The Dark Space (2 page)

What I had going for me was basically my mouth.

I’ve got a big mouth. Literally, it’s huge. When I smile, I’m all teeth and gums. I look like the lower half of my face is going to split off. Girls dig that, though, because it makes me “approachable.”

And the truth is, I never fucking shut up. It’s a curse with girls who are looking for still waters, but it always got me the girls who preferred a witty guy to a hot one. Witty gives you something to do to calm your nerves when you’re working your way into each other’s pants.

I got the girls who wanted to fuck ironically, too, or who wanted to pretend they were — the girls who clutch your head when you’re eating them out and moan like they’re dying, but then right afterward they want to talk about some abstract intellectual shit to prove they’re not really bodies, after all.

Whatever. I was game. I started getting hard-ons for brainy babysitters before I even knew what a hard-on was, so I wasn’t going to say no to some chick who wanted to sixty-nine me and then talk about Ibsen. I’d take it.

This girl, though —
Winnie
— she wasn’t buying what I was selling. So, fine. I decided right then and there I’d give her as wide a berth as the class allowed.

Which is why it was strange that I ended up chasing after her.

At first it was just that we were on the same path, cutting toward the science building. I noticed her head, her hair rumpled above a giant brown scarf that grew out the collar of her black coat and swallowed the back of her skull.

She had these rubbery kind of boots. Not the Wellies like girls wear, but these boots that were olive green rubber with lines scored across them and a lumpy sole the color of those gold-beige erasers in the art supply part of the bookstore. The tops were leather, and they laced halfway up her legs.

There was nothing interesting about the scarf or the coat or even those boots, but I found myself speeding to catch up to her, my heart beating hard at the unaccustomed exercise.

On some other girl, those boots would have been retro, or funky. They would have
meant
something.

On her, they were just boots.

She disappeared around the corner of the science building, and by then I was sprinting, and the main thing I was thinking was,
I’ve never seen her before. Not ever.

I was a senior. She had to be a senior, too, because only seniors can get into Contact Improv.

Four years. Seven semesters of sharing a campus, a set of dorms, incestuously overlapping sets of friends.

How many times had I passed her without seeing her?

How many times had she disappeared, right in front of my face?

My family moved around a lot when I was growing up.

My dad’s a midlevel manager in a janitorial supply and labor company called ServicePro. They send him to whatever institution they have a new contract with, to start their services with the factory or school district or business park, make sure everyone is pleased, and then they pack him up again. Six months. A year. Eighteen months is their outer limit if it’s a big contract, like a hospital.

We didn’t move to exciting places, just medium-sized Midwestern towns that when you told someone you’d lived there, they’d say, “Oh, I think I had a softball tournament there once.” Rockford. Ames. Fort Wayne. Saint Cloud. Sioux Falls. Dayton. Janesville. South Bend. Portage. Norfolk. Davenport. Lee’s Summit. Columbia.

Whatever. Whatever. Whatever.

New town, new school, new kids. But nothing was ever really new.

When I was ten, we moved in the middle of fifth grade. I had moved in the middle of the year before, so I knew it was the worst kind of move possible. I was bracing myself for disaster.

It was another nowhere-familiar-sounding place. Northfield, Minnesota. The contract was for some college there, Carleton.

For the first time, everything felt new.

My afterschool sitter was a student there, an English major who planned to go to medical school. She explained to me about looking balanced to admissions boards, about how to build your resume, what the good college activities were, which ones were a waste of time. She wore her hair in two braids she pinned in a crown around her head, so I started trying to capture my stringy wisps in the same style. She wore sweaters,
Fair Isle sweaters
, with overalls and beaded moccasins, and I begged for all three for my birthday.

She took me on campus, after school, to sit in a dorm lounge with her and her friends, other girls I studied and longed to emulate.

Northfield was the first place that when we left, I cried.

I started collecting college catalogs in binders with plastic sleeves, like other kids collected
Magic: The Gathering
cards or
Pokémon.
Carleton, of course. Macalester. Grinnell. Beloit. Cornell. Knox. Lake Forest. Luther. Saint Olaf. Antioch. Kenyon. Hope. Oberlin.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

From then on, it didn’t matter where we went, because I knew where I was going.

I learned to ignore the new towns, the new schools, even the new kids, because on the other side of it, I would be nestled into a campus with old trees and old buildings and wise professors. I would take a major that provided balance and participate in the best activities, and I would make friends, and, best of all, the very best thing—

Four years.

I would live on a campus in some brick or stone building sheltered by a canopy of oak. I would have a future, a chance, a reason to make friends, to make a best friend, to be a regular somewhere. Anywhere.
Hey Winnie, here’s your Earl Grey with steamed milk and vanilla syrup. We’ll put that on your tab.

But it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.

It didn’t, and it did.

Four years had earned me an awkward advisor telling me I could use
greater ease in social situations
as he signed me up for Maggie Hyong’s make-out class.

I mean, at least he knew me well enough to say so, right?

“Hey! Teacher’s Pet, whatever the fuck, hold the fuck up.”

I had been hearing a guy yell for a while, but I was good at ignoring guys yelling. They were never yelling in my direction, after all. But I stopped, right in front of the sodium-bulb-lit access tunnel that led to the commons cafeteria.

It was the
Teacher’s Pet
that yanked some thread in my brain connected to my feet.

I held up.

I didn’t turn around, though. I just kept still.

Then Cal Darling was right in front of me, bent over at the waist, gasping with one finger in the air, asking me to wait for him to recover.

For some reason, I did.

“Jesus Christ, woman, you move fast for someone so fucking short.”

“You’re short.”

“That’s what I’m saying. You’re breaking the laws of physics.” He gasped a couple more times and then shoved his hands in his parka. It was an actual parka, with a thousand technical-looking zippers and fur around the hood. It should have looked completely ridiculous, but it’s like the coat hardly contained whatever it was that was Cal.

“What do you want?” I couldn’t believe I was talking to him like this, hard and impatient.

“We’re going to make out,” he says. “You want to grab a coffee first?”

“What?”

That was all I could think of to say.
What?

I should’ve asked him what he meant, but I was too busy bristling with hostility.

Which, you have to understand — I wasn’t like that. Hostile. I’d imagined conversations with Cal Darling, and they’d never been anything but pleasant.

I daydreamed myself talking to nearly everyone. Four years’ worth of imaginary conversations. Cal more than most, I’ll admit, but not because I had a crush on him.

I didn’t. I say that, and I mean it.

I thought of Cal more than others because he’s that sort of person. Ubiquitous, pushy. Pushing into other people’s lives, into their daydreams, even when there was nothing about him that ought to make that possible.

He wasn’t cute, or even charming. He wasn’t anything but
pushy
.

“You and me,” he said with a grin — one of his giant grins, obscenely winning. The grin that got him extensions on all his papers, got him into events without his student ID. The grin he’d flashed at me during first-year orientation right before he cut into line in front of me with three students who became his new best friends. “And everybody else in that class. Or didn’t you know you were signing on to swap body fluids with a dozen strangers?”

“Eleven,” I said.

“You counted?”

“Eleven, counting you and me.”

He rocked back on his heels. “Damn.” After a pause, he grinned again. “Still, it could be twelve if we have to stage-masturbate and Maggie joins in. I’m rounding up. So how’d you get a name like Winnie? Bet the kids made all kinds of jokes about poo, huh?”

He rubbed his hand over his face, which was covered in a wheat field of stubble. He tended that stubble like a rose garden. His hair was always mashed down or sticking out in weird directions, the consistency and color of straw, with dark-brown roots like he was trying to be Kurt Cobain circa 1993.

I really didn’t like Cal Darling, was the thing.

I kind of hated him.

But I’d discovered that hatred had a way of creeping into the corners of my life. Seeping in along the pathways of my disappointments. Over Christmas break, I’d told myself I had to do something if I was going to keep hate from taking me over.

I’d been thinking about next year and the year after that. What my future would look like if I allowed myself to hate.

I didn’t want to hate him.

I didn’t want to talk to him, either.

“I have somewhere to be,” I said.

“It’s convocation right now,” he said. “No one has anywhere to be.”

This was true. The entire campus had the convocation period free so that we could convoke, although no one ever did.

“I’m meeting someone.”

“Who are you meeting?”

That was when I most wanted to hit him. When he asked me that.

Looking back, it’s my favorite part of my first real memory of Cal. I can still remember what it did to my fist, to the muscle in my forearm. Woke it up, brought it alive with potential energy.

I’d imagined, always, that if he pushed, I’d yield. That’s what I always did — yielded until I backed into a wall, then melted. Faded away. But in that moment I wanted to shove him on the shoulder of his too-big parka, in that puff of crumpled high-tech fabric, and find out what happened next. What he would say.

I wanted to know what it would feel like to push back against someone with so much momentum and force. I wanted to know how hard I’d have to put the brakes on to keep a guy like Cal from rolling over me.

And I realized, right before I told him “No one you’d know” and walked away, that I wanted, too, to find out what his shoulder would feel like under my hand.

I wanted to touch him.

That was what made me smile when I left him there, mouth gaping.

Because I never wanted to touch anyone.

“Get your feet off my desk, Calvin.” My dad didn’t even look up, just shoved at the toe of my Con with the end of his pen and kept reading whatever poor asshole’s paper would suffer his contempt.

“Settle, prof.”

“Go away.”

“I would, but I need your filial guidance.”

“Your mom’s home. Go bother her.”

“Mom’s four loveless blocks away, and you’re conveniently located between my problem and Tater Tot Wednesday at the grill.”

Dad looked up and shoved his reading glasses to the top of his head. Lately, the campus confession Facebook page had been plagued with swoony comparisons of Professor Darling to Hugh Laurie, so I felt like it was my duty to keep things plenty real for him.

“Girl trouble,” I said.

He slid his glasses back on and picked up his pen. “Go away.”

“Dude, you’re my dad, give up the advice already.”

“Use a rubber.”

“Come
on
.”

“A new one every time.”

“Yeah, you know what?” I stood up, and I realized I was actually kind of pissed. I normally relish a good Darling-man bit, and when I had walked into my dad’s office after Winnie took off I thought that was what I wanted, but it wasn’t. All of a sudden, it wasn’t what I wanted.

I had no idea what I wanted, except not this jackass bit we did.

I shoved my arms back into my coat and kicked the chair I was sitting in back to its regular position.

“Wait,” Dad said.

“No, it’s cool. I’m going.”

“Cal, sit down. Sorry. I’m just so fucking far behind on grading. You know how I get.”

I sat down. Dad pretends like he doesn’t understand me. He pretends like Mom and I have the big connection, but something I’d grown to understand in the past couple of years yearning to get out of there — really getting in touch with the general state of yearning — is that me and Dad aren’t all that different.

It was that we understood each other too well. So well that we both knew it’d be too painful to talk about anything more serious than our stupid bits.

I just wondered how long Dad’s eyes had been on the horizon. I had the feeling I’d only just got my head out of my ass and noticed.

“I’m in Hyong’s Contact Improv.”

“Maggie Hyong?” My dad looked out the little window in his basement office, the sill level with the snow outside. “
Dang
.”

“You know what happens in there, right?”

“She did a presentation on it to the faculty a couple of years ago, after she published her book.” Dad looked at me. “How’d you get in?”

“Pulled a good registration lottery number.”

“Mazel tov.”

“You know Winnie Frederickson?”

Dad leaned back in his chair, chewing on the earpiece of his glasses. I think he learned this shit in professor school. “Tall, real athletic, with the pink streak?”

“You’re thinking of Muriel Jenning. Winnie’s short. Like, real short, I’ve got a few inches on her.”

“Soc major?”

“No idea.”

“What’s your major, by the way?”

“Spanish.”