The Year Of Uh

by Jud Widing

  Nur smiled, and that only made Deirdre sulkier.

  “Goodbye, Nur.”

  She started and looked up the stairs to see Hyun-Woo traipsing down, trailing some of the other people he’d been smoking with yesterday.

  Yuck. She’d forgotten he’d been smoking. Had he been smoking? Or had he just been hanging out with people who were? Not that it mattered, but she tried very hard to remember…

  Nur started to wave, but stopped herself and instead opted for a casual nod. Why the latter should be preferable to the former, she couldn’t say. “Goodbye, Hyun-Woo. Ah!” She held up a finger, then pointed it towards Deirdre. Made a walking gesture with her fingers. Shrugged. “Deirdre.”

  Hyun-Woo laughed and turned that radiant smile of his onto Deirdre. Nur wished he hadn’t, because it was absolutely wasted on her. “Goodbye, Deirdre.” Wasting his breath now, too.

  Deirdre shrugged as though physically bucking off Hyun-Woo’s pleasantries. She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came. Nur silently thanked whatever deities might be in the vicinity, and led her sister back to Uncle Dr. Bernard’s house.

  CHAPTER 6

  Three hundred and fifty-six days.

  Nearly a week and a half gone. Nur was experiencing the least appealing aspects of time’s relativity: her days ground on and on and on, endless slogs of sullen wordlessness punctuated by spasms of vein-bulgingly taxing linguistic gymnastics. Were she a less empirically minded person, she might well believe that American days lasted closer to 30 hours.

  And yet – time in macro was absolutely flying by. She started school eight days ago. Reveille, breakfast, class, home, sleep. Nur pushed for détente with her sister, hoping to entice her out on some fun excursions. There was stuff to do in Boston! They ought to be doing it! Classes only ran for about six hours on weekdays, and Beantown (a cutesy nickname she’d picked up from the Eastern European-looking woman in her class, a Croatian named Dunja) wasn’t so large that a cross-city jaunt was infeasible in an evening. Plus, they’d had two days of weekend all to themselves. What had they done with it? Absolutely nothing.

  They’d done nothing, and now they had three hundred and fifty-six days left. Nur looked at the clock.

  12:03 AM, it displayed in merciless red LED.

  Scratch that – three hundred and fifty-five days.

  It was officially Friday. Their second one in America. Nur wanted to get Deirdre out and about, but she wasn’t about to let that vain desire torpedo her free time. There would be an excursion this weekend, and that was all there was to it.

  There was slightly more to it than that: Nur really didn’t want to go alone. Call it fear or wisdom or something else, but the prospect of waddling off into a strange city in a strange country by herself sent a shiver jolting along her spine. “ILL-ADVISED”, hummed the neon sign glowing behind her eyes. That about covered it. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible idea, but it was ILL-ADVISED.

  Deirdre had throttled back on her sulking. Well, the sulking had ebbed, anyway. Whether this was a conscious decision on her part, or merely the result of an inability to sustain such focused self-pity, Nur couldn’t guess. Nor did she care to. Either way, Deirdre was now standing right next to Nur (seated, natch) on the T, as opposed to halfway down the car with her face smushed against the window.

  “So,” Nur ventured in her most affable tone, “I was thinking about maybe going out and doing something fun this weekend. What do you say?”

  Deirdre didn’t say anything, which Nur had expected. So she soldiered on: “There are all sorts of historical sights – this is a very important city in America’s history – but I know you’re not so interested in those. So maybe we could figure out something we’d both like to do? It’s Friday night in America! There must be live music, or, I don’t know, a wh-“

  “Why do you want to hang out with me? So you can laugh about me behind my back again?”

  The train screeched to a halt not due to some unforeseen obstruction on the tracks, but simply because the T screeched no matter what it was doing. Nur imagined the depot in which the (very stationary) trains were stored overnight was nonetheless a cavern of unholy iron caterwauling. The doors opened, some people got on, some got off, and the T screeched in to motion.

  All this time, Nur was attempting to find a handhold in what Deirdre had just said. She hadn’t, and so went plummeting from the Sisyphean summit of Conversation With Deirdre.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Deirdre leaned down to eye level with Nur, her bending back conveniently synchronized with a sharp bleat of the T taking a turn. “That Asian guy! When he came up and talked to you that day, you pointed at me and did some gesture and then you both laughed!”

  “…” Good grief. Deirdre had been nursing that little nugget of nothing for over a week. Is that why she’d been so sullen this whole time? Nur considered responding with the bemused incredulity she was feeling, but had the presence of mind to catch a scoff in her throat.

  Instead, she opted for the cooing, conciliatory approach. “Deirdre, we weren’t laughing at you. We were laughing at a misunderstanding we’d had the day before. When you ran off…” Nur explained the whole situation, all the while watching Deirdre rebuilding her sulky bulwarks. Why do I even bother. It wasn’t a question, just an observation. Still, she hued to the line of ‘oh jeez what an unfortunate misunderstanding for which we are both equally culpable, I will apologize to you in the hopes that you will reciprocate (even though I don’t feel I’ve done anything wrong)’, hoping that her words might plant a seed of rapprochement (how curious, that Nur thought of her relationship with her sister primarily in terms of politics and warfare) that might grow under the warmth of her demeanor.

  Nothing grows overnight, though. Nur would have to be patient. Which was obnoxious, because it was tonight with which she was primarily concerned. She wanted to go somewhere, but she didn’t want to go alone. Who else could she ask?

  “That Asian guy.”

  A different kind of shiver jolted along Nur’s spine. This one lit up another neon sign in her mind, but this new one sure didn’t say “ILL-ADVISED”. What did it say? She couldn’t be certain. It was written in a language she didn’t understand yet. But it gave a lovely light.

  After a week and a half, Nur could struggle through some very, very basic conversations in English, as long as the interlocutor didn’t throw any curveballs. If she asked somebody how they were doing, and they said anything other than “I am doing well”, then, well, she wouldn’t be.

  So trying to invite a boy out (not that she was asking him out, obviously, she was just inviting him to join her while she went somewhere that just coincidentally happened to be out, of course, naturally), a procedure that required great tact and forethought in her native language, was some ways beyond the pale. But the choices were either sit alone with Deirdre in the gloom of Uncle Dr. Bernard’s house again (Aunt Amy was a welcome counterbalance, and would let slip some Creole from time to time. But the wry glares of disapproval Bernard threw her way ensured that those strategic slip-ups remained unidirectional), or potentially embarrass herself by asking this guy o…er, well, whatever.

  Right! Whatever! It wasn’t a big deal! They sat together in class, and often paired up for exercises. They were becoming friends, of course, and friends would go out with ea…friends would have fun togeth…friends would, um, pass time by simultaneously experiencing a given event in a sufficiently narrow geographical proximity as to permit it to be said that they were experiencing said event as a social bloc.

  See? Not a big deal!

  Tuppence Crabshoe, who despite Nur’s hopes had not ceded control of the class to another teacher (why the owner of the school was refusing to delegate the beginner’s class to somebody lower down the ladder, Nur couldn’t imagine) and insisted on continuing to called her “Ahnonur”, d
ismissed them and wished them a “GOOD WEEKEND.” The words were written on the whiteboard in big block letters, which she underlined twice for emphasis.

  Chairs scraped as students stood. It was imperative that Nur catch Hyun-Woo and ask him before he left the classroom – she wouldn’t have the chance to ask him properly if Deirdre was lurking around, trailing grumbling thunderheads along with her.

  Granted, there was no reason to remind herself of this imperative, because they were sitting right next to each other. Flagging Hyun-Woo down was a simple matter of looking at him and saying “Um.” Still, this simple task seemed so unspeakably urgent that, when the time came, she looked at him (so far so good) and honked another word she’d picked up from fellow students: “HEY.”

  Hyun-Woo started slightly. “Yes?” he asked. Which, in as much as Nur was familiar with the word “Yes”, didn’t make very much sense to her. But it was already clear that Hyun-Woo was picking up English far more easily than anybody else in the class. Nur had heard that after one is fluent in multiple languages, acquiring new ones became a matter of less and less difficulty…which hardly seemed fair. Hyun-Woo already spoke a million languages – he didn’t need one more! Why not let people like Nur have it? Why-

  Education isn’t zero-sum, you dummy. Now quit stalling and focus.

  She cleared her throat. Oh, blast it all, she ought to have looked up some relevant words in the Creole-English dictionary!

  But you didn’t know you were going to ask him until you were already on the train.

  Well then she should have the dictionary with her at all times, shouldn’t she? And besides, she might not have known she was going to ask him until the T ride in. But that doesn’t mean she hadn’t been thinking about it, in the back of her mind…

  Stop talking to yourself and talk to HIM!

  Alright, alright! Jeez!

  Hyun-Woo was staring at her with a look of focused concern. How long had she been staring at him? And how vacant must she have looked, as she bickered with her brain?

  You are your brain.

  Shut up.

  “We go to…” where could they go? What places were there to go that she knew how to convey in English, wh-

  “There are over 23 million things in there-“

  “…the library?” Granted, not much of an adventure, since it was all of a five-minute walk from the school. And, really, that was a thing she could probably have done herself. She didn’t expect a library to be one of the dangerous corners of the city. She really should have worked out something better ahead of time, but now it was out.

  Hyun-Woo smiled at her, a curtain of his thin black hair flopping rakishly across his forehead. What a smile! His upper teeth were perfect, straight and white. His lower teeth were just as white, but ever so slightly crooked, as though he’d leased his braces and hadn’t been able to make the final payments. The dental idiosyncrasy was charming, and paired up with the cute little dimples set high up on his cheeks, th-

  Friends friends just friends don’t make it weird you don’t even know this guy

  He made an expansive gesture with his hands. “The Boston Public Library?”

  “Yes,” she nodded, using that word as an affirmative, the way she understood it to be used. “Tonight.” She tapped her bare, watchless wrist. “Seven o’clock?”

  Hyun-Woo nodded back. “Seven o’clock.”

  Nur nodded back to his nod. Or maybe she hadn’t stopped nodding from before. Who could tell.

  Tuppence Crabshoe, that’s who. She’d been standing by the door, watching them like a sinister cross between Dr. Frankenstein and Geppetto. Nur gave her a “Not a big deal!” face and slipped out of the room.

  Deirdre was waiting outside. Nur bounded down the stairs towards her, which enthusiasm caught her sister completely off guard.

  “Come on!” Nur shouted over her shoulder as she practically skipped down the block. “Let’s get you home!” There was just enough time for Nur to run home, drop off her sister, get changed and head back in to town. Deirdre had mocked her for packing the nice dress, but Nur was going to get the last laugh.

  CHAPTER 7

  He knows I wanted to meet at the library, right? And not at the school?

  Does he know where in the library I wanted to meet?

  Do I?

  Nur spent the train ride back into the city imagining all of the ways the meeting could go wrong. That’s how it felt, anyway. So what a pleasant surprise it was to discover that she hadn’t imagined literally all of the ways.

  The Boston Public Library was closed, and had been since five o’clock.

  Hadn’t seen that one coming. Perhaps should have; alas, did not.

  The universe was round, last Nur had heard, so she looked forward to the day when her hindsight reached back, wrapped its way around the fullness of eternity and returned to her from the other side. On that day, she might be able to boast of something approaching foresight. Thus, she looked forward to it. Or backward. Or something.

  Until that day, she would be here, sitting in a lovely white cocktail dress (upscale but casual, low-cut but tasteful) on the steps of the Boston Public Library’s Dartmoth Street entrance, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. A group of rowdy boys passed by, and one shouted something in a tone that struck her as less than gentlemanly. She chose to believe it was “you are overdressed for the Library, which is closed, but your dress is still adorable and flattering”. She was reasonably sure that wasn’t what he’d actually said.

  7:04. Maybe Hyun-Woo had gone to the school, or one of the other entrances. It was a big Library after all. And the whole big thing was closed.

  Disaster.

  “Nur!”

  She was up on her feet like a shot, or two shots, thanks to the cracking of her knees. I hope he didn’t hear that, she wished inexplicably. What would it matter if he did?

  He came trotting up the steps, wearing exactly the same thing he’d been wearing to class. A nice off-white button up shirt, olive green pants. He’d been well dressed to begin with, but Nur still felt slightly foolish for having changed her clothes for a trip to the library.

  “Hey!” he said as he made a show of looking at her dress, though he spun it out into “heeeeeeey!” Thankfully, there was nothing lecherous about his gaze. As most all women are, she was cognizant of how quickly the sun could set on even the most jovial of strolls. Of course not all men were of that sort, but there was often no way to know who was until the shadows had claimed their quarry.

  She returned his smile, envying him, as she did all men, that he almost certainly had no such thoughts poisoning his pleasant evenings out. Once upon a time she would try to parse this feeling, to see if there was perhaps a hint of antipathy in it. She hadn’t bothered with doing that in quite a while – she was well-accustomed to their obliviousness.

  “Great!” he said, boldly offering her two thumbs up (for all he knew, she was from the sort of culture where a raised thumb meant ‘I have lain with your most cherished female relation and found the experience unsatisfactory’). She gave a coy little curtsey, like an idiot, what are you doing Nur, and quickly recovered with another great popping of the knees. Perhaps she was being overly self-conscious, but very little was breaking her way this evening.

  Nur pointed over her shoulder. “Library is closed.” She knew enough, from her preliminary attempts at English study back in Seychelles and her nine days of intensive immersion, to know that “Library is closed” was syntactically graceless. But never mind that; she had a thought in her head which she conveyed in a language not her own, in a real-world context. This was a thrilling development.

  So thrilling, in fact, that she nearly forgot that Library was closed.

  “Aw,” Hyun-Woo moped. But not for long – he took out his phone, punched a few buttons, and then gestured for Nur
to follow him. Which she did, marveling that his phone apparently worked perfectly well without the ball and chain of free internet (oof, what a child of my generation I am). He led her back to Boylston, where they took a left and walked for several blocks. She was just starting to wonder where, precisely, they were going, when he gestured for them to cross the street. As they stepped out in the middle of the street, which was jay-walking, which was a crime, nine days in America and she was already committing crimes, which was insane because she was well aware of the state of American prisons…those thoughts vanished because as they stepped out, Hyun-Woo took her hand as though he’d been doing it every day for years.

  That’s when she knew the evening had changed. The original plan was to go on a little expedition with her sister, and here she was, out with a guy.

  Correction: getting drinks with a guy.

  He walked her right up to a bar, so packed that it spilled out onto the street, and made a ‘how did I do?’ face.

  Nur almost gave him a thumbs up. But then she didn’t, because Correction The Second: she was not getting drinks with a guy.

  Because the drinking age in America was 21. Nur wasn’t a big drinker, but she’d had a few in her time, and all of those had been legal. The drinking age in Seychelles was 18, and she had an entire year to grow accustomed to ordering adult beverages. She’d nearly forgotten that, for some reason, Americans drew the line at age 21, and it was a very bold red line.

  Now goddamnit, how to convey all of this to him? She couldn’t think of a quick way to do it without him thinking she was trying to shirk him. She wanted to get a drink with him, but she couldn’t, legally.

  She was taking too long to formulate a response: his puppy-dog face was starting to fall, less spaniel, more basset hound. Nur raised her hands in a placatory gesture (she sincerely hoped he wasn’t from a culture in which this meant ‘I have taken an informal poll of the individuals living in your vicinity and the consensus is that you emit an unspeakable odor, in case you haven’t noticed all the wilted flowers and rotten fruit you leave in your wake’)