Chapter 11

CHAPTER

11

PRESENT

Frostburg Antique Mall always smells like an ashtray, mingling with the faint ammoniac odor of the litter box tucked behind the creaky door of the single bathroom. But a handful of the vendors offer Saturday morning deals and it’s right around the corner from a coffee shop, which means iced coffee and antiquing has become a semi-regular weekend pastime, when I’m not drowning in an ocean of ungraded homework.

Usually, it’s a pastime I enjoy alone, but today a very blond and nosey shadow decided to tag along—supposedly because she was bored, but she’s been interrogating me about last night. It was a few minutes past six when I got home from The Falconer, but I’m being scrutinized like I turned up after breakfast still wearing last night’s makeup. “Like I said, it was a work thing. I had a few drinks with some colleagues. Nothing exciting.”

“Bummer,” Reagan sighs, snatching a vintage bucket hat off the rack and trying it on in the mirror. “I was kind of hoping you guys had an actual date.” She poses, inspecting her reflection at different angles, and then flings the hat onto a nearby chair, startling one of the nameless shop cats so that it darts beneath a Victorian sideboard.

“I fail to see how my love life is any of your business, anyway.”

Reagan shrugs as we peruse a hoard of costume jewelry, all of it marked Buy One Get One Free . “I mean, it’s not. If you want to die alone, by all means. But getting railed every now and again might be good for you. It would help you, I dunno, loosen up.”

I snort into my paper coffee cup. “We are not having this conversation.”

We skip over a booth filled mostly with mid-century baking utensils—stained wooden rolling pins and metal cookie cutters so bent out of shape that it’s hard to tell whether they’re supposed to be bells or Christmas trees or snowmen—in favor of a vendor selling vintage clothes and shoes.

“Statistically, it’s less likely with each passing year that you’ll find someone, you know,” Reagan is saying as she bends to inspect a pair of scuffed-up Dr. Martens. “And even if you do find someone in the next five years, getting married in your late thirties tends to lead to a higher divorce rate than, say, if you had gotten married in your late twenties.”

Slightly depressing, from my vantage point. “Did you Google that?”

“Nope. I learned that in Psych 101, my last semester at Chesapeake.”

“So what are you prescribing me, doctor? Arranged marriage, stat?” I select a sport coat from one of the racks and check the size.

“A good old-fashioned friend-with-benefits.” She gives a meaningful waggle of her eyebrows.

“No way,” I say. “He’s not even my friend.” Even after all these years, it still stings to admit that. Last night, talking for the first time in a long time, I was almost able to convince myself that maybe we could be friends again. But after a long and restless night of grading HIST-252 reading responses and a series of hazy, stress-induced dreams, things look different by the light of day.

“You’re assuming he’d be interested,” I add. I pull the sport coat over my T-shirt and examine my reflection in the floor-length mirror, imagining how it might look with my usual work clothes. One of the lapels is moth-eaten and it’s got bad eighties shoulder pads that make me look like David Hasselhoff. Nope. Not going to work.

Leaning against an old vanity, Reagan arches a brow over the lid of her cup of coffee. “He’s a red-blooded male.”

“That’s… no.” I shrug off the coat and return it to the hanger, warmth crawling up my neck. I’m reminded of a different coat, of hangers clattering around in a musty closet. “Teddy’s different.”

“Oh, my sweet summer child.”

I can’t help but laugh. “I just mean he’s practically a robot.” I slide metal hangers out of the way in pursuit of something I might actually get away with wearing. “On his list of priorities, sex probably rates, I don’t know, somewhere in between doing the dishes and brushing your teeth.” Even as I’m saying it, I know full well that it’s a lie. But it’s a lie that I hope Reagan might buy, seeing as she only knows him as her professor. Not as a best friend. Not as something a little more.

“I think you underestimate the whole thoughtful, studious thing he has going,” Reagan says. “He’s probably a total freak in bed.”

“Okay, that’s enough.” I wave a hand to stop her, as though I can wave the images right out of my head. Warmth seeps into my cheeks, though I’m not totally sure what I’m embarrassed about. Sure, it’s inappropriate to be talking about my colleague this way, but it’s not like I’m the one hypothesizing about Teddy’s sex life. I stuff a pair of woolly pants back onto the clothing rack and grab my half-melted iced coffee off a nearby table. I’m not really in the mood for looking at a bunch of itchy old clothes.

My phone vibrates as I’m unlocking the front door. I fish it out of the pocket of my skinny jeans—a fashion blunder that Reagan keeps insisting on rectifying, because apparently flares and mom jeans are back in. Izzy’s smiling face has taken over my phone screen.

I slide to answer and lift the phone to my ear.

“I’m so sorry it’s taken me so long to call back.” She’s talking before I have the chance to say anything, rattling the words off quickly and a little breathless. Probably walking to her car, or at the gym climbing the StairMaster, or out running errands—Izzy’s largest issue with the phone is that she can’t sit still, so on the rare occasions that she does make a phone call, it’s usually when she’s in the middle of doing some sort of physical activity that doesn’t require too much focus. “Things have been completely bananas the last few months. Work is chaos and I had to renew my residence permit last month. Total nightmare.”

I smile even though she can’t see me. She accepted a TESOL position teaching schoolchildren in Lisbon five years ago and never left, so I imagine chaos to mean Portuguese kids learning how to curse in English. “I know the feeling. Well, not the residence thing, but life has been…” I trail off. I’m not sure I want to announce my application for tenure until I’ve secured it—it feels premature, somehow. “Interesting.”

“Good interesting, or bad interesting?” comes her eager voice.

I move into the kitchen, where I deposit the plastic Subway bag and reach into the overhead cupboard for a glass. Reagan steals her sandwich out of the bag and disappears down the hall, where the door to her bedroom closes with a snap. Apparently, we’re not eating together. Works for me, since I’ll probably be on the phone for a while, but Reagan has a special talent for making me feel less like an older sister and more like a parent to a hormonal teenager. “Just interesting.”

Izzy sighs. “Tell me about it. You’ll never believe who added me on Facebook.”

I pour myself some water from the Brita and settle onto one of the barstools at the kitchen counter. Light streams in through the curtainless window above the sink, tinged gold by the changing leaves of the old maple. “Brandi?” I guess.

“Mohammad Darvish.”

I pause in the middle of unwrapping my cold cut sandwich. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while, but she managed to say it with as much ire as when we were teenagers. “He’s aware that no one uses Facebook anymore, right?” I ask.

“You updated your profile picture like last week.”

“I’m old and uncool, as Reagan likes to remind me. Isn’t Darvish supposed to be some big tech guy or something?” Last I heard, he was working in Silicon Valley, but that was years ago, now.

“He’s a programmer for some dating app because he obviously can’t get a date the old-fashioned way,” she rattles off. “But that’s not important. We got to messaging. He mentioned something about Teddy accepting a temporary teaching position at a school in Maryland.”

I slow my chewing. We’ve avoided talking about Teddy ever since the falling-out happened, because an argument with Izzy had followed not long after—nothing on the same scale, but when I’d called her to complain that he was ignoring my calls, she’d told me that I deserved to have them ignored after turning him away the way I did. Cold-hearted, I believe were her exact words. I resented her for it at the time, but it was the truth.

“Is that true?” she demands.

“Yes,” I admit.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I hesitate. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell her—I told myself it was because I didn’t want to bother her, but that’s maybe not the whole truth.

Izzy and I were never meant to be best friends. She had a whole number of friends away from camp, and I had Teddy. Izzy’s wonderful, and I love her with all my heart, but we don’t have all that much in common. She thinks my history books are horribly boring and my taste in music is garbage. I think she’s flighty and occasionally too honest for her own good. We can recognize those things about each other, but it doesn’t mean we love each other any less. It just means we’re not each other’s person, and that’s okay.

But over the years, it’s like I’ve defaulted to her, and she’s accepted it sort of like one accepts a stray cat. It starts with setting kibble on the porch to make sure the poor thing doesn’t starve, and then suddenly there’s cat hair all over your pillow and you’re scooping out a litter box on your hands and knees.

“It didn’t seem like the sort of thing I should bother you about,” I say. “I don’t know, Iz. It’s just…” I trail off, munching on a potato chip. “It’s complicated, you know?”

“Is it?” she challenges.

I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say to that. In her mind, it’s probably not all that complicated. I’m the lost cat on the found flyer and this is her opportunity to shove me back into Teddy’s waiting arms, except it’s not, because I can’t just take back the things I said. I’m about to explain as much when Reagan enters the kitchen, combat boots clopping on the tile. My eyes narrow as they sweep over her outfit, taking in the cropped tee and pleather shorts. I hold the phone away from my face. “Where are you going?”

“What?” asks Izzy’s faraway voice.

Reagan grabs one of her Diet Cokes out of the fridge, shrugging. “A party.”

“What party?” I press.

“It’s just this thing with Kappa Sig. Nothing too wild.”

“Is that Reagan?” Izzy shouts into the phone, loud enough that we can both hear her. “Tell her I haven’t forgotten about my flat iron.”

I ignore the flat iron in favor of more pressing issues. “Will there be alcohol?”

“It’s a frat party, what do you think?” Reagan pops the tab on her Coke and takes a sip as she backs toward the door. “Even I know you’re not that out of touch.”

“I pride myself on being out of touch, thank you. Hey,” I rush to add as she turns to leave. She spins on the heel of her chunky boots to look at me, her face fixed into the very picture of patience. “Stay safe. Don’t leave your drink with anyone.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Child,” I call after her before returning the phone to my ear. “Sorry. Reagan’s taking off to some party.”

“Six years,” Izzy laments. “Six years without that flat iron, and I’ve never found another like it. They just don’t make ’em like that over here.”

“I’ll tell her to mail it to you.”

“No. International shipping prices are highway robbery. And I’d have to use one of those adapter thingies with it, and I’m not sure it’s the right voltage anyway.” The price you pay when you throw caution to the wind and run away to Europe, I guess. “Maybe I’ll hit her up on Instagram. Ask her to Zelle me.”

“She probably wouldn’t see it,” I point out. “I’m pretty sure she has like two thousand followers.”

“Yeah, because she went to public school. That’s normal for them.”

“Speaking of Instagram”—I’m eager to steer clear of any more questions about Teddy—“I saw you deleted all the pictures with Margarida.”

She heaves a loud sigh. “I dumped her ass after I caught her riding around on her moped with some little exchange student. She said she was just giving her a ride, but the girl was clinging to her back like a spider monkey.”

“One girl’s heartbreak is another girl’s Lizzie McGuire Movie .”

“At least I’ve had my main character moment,” Izzy shoots back. “When was the last time you went on an actual date?”

“Why has everyone picked today to bully me about my love life?” I ask, dodging the question because I genuinely have no idea when my last date was. “Reagan was on my case all morning about ‘getting laid.’” I throw air quotes around the phrase like it’s some kind of hip new slang—which is maybe proof that I do, in fact, need to get laid, but I shove the thought to the back of my mind. Archive it, catalogue it. I’ll get back to it later.

“Maybe because you live like a freaking monk. Irving doesn’t require its professors to take a vow of celibacy, last I checked.”

“I don’t live like a monk,” I protest.

“Do you even own a vibrator?”

“Yes, actually.” A little silver number I ordered off a late-night infomercial while wine-drunk on the couch after spring finals.

“When was the last time you used it?”

I haven’t touched it since the unboxing. “That’s personal.”

Izzy laughs in my ear. “Right. So it’s been a while.”

“I just—I’m super busy,” I sputter. “I mean, what would I even fantasize about?” I leave the underlying concern unspoken—not a question of what, but who.

“Read some smut, maybe. I have a whole reading list I can send you.”

“Anything with vampires?” I ask through a mouthful of potato chips.

“No, but I do have a bunch of dark romance. Oooh, there’s this one book where the guy chases the girl through the woods. I’ll mail you my copy,” she says proudly. “Actually, no. It’s kind of a big book, now that I’m thinking about it. I’ll gift you a copy on Amazon.”

I pick at what’s left of my sandwich, my hunger sated. Other things not so sated, if I’m being honest. “That’s part of the problem. I don’t have time to read four-hundred-page novels. If I’m reading, it’s always research. Otherwise I’d never get any work done.”

“Then maybe you should fantasize about Napoleon or something.”

I snort. History never was Izzy’s strong suit. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

It’s been a long week, so I take the evening off from grading reading responses. I permit myself exactly two episodes of True Blood —in my search for good vampire shows, I find myself returning to all the stuff I watched when I was younger—and then I peel myself from the couch and head to the shower. Afterward, I throw on my robe and shuffle into the bedroom, where I remove my coin necklace and place it in the little dish on my nightstand before flopping into bed. It’s only then that I allow myself to access the day’s archives, the thoughts I’ve stuffed into the deepest and darkest filing cabinets of my brain. It’s something of a nightly routine: review every social faux pas, every awkward conversation, before I drift off to sleep.

In today’s news: apparently, everyone’s under the impression that I’m some sort of sex-starved hermit.

They’re not wrong. It’s been at least—actually, no, I don’t want to think about how long it’s been, because I’m pretty sure the last encounter was toward the end of grad school. It’s not the lack of sex that bothers me so much as the lack of desire. I haven’t wanted to have sex with anyone in particular, so I’ve been content to just go about my life without really dwelling on it. But now, lying here with my damp hair in my decidedly unsexy robe, I think maybe it would be nice to want someone. To actually care. To dwell on a living, breathing person, and not on people who have been dead for nearly five hundred years. Even Teddy has put more time and effort into adult romantic relationships than I have.

My mind drifts to his hand around the glass of gin and tonic last night. He’s always had nice hands—large, masculine, dark hair encircling his wrist. It’s been so long since I’ve even allowed myself to entertain the thought. Remembered the feeling, however fleeting, of those hands on my body. I can just picture that intensity of his, that laser focus, all of it directed at me.

Warmth builds in my lower abdomen at the same time as it tinges my face. I shouldn’t be thinking about this. It feels off-limits, but at the same time it feels so good to let myself fantasize a bit, and really, what’s the harm? I set my phone face down on the nightstand and ease open the drawer, where the small and silver contraption lies innocently among old hair ties and cough drops and dried-up pens.

A buzz rattles the dresser and I leap out of my skin.

Not the vibrator. My phone. Heart hammering in my throat, I slide the drawer shut and flip the phone over to see who’s calling. Reagan. Any lingering heat fizzles out of me. Taking a few breaths to calm my frustration, I swipe to answer. “What’s up?”

“Professor Fernsby?” asks a hesitant voice—one that I’m certain doesn’t belong to my sister. “This is Natalia. From History 111?”

I haven’t memorized all the new students this semester yet, so I can’t put a face to the name. But whoever she is, she must be a friend of Reagan’s. “Why do you have my sister’s phone?”

“She’s—” Natalia stops short. Bass thumps in the background, mingling with raucous voices. “I don’t want to get her into any trouble.”

I withhold my exasperation. Unusual circumstance aside, this is a student of mine, and I need to remain professional. “She’s an adult. I’m not going to ground her.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Natalia continues. “We had to take her keys. She hasn’t tried to drive or anything, but I’m not sure…”

“No, you made the right choice.” I’m already hoisting myself back out of bed and searching for clothes to throw on. I worry enough about Reagan’s driving when she’s sober. I don’t want to imagine what it would look like drunk. “Thanks for calling me. I’ll come get her. Keep an eye on her until I get there.”