The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom (8 page)

I
t was
days like this I wished Dad wasn't so far away. It wasn't that I expected him ever to get his shit together enough that I could confide in him so he could comfort me. (Besides, I don't think even fathers who are paragons of mental health want to hear about how their daughters gave it up to a boy who turned out to be a total jerkface.) But sometimes I envied students whose families lived close enough that they could go home for the weekend. Because right about now, climbing into my childhood bed, pulling the covers over my head, and hiding from the world long enough to get my self back without everyone's eyes on me sounded like heaven.

I took a deep breath at the door to my room and tried to tell myself that facing Nessa couldn't be worse than the hateful version of Matthew I'd encountered earlier. Part of me hoped she wouldn't be there. But it was probably better to get it over with. I had resolved to tell her about Royce. Then we'd have to find a way to get on. It was too close to the end of the year to expect housing services to reassign us, but if worse came to worst, I could crash at Tony's off-campus apartment, assuming he wasn't entertaining one of his legions of female admirers.

Just as I was about go to the door, it opened from the inside.

I jumped, and so did Nessa.

Then she threw her arms around me and started crying.

I
t hadn't been nearly
as hard as I'd anticipated to tell Nessa about my scary encounter with Royce at freshman orientation. I had expected her to be angry, and she was, but not in the way I'd been braced for. I'd prepared myself for her to be defensive, to not believe me, to take Royce's part.

But instead, after informing me that she'd broken up with Royce the night before, she started laying into me about not telling her earlier. “I don't even mean once I started dating him, Jenny. Like, earlier-earlier. Why have you been carrying this around for three and a half years without talking to anyone?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. He just grabbed my boobs. It's not like he—”

“Don't make excuses for him.
God
. I'm such a dipstick.” She'd been sitting next to me on my bed, but she stood and walked over to her own and gave her pillow a hearty
thwack
. “Ugh! I wish I could hit him.”

“Well, actually…” I said, grinning at the memory of Matthew decking Royce, even though thinking about Matthew at all was sort of like taking a razor blade to my heart. I hadn't been planning to tell her about Matthew. But then, I hadn't been expecting the old Nessa, the one who was funny and smart and sympathetic and
not brainwashed
. So it all came out.

She was hugging me again by the time I was done with my tale of woe. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, sitting on my bed and holding me in her arms while I cried.

I shrugged. “I wanted to lose my virginity.”

“Not about that. Well, I
am
sorry about that. But I meant I'm sorry I pretty much abandoned you this year. I feel like if I had been…more present, maybe none of this stuff with Matthew would have happened.”

I shook my head. “I abandoned you too. I hate myself for not telling you about Royce earlier. I feel like I let you walk into the lion's den with no warning.” The guilt was stronger than ever now that I had my old friend back. What had been
wrong
with me? How could I not have warned her?

“It wouldn't have mattered,” she said. “Lots of people told me he was bad news. Like Dawn Hathaway—if anyone should know, it would be the gossip columnist, right? But I didn't listen. I was determined to be with him.”

“Why?” I asked, as gently as I could.

“I'm not as strong as you, Jenny. I mean, who am I? I get B-minuses. I never talk in class. I'm the production coordinator of the newspaper. You know why I went for that job?”

It had never occurred to me to ask. “Why?”

“Because when you're production coordinator, you don't have to go out into the world and ask people questions. You just have to make sure everything's running smoothly.”

“It's an important job,” I protested.

“I didn't say it wasn't. But it's also an invisible job.”

I sighed. I got it. “And then Royce takes notice, and suddenly you're not invisible anymore.”

“The parties, the beautiful people, the gifts. It was a whirlwind.” She shook her head, clearly frustrated with herself. “And the truth is, I didn't want to resist. I wanted to…pretend for a while.” Her voice caught. “Even though, somewhere in my heart, I knew it wasn't real.”

It was my turn to hug her. We sat like that for a while; then she sniffed and pulled away, flashing me a crooked smile. “You know what? I'm kind of wondering now if he pursued me because of you.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, though I knew full well what she meant.

“He talked about you all the time. It was almost like he was obsessed with you.” She cocked her head and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “You know, I met him at that frat party in September. You remember? The Delta Chi back-to-school bash? You took Beth home early because she was sick.”

I did remember. The youngest member of the newspaper had miscalibrated a bit on her first big college party, and I'd felt responsible for her. Ironically, I hadn't wanted Royce to get her in his sights. I couldn't have imagined my roommate would roll in hours later, aflutter because she'd kissed the guy and he was taking her sailing that weekend.

“I knew Royce, of course,” said Nessa. We all did. You didn't go to Allenhurst without knowing its golden boy, at least by reputation. “But I'd never spoken a word to him in three years. But that night, right after you left with Beth, he came up to me and asked if I knew you. He had seen us talking earlier. I told him we'd been roommates since the beginning.” She huffed a bitter laugh. “And then he asked me out.”

God. It only confirmed my suspicions, but I felt terrible for Nessa, grappling not only with the news that her boyfriend was a horrible person, but that he had been using her this whole time. “Yeah, I don't think anyone has ever told Royce ‘no' before. I feel like maybe he
has
been a little obsessed with me. Not because he likes me, but because…” It was hard to explain.

“He feels like you owe him something.”

I nodded. “I'm sorry.”

“Enough sorry!” Nessa waved her hands in a dismissive motion. “Enough boys, too!”

“I'll second that motion,” I said, smiling sadly.

“Let's go to Boston,” she said, standing up and holding out her hand. “Just you and me, like we used to. If we leave now, we can be there by lunch.”

We did used to make the ninety-minute bus ride to the city every couple of months, to see a Red Sox game or go shopping or just to hang out in some new scenery. We hadn't been all year. I was exhausted, but…

I took her hand. “That is an offer I cannot refuse.”

Curry didn't say anything for a really long time as he circled the portraits of Jenny. He didn't light a second cigarette when the first one burned down.

“You are in love with this girl.” It wasn't a question.

“
What
? No!” I had to take a step back, I was so stunned by the pronouncement.

He narrowed his eyes at me and then looked back at the drawings. “Perhaps you hate her then?”

“I don't
hate
her,” I said, realizing too late that it came out sounding awfully defensive—the artist doth protest too much and all that.

My maddening mentor shrugged, as if it were all the same to him. “These are the best I've ever seen from you. You're finally getting somewhere.”

“Because I cranked out some pastels of some chick?” I probably shouldn't have been talking to him like that, but I couldn't help it.

“You are torturing yourself over this woman.” He smirked. Before I could muster a protest, he added, “It is not necessary to torture yourself to make great art.” He held up a finger, as if to forestall the rejoinder he thought was coming, but in truth, I was too shocked to speak. “But if you're going to do it, better over a woman than something that doesn't matter.”

“I only met her a couple weeks ago, so—”

“Torture yourself over a woman,” he continued, as if I hadn't spoken at all. “That's understandable. You can use that. But the rest of it? You've been torturing yourself about everything all semester. Form. Technique. God knows what else.” He turned to me. It was still so strange to see him without his trademark cigarette. “And how has that been working out for you?”

“Suffering has nothing to do with art?” I shot back. “What about Van Gogh? Bacon? Arbus?” My voice rose, indignant, because he was wrong.

“Some artists manage to leverage their suffering into greatness. But suffering isn't a precondition to great art, Matthew. Caring is, though. You can't just be a robot the rest of your life. You have to let yourself care about something.”

It was the most he had ever said to me in one go. We stared at each other for a long time. How could this asshole presume to know anything about me? About whether I'd suffered. About whether my suffering was
worthy
. About what I'd had to do to get through the past four years. About what I'd had to do to get through the last
twenty-two.

“What I care about,” I finally whispered, shaking so hard with suppressed rage that I couldn't make my voice any louder, “is not flunking out of college. What I care about is my goddamned senior portfolio.”

Curry smiled as he stared at me. Seeing him smile was even weirder than seeing him without a cigarette. “I don't give a flying fuck about your senior portfolio, Townsend. You do what you like, and I'll sign off on it.”

Then he turned and lit a cigarette, dismissing me.

I
t wasn't late enough
when I got back to campus. It wasn't
dark
enough, the spring days having grown longer without me noticing. That I was planning to go out without sufficient darkness was a sign of how out of control I was. But I was beyond caring. I banged into my room and yanked the portraits of Jenny out of my portfolio. When I ripped the corner of one of them, it only fanned the flames of my rage. I didn't even have a new stencil, for fuck's sake. It showed how utterly distracted I'd let myself become in recent weeks. I slammed my backpack on my bed, intending to empty it so I could refill it with my supplies, but the already-wobbly zipper finally gave way, and all my shit went flying.

Fuck it. I didn't need the backpack. I just had to go, had to obey the fire in my limbs commanding that I
keep moving
. I grabbed a garbage bag, jerked my closet door open, threw all my paint cans into the bag, and headed out into the twilight.

I could feel the fury starting to dissipate as I walked. It was like my junkie body knew it was going to get its fix soon, and it opened a tiny pinhole in my chest, allowing the rage that had accumulated there to begin to hiss out. By the time I was done, a couple hours from now, I would be okay, back to myself. I glanced at the art building up ahead. I'd be that goddamned wooden door, unchanging and impermeable.

The art building sat at one end of a circular commons that formed the center of campus. It was lined with the university's oldest, most stately buildings, anchored by Salter Tower, the campus's iconic clock tower, and ringed by a roundabout used by buses coming into campus. As I approached, a regional commuter bus of the same variety from which I had recently disembarked pulled up in front of the student center, which was on the opposite side of the circle from the art building. I slowed my pace and averted my face. Some of the profs commuted to campus from Boston, and though it was unlikely that any of them would be arriving on a Sunday evening, I had to make sure no one with any authority saw me leaving campus with my sketchy garbage bag. As the bus pulled away, I allowed myself to glance over to see if I needed to worry about any of the passengers.

One. There was one I needed to worry about.

She was laughing, laden with shopping bags and jokingly objecting to something that Nessa was saying. She was back in her colorful armor: a denim miniskirt, purple leggings, and a matching loose purple T-shirt belted low across her waist.

The pinhole that had opened up in my chest ripped itself into a huge, gaping rift, and instead of exiting in an orderly, drawn-out fashion, my rage was all sucked out of me in one heaving, horrible instant.

You have to let yourself care about something.

The shocking truth was that I wanted to fall to my knees before her once again. Right now and every day for the rest of my life. So I could taste her, yes, but also so I could beg the forgiveness I came nowhere near to deserving. So I could exhort her to have me.

“Was I drunk to let you talk me into that?” Jenny exclaimed, looping her arm through her roommate's. “Because I am never going to wear that shirt.”

“Shut up! That shirt is amazing! You're going to kill in it.”

“It doesn't even have a back, Ness! It—”

Even if I hadn't been watching them, standing there immobilized by the great roiling mass of fear and love and anguish and lust and guilt that had taken up residence inside me, I would have been able to pinpoint the exact moment she saw me. It was the moment the laughing, teasing, easygoing banter died. Killed by the sight of a boy who had broken her. Or tried to. Because even if she didn't know it herself, no one could ever really break her.

Her face took only a moment to catch up with what she was seeing. Then it rid itself of all outward sign of emotion. Like the door. The untouchable door. Oh God, it was like being lanced directly in the heart. Rainbow Brite wasn't supposed to look like that. To
be
like that—immovable and impenetrable. She deserved so much better.