Life Before (23 page)

I could lie. I really could. I know enough—about the United States, at least—to cobble together a decent road trip itinerary. But I don’t want to lie anymore. “Honestly? I’ve never been anywhere. I’ve lived in the same small town since I was born, and the same house since I was four. Before I came here, I never even left my home state, except for dinners just over the border.”

“So what do you do with your time?”

After hearing about my soccer team and physics Olympics, Kat wants to know about all my friends, so I ride tangents about friends and euchre and Sunday dinners out for wings. I confess that vacation to me is a day at Cedar Point with Jill’s family—only I call it “a huge amusement park” because I think Cedar Point is a one-off. I don’t have a car or a passport or a real suitcase.

“But I want those things. I want to go everywhere, in the US and abroad. I’ve seen every episode of
The Amazing Race
! Surely that counts for something?”

“God, you are so average,” Kat says. “I mean normal. You’re so normal.”

Average
is spot-on. If we are our experiences, then I am an average, small-town guy. I’m not completely worthless, though; Tulane has seen something in me, enough that they’re paying to educate me, and clearly my closest friends see something in me.

But everyone—even the most boring, vapid person—has friends, right?

Compared to Kat, I am average. She’s this interesting and multidimensional creature, and she’s just a year older. I don’t even know how to become interesting from here. I can’t even explain it to her.

Her stare is unnerving.

“What?”

“I can see the wheels spinning in there,” Kat says. “You’re about to come up with something big.”

I can’t help smiling. “I just always thought I would become this interesting and worldly person once my life began.”

“Life is—”

“I know, I know. I’m living my life, blah, blah, blah. I hear what you’re saying. What I mean is, thinking of this as already my life, I’m not sure how to shift gears and make myself an interesting person.”

“Oh, I think you’re very interesting, Graham. You’re empathetic. You’re curious. You’re kind of mysterious. Very interesting.”

Curt’s footsteps on the back porch are Kat’s cue to slip her books into her bag.

“Also, just do things that you think are interesting.”

Easier said than done.

“Also, always say yes.”

“Say yes what?”

“Say yes to everything. You’re invited to the Holocaust Museum? Say yes. Someone wants to spend a weekend fishing in a rowboat in the middle of Champlain, say yes. You hear there’s one empty spot in a Japanese class or are offered chicken feet for dinner or are asked to volunteer, say yes. When faced with opportunity, say yes. That’s how you become an interesting person—by doing interesting things.”

Kat and Curt have their business discussion. Sophie would be embarrassed to hear them talk about her bowels, so I excuse myself.

Putting together my bed, which gets less particular every day, I try the yes on for size. Yes, I’ll camp in the Adirondacks. Yes, I’ll go hear Mastodon. Yes, I’ll sit through a lecture about the evolution of the human brain.

I send a promise out into the void: I will become more interesting once life resumes. Or right now, at this point in my life.

I’ll bet it’s a lot easier to say yes when you aren’t trying to suppress a childhood worth of secrets or hide how much your family is struggling. Those chapters of my life are closed. Even if my life is just resuming, and not starting from scratch, I think it’s going to be a lot easier from here on out.

Especially if Gary is caught. I hope he’s caught. Haven’t I endured enough trauma and hard knocks? Can’t I just catch a break?

Okay, I caught a break with the job. And the couch. Can’t I catch another break? Just one? One big break.

T
HIRTY-FOUR

Just twenty-one hours until we heroically lead police to Gary, I need to go for a run to keep myself calm. After eight hours of dishes and toilets, running is like the new normal’s lifeline to the old normal.

Kat pokes her head back into the house while I’m Mister Rogersing my shoes.

“Down and Dirty is playing at The Hub. Want to come?”

I don’t even know what Down and Dirty is, but after last night’s little life lesson, I can hardly say no. Kat knows this. “Come on. We’ll walk. It’s a nice night.”

On the way, Kat enthuses about the band. “They’re great. Mostly covers, but maybe three years ago they started writing their own stuff. It’s good. Suits, you know, all the moods.”

“All the moods?”

“Yeah, you know. The blues is about pain and love and loss and sometimes hope. They do it all.”

Blues music has never seemed nuanced to me.

Kat has more to say. “The blues always get me a little, I don’t know, frisky?”

That gets me a little frisky, no I-don’t-know about it. “How does that work?”

“Like when I’m listening to B. B. King, or Keb’Mo, or ancient LPs of Buddy Guy alone in my parents’ basement when I was sixteen. It just feels deep, like this very basic, very human rumble and sway. I want to be holding onto someone, grinding our hips into each other and running our hands all over each other’s bodies. Or Ray Charles, which is technically R&B. It makes me want to take off my shirt. Is that weird?”

“No.” It’s freaking hot.

Imagining her taking off her shirt drives me wild. I’m not proud of this; I don’t want to be one of those shallow guys who gets excited over any old topless girl. But Kat isn’t any old topless girl. She’s interesting and smart. And kind.

But she’s not Gretchen.

Is thinking about another naked girl cheating? On my not-really-actual girlfriend? I don’t know. But either way, I can’t get the image of topless Kat out of my head. Maybe I’m cheating, but only in my head.

At eight thirty, the place is still pretty empty. An old red jukebox in the corner blurts out tinny blues while we wait. I have to shout to be heard. “So, when did you start listening to the blues?”

“In ninth grade, I had this friend who loved the blues. She spent all her time and money on sneaking into blues clubs and buying music online and reading about the blues. It was sort of thrust upon me.”

That’s just how Jill dumped heavy metal into my head, though I still hate it all these years later.

Kat launches into what I can only call a soliloquy, all about her friend Dawn, who was the best friend she ever had, and how life went downhill when she left Chicago. “I called her Dawg because, well, you know. Kat and Dawg? We were fourteen. Everything is silly when you’re fourteen.”

Kat has loads of stories about sneaking out of Dawn’s house to go catch a show, or eating food that her parents forbid her to eat when she was at Dawn’s. Eyes wide, she recalls little adventures they took around Chicago on a day when their school inexplicably lost power.

“And then, when my parents moved us to Austin, Dawn found a new best friend. We drifted apart. I hung onto the blues, though.” Her voice is light, but a lot of pain lies just beneath it.

The lights dim and people keep talking—loudly—while these three guys on stage start plucking strings and adjusting microphones and all that. It doesn’t seem very professional to me.

When they start singing, though, it’s magic.

I have heard some blues before—background in the house or accidentally when someone’s iPod was on shuffle or in a movie once in a while—but this is different.

First we’re bouncing to an upbeat song, the singer smiling because we’re in on the secret. His face contorts in anguish when he slows it down. There are maybe fifty people here, some gathered at the bar, others dancing right next to their tables. Every single person is moving, so the mood in the club ebbs and flows with the music.

Yeah, the blues are nuanced.

The blues are sexy. Pop singers have all these albums about making out or getting it on or getting someone to fall in love with you, but all they really need to do is turn on the blues. Maybe that’s why there’s no mainstream blues stuff. Everyone would be getting it on all the time.

“Thanks for bringing me,” I whisper-shout near Kat’s ear.

“Can you feel it?”

“I can.” I don’t have a wild urge to start dancing, but I am moved.

“Hear this? They’re covering Ray Charles. ‘Sentimental Journey.’ Come here.”

Kat drags me to the darkest corner of the joint. “Wrap your arms around me and close your eyes.”

At my first middle-school dance, I tried to find girls’ hips with my hands, and kept us arms-distance apart. You could have driven a school bus between me and Maddyson Sutch, with room to spare.

When my arms were wrapped around Gretchen in our mini-forest—ages ago now, really—my hands weren’t so much wrapped around her as they were exploring her back and midsection and perfectly rounded butt.

Aiming for something between dancing with Maddyson and making out with Gretchen, I hug Kat loosely.

“Closer,” she says, and I pull her toward me. “Now, hold onto me. Let go of yourself. Keep your eyes closed and feel the music.”

How the hell do I let go of myself? I stand still and listen for a few minutes.
The night time is the right time/to be with the one you love
.

Kat digs her fingers into the spaces between my ribs. She shuffles one of her feet between both of mine, and then we sway slowly, forward and back instead of side to side.

It’s impossible to separate my body from my brain, to sway, to let go and live in the moment. Kat bends her legs and our swaying deepens. And suddenly, letting go feels remarkably easy.

My other senses sharpen when my eyes are closed. Kat’s torso feels warm through our clothes. She smells so strongly of patchouli that she must wash her hair with it. Maybe she smokes pot and uses patchouli to mask the scent. That’s what potheads in Laurel do.

Laurel. Hundreds of miles away, Gretchen’s body also is warm beneath her clothes. Kat’s waist slopes smoothly toward her hips, which seem wider than Gretchen’s. Gretchen has those tiny dimples above her perfect ass. And that hair I can run my fingers through ten million times.

“You’re thinking again, Graham. Stop thinking and feel.”

I feel like I want to be with Gretchen, who said that same thing to me exactly six weeks ago. And maybe I can’t be with Gretchen, but I want to be. I want to lose myself in her kisses, in her hair, in her shirt. If I could go back to that girl who was mine for five seconds—if I could wrap my arms around her again—I would hold tight forever.

But I can’t. For now, wrapping my arms around Kat is okay. For now.

T
HIRTY-FIVE

Kat’s patchouli lingers on my clothes this morning. I’m mummified in sheets after a night trying desperately to keep warm. What the hell happened to summer? Burlington is freezing.

With my eyes closed, I imagine Kat’s cheek pressed to mine. Mostly, when my eyes are closed, I still think of Gretchen. Pushing both girls out of my head, I get ready for work.

Curt and I walk to the deli through dense fog. I’ve never seen anything like it. People materialize from five feet in front of us and disappear five feet behind. I can’t see across the street, or that there
is
an across the street.

“This is really weird.”

“It happens,” Curt says. “In August it happens a lot. It’s weird for July, actually. It’ll burn off this afternoon.”

I hope he’s right. Being so disconnected from my surroundings is unsettling.

Everything about today is unsettling. My guilt over Kat fuses with my longing for Gretchen to form a Xander-shaped ball of ambiguity. I need to connect with Gretchen. Check her Instagram or email her, or somehow feel like she’s still there, just beyond my visibility.

“Mind if we stop for a cappuccino?” Curt says.

“Can you get it at The Byte? I want to check in online.”

Every few paces, someone new materializes from the still-dense fog, and Curt knows practically everyone. All the hellos and howdies are going to make us late for work.

Nearly to The Byte, Curt says, “I can’t believe you used to pay for their Internet every day.”

Me neither. “I needed my fix.”

“Your social media fix. You are an odd duck, Graham.”

“Guilty as quack.”

Curt snickers and yanks open the door. “You said ‘quack.’”

Curt imitates a genuine duck as we wait in line: “Quack, quack, quack.”

Now flush with cash from the deli, I splurge on a peanut butter brownie and large cream puff from the plastic case.

When Curt strikes up a conversation with the cashier, I survey the customers preoccupied with caffeine and Wi-Fi. Yellow Backpack Girl types frantically on her laptop as a small group of tourists argue emphatically in Japanese. Some guy with a hoodie pulled over his face stares at the mug in his hands. He reminds me of me, two weeks ago. The sadness of holing up here day after day seeps back into my mind.

“Change?” the cashier says, and I pocket my coins.

Curt starts a conversation with the woman behind us in line. She’s wearing leather boots in July. It’s not that much of a cold snap.

The Byte seems almost lively, now that I’m in a better headspace. Yellow Backpack snaps her laptop closed to chat with the guy next to her. The Dice Guys arrive and commandeer the table next to Hoodie Guy, who rewraps his hands around his mug.

A flash of blue on his right hand. I whip back toward the counter. No other man past age twenty wears a gargantuan gold class ring with a sapphire birthstone.

Could it be?

No. I’m being paranoid again. Gary said he forgave me. Besides, he’s in Elyria, Ohio. My trail is cold.

Still, I can’t force myself to turn around and check. A tiny part of me thinks it’s not a random stranger. Shuffling a little closer to Curt, I check out Hoodie Guy in the huge mirror behind the counter.

Curt makes a date with Boots while Hoodie Guy sips his coffee. The guy is definitely wearing a huge ring on his right—no, left—no, right ring finger. He shakes the hood a little further back on his head, and I recognize that nose. His short forehead and wide face. Covering my own face with my hands, I shield my reflection.