Back When You Were Easier to Love (12 page)

“Good night,” I say, and it sounds a little sharper than I intend it to. “See you in the morning.” I start up the stairs so everybody knows this mission is accomplished.

“Okay,” Jen whispers when we reach the landing, “so if all Haven things look like that, I might be convinced to come for a visit.”

Day one of
the Zan hunt dawns slightly overcast and cool, which strikes me as just the right weather to begin a day of finding someone. I imagine seeing Zan, watching the clouds part and the sun slant through as he glances up, sees me, and smiles. When he sees me, he smiles.

“I’ve made an appointment for us with the Pitzer admissions office,” I tell Noah when I come into the kitchen. Gretel’s already left for school, and her parents have already left for work. Noah’s wearing a BYU T-shirt, reading the
LA Times
, and sipping (fair-trade) herb tea out of a mug Gretel made at camp. “We’re taking a tour at ten. That way we can figure out the campus hot spots.”

“Campus hot spots?” Noah sounds skeptical.

“Hot spots,” I confirm.

It’s on the tour that we’re going to find Zan. I saw it in a dream.

This is how it will go. We will be walking, the tour guide and Noah and me. And the tour guide, a male whose name I do not know, is ravishingly, drop-dead, every-cliché-in-the-book handsome. And he will want me. He will be trying to make me smile, and he will be touching me in subtle not-on-purpose-but-not-by-accident ways.

And we will be stopped at a coffee cart, and he will offer to buy me a drink, and Noah will say, “A Sprite would be great, thanks,” and we will ignore him. And the tour guide will have a Mocha Java and I will have a caramel steamer and over his shoulder I will see Zan. I will see Zan, and he will see me, and he will smile and time will stop and our gazes will lock and he will say, “Joy, when did you love me?”

And I will say, “Now, Zan. I love you now.”

I know this. I saw it in a dream.

“And then what?” Noah says.

“And then what?” I repeat, startled. Because for a sweet, sweet split second I think about what comes next in the dream, the kiss, the kiss that will end the aching I’ve felt every day and every night for the last eleven weeks. The kiss that will make my body full again. The kiss that will make me full again.

But Noah’s not talking about my dream. “We’re taking a tour at ten and then what? What’s the plan after that?”

I tear a banana off the bunch hanging from the castiron hook near the back window, and stare at the semi-wilted birds of paradise, their bright orange strikingly beautiful against the blue gray sky. My banana peels in perfect, even strips.

“So we’re just going to take a campus tour and hope we see him along the way?
That’s
the plan?”

“Noah,” I say patiently, “there are currently nine hundred sixty-three students enrolled at Pitzer College. That’s less than half the student body of Haven High. Statistically speaking, we’re more than twice as likely to see Zan today as we are to run into him in the Haven High cafeteria.”

Noah furrows his eyebrows and looks at me, with eyes that match the sky. They are not happy eyes. Finally he says: “Your ideas about statistics are questionable at best.”

“Finish your tea,” I tell him. “We’re going to be late.”

 

Here’s how the tour really goes down. We get to Pitzer Hall early and load up on free pens and catalogs picturing ethnically diverse students. Our tour guide’s name is Dave. He wears slim-cut jeans that hug his skinny legs, a faded, tight-fitting gray tee, and a hemp necklace. Likely not interested in people like me, and even if he were, not the kind of guy who’d make Zan insane with jealousy.

We’re not the only ones on the tour, either. There’s a guy from West Hollywood named Miguel who seems more interested in checking out the party vibe than the campus, and I can already tell I’m going to annoy him with all my questions.

“Welcome to Claremont, California,” Dave says, “known as the city of trees and PhDs.” He’s smiling like it’s supposed to be impressive, but his words make my stomach sink and crunch, sink and crunch. They remind me of that night, of Zan’s angry voice yelling, “It’s Oxford in the Orange Belt!”

“It’s okay,” Noah whispers in my ear, and I realize I’ve let out a so-small-you-can-hardly-hear-it scream.

First stop on
the tour is the residence hall area, masses of buildings with student artwork painted directly on the outside walls. “Everybody has something to say,” Dave tells us. “The administration respects that.”

It seems to me like something maybe the administration shouldn’t respect quite so much, because most of the “graffiti art” looks heavy on the graffiti and light on the art, at least to my eyes. But Zan lives within these walls, somewhere. These are Zan’s walls, and they can look however they want to look, because he is inside.

“Another thing the administration respects is the individual’s right to decide with whom he or she will cohabitate.” He knocks on one of the dorm doors and a girl yells for us to come in.

“Decide with whom he or she will cohabitate?” asks Noah.

I shrug. “No idea. Roommate selection, maybe?”

The room we walk into is just a few feet by another few feet. Our hostess is nodding along to her iPod while lying on her bed, which is so close to the ceiling she can’t even sit up without hitting her head. Under her bed is her desk, covered with stuff, and her dresser, also covered with stuff. The other side of the room is identical.

Glass bottles line the windowsill, and the air is thick, stale-beer air. I haven’t smelled stale-beer air in so long, and I don’t think Noah has
ever
smelled stale-beer air because his face is contorted like he’s trying not to breathe. The vein beneath his eye twitches.

Dave is, out of necessity, standing too close to me. I breathe in patchouli and male body odor, which, coupled with the stale-beer air, makes me woozy. As I move closer to Noah my foot ends up sliding on something, and I sort of fall onto him. I look down at the satiny panties now spread across Noah’s white sneaker. To his credit, Noah doesn’t say anything or even attempt to move. He just steadies me and tries to smile.

The girl who lives here is willing to show
this
off?

“Cornelia’s chosen to room with another female this semester,” Dave says as Cornelia resumes staring at the ceiling. “They share the bathroom”—he motions to the door behind me, which I don’t dare try to open—“with a male/female room, making this a single-sex room, coed suite. Anyone can live with whomever they want to. We’re the first campus in the country with one-hundred-percent gender-neutral housing.”

Gender-neutral housing.

I think about these walls, Zan’s walls, and I can see myself living with him. Our place would be nothing like this place, with disgusting smells and underwear on the floor. Our place would be organized courtesy of IKEA. We’d have cool bumper stickers and a poster of Noam Chomsky on the wall, and the bottles on the windowsill would be filled with fresh flowers. After class Zan would come in, set his books on the desk, and ask me how my day was and did I want to get something to eat? And we’d have all our meals together and at night he’d tuck me in and lie next to me until I fell asleep, then sleep in his own bed because, even with gender-neutral housing, there are limits.

Limits. And I’m back to reality; back to knowing there’s no way this gender-neutral concept would fly with my parents, or my religion, or even with me. But the dream of it all. I can’t help savoring the last, forbidden sweetness of the dream of it all.

It’s about this time that I start needing some air and I think everybody else does, too, because Dave says it’s time to move on.

Outside, a eucalyptus
tree bows overhead, its creamy-colored bark like elephant’s skin, smooth and taut over some bumps, loose and sagging over others. Zan’s here, somewhere. Somewhere, Zan’s here.

Noah follows my gaze. “Looks like an elephant,” he says casually, pointing. I don’t want him to be the one saying it. I want Zan to be the one saying it, Zan to be the one reading my mind.

“What’s wrong?” Noah asks me, and there’s the concern in his voice I haven’t heard this whole trip—not since Homecoming night at my house. “You look pale.”

“I always look pale,” I say, swallowing hard. “I am pale.” Which is true. I am. But I still feel the nonexistent color draining from my face. What’s wrong with me? We’re here. We’re one step closer to finding Zan. And I’m not scared. I’m not nervous. But I’m not happy. I don’t know what I am. “Anyway, I’m fine,” I say, which is not for sure true but definitely the right thing to say, because Noah nods and his shoulders relax.

“Okay,” says Dave, “let’s check out the campus hot spot, shall we?”

“Did he just say ‘campus hot spot’?”
I whisper to Noah. My practically nonexistent arm hair is standing straight up on my practically colorless arms.

Noah at least pretends not to notice the coincidence. “
Did he just say ‘shall we’?”
he whispers back.

“We have our own coffeehouse here.” Dave walks backward while facing us, and I wonder how tour guides learn to do that without bumping into things. “It’s a restored Craftsman-style cottage the college bought back in the 1950s and moved to right . . .”

He slows then stops. “Here. Ballad of the Sad Café. Best coffee in the Los Angeles County area, and
the
place for on-campus happenings. Student art exhibits upstairs, student recitals downstairs. The improv group performs here, the garage bands play here, student filmmakers have screenings here. This is the place to see and be seen.”

The place to see and be seen.

That’s exactly what I want.

To see and be seen.

 

I don’t pay attention to the rest of the tour.

We go through buildings and talk about study abroad and are told dates and statistics, but I don’t care. Zan is as good as found.

So we finish back where we started.

Noah’s being all polite, telling Dave thanks and Miguel it was nice to meet him, but I’m still in a daze. Zan is as good as found.

“So, whatdya think?” Noah’s eyes are deep blue and excited. “Lunchtime?”

I nod. “Let’s go.”

“So,” says Noah.
“Ballad of the Sad Café. We meet again.”

We’re not really meeting again—the two-second walkthrough on the tour barely qualifies as an introduction. My stomach drops, even though this is just a coffee shop. But it’s more than a coffee shop, really. It’s like my whole future is in here, waiting for me to live it. My past and my future, melding into one. This is how it should be.

“Doesn’t it smell good?” I inhale deeply as I push open the door. There’s this robust and somehow comforting aroma permeating the place. Right off I can tell Zan loves it here.

On one table a chess game is waiting to be played. New Age music is blaring through the speakers and there’s real art on the walls. There are a few old dinerstyle booths around the room, and there’s a group of students at one, looking deep in conversation. I am vaguely aware of Noah, hands in pockets, whistling.

“Will you cut it out? You’re embarrassing me.”

“What?” He goes back to whistling “On Top of Old Smokey.” Idiot.

This place is full of memories. I long to have them become my memories. I want to live this life, too. But more than that, I want to have already lived this life. I want for Zan and me to have lived it together.

That smell again. Nowhere in Haven smells like this. We’re probably the only town in America not to have a Starbucks, and Phil’s Market doesn’t even sell fresh coffee beans. I drink in the air, swallow the smell. “I bet Zan has breakfast here every morning.”

Noah’s gaze is fixed on the ceiling and he sniffs the air warily. “What makes you say that?”

“He liked Mocha Java,” I say, calming myself with another inhale-exhale routine. “Right before he left. He started drinking Mocha Java. I was worried, about him drinking coffee. I worried that this was something way bigger than just hating Haven—this was hating the Church. But I don’t worry for him anymore. He’s just moved on. Now he’s here, drinking Mocha Java and eating bagels.”

“Well, technically he’s not
here
here.” Noah looks at the few groups sprinkled throughout the room. It’s only eleven fifteen, I realize, glancing at the old-school wall clock. No college spot, however hot, is happening at eleven fifteen in the morning.

Noah wanders over to the huge bulletin board on the east wall, but Zan consumes me so much I feel too heavy to move. He’s here. And maybe our values are a little different now, but that doesn’t matter. We can have different values and still be the same. We’re still the same. Joyand-Zan. ZanandJoy.

Noah’s silent a moment. “Did you know that the amount of money the U.S. spends on weapons in a week is enough to feed the whole world for a year? A whole year.” He stares at a flyer that says FOOD NOT BOMBS tacked up next to an advertisement for yoga classes.

“Noah, have you been listening to me?”

He sighs. “Yes, and I have to tell you that your idea of closure is, in my humble opinion, a little bit skewed.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, what if he’s moved on in more ways than just being able to get a decent cup of coffee? What if he’s moved on because he’s actually moved on? We, meanwhile, have moved backward.
You’ve
moved backward!”

Noah’s upset now, so I’m upset, too. I can’t stay calm when he’s not. I can’t stay calm most of the time, but I
definitely
can’t when he can’t.

“Shut up! Who are you to talk about moving on? You’re here, too. It wasn’t just me who wanted to pack up and head to California.”

He could argue this point, but he doesn’t. He clenches and unclenches his fists a few times, which seems to purge the freak energy.