The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (7 page)

He’d come to my room in the dark, quietly undressed, placed
the pillow between us, and got into bed beside me, all without waking me up.

He tossed and made a snorting noise and his foot—bare—grazed
my shin. It was too much. My disbelief at his presence suddenly fell aside when
I wondered if he’d not really been kidding about sleeping naked now. Was he
naked? Griffin naked.
Griffin
naked
. Even as my eyes were wet my
underwear got tight.

I had to know, and felt gross for having to know. I lifted
the blankets but it was too dark to see under there. I reached under the covers
and moved my hand slowly across the mattress and allowed my fingers to graze
his hip. They touched cotton.

I felt silly for expecting anything else. Vince, I told
myself, he’s not trying to seduce you, he’s only looking for a place to sleep.
All he wants is sleep. A simple thing and you have not, after all these fucking
years, gotten through your head that he wants nothing more than a comfortable
place to sleep. I hated myself for touching his underwear, for violating him
that way.

I felt sick, and I had to get up.

Slowly I rolled over and dropped out of the bed. I grabbed a
sweatshirt off my dresser and slipped out of my room, carefully closing the
door behind me.

The fire was low so I dropped on a few pieces of wood and
pushed everything around with the poker. The corduroy chair felt warm and I
pulled a polar-fleece throw around me and sat Indian-style with the blanket
tucked under my bare legs.

I watched the fire thinking I should go into the bathroom
and jerk off, to help me not care so much that Griff was in my bed, but that
wouldn’t be right—I wouldn’t feel any better doing that right after
touching his underwear.

So I just sat and watched the fire—fire and ocean are
two things I can watch for millions of years without getting bored. I don’t
know how long I sat that way before I heard the bed creak and then I heard him
call out, very clearly, “Beth?” A moment later: “Vince?”

A few minutes after that he came down the hall. He was in
his underwear, his arms wrapped around his thin chest, hugging himself.

“Oh,” he said when he saw me.

“I’m out here.”

“Sorry, did I keep you up? Was I hogging the bed?”

“No, it was fine. I just couldn’t sleep.”

“Oh. Want some company?”

“OK.”

He started to walk into the living room but then he turned
and went into the spare room. I heard some zippers and he emerged a minute
later in sweatpants and a hoodie. He sat down in the other chair.

Reaching out for the poker he said, “Can I see the thingy?”
I grabbed it and handed it to him. He leaned over and stuck it into the embers,
not doing much of anything except making sparks that drifted up into the
chimney. “I’m all thrown off,” he said, “time-wise.”

“Yeah.”

Settling back in the chair, the yearbook on the ottoman
caught his eye and he picked it up, began to page through it.

“Hey,” he said, “what was that thing you wrote about
drinking and flying or whatever? What did that mean?”

“It’s a line from
Superman
.
I really don’t know why I put it in there.”

“All mine are stupid too,” he said. “People are so cryptic
with these things, I bet most people look back and have no idea what they mean.
I don’t understand half the things I wrote. Like what the heck are Pantie-O’s?”

It hurt that I had to remind him; it hurt that he didn’t
remember whether he’d written it just for me.

As he turned the pages the supplement fell out, slipped down
between the cushion and the arm. He plucked it out.

“So it
was
in
here,” he said.

“Yeah. There’s a picture of us on graduation day.”

“I remember that picture,” he said, nodding. His voice was
croaky, a nighttime voice. “We’re all blurry.”

“Blurry, yeah.” I looked into the fire. “It’s like the camera
somehow saw what we really were, you know? Like a mirror does to vampires. I
remember the look on your face when I came up to you at graduation. You looked
like I was back from the dead. You wanted to know what happened.”

“Yeah, I did,” he said. “I
was
confused. But all that stuff was a long time ago.”

“Not to me.” I gestured at the wall, at the photos. I could
feel my throat tighten up and I laid my head back against the cushion.

He nodded. He zipped his hoodie higher, slowly, obviously
taking care not to snag any chest hairs, and resumed hugging himself. I almost
offered to go get him a blanket, but didn’t.

“So I guess at some point we should probably talk about why
you stopped acknowledging my existence,” he said. “I kind of feel like it’s the
elephant in the room. Maybe it’s the elephant in the decade.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We don’t have to,” he added. “I came here to hang out with
you, not interrogate you.”

“I don’t know, Griff, it happened because I was embarrassed.
I was
embarrassed
.” The word came out
one biley green syllable at a time, each one burning my throat on its way up. “I
was never really able to get past that fucking email. It was easier just to
stop talking to you.”

“What email? Wait—you mean the
Truman
email?” He sat up straight. “You’re kidding. Is that what
this has always been about? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Um. Embarrassed?”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “So asking me out on a date
when we were teenagers is an unforgivable sin in your book? Is that in
Leviticus or something?” He looked at me and I rolled my eyes and felt just like
the teenager I’d been. “No,” he said, reading my face, “just embarrassing.
Huh.”

“I was afraid that you were always wondering about my
motives.”

“Motives for what?”

“I don’t know. For being close to you. For being your
friend.” I feared that every glance he would think I was mentally undressing
him, every handshake an excuse to touch him. That when he came out of the
bathroom wearing only a towel, I— Or when we sat side-by-side at the
movies—

“Then apparently you didn’t know me as well as I thought you
did, Vince.” He was angry, but in his eyes there was also relief. At least now
he knew it hadn’t been his fault. “I told you it was cool and I wasn’t lying.”

“I know you weren’t. It’s my problem, not yours.”

“Well Vince, man, you need to fucking get over yourself.” He
bounced his fist like a gavel on the plump arm of the chair. He got up and kneeled
down on the brick hearth, worked busily at the embers with the poker. I watched
his shoulders rise and fall with a deep sigh. Finally he put the poker down and
slid across the floor, leaned against his chair. “OK,” he said, looking up at
me, “if the email was the problem, let’s just go through it. Let’s just get it
all out in the open. Isn’t that what I told you the night I figured out your
little secret? Maybe if we’d gotten it out a long time ago we wouldn’t have all
these—” He looked from me to the fire. “Whatever. How did it start? You
saw me in some class we had or something.”

“Rebellion in Literature,” I said.

“Ah, that’s right. Rebellion in Literature.” He gestured
come here
with a wag of his fingers, and
my living room became a time machine.

***

Spring semester of my freshman year—that’s
when, as they say, the magic happened. It really did seem like magic that first
day of class. Magic, lightning, fate—whatever you want to call it, it was
it. It was magic when he came through the door, backpack slung over his shoulder—magic
when he strode across the scratched tile with a cocky swagger I’d later
understand was a clever disguise for his shyness. The chairs were arranged in a
circle, filling slowly as students trickled in. He took a seat on the other
side of the circle from me, almost so we were facing each other across the
empty middle. When he looked up I looked down at my hands, felt my face redden.

I learned his name when the professor, a young woman named
Nicole, not yet jaded by experience and who still believed she could change her
students’ lives (and, via them, the world), took attendance the first time.

“Ariel Dean,” she read from her roster, then looked up to
scan the circle.

Griff raised his hand. That act of drawing attention to
himself permitted me to look at him full-on for the first time since he sat
down.

“I go by Griffin,” he told her. “My middle name. Or Griff,
less formally. Uh.”

“Griffin Dean it is, then.” The professor noted it on her
attendance roster and I began doodling a capital
G
on a sheet of loose-leaf paper.

After attendance Nicole made us go around the circle telling
what our favorite book was, making an effort to remember our names but actually
only remembering Griffin’s. His favorite, he said, was
The Positronic Man
, by Isaac Asimov, which he added was turned into
a bad movie starring Robin Williams. I agreed aloud that it was bad.

“I’m glad it’s not just me!” he said, and he pointed at me
and smiled. I perceived the flip of his finger as a mind-blowing and
unqualified show of affection and blushed, thinking it was obvious to everyone
else in the class that our souls were entwining before their very eyes.

When I got back to my dorm room after that first class I
looked him up in the student directory and was heartbroken to find no Deans at
all, Griffin or otherwise. In the days before Facebook the thin booklet was all
I had, and apparently I had nothing. During the next class, though, I received
a consolation prize: a list of the whole class’s contact info, which the
well-intentioned young professor provided so we could get in touch with each
other outside of class. Griffin had written his name and his email address in
tiny, cramped letters. I ran my finger over his letters even though they were
only photocopies.

For more than a month I lived and breathed for Mondays and
Wednesdays—for class days, Griffin days—and every other hour of the
week served only to anticipate, to prepare. I arranged my laundry schedule so
my best jeans would always be ready for Rebellion in Lit. I got up earlier on
those days so my hair could be carefully messed according to current style. All
in case that day was the day we were to speak.

But no matter how I tried to align the planets or bribe
fate, each class was a bigger disappointment than the one before. There was no
conversation with Griffin, no chance encounters before or after class, or in
the dining hall, or on the sidewalk. Class after class my hopes were pummeled
and even though I was naturally optimistic it began to wear me out, made me
feel numb and indifferent and bitter. And sad.

At the end of February, our earnest young professor
scheduled one-on-one meetings with her to discuss the progress of the course.
When I arrived at her office for my meeting Griffin Dean was sitting in a chair
outside her door. I took a deep breath. Six weeks into the semester, we would
talk
. My heart started to slam in my
chest even as my muscles quieted into a rehearsed steady-cool slowness.

He had a U2 baseball cap on backward—above the strap
were the appropriate words
Achtung Baby!
—and
a paperback open on his lap. His right leg was crossed over his left, ankle to
knee. His jeans were torn up and dirty at the heels where they dragged on the
ground.

I sat down beside him. “Hey,” I said, the simple word I’d
wanted to say to him for weeks.

“Hey,” Griffin said. His voice, for the first time since
that first day, was for me. The sound as it entered my ears was as lovely as a
field of sunflowers, something to treasure like a mint copy of
Action Comics
#1. He jiggled his sneaker
and uncrossed his leg.

What was he reading?, I wondered. It was hard to look at the
book without appearing to be examining his balls. Was it the book for class? I
shifted in my chair and used the motion to disguise a glance. The book had a
flying saucer on its cover.

“She running late?” I said.

“A little, yeah.”

“Figures— I thought
I
was going to be late.”

He smiled and returned to his book. I stared at the bulletin
board on the wall opposite the chairs. A flyer announced auditions for the
spring musical.
Think of something else
to say
, I screamed in my head. This chance of a lifetime took weeks to
arrive and likely would never come again.

“Good book?”

He stopped reading and marked his place with his thumb.
“Yeah, but it’s not really spacey enough.”

Not spacey enough. I didn’t know what that meant, so I just
agreed.

“I’m reading this amazing book about dogs,” I added. “I
mean, it’s called
Dogwalker
. About
mutant puppies. Or—well some of them are. And this mole who hides under
the couch and sings but turns out to be a tiny man.”

“A tiny man, huh?”

“He hides and sings. And there’s another one about a
mattress. He has to find a mattress.”

“The tiny man?”

“No, the narrator.”

I heard the scrape of chairs moving inside the office and
then the door opened.
Fuck. Not yet!
I hadn’t had enough time with Griffin yet.
Take
longer, damn you!
But a girl pulling on a Shuster Tennis jacket came out
with the professor following her.

“Griffin, hi—I’m sorry—about the time,” Nicole
said. She had a red pen behind her ear. The cap was chewed.

“No problem,” he said.

“Eliza was giving me
loads
of great feedback. I’ll be with you in a minute, Vince. Thanks for waiting.”

Eliza nodded at us and walked away toward the elevators.
Griffin stuffed his book in his backpack, got up and went into the office. Just
before he closed the door he turned around and winked at me.

*

“I think I just meant, you know, about Eliza giving
the teacher
feedback
. They were both
pretty foxy.”