Better Than Running at Night (7 page)

"Does anyone notice anything special about these grays?" Ed shouted.

No answer.

Ed pulled out a piece of cardboard with gray squares on it, fading from white to black. "There are nine values on here! And the
values decrease in whole steps! See?! The square in the middle is exactly the average of black and white. And each of the squares is the average of the two squares that surround it!"

I didn't want to be in the Garage, and couldn't imagine being there until six. I needed to know what Nate was feeling now, if he regretted it, if he'd ever want to talk to me again. Like in the movies, when the guy just uses the girl for sex and never calls. Maybe I should've waited.

The next thing I heard Ed say was, "Check this out, Ellie! Which one do you think it is?!"

"Um, it's the one ... in the..."

Ralph covered his mouth to hold back a laugh. Sam peeked at me from under his cap.

"That's correct, Ellie! The tall bottle on the right is the middle value!"

"That's the one I meant," I said.

"Of course it was!"

The tail end of a laugh escaped through Ralph's cupped hand.

I wondered if I should go to Nate's right after class, or if I should go later, or if I should even go at all. I wanted to see him, but I didn't want to seem clingy. And what if I showed up and it turned out that he
had
changed his mind about me?

But when six o'clock rolled around, I found myself running straight through the freezing mist to his house.

I rang the buzzer.

He opened the door just enough to stick his head between it and the frame.

"I'm on my way out," he said.

His first assignment, a self-portrait, was due tomorrow, so he had to go to the painting building to work on it. He said he didn't get work done last night for obvious reasons.

"You sure you're not offended?" he asked, rubbing my cheek with his thumb.

It hadn't occurred to me to be offended until he brought it up. That's why we were in school. To get work done.

I wondered if he really had work to do, or if he didn't want to see me.

I headed home. The brown slush of the day had frozen fast with the setting sun. A girl ahead of me on the sidewalk slipped and fell on her butt. Her gluteus maximus. I jumped over an ice puddle and walked on the tire-marked road, where my boots could grip the ground.

At home I cooked myself some mac and cheese, and scribbled
copies of pictures from
Human Anatomy for Artists
in my sketchbook.

That night I climbed into my bed as a nonvirgin for the first time. Until yesterday there was always this open-ended wondering about when and where and
if
it would happen. Now there was one less word that could be used to describe me.

I lay in bed for hours that night, wishing I could turn back the universal clock and get some sleep. Maybe I should've cooked up some milk. As if that would really work.

I was thinking about Nate. And his dad. Nate never got a father-son sex talk—an experience I thought all boys were supposed to have. Unfortunately, my dad tried to have a father-daughter sex talk with me. Back when I had no concept of what sex really was.

"What do they teach you in sexual education?" he asked me after dinner one night. He made it sound so official. At school we all said "sex ed."

"I don't know," I said. I was rummaging through my mom's high school yearbook. I was looking for a guy with dark wild hair. I'd seen him in some pictures that I found in a shoebox under my mom's side of the bed and I wanted to know his name. Mom was at her gold leafing class.

"I can't believe they start you in on this in sixth grade," He peered over his glasses.

I shrugged.

That was our first-year meeting with Ms. Tittlebaum. After lunch for a week, the girls and boys were separated into different rooms, which was supposed to make us feel more "comfortable." The first day, Ms. Tittlebaum had drawn a gigantic penis on the chalkboard and asked us if we knew any nicknames for it. It was pretty hard to feel comfortable, even with only girls in the class. Nobody raised her hand.

"I'll tell you all you need to know about sexual intercourse," my dad said.

"Please don't." I found a picture of a guy with wild hair, but not the right face.

"Hold on to your virginity. Hold on with all your might. Those high school boys have only one thing on their mind. Trust me, I was one once."

I scrunched my face at him. "That's gross. Don't tell me things like that."

There were a few guys on the next page with
his
hairstyle. It must've been in back then.

"Well, what do
they
tell you about?" he asked.

"Puberty. You know, growing hair and stuff."

One guy left a note, "Love You Always," by his picture, but he was all skinny and geeky looking. Couldn't be him.

"How about protection? Are they teaching you about that?"

Sure they were. But I wasn't going to tell my dad that Ms.
Tittlebaum had brought in condoms and that we'd all passed them around the room like we were playing hot potato.

"Okay, you don't have to answer," he said, smiling. "I can see that yearbook's way more interesting than your old man. Find any of Mom's friends?"

"Some, I guess."

He
had
to be in here. Maybe I'd skipped a page somewhere.

"Mom's got all sorts of ex-boyfriends in there," he said. "But I won her in the end!"

I turned back to the first page to start again.

He sat, watching me, for maybe ten minutes. He got fidgety—bouncing his knee and tapping the table. I pretended he wasn't there.

"What are you doing, anyway?" he finally asked.

"Just looking for someone, okay?" I said. "Not that it's any of your business."

He took off his glasses and sneered at me. "I was only asking a question," he said firmly.

"And I was only answering."

He sat back and fumed.

"Who are you looking for?" he asked after a long silence. "Your real dad?" Suddenly his eyes looked stunned, as if he couldn't believe those words had escaped his mouth. He took a deep breath and let out a forced chuckle. "Or do you have a crush on someone in there?"

I didn't join his laughter.

He put his hand on top of mine, sandwiching it against the yearbook. "I'm just teasing," he said. "You know that, right?"

His hand was shaking.

Friday morning, Ed had set up a table full of dilapidated violins. He put on a tape of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D as inspiration. I recognized the melody, but had never known what it was called. I wrote it down in my sketchbook so I'd remember to buy it. I had always thought of classical as background music. Easy to tune out. But the piece was so intense it was hard to concentrate on drawing.

Ed was doing a composition analysis, jumping from person to person. He wanted us to make the negative shapes, the spaces around the violins, dynamic.

"Negative and positive shapes must play off one another!" he shouted. "And in this case, I mean it literally!" He bowed his air violin in sweeping strokes as he laughed. He circled around, giving a few tips here and there, but soon he stepped back and let us work. For a while, all we heard from Ed were Disney whistles mimicking the violin concerto.

Ralph and I stood at easels, but Sam sat hunched over a desk. Headphones on, select dreads peeking out from under his hat.

At the end of the concerto's first movement Ed stopped behind Sam and said, "Hey, Sam, what's playing?"

Sam kept sketching, like there was another Sam in the room and Ed was definitely talking to that one.

Ed scuttled in front of him.

"Sam! Sam!" He waved his arms around, adding occasional jumps to his flailing.

At this point, Ralph and I didn't even attempt to stifle our laughter. And when Ralph started laughing, he had a hard time stopping. He also had a hard time not sounding like a girl experiencing mild hysteria.

With a look that seemed to say, "Get this, guys!" Ed burst into fully fledged jumping jacks, shouting Sam's name in time, comb-over flopping with each jump.

"SAM! SAM! SAM! SAM!"

Finally, Ed knelt down and stuck his face in front of Sam's to get his attention.

"What's playing, Sam?" he asked, just as energized as the first time.

"What?" Sam said, not removing his headphones. He looked Ed in the eye without moving his head.

"What are you listening to?" Ed pointed to his own ears, just in case Sam didn't understand.

"Phish," Sam said. His mouth barely moved when he spoke.

"Fish? Fish! Sam, what a good idea! I will have to get fish for you guys to draw next week! Just picture their color, their texture, their movement! Sam, you are wonderful!"

Sam's unmoving eyes seemed to refuel Ed's energy, as if they were mirrors reflecting it right back into him.

"And Sam!" Ed shouted as he jumping-jacked back to the setup.

"Yeah," Sam answered dryly.

"Thanks for the workout!"

I walked to the computer lab after class, thinking maybe I'd run into Nate. But he was nowhere in sight, so I decided to make use of my new e-mail account while I was in the building. Nate must check his messages often, since he works here, I thought. I wanted to tell him how much I liked lying beside him and feeling him in the dark. But I didn't want to sound like a cheezeball.

For a few minutes I twisted in semicircles on a swivel chair, watching the cursor blink back at me, before I came up with anything.

Finally I wrote:

Nate,
You have the best back in the world, and I feel privileged that you let me touch it. I know that sounds silly, but it's true and there's no other way to express it. Looking forward to our next encounter,
Elite

It was warmer than usual outside. The campus was still slushy from all that rain and melted snow.

Going up the hill, I recognized Nate's electric hairstyle.

He was walking with some girl. Half of her head was shaved to a dark stubble. The other half of her hair was bleached blond and came to her chin. She kept flipping it out of her eyes.

"Ellie!" he said overenthusiastically. "This is Clarissa. She's visiting for the weekend from NYU. She's my, you know—" He smiled sheepishly and looked back and forth from her to me. "My um—"

"Girlfriend," she said curtly, shoving her hand in my direction for a shake.

Her hand felt like a limp flounder.

She looked my charcoal-covered body up and down, as if I were a cute little dress she was thinking of buying. A miniature backpack clung to her shoulders over her leather jacket. Her black boots laced all the way up to her knees. There they were met by the hem of a leopard-print skirt.

"You should come over sometime," Nate said, glancing back and forth from me to Clarissa. "I bet you two would hit it off."

"I have to go home now," I said. I tried to form the words clearly, but they came out all wavery. I wanted Nate to wink or give some sign that Clarissa was delusional—that maybe
she
thought she was his girlfriend, but he was merely humoring her. All I got was his usual grin and her footsteps clacking into the distance.

When I was sure they were around the corner and out of sight, I ran to my house. My head throbbed. I had heard of people who drank to forget. No, the best thing to do would be to keep running. Running and running until the name
Nate
meant nothing to me. But I'm not
that
much of an athlete. I don't think my feet could've taken me far enough.

I did have wheels though.

I bolted down the stairs to the basement, where my bike was locked. I didn't even wait to get to the street before I got on. I wanted to pump my thoughts out as I stood on the pedals, pushing through the slushy mud. By the time I got off the grass I was in a rhythm, booking down the sidewalk.

I wished more than anything that I could enter cyberspace and delete that stupid e-mail.

Tears stuck to the walls of my throat. It hurt to keep them from spouting out of my eyes, but I forced them back anyway.

I should've known that Nate didn't
really
like me, that he only wanted me for my body.

I did know. And now I wouldn't let him make me cry. He wasn't worth it.

I saw some movement coming from the courtyard ahead and to my left, and it occurred to me a little too late that I should grab my brakes. I came to a screeching halt. My front wheel just barely bumped the leg of a woman in a fur coat. She gasped and looked at me as if I had murdered before her eyes the minks she now clutched around her wide bosom.

"I'm sorry, I'm really sorry," I said.

But her blood-red lips were stuck in a giant O.

From the window of a purple pickup truck, a man called to the mink lady, "Hey, are you okay?"

This broke her from her trance and as she crossed the street she yelled back to him, "I don't know where
the fuck
they're looking, but it ain't ahead!"