THE NEXT month passed in a haze of sleep, forcing myself to eat, going through the motions of attending class, mindlessly making coffee, and, yeah, fine, a lot of crying.
The night I’d walked in on Will with that man, I’d called Daniel sobbing while walking aimlessly. Daniel had gotten freaked out that he couldn’t understand me and then, when I’d calmed down enough to explain what had happened, been so furious at Will that he’d threatened to come down and beat the shit out of him, and Rex had taken the phone away.
When I’d hung up with them, Rex having extracted a promise from Daniel that he would not take the early BoltBus to New York and defend my honor, I collapsed in bed, pulled up the covers, and slept for twenty hours. When I woke up, I had the bizarre synchronicity of having inadvertently set myself on Charles’ schedule. We went to the dining hall together, and he monologued about how the schedules of modernity enslave us, bending our minds and habits to the patterns enforced by business hours, greeting card designations, and department store sales.
“Fuck time,” I’d said. “You think it’s moving you forward, moving you closer to something, but it’s really just happening without you.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Charles had said, like I’d finally seen reason.
Milton had found me in the same stairwell where we’d first met at orientation.
“Oh, hon,” he’d said when I told him. That’s all. He didn’t say he told me so, or that he hated Will—though he said both later on, the former to my annoyance and the latter to my vague and petty satisfaction. He’d just held me while I cried and then taken over my life for the next week, making sure that I ate and slept and went to class.
He dragged me bodily from the dorms one night to go to a movie with him and Gretchen that I didn’t pay attention to and didn’t remember after. I sat between them in the darkness, my friends, and I imagined I was still in the planetarium with Will, and I cried. And then when I got back to my room I YouTubed the planetarium scene from Rebel Without a Cause that Will had mentioned, and I thought how James Dean actually looked a little bit like Will—the sharp angle of the jaw and the eyes that shifted from bravado to uncertainty a little too easily.
Two weeks after the night I’d walked in on Will, he called me to ask how I was. I’d left him a drunken message the night before that I only remembered cringingly when I saw his name appear on my phone. I answered but didn’t say anything at first. Will talked like things were normal between us. He told me about a client at work (screaming fit when he told her she couldn’t have an entirely black cover no matter how edgy her book might be) and about the new Vietnamese place he’d tried in the neighborhood (great bún but bland spring rolls). He told me that he’d been rewatching Firefly and wondered if I’d seen it (of course I had; what kind of tasteless moron did he take me for).
And, finally, when he petered out and lapsed into silence, I took a deep breath, sat up straight, and told Will what I’d realized.
My friends had weighed in. Milton was loudest, as usual. Will is bad for you. He’s a drug and you’re an addict, and you can’t be trusted to make logical, healthy decisions around him, so you should stay the fuck away. But, barring that, just don’t make yourself vulnerable to him. Be as remote and untouchable as he is.
Gretchen was practical and generous: If he’s taking up space in your head, then he’s a part of your life, and you owe it to yourself to figure out how you feel about him. It blended a bit with something that Tonya said in yoga when we were in challenging poses: Find the place where you’re doing work you don’t need to do. Soften your jaw, your eyes, your hands. They aren’t helping you lunge so you don’t need to expend energy on them.
The truth was that Will was a constantly tensed muscle, using energy even when I wasn’t actively engaging with him.
I took a deep breath and told Will, “I guess I kind of thought if I just waited long enough you’d realize that you wanted to be with me.” My voice sounded small and pathetic, but I forced myself to go on. “I know you didn’t promise me that. I know. We really do want different things, I guess. And I’m just making myself pathetic now, so I need to stop.”
Will started to say something, but I didn’t let him. I needed to get it out now or I never would.
“The thing is, I can’t see you. You take up too much… everything. I don’t know how to, I guess, feel things halfway. If you’re always there in the back of my mind—if I’m always so invested in you…. See, I want to give you what you want. You know? I want you to be happy because I—I care about you so much. But I can’t really because giving you what makes you happy makes me so… so fucking miserable.” I took a deep breath, trying not to cry and failing.
“So I get that you won’t change, but I don’t think I can either. I can’t stop wanting what I want—so. So I need to stop. I need to like get a fucking life, I guess. Of my own. Yeah. I need to get a life.”
Silence, but I knew he was still there.
Finally, his voice as small as I’d ever heard it, Will said, “Okay. I understand. Take care of yourself, babe.”
He ended the call.
And I broke all over again.
I THREW myself into Project: Get a Life with as much enthusiasm as Charles undertook his Project: 36-Hour Days, and a level of manic desperation that I acknowledged and accepted.
Milton was enthusiastic and got everyone else on board too. He dragged me to campus plays, choir concerts, dance performances, narrating the reviews of each that he’d compose for the Arts column in the school paper that he’d begun writing for.
Thomas took me to Life Drawing with him, at which I produced one ludicrously malformed sketch after another. Thomas being Thomas tried to encourage me, telling me my style was Picassoesque. But a mention of Picasso just made me think of the day Will and I went to MoMA, and I found myself wondering what he’d seen in that painting Christina’s World that was different enough from what I’d seen that it’d made him kiss me in public.
I wondered what he’d thought the gray thing was between the house and the barn. And, as I sat on the uncomfortable metal stool in the art room while people sketched around me, I had an internal collapse at the realization that I might never know.
Gretchen made sure I went with her to yoga three times a week, pulling me out of my room and throwing sweats at me if I didn’t show up in the hallway to meet her at the appropriate time. Of all of it, that was the one activity that felt like it was helping. For those sixty-five minutes, I took myself out of my own hands and placed myself in Tonya’s. I followed her instructions with a slavish accuracy, desperate to believe that just showing up in good faith was enough. Desperate to believe what she always said: that we were each enough, as we were, and that we could sink into our enoughness and trust it to buoy us.
And if occasionally something she said in class struck my heart or my gut with the precision destruction of a smart bomb—like the day she said, “It’s in the moment that you give up that you realize you could have kept going. It’s also the moment it’s too late.”—then no one said anything about the tears that streaked my skin along with sweat.
Gretchen didn’t talk much about her personal life, but she and Layne were still seeing each other, and from the brightness of their smiles when Gretchen would show up to Mug Shots, things were going pretty well. I never told Layne how spectacularly I had twisted her advice, but I figured Gretchen had probably given her the basics because, though she never brought it up, I would sometimes catch her looking at me with a kind of sympathy that said she’d been there.
But for all that my friends saved me, week after week, I still wanted something that was just mine. I saw my mistake now. That casting Will in that role—as the thing that was just for me—was paradoxical and had set me off on the wrong foot. No, I wanted something that was mine the way theater was Milton’s and art was Thomas’, and… you know, toppling the heteropatriarchy was Layne’s.
Physics was the thing I’d found that I was constantly interested by, so I talked with my professor, and she let me start working in the physics lab. Just helping out for now, but with the promise that if it was a good fit I could potentially be involved in research projects the next semester. I talked to one of the seniors who told me they sometimes let sophomores assist over the summer in exchange for room and board if they declared a physics major before the end of the semester, so since I was technically a sophomore, credits-wise, that’s what I did.
Filing the paperwork made me feel better. As if now that I was affiliated with a department I belonged here somehow. It was the first time I’d felt like I belonged anywhere, really. Even doing scut in the lab was fascinating. Milton always said he didn’t get how I—someone he thought of as being creative—could want to be a science major since they were methodical and unimaginative.
But he was so wrong.
Yes, physics was methodical, but the method was part of what the very discipline questioned. It was incredibly creative. These scientists began, sometimes, from whims and questions as personal as any that inspired a play or a song, running those personal investments through the most rigorous of testing, a gorgeous blend of feeling and thought that produced experiments and theories from the atomic level to the heights of philosophical query.
I was particularly fascinated with the crux of astronomy and physics, and when I started looking at the course catalog for fall semester I heard Will’s voice in my head for just a moment, saying, “Astrophysics? You’re going to study actual rocket science?” I thought he’d be excited by it, actually. One of the things I liked so much about Will was how his creativity and art were crossed with a nearly scientific rigor, his designs as much based in layout and market research as they were in aesthetics.
And then I banished his voice from my head like I’d done a thousand times since that night and redoubled my attention to work.
ON VALENTINE’S Day in elementary school, we were instructed to give cards to everyone in the class. We’d made construction paper mailboxes with our names on them and placed them at the front of the room, colorful and open, ready to receive well wishes from anyone who might drop them in.
In fourth grade, I’d followed this instruction as I had every year before, carefully tearing apart the perforated Batman cards I’d gotten at Target and writing a classmate’s name on the back of each one. I’d saved the best one—Batman standing next to the Bat signal looking out over a moon-drenched Gotham City—for Noah Waldmann, who I thought was the coolest kid in my class. I’d been crushed when I looked through my mailbox to see that I hadn’t gotten a card from him. Then embarrassed when I realized that though the girls had given cards to everyone, unlike last year, all the other boys in my class had only given cards to the girls. Something had shifted. An unspoken line had been drawn through our social relations that had been clear to everyone except me.
Aside from that mild humiliation, Valentine’s Day was just something that happened, with the bonus that there was usually candy lying around. Sure, maybe I got the slightest bit jealous when I thought about people out with their dates, having attention lavished on them. But I knew it was just a stupid Hallmark holiday, really.
This year, though, it was like every force in the universe seemed hell-bent on shoving Valentine’s Day down my throat, up my nose, and into my eyeballs. Every storefront was plastered in a nauseous combination of pinks and purples. Posters for everything from kissing booths to film series appeared on campus bulletin boards, all of them printed on garish pink, purple, and red paper. The dining hall acquired table toppers that left an unsanitary dusting of glitter on the tabletops, which I’d find on my clothes and in my hair throughout the day. Even the radio was in cahoots, rendering songs I usually liked noxious through syrupy dedications of love.
So, though I had never paid the day much mind before, now, at exactly the moment I wanted to avoid thinking about romance, it was everywhere and there was no escape.
When I walked into Mug Shots the week of V-Day, Layne was in the middle of showing George, our newest employee, how best to place red hots just so on the whipped cream that topped our Hearts Afire Hot Chocolate, and where the vat of precrushed candy canes to sprinkle on the Mint Mocha Love Latte was. There was a dish of candy hearts, two of which were to go on every saucer holding a for-here drink. There was white-chocolate syrup dyed red for the Brownie Blitz Cappuccino, pink marshmallows for the Gimme S’Mores, and cinnamon sticks to stir the (Very) Dirty Chai Lattes. It was as if Valentine’s Day had exploded. And it was caffeinated.
That whole week I got home from work with red chocolate blood spatter dotting my clothes, shards of candy cane under my nails, and dust and dirt clinging to the marshmallow residue that coated my hands. By the time Gretchen came in to meet me near the end of my shift on Valentine’s Day evening, all I wanted was to be stricken with a particular strain of colorblindness that would disable me from seeing any color that contained red pigment. Also if I never heard the phrase, “I guess I’ll treat myself since no one else is going to treat me,” presaging the order of a drink again it would be too soon.
Somehow, though, all it took was watching calm, practical, totally together Gretchen lean over the counter to kiss Layne, who mumbled and flushed and pushed her glasses up her nose in delight, to make me as melty inside as one of the molten chocolate lava cakes that we served with cinnamon-cardamon marshmallows to dip in their liquid center.
After I’d made us both the most decadent drinks I could concoct (a combination of the Brownie Blitz Cappuccino and the Gimme S’Mores) and poured them into enormous to-go cups, Gretchen and I walked back toward the dorms, cutting through Washington Square Park because we always cut through Washington Square Park.
We sat on the edge of the fountain half sipping our drinks and half scooping them into our mouths with straws because I’d added so many brownie chunks and marshmallows that they were practically solid.
“So, you and Layne are really a thing, huh?”
“Yeah.” Gretchen stabbed at brownie chunks with her straw, eating them like shish kebab. “She’s pretty great.”
“She, um, came around, then? On the you-being-too-young issue?”
“Well, it wasn’t that she thought I was too young per se, just that we were in different places in our lives. Which is true. Kind of. But, yeah, she pulled her head out of her ass and realized that if we liked each other, then it was stupid to manufacture reasons not to be together. I mean, it’s not necessarily going to be serious or anything. But we… yeah, it’s good.”
“I’m happy for you.” And I really, really was.
Gretchen’s grin—complete with brownie in her teeth and whipped cream in the corner of her mouth—lit up her whole face.
BACK AT the dorms, things were underway for what I was informed would be the most epic sugar eating competition I’d ever seen. I informed the boy who told me this (a strange, jockish guy with red hair and eyebrows so blond they were nearly invisible against his ruddy skin) that since I’d never seen any eating competition, it wouldn’t take much to impress me.
As it happened, though, even if I’d seen a lot of them, I still would’ve been amazed and borderline horrified as I watched my peers consume volumes of sugar so great that I actually feared for their lives. Gretchen, uninterested, went to change because she was going over to Layne’s later, but I found Milton, Thomas, and Charles standing with some other people from my hall, all of them watching the action with varying levels of bemusement and anticipation. There were six categories of competition, each bizarre and ridiculous in its own way.
“So, like, I heard this premed guy actually went into a sugar coma a couple of years ago,” Thomas was saying.
“Should’ve known better, shouldn’t he?” Milton joked. “Never gonna get into medical school with an oversight like that on his record.”
“A sugar coma is not a real thing,” Charles offered in clarification, and Thomas and Milton rolled their eyes affectionately behind his back.
The first contest was to see who could eat the most marshmallow Peeps in one minute. There were three competitors, all of whom were friends and apparently proposed the contest because they legitimately liked Peeps and wanted to redeem the much-maligned food. The second was a couples’ challenge involving truffles and clothing removal that got so messy and scandalous that one of the couples quit. The third challenge almost turned my stomach. It involved the consumption of marshmallow fluff using sex toys as vehicles of delivery in a truly upsetting manner.
The fourth was a team challenge that required each team to construct a house of cards out of chocolate bars and then eat it piece by piece without knocking the rest of the house over, removing the bars of chocolate, Jenga-style. Piles of wrappers mounded underfoot as the constructions grew, nearly tripping one girl and sending her sliding toward the table where she would’ve knocked over all the houses of chocolate if someone hadn’t grabbed her by the back of her shirt at the last minute.
The fifth challenge was really a drinking game, since that hot chocolate was definitely spiked with something stronger than Mug Shots’ Hearts Afire cayenne-cinnamon syrup. I knew because they invited audience participation, and Milton pressed a full cup (clearly smuggled out of the dining hall) into my hand with a wink.
But the final challenge was my favorite. Teams of two unrolled yards and yards of licorice around the room in a madcap game of follow-the-leader where they took turns placing and consuming the licorice while crawling under tables, jumping up to tap doorframes, and, once, following the path of licorice that snaked up the leg of a blushing boy’s jeans.
By the time Charles and I were heading back to our room, I felt almost cheery, and distinctly more amenable to Valentine’s Day. It didn’t hurt that I was tipsy from the hot chocolate and that since the event coordinators had given out all the unused candy to the audience at the end of the competition, I was now in possession of enough snacks for a week.
Charles gazed thoughtfully at the pile of candy I put on the dresser, hands in his pockets and a pink lollipop making a comical bulge in his jaw.
“Do you think the Student Activities Board is in cahoots with the parent candy company that owns the brands they just consumed downstairs?” he asked seriously.
THE MORNING of my twentieth birthday, I woke up before my alarm for once, shutting it off before the train whistle could blast through my tender early morning brain. I called my mom to thank her for the birthday card she’d sent with a gift card to Olive Garden in it. “I figured you could take your friends out to a nice dinner after all that dining hall food,” she said. It was such a fundamental misunderstanding of my life on every level, but so very like my mom that I was overwhelmed by a sudden and unexpected rush of affection for her.
She told me about how Eric had gotten very into some reality TV show about people who want to be professional wrestlers or something and had started going to the YMCA religiously to lift weights every day.
I talked a little about my classes and satisfied her yen for celebrity sightings by telling her about the time I’d seen Michael Fassbender in Washington Square Park and how I’d served coffee to Michelle Rodriguez. She’d never heard of either one of them but after I’d listed some of their IMDb credits she was excited. She was disappointed to hear that I hadn’t been to a Broadway show yet, though, so I told her about going to Into the Woods, only I fudged the truth a little and said it was off Broadway. My mom was the only living human who couldn’t tell when I was lying, so she just oohed and ahhed over the mention of a play she’d heard of.
That night I really did take everyone to dinner at the Olive Garden in Times Square. It was mobbed with tourists, and we’d had to fight our way through the crowds. One does not simply walk into Times Square. But I relished the chaos for once. The bright lights and neon signs and huge television screens and billboards snapping my attention from scene to scene like a music video. People bumping into me and each other in confusion or enthusiasm or distraction, like meteorites colliding in space, or atoms crashing together, trying to get closer or to transform each other.
Inside, Milton, Charles, Thomas, Gretchen, and I laughed at how kitschy the Olive Garden seemed in contrast to the rest of the city. But I think they took as much unexpected comfort in its familiarity as I did, the menu and the décor and the smells the same here in this glittering wonderland as they were anywhere else.
We shared plates of fettuccine Alfredo and gooey cheese ravioli, towering piles of spaghetti with meatballs, and salad and breadsticks that really did seem endless. We drank raspberry lemonades spiked with vodka, courtesy of Milton, and finished with tiramisu, cheesecake, and something called a chocolate caramel lasagna, the flavors somehow so simple and pure that we kept eating them long after we were full, straining, maybe, to keep things recognizable.
I even ate some of the tiramisu, despite its newly negative associations, determined not to let my feelings for Will cast a pall over the evening.
After, we sat in the square for a while, people watching. Milton waltzed with one of the Disney characters, and Gretchen and I planked on the steps outside the TKTS booth. Thomas drew comics with me as the birthday hero, a cape with my initials on it floating out behind me as I rescued a tourist stranded on a billboard. Charles didn’t say much—for him the meal had been breakfast—but he took pictures of all the clocks with his phone, muttering notes for his project under his breath until we headed for home.
When we got back to the dorms, giggly and full, Milton invited us all to his room for some birthday Felicity, and I went to change into pajamas first.
Outside my door was a gift with my name on it, wrapped in fancy matte paper, gold and purple lines interlocking in a sprawling geometric design. The perfect balance of beauty and organization. My heart stuttered as I scooped it up and went inside, closing the door after me as if the box might contain something clandestine or volatile.
Leo, the card read. You don’t need to change. Not for anyone. But maybe the slightest upgrade won’t be unwelcome? Happy birthday.
Will hadn’t signed it. He didn’t have to.
Inside the box was a pair of brand-new Vans, identical to the old ones that Will had so scorned.
