by Claire Adams
Smoke
Mia
I really hope he’s not here today. He’s always late, but it’s never easy to tell whether he’s actually going to show up or not.
Ian hasn’t really tried to talk to me all that much since class started, but today’s the day that Professor McAdams assigns us partners for the final class project. Whoever I get paired with, I’m going to be stuck with for the next three months or so, and I really don’t want to endure the hyper-ambivalence that I have toward him with any kind of increased frequency.
It might be simpler if I didn’t like anything about him, but after seeing him skate, that stupid portion of my brain that’s shaped like a skate deck has been trying to convince me that all of the reasons I thought he was an annoying moron at the competition were misperceptions.
The reality, and I’m sure of this, is that Ian is nothing more than a tattooed guy with no personal skills that just happens to be about the best skater I’ve ever seen in real life, but being in that kind of proximity with him—I don’t know. That stupid part of my brain has won the battle before, and it’s not usually a brilliant idea when it does.
Class starts, though, and Ian’s nowhere in sight. I’m not ready to pop the champagne cork just yet, but it’s a good sign.
“All right,” Dr. McAdams says, “today, as you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention, we are going to put you in teams of two for your final project. During class today, I want you to talk with your new partner and come up with a few ideas you might want to do and hand them in on a paper that contains your names—I can’t believe I still have to say this to people. You’re adults, most of you, and you should know how to write your name at the top of a piece of paper for class. I’ll look over your ideas and select the best two. Of these, you must pick one and that will be your final project. If you do not have two viable options on your paper, you can either try again on your own time, bringing something we can actually use at the beginning of next class, or I can assign you something.”
Oh, just get to it, will you? The longer you talk, the greater the chances that Ian walks through that door and I’m stuck between my standards and a hard place, if you’ll forgive the pun.
“I’m not vindictive when it comes to assigning projects, either, so if you and your partner are genuinely having a difficult time, don’t hesitate to ask for ideas from me. That said,” Professor McAdams says, “why don’t we get you paired off and we’ll get going?”
He’s still not here, but I’m not uncrossing my fingers yet. I’m in the fourth column, third row and the professor’s taking her sweet time writing down everyone’s partner assignments. The good news is that she seemed to skip over the other empty seat on that side of the room. The bad news is that I can’t remember if that seat actually has a person that goes with it or not.
“Mia, you’ll be with Riley,” Professor McAdams says, and I turn around to face my new study partner—project partner, whatever.
Riley is about my age, dirty blonde hair and glasses. She doesn’t say a whole lot in class, but then again, I have been noticing that participation within the classrooms in our institutions of higher learning is waning prodigiously.
Whatever the case, she’s not Ian, so there’s nothing complicated, no competing feelings of attraction and disinterest, just simple partner work where I’m probably going to end up doing just about everything and Riley will scribble her name at the top of any paperwork as her contribution to whatever groundbreaking research we decide to conduct.
The professor finishes pairing everyone up and I finally breathe easy. Even when Ian comes into the room while Riley and I are putting our desks together, I’m feeling a lot better about everything.
“Hold on,” Professor McAdams says, “we just had someone come in, so we have an even number. What’s your name?”
This isn’t happening.
“Ian Zavala,” Ian says.
It doesn’t matter. I’m already paired up. We’re really very close to beginning talk about what we’re going to do for our project. We’re locked in.
“Okay, and where do you sit?” Professor McAdams asks.
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
No, I’m sure it’s not going to matter where he sits. I don’t even think the professor ever bothered writing down assigned seating. The fact that he’s set up camp directly behind me long enough that people just assume that’s his seat doesn’t mean it’s his seat, and even if it did, it wouldn’t mean that I’d have to give up my partnership.
If I have to give up my partnership, everyone who was paired up after me is going to have to give up theirs and there’s no reason to make this whole process that much work. She’ll just pair him with whoever was going to be on their own before and that will be—
“Why don’t you and Mia team together, and Riley, you and Patricia can be a pair,” Professor McAdams asks.
Okay, so being that Patricia was the only person after Riley, I guess technically it makes just as much sense to pair Ian with me as it would to pair him with her, but I really wanted this to be my easy class.
Psychology fascinates me. It’s my wheelhouse. This should be a class where I breeze through and solidify my foundation in the more general concepts before I go into more field-specific classes starting next semester.
Now, as Ian smiles sheepishly as he makes his way past my desk to sit in his usual spot, the experiment has become me.
How will Mia handle being paired with a guy she’s simultaneously turned on and off by? What kind of stress and psychological strain will this new situation put on our young heroine?
Tune in next week.
“So, what are we doing?” Ian asks.
“We’re supposed to come up with ideas for some sort of experiment to do as our final project,” I tell him.
“You were at that competition a while ago—” he starts.
“You know what?” I ask him. “You and I are going to be working together for a while, and we don’t know each other, although I think it’s safe to say that we do both remember meeting one another when you were staring at my breasts right before you went out and skated in front of a few hundred people.”
“Yeah, that was a pretty good day,” Ian says.
“Glad to hear it,” I tell him, “but as we’re working together, you will either look me in the eyes, in the direction that I’m pointing, or not at me at all, do you understand me?”
He laughs. “Sure thing,” he says. “What’s your name?”
“Mia,” I tell him. “You’re Ian.”
“Remember my name from the big screen, huh?” he asks.
“You just said it to the professor about forty-seven seconds ago,” I tell him.
“That was really specific,” he says. “You kind of strike me as the uptight type, only the uptight type doesn’t usually hang out at skating competitions. The only people that really hang out at skating competitions are skaters, wannabe skaters, and skate groupies. Are you a wannabe skater?” he asks.
“Could we possibly focus a little bit here?” I ask. “I know we have some time before the project is going to be due, but if we don’t plan this thing out, we’re going to find ourselves with a week left and nowhere near enough time to do anything that we might want to do, so could we just…?”
“Sure,” he says. “What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I think one of the first things we’re going to want to consider is going to be the method of collecting data. As this is a psychology class, not a chemistry class, we’re going to be working with people, so collecting data is going to have to have some aspect of getting information from people about a particular topic. Is there anything you can think of?”
“We could always try to reboot what they did at Stanford,” he says. “You know, when they put all those students into a warehouse or something, made half of them guards, the other half prisoners, and watched as half the people started humiliating and abusing the others: We could do that.”
“I know what you’re talking about,” I tell him, “but first off, that’s not quite what happened. Second, someone already did it. Why would we want to repeat an experiment when we can try something new?”
“Don’t scientific experiments have to be repeated before results can be considered valid?” he asks, tapping the end of a pen against his full, bottom lip.
Really, I’m just impressed that he has a vocabulary large enough to form the question.
“Yeah, but we’re not a research lab,” I sigh. “We don’t have those kinds of resources. This is for a class in which we are students. I don’t even know how we would put something like that—”
“Yeah,” he says, leaning forward, “I didn’t really mean that seriously. I was just hoping for a quick chuckle at the schadenfreude of it all.”
“Where did you learn to talk like that?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” he returns.
“Schadenfreude,” I say. “How do you even know what that means?”
“What?” he asks. “I watched PBS when I was a kid, too. Don’t think just because I have all these tattoos that I’m some kind of idiot—oh hey, Gooch,” he says to someone on the other side of me. “Heard you got crabs from the old lady at that party last week; bummer.”
I’m trying to find out how this guy became so intelligent and now he’s talking past me to someone about their rumored venereal disease. If it weren’t impossible, I’d honestly think he was toying with my indecision about him.
This is one of those nice moments when I get a free stare, though. He’s talking to someone behind me, but we’re also in a conversation, so I get to just stay here and take in the contradictions.
Still, after a couple of weeks in class, I haven’t seen him without a beanie on his head, but a few inches of medium brown hair poke out from under the bottom of the hat. The tattoos stop well before his neck, and he seems to have remarkably clean teeth for someone who comes off like such a lazy slob.
“…probably best to wrap your guy up next time, don’t you think?” Ian asks and I shudder.
Being a skate aficionado, I’ve grown used to the kind of crass talk that goes on in a skate park and, although it’s not the way I choose to speak myself, I like to think I’ve even become very tolerant of those who choose differently. Still, the uncomfortably loud talk about VD in the middle of a college classroom is enough to make me want to hide my face.
“So,” Ian says, turning back toward me, and I could swear I see his eyes dilate before he reaches his second word, “what kind of sampling method do you think would be best?”
“I’m open to ideas,” I tell him. “Questionnaires can be useful because they can provide anonymity, which you’d think would make people more likely to tell the truth, but that’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes, immature people lie on questionnaires because they think they’re funny or witty or—are you listening?”
Ian looks down at me, his eyes having drifted to what I can only assume was the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he says, “what?”
“Where did I lose you?” I ask, really trying to be patient.
“I think we should do phone sampling,” Ian says. “It’s probably more likely to put people into awkward situations while they’re supposed to be answering your questions, but it would be hilarious to toy with them when you know you’ve got someone who’s trying to be discreet.”
“You’re going to make me do this whole thing, aren’t you?” I ask.
For the average slacker guy, he has remarkable posture. I’m not sure that I appreciate the crossed arms or the smirk on his face.
“I didn’t say that,” he answers. “I just think we may as well have fun if we’re going to work. They say people always perform better if they’re doing something they enjoy.”
“And that qualification is met, for you, by making strangers uncomfortable over the phone?” I ask.
“It’s just a thought,” he says. “Actually, as you say it, it does sound pretty dumb. What were you saying about the questionnaires and how they’re racially biased?”
“What?” I ask.
“I’m just kidding,” he says. “You still seem really tense. I’m just trying to get you to loosen up.”
He gives me a self-satisfied grin, pointing a neon sign at the source of his smugness. He thinks he’s doing me a favor, showing me that loosening up and having fun isn’t the devil’s poison sent to wreak havoc on my soul, but the problem is that I’m not an uptight person.
He’s putting this whole avatar over me that fits his preferred experience and it doesn’t matter if it’s anything to do with who I actually am or not.
That’s what pisses me off.
“Listen,” I snap. “I’ll figure out the sampling method, but let’s get together tonight and come up with an idea, something we can really work on. When we’re done coming up with that idea, we come up with another one and then another one until we’ve got something that’s going to work and I’m not uptight and we’re not crank calling people, either, and that does not, no matter what you might say, contradict what I just said about being uptight. It’s not being uptight to give a crap.”
“You’re really pretty when you’re annoyed,” he says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
Surprisingly, yes, I have been told before that I’m particularly attractive when I’m annoyed—though I think the exact term used may have been irritated or peeved. I really don’t remember which.
“No,” I answer, “and you’re an idiot.”
“We still have like five minutes of class left,” he says. “You don’t want to spitball a few ideas while we’ve got the time to do it?”
“I’d really rather spend what’s left of this class period facing forward and quietly reflecting on how nice it is to not have to talk to you and how I’m going to endure the coming months where such quiet moments are going to be in such short supply,” I answer. “So, let me give you my phone number. Send me a text after three and we’ll meet up.”
“What happens before three?” he asks.
“Before three, you’ll be waiting until three so you can send me a text,” I answer. “Now, I’m turning around. Quiet moment…”
I turn my body and then my desk/chair combo back toward the front, and I lean back in my chair. Now, I’m scratching my desk and looking down at my desk, thinking about how awkward it is trying to give the cold shoulder to someone who’s sitting right behind me.
It’s more anxiety-provoking than I would have thought. I hadn’t considered the sensation that he’s watching me right now because he’s sitting where he is, that he can’t help but be watching me right now.
I lean over and open up my backpack, leaning over the side of my chair and giving a quick look. Ian’s not looking at me. He’s giving the middle finger to someone on the other side of the room and I have no idea if he’s being playful or if a fight is about to break out.
It might be kind of exciting if I weren’t sitting so close to the guy.
On the bright side, though, at least I know he’s not staring at me. Not that he would, anyway.
* * *
The text came through a few minutes ago. Ian wants me to meet him at this café near where he lives.
Frankly, I’m just surprised I heard from him at all. I was kind of hoping I could at least get the major footwork of this project done before Ian decided it was time to actually get interested.
I get dressed and tell my dad I’ll be back in a little while.
I’m still his little girl and it’s really starting to bother me. I get that on some level, I’m always going to be his baby girl or whatever, but I am twenty years old. The least he could do is update his vernacular.
“You going out to play with your friends, sweetheart?” he asks.
“I have a project for one of my courses, and I’m meeting with my partner to go over the details,” I answer. “It’s for psychology.”
“You’ve been taking a lot of those,” h
e says. “I thought you were done with psychology.”
“Nope,” I tell him.
“Huh,” he says. “When did you decide to go back to it?”
“I never decided to go away from it,” I tell him. “The only reason I haven’t had any psychology classes the last few months is because that was summer break and I don’t have school then.”
“You don’t have to get snippy about it,” he says, and I cringe. His eyes are wide and moving quickly from side to side. “I guess I just haven’t been as available as I should be.”
It might be a less frightening sentiment if it didn’t look like he’s on the verge of a panic attack at the thought of missing some detail of my life, but it does, so it is.
“We’ve just been talking about other things,” I tell him. “After classes, I don’t really want to talk about school that much, you know that.”
“Yeah,” he says, seeming to relax a little. My dad is how I know I’m not uptight. If I were even a little uptight, there would be some aspect of his behavior that I could understand on some instinctual level, but it’s taken every psychology class I’ve ever taken and a lot of my own research to know that my father suffers from an inability to let go of his image of me as a small child that needs to be protected from anything and everything in the world. Most of the time, he just comes off as weird. It’s about that long before he finishes his thought. “I know that.”
“I’ve got to go,” I tell him. “I don’t want to be late. I think my partner’s the type that’s not going to sit around waiting too long to do homework.”
“All right,” dad says. “Just drive safe, and I want you to watch out for kids on the road. They can just pop right out in front of you with no warning. They’re like cats.”
“Cats?” I ask.
“Or spider monkeys,” he says. “I don’t know. Whatever they’re like, they’re unpredictable. I just assume, every time that I’m driving toward a part of the block where a child is playing in the driveway or on the lawn that that kid is going to jump out in front of my car. It’s good to go slow, even if it looks like they’re going inside with their—”
