mom,” Jane lied. She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to go to college, and she had no clue what American Studies really entailed. It sounded awfully broad.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “I’m changing my shirt,” she said, holding a pillow up to her face so her voice would be muffled. That was how much she didn’t want to have to face her mother at the moment.

  “Well, come downstairs and talk to me when you’re done changing,” her mom said. Jane heard footsteps retreating down the hall and then coming back seconds later. “Are you going somewhere? Is that why you’re changing?”

  “No, Mom,” she said. There was a good chance that the combined sighs of mother and daughter could be heard around the world.

  Jane bolted over to her computer, needing to find something, anything, to do with her summer. Her two best friends were going to be counselors at band camp, the sleepaway kind. They were leaving the next day for their ten-week stint. But seeing as how Jane wasn’t actually in the band, nor did she play a
n instrument, a job as a band camp counselor wouldn’t work for her.

  A quick Google search brought her to an online job board. She clicked fast and furious, hunting for any jobs that might suit her, scrolling through the ads as if her life depended on it.

  As if being friendless for the summer wasn’t bad enough, spending all of break at her mother’s university sounded like the opposite of anything she was interested in. It sounded soul sucking and mind numbing. So maybe, in a way, her life did depend on it.

  Telemarketer: part time, unlimited earning potential

  DO YOU LOVE DOGS?! Min. wage but get to play with puppies!

  Knives, Knives, Knives: excellent commission

  CASH FOR BILLS!

  Sperm donors needed

  Each one was worse than the last.

  Her parents would kill her if she got involved in a pyramid scheme; she knew that for a fact. Her older sister, Margo, had gotten involved in one a few years ago. She was trying to sell beach condos. In their beach-adjacent community. The worst part was that her parents never seemed to get mad at Margo for the pyramid scheme. They claimed the humiliation of losing her money was punishment enough. Jane disagreed, but no one ever asked her.

  “Margo skipped a grade. Margo passed all the AP tests with the highest marks. Margo got a full-time internship at Princeton University this summer, and she doesn’t even go there. Margo’s going to be the first person on Uranus,” Jane muttered under her breath. In a moment of desperation, she clicked on the link for Child Care. It was a last-ditch option, but that was where she was; that was what her life had come to.

  Jane scanned the listings, knowing that she needed to avoid any and all situations that involved babies. Babies were terrifying, with their soft spots and their wobbly necks. Way too much responsibility for a girl like Jane.

  Mother’s helper needed for newborn triplets.

  Child care in our home.

  Do you love babies?

  Babysitter needed.

  She clicked on the last one because it was located in her town.

  She skimmed it once and then slowed down to scan it more closely on the second read-through.

  Four days a week, 9 to 5 …

  Eek. Nine a.m. was not her best time of day. But it was in town, so she wouldn’t have to get up too early to make it there on time.