I say it louder than I intend, and the faces of students and faculty traveling across campus turn towards me with looks of concern mixed with interest.
“I can explain. Wait.” Justin runs towards me, and I decide to stop and face him. Because I don’t want to become a spectacle, but also because a part of me knows I’m not thinking rationally—Dr. Koftura and I have gone over scenarios like this before—what to do when I feel myself getting out of control. Or what I should have done. Focus on your breathing, I remind myself.
Justin and I are standing close enough to have a normal conversation, and when my eyes meet his there’s kindness in them. I exhale.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he says. “Why do you think I’m a fraud?” He tests the last word out on his lips, like it has no place in this conversation.
I take another full breath and feel it fill my chest. I don’t answer until I’ve breathed out again.
“I talked to one of the grad students—they’ve never heard of you.” My voice rises slightly as I say this, and I consciously try to shift it back to normal as much as I can. “And who’s your advisor? You never even told me their name.”
Justin actually laughs at this point. Looking at his face and how unworried he suddenly looks, I try to laugh, too, but all that comes out is a choked sort of sob.
“My advisor’s name is Professor Farak. I don’t have an office because there are no spaces left in the grad student room, and I said I didn’t want to share a desk.”
I let the information sink in for a moment. And another.
Justin looks expectantly at me, and then lets out a sigh of exasperation and moves to turn around and walk away. That’s when it hits me—it’s just exactly what I’m doing.
“I’m sorry,” I call out. “I don’t know what to say.” The wind has kicked up and I reach up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m so embarrassed.” I stare at my feet.
Justin turns back and comes closer to me. He puts his hands on my shoulders and squeezes a little harder than would be pleasant. He says, “Well, why don’t we go make it better? Can I take you to lunch?”
And as I turn my body into his and join our steps together to head towards Kilcawley Center, my mind flashes back to that hallway and the names on the doors. The second door I passed read, in black embossed letters against the frosted glass of the door, “Professor Joseph Farak.”
Justin would have seen the sign, too, as he came down the hallway to meet me.
Certainty comes like an avalanche. It’s him that’s doing something. Not me.
I break away from our coupling, and as I do so I shove Justin away. He stumbles into a bench along the side of the sidewalk and knocks his shin against the metal bar of its armrest.
“You are a liar. I went by your advisor’s office—in fact I could see it the entire time I was waiting for you, and nobody came in or out. You weren’t meeting with your advisor. You just made that up as you walked by it to meet me.”
I want to stop, but I keep going. “Where were you?”
Justin has sat down on the bench, and he murmurs his answer so quietly I can’t quite hear. I only catch the last word, which sounds a lot like “Bitch.”
Something shatters inside my head.
I put my face next to his, a finger thrust at him, and say, “Don’t you ever call me a bitch again, or you’ll regret it.”
Justin and I lock eyes, and that same expression that I saw in the hallway by the grad student office washes over his face. Watching it again, I recognize something I didn’t before.
Disgust. He’s disgusted with me.
I start to move away, appalled at my behavior, an apology again on my lips.
But before I can say anything, Justin sets his mouth. I watch as he clenches his fist.
“Get out of my face,” he says, gritting his teeth so hard I swear I can hear the enamel grinding away. His face has turned red and a vein pulses in his forehead like it’s about to burst. “You bitch.”
I reel back, ready to follow through with my promise.
“Morgan?” A female voice breaks into the chaos. I turn reflexively, and my colleague Maria is standing a few feet away from me, looking perfect as ever in her red coat and matching lipstick. She must just be leaving the café. “Are you alright?”
Justin quickly stands up. “She’s fine,” he says. “It’s just a disagreement we’re having.” He reaches out to touch my arm and I jerk it violently away. Out of the corner of my eye I see Maria startle back.
I look over at her. “I’m fine, Maria, thank you.” I brush a few stray hairs from my face, self-conscious as ever of what I must look like to her.
“Are you sure?” she asks, but I don’t reply. Instead I start to walk towards DeBartolo Hall, and after a moment Maria moves to join me. Justin stays where he is, and I only glance back once to look at him as Maria and I walk away. I don’t catch his eye, though, because his face is buried in his phone.
Predictably, my phone buzzes a few seconds later. When I bring the screen up there’s a text from Justin. We were meeting at a coffee shop downtown because his office is under construction.
Oh God, is all I can think. What have I done?
10
Maria and I are both silent on our walk back to DeBartolo Hall, but as soon as I am safely within the privacy of my office, I call Annie. She picks up on the second ring.
“This had better be an apology,” she says when the call connects.
“I think it’s happening again.” The words rush out of my mouth and into the phone, and it’s a relief to say them out loud to my best friend.
Annie doesn’t need to ask what I mean.
“What happened?” she says, and the playfulness that’s almost always in her voice is gone. “Are you okay? Is Justin okay?”
“Yes, yes,” I assure her. “It’s just . . . we had a fight,” I offer lamely. I wait, trying to arrange my thoughts in my head before telling them to Annie. Part of me wants to leave out certain details, but ultimately I decide to give Annie almost everything. I talk in a rush, before I can change my mind.
“I talked to Justin earlier today and he sounded weird on the phone and said he was meeting with his advisor, but then he wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter when I looked him up—” I leave out my new, now-defunct, Snapchat account.
“You did what?” Annie tries to cut in, but I barrel on.
“—and it just seemed weird, so I went to go find him at his office. Except he wasn’t there, and then he showed up after I texted him and said he was meeting with his advisor, but his advisor’s office was down the hall and Justin wasn’t inside, so. . .”
“Morgan, what happened next?” Annie over-articulates the words, making my cheeks flame up and a lump form in my throat. This is how people, even best friends, talk when they think someone is losing their mind.
“I’m not crazy,” I murmur the words, and even to me they sound unconvincing.
Annie doesn’t say anything for a moment. “I know that. You know I know that.” I hear a rustling against the phone and picture her rubbing her hand across her face, which is one of Annie’s tells that she’s working at keeping herself calm. On my end of the line I close my eyes and pinch my nose to keep a fresh wave of tears from welling too much.
“What else happened?” Annie asks again.
I tell her about the fight Justin and I had, and how I got in his face and that he then called me a bitch. I explain his message afterwards, and how I misread the entire situation—blew it all out of proportion. I leave out the part where I saw him clench his fist, because I’m not sure anymore what I saw and what I think I saw. And besides, people do all sorts of things when they’re fighting.
Like threaten their boyfriend.
After I’m done, I wait for Annie to say something, and the silence on her end of the line is excruciating. Just like when I ask my class a question and everyone stares at their feet, hoping t
o get away with me answering it myself, I count silently in my head as a way of managing the awkward pause without filling it with my own blather. One one-thousand, two one-thousand. It works well with my students, because often what feels like an eternity is actually five or six seconds until one of them takes pity on me and raises their hand. Today, with Annie, it takes to the count of eight one-thousands before she says something.
“We had a contract. You promised.”
Annie’s voice isn’t disappointed or mad. She just sounds worn down, and the realization that I am leaving everyone who cares about me in a wake of either frustration or fatigue makes my face burn hot with shame.
“I know I did.” I scrounge around in my brain for something to hold on to, to show for myself. “I didn’t Google him.”
Annie gives a reluctant laugh, and I feel both of us relax a little bit. But there’s no way Annie will just let this go.
She cares about me too much.
“This is exactly how you acted with Richard before and after he broke up with you,” she says. “You remember? Stealing his phone and reading all his texts, searching for ex-girlfriends online and then pretending to be friends with them so you can get more information, following him to see if he was having an affair with his ex-girlfriend—and that all started because he told you that she called him to say congrats on his thesis defense. Because he turned out to have a past. To not be a perfect, unblemished, idol of a boyfriend.”
I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to argue about. It’s all true.
“Come on, Morgan. That’s what I was so upset about the other night. You make these fantasies of what love is supposed to be, and then, when life doesn’t live up to reality, well . . . we both know you have a history of being a little—” She stops for a second, searching for the right word to describe me, even though I already know which one she’s going to choose. “Look, I’m just going to say it—paranoid. You see problems that aren’t really there, and then you go off and make real problems that actually replace the imaginary ones.” Annie pauses, and I hear her take a sip of something. She and I always need something to munch on—nuts and Trail mix for me, Ho Hos and Twizzlers for her. Don’t read into that too much—orally-fixated, my ass. We both just run high metabolisms, and it’s a small reassurance that my implosion this morning hasn’t put her off her snack game.
Maybe this isn’t so bad after all.
“I know it’s not exactly the same,” Annie goes on. “You haven’t shown up at his house after he broke up with you, drunk, screaming that he was a liar and a cheat. Justin hasn’t called the police on you because of a night when you got drunk and showed up and you wouldn’t leave, and you started waking up his entire neighborhood. But that’s just it—for every single example I’m giving I feel like I have to put a massive ‘yet’ at the end, because if you keep doing this you are going to end up in the back of a police car again. Or worse.”
Maybe it will be.
I let her words sink in. Part of me desperately wants to defend myself and say that Richard was ages ago—that I’ve changed—and that this whole thing with Justin is nothing like what happened with Richard. But another part, deeper inside, knows what I’m capable of.
“I’m just so embarrassed,” I concede, and the echo of my words from earlier today with Justin—before everything really went to hell—unmoors me for a moment. “What am I going to do?”
An e-mail pings into my inbox. My eye catches the subject line. Urgent Review Sheet Question. I’ve received thirty-five e-mails since this morning.
“Do you want to keep seeing him?” Annie asks, her tone unreadable.
I picture Justin’s face when I called him a fraud. How disgusted he was with me.
But then I picture all the other times he’s looked at me and my chest almost bursts.
“Yes,” I answer, my voice wavering just a fraction. “The good and the bad—I want it all. With him.” I cough to cover up the pressure catching in my throat.
I’m terrified. It’s not just that I’ve ruined everything, but that I’ll always ruin everything. There’s another pause on the line, longer and heavier than the ones before. And then Annie makes her decision. To let me try to love Justin.
“Alright. Okay, Morgan.” Her voice is quieter than it’s been this entire conversation. “You can’t understand how much I want this to be true. For you.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just sit there, trying to read my best friend’s thoughts across the line. When Annie talks again there’s a hint of humor back in her voice, and it soothes the pulse that’s been rioting inside my temple this entire conversation.
“In that case, you should call him and apologize. And then he should apologize to you for calling you a bitch, and done. The end. Then go have hot makeup sex and order pizza.”
“It’s good advice,” I say, relieved at how simple Annie thinks it’ll be to fix this. I absentmindedly reach out and play with a black Sharpie lying on my desk, twirling it between my thumb and forefinger. There’s a bag of kale chips in my bag that I grab and rip open in one satisfying jag of my arm.
“I still haven’t told him,” I admit.
I don’t have to tell Annie what that is. The accident. The brain damage. The episodes. Her voice. I almost add that I heard it again when Justin came to visit my class, but Annie cuts into my thoughts.
“You should,” she says. “Maybe not right away; maybe not while you’re eating something that’s meant to give rabbits diarrhea.”
That makes me smile.
“But you should,” she goes on.
I take a sip of water to wash down a bit of chip stuck in my throat. I cough.
“That stuff will kill you,” Annie chuckles.
I need to say it out loud.
“What if he decides he doesn’t want me anymore?” I ask. “That he doesn’t really love me.” What if I’m too damaged for any of this? is what I really mean.
“He won’t,” she assures me. “Because he loves you. Telling him about your past doesn’t change who you are.”
I consider this for a moment. Only half teasing, “So does this mean you’re on Justin’s side now?”
“I’m on your side—I always am. If this is who you’re going to love, well, then I’ll just have to learn to love him too.” I hear her take a quick breath in. “And then you need to follow the contract we set up.” Annie chews on those last words. And maybe a piece of licorice. But there’s an urgency there too.
“It’s just. . .” My voice trails off because my mind is back on that conversation with him, seeing him clench his jaw. And his hand. Angry. Ready to strike.
Me, reeling. Ready to strike back.
But Annie is right to hold me accountable. “It’s just what? Is there something you’re not telling me?” She’s instantly nervous, probing.
I push it aside, because—like Annie said earlier—I have a tendency to make imaginary trouble into real problems that have teeth. And so I offer up a problem I know is real.
“It’s just that, this morning—” God, was it only this morning? “Justin said he loves me, and then the very same day I go and make this huge mess of things.” An e-mail pings into my inbox. A forgotten Post-it note on my desk reading Tech x 5692 glares back in bright fuchsia. I want to say goodbye and end this call. I want to avoid this thought that’s been burning inside my head since I left Justin this morning.
“What if being in a relationship is just something I can’t do? You know—what if this is just one thing that I can’t get right?”
Annie doesn’t hesitate.
“We aren’t broken,” Annie says, and the relief that floods my body is familiar and welcome. Annie knows me so well, knows what I need before I even do myself sometimes.
She’s my best friend.
Annie’s voice suddenly gets much louder. She must have the receiver right up to her lips as she says, “We. Aren’t. Broken.”
“I hope you’re right,” I say, feeling su
ddenly as exhausted as Annie sounded earlier.
“You might be the doctor,” Annie replies. “But trust me. This I know.”
A beat passes.
“One of these days, I swear—you’re going to wake up and realize how much you’re worth. And then all this other stuff will be like a bad dream.”
I wait for her to go on, because I don’t want to break the spell of what she’s just said.
“Just keep trying.” Annie clears her throat. The line fizzles as she takes a sip of something.
I crunch a kale chip into the receiver, and Annie fake gags at the sound.
Then briskly she adds, “Now, delete all your social media apps, call Justin, and . . .”
“What?”
“I think you need to make an appointment with Dr. Koftura. Just to check in.”
I crush the chip bag in my hand until its edges prick at my skin.
“Way ahead of you,” I finally say, because I know she’s right.
11
I check my schedule for the remainder of the day after I hang up with Annie. One of the perks of being in the teaching faculty is the ability to work from home when not in the classroom or holding office hours, along with the apparent flexibility you have to make emergency doctor appointments if need be. I have a meeting with my boss, the head of the psychology department, Professor David Sothern, in an hour and then the rest of my afternoon is free. David had been a little cryptic in the e-mail, but then again that’s always been his style. You never know whether you’re going to get promoted or chastised.
A few months ago, one of the cognitive psychologists down the hall from me, Lance Jacobs, unsuspectingly went into a meeting with David, only to be told he wouldn’t be receiving tenure. Lance had stormed out of David’s office, yelling obscenities and insulting David’s wife/mother/genitalia. The noise brought the entire department out from their little warrens, myself included, and we watched as David calmly waited for Lance to wear himself out. David never said a word, just put a hand gently on Lance’s shoulder and led him out through the door to deposit him into the shifty elevator that was thankfully waiting to be boarded.
It Was Always You Page 5