I didn’t know whether to laugh, because I didn’t know if he was serious. I didn’t know if he knew that my “goddamned advisor” would do whatever Curry told him to do.
We parked in a lot a block or so away from the art building, and as we approached, I saw a small crowd of people gathered, and I could hear them buzzing, though I couldn’t make out any of what they were saying. My heart leapt, because what else could it be but some kind of protest led by Jenny?
My body ached for her. I wanted to see her so badly, yet I clung stubbornly to the notion that I needed to sort out the portfolio first. I needed to do what both she and Curry had been telling me to do. I needed to become the sort of man who was worthy of her.
“Oh, look, here’s her little fagboy boyfriend.”
Unfortunately, I would have known that voice anywhere. I looked around, trying to spot Jenny or Nessa or any of the newspaper people. But it was all frat-boy types in their baggy khakis and pink shirts with upturned collars like they were dressed for cricket or polo or some shit.
“Royce,” I said as the crowd parted and opened a path between me and him. I wasn’t afraid of him. Curry’s presence helped, but mostly, I stood straight and proud in the private knowledge that, no matter how terribly and possibly irrevocably I’d bungled things, for one crystalline moment, Jenny had chosen me. Royce would never be able to say that.
He just sneered and glanced over his shoulder. I followed his gaze, and—
No. No, no, no.
“No.” I said it out loud, as if that would somehow change what I was seeing.
The bag. I’d dropped the bag yesterday, after Jenny got off the bus and I’d been annihilated by the truth of how fucking much I loved her. For some moronic reason, I’d become momentarily obsessed with touching the door to the art building and I’d needed to free up my hands.
And, I only now realized, I’d never picked up the goddamned bag again.
It wasn’t just the ugly sentiment, but the fact that he’d painted it on her beloved art building. He might as well have spit in her face.
This couldn’t stand. Something shifted inside me, and it must have been reflected in my outward being, because Royce flinched, and as he did so, a murmur rippled through the crowd. He thought I was going to hit him, but he was wrong. I held his gaze a moment longer, but I wasn’t even tempted. I was done with Royce.
I swiveled to face Curry. “Change of plans.” He raised his eyebrows. “I have something I need to do, but I can’t do it by myself. I need help. Will you help me?”
Jesus, if only he knew how hard it was to choke those words past the fear lodged in my throat.
One end of his mouth quirked up slightly. Maybe he did know. “I thought you’d never ask.” Then the other side hitched up too. “I have no idea what you have in mind, but I think I might need to go back to the car for my cigarettes.”
Jenny
Enough with the pounding already. I was taking a nap. Well, I was trying to take a nap. Nessa, having capitulated to my insistence that she go oversee the production of tomorrow’s paper, had extracted from me a promise that I would try to sleep. Ever dutiful, I was lying on my bed in the dark. My head felt less awful than it had earlier, but that was about all I could say for myself. The only reason I’d succumbed to Nessa’s demand was that I knew promising to rest was the only thing that would get her out of the room. Though I appreciated the loyalty, I wanted to be alone so I could cry. And I had. Cried until I felt like an empty shell. Like he’d broken not just my heart but my lungs and guts and marrow, too.
“Jenny!” called the voice at my door. “Jenny, it’s Beth! Open the door!”
I groaned. Beth was supposed to be overseeing the planning for Thursday’s paper. I had thought she was the type who could rise to the occasion and not need hand-holding, but apparently I was wrong.
I heaved myself out of my cocoon and hobbled over to swing open the door. “What’s wrong?”
“I tried to call, but it keeps ringing and ringing.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, well, I had to take the phone off the hook.” The phone had been ringing when Nessa and I got back to the room earlier, and after answering it and listening for a few seconds, Nessa had slammed it down without speaking. A couple more repeats of that, and she pulled the whole thing out of the wall before tucking me in.
“You have to come with me!” Beth urged.
God, would everyone just stop with this today?
“The art building! You have to see it!” She was breathless, far from her usual no-nonsense self.
“I’ve seen it, Beth. Why else do you think I’m holed up here wallowing in my misery? Why else is my phone off the hook?” If she was only just now finding out, she wasn’t the newswoman I’d believed her to be.
“You haven’t seen this.” She came into the room and flipped on the overhead light, leaving me blinking and holding my head. She made a slow turn around the room until she spied my pink hoodie. She picked it up off the floor and threw it at me. “Put this on. We’re going.”
What the hell? It couldn’t get any worse.
“What are you putting on the front page on Thursday?” I asked as I followed her toward the center of campus. Man, she was going fast.
“I’m putting this on the front page.”
I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t. The graffiti was certain to be big news on campus. “I’m surprised it’s still up,” I said, thinking of Tony’s promise that he’d get rid of it. Several hours had passed since I’d parted from him.
She shot me a look. “So you do know about it?” When, confused, I didn’t answer, she said, “Anyway, I’m not sure it will be there much longer. The administration is out there. President Bannister is talking to Curry.”
Emmanuel Curry? What the hell?
A huge crowd was assembled on the circle. Some of them carried hand-lettered placards exhorting the administration to save the art building. As we walked, an ABC news truck from the Boston affiliate pulled up.
“Whoa,” said Beth. “This shit is getting real. I hope Tony is getting this.” She started looking around the crowd, which, despite my confusion, gave me some measure of comfort. At least my heir was comporting herself with the concern befitting an editor facing a situation that…
What the heck was actually happening here? The crowd was so thick that I couldn’t see what everyone was looking at.
“Oh my God!” an unfamiliar voice cried. “I think that’s the girl.”
“Jenny!” I turned because that second voice, coming from behind me, was one I recognized.
“Nessa!” I called as she ran toward me, huffing heavily. “What’s happening?”
“I tried to find you—I’ve just come from our room.”
“Why?” I was getting impatient. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
She took my hand and started barking, “Excuse us, make way, please,” as she elbowed her way through the crowd. When we encountered a particularly thick clump, she snapped, “This is the girl from the painting, so make way.”
Those seemed to be the magic words, because a path opened, and Nessa dropped my hand and gave me a shove.
I stumbled forward a bit but managed to right myself.
“Walk,” she hissed.
So I did what any good journalist would have: I walked.
I saw him before I saw what he was doing. He was perched on a not-super-reliable-looking scaffolding, and my first thought was that he was going to hurt himself. He had to be twenty feet up, and he was reaching as far as he could with a paintbrush and—
Oh my God.
It was me. He was painting me.
It was the same image from one of the pastel drawings from the other morning—the sad one. It was huge, though, taking up nearly a third of the wall. He’d already finished my face, which was how I could tell it was the sad one. The hair was done, and he was working on the place where my shoulder met my blue dress. There was a second scaffolding maybe twenty
feet over from him, and someone had clearly used it to paint SAVE THE ART BUILDING in letters that were maybe three feet high. They’d been hand-lettered but they were perfectly aligned, so immaculate one would have thought they’d been typewritten. Beneath them was a numbered list, done in smaller letters. I took a step closer. The first said, “This building is over a hundred years old, and the only example of Gothic revival architecture on campus.” There were three more items in the list, but it appeared that it wasn’t finished. I didn’t think Matthew had done the lettering. It seemed impossible that he could have done as much of the painting as he had and made this list in the hours that had elapsed since I’d been here and seen my phone number—which was now nowhere in evidence.
I looked around. There was an older man standing in paint-splattered jeans and a T-shirt, and he was talking to President Bannister and a couple other men, one of whom I recognized as the chair of the university’s board of governors.
“You have to understand, Mr. Curry—”
“What the hell does it matter what he paints on it if you’re going to tear it down anyway?” Curry yelled, waving a paintbrush that confirmed his identity as Matthew’s partner in crime.
“Jenny.” I turned, wary, no idea what or who to expect. What could this day possibly have left to serve up to me?
“Officer Artie!” I smiled despite myself. Officer Perez and I had had our clashes over the years, but right now he seemed like a friendly, reliable face in a crowd I still wasn’t sure how to classify.
He glanced at the argument unfolding between Curry and the president. “I’m not sure how much longer this”—he gestured at Matthew’s scaffolding—“will be allowed to go on.”
I nodded. “I’m not going to chain myself to the front door or anything, so don’t worry.”
He smiled. “No. I just thought you might want to…I don’t know. Go up there and talk to him?”
“You’re telling me to go ahead and climb that rickety-ass-looking scaffolding up to where a student is committing a crime in broad daylight?”
“I’m not telling you to do that,” he said. “I’m just telling you if you were going to do something like that, you might want to get to it.”
He winked and went over to insert himself into the escalating argument between the men.
I walked to the base of Matthew’s scaffolding. It was amazing. There were probably three hundred people milling around at his feet. Emmanuel Curry was defending Matthew’s guerrilla art project—vociferously—with the school’s top brass. Matthew was hanging precariously twenty feet in the sky. Yet none of these things seemed to penetrate his consciousness at all. He worked with a single-minded intensity that made me blush because it reminded me of the way he had gone down on me.
Did I dare?
I dared.
Matthew
I didn’t notice her until she was right there. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty good metaphor for our entire relationship. I’d been fine for nearly four years, content in my complete ignorance of the existence of Jenny Fields. If I had seen her from afar, I would have classified her as of a type: rich, preppy, entitled.
But then she was just…there. In my space and in my face. And once she was there, it was impossible that she should be anywhere else.
Our eyes met as her head popped up over the floor of the scaffolding I stood on. I went to her, grabbing her arm as she hoisted herself up the last rung of the ladder, because I was suddenly seized with fear that she would fall. But I dropped her arm as soon as she stood before me, safe and upright. I didn’t have the right to touch her anymore.
But I could speak the truth.
You have to let yourself care about something.
“I love you,” I said, and, amazingly, I wasn’t afraid.
“What?” She laughed, but it was a nervous, unsettled laugh, not her usual delighted, conspiratorial giggle.
“I love you.”
She furrowed her brow. She was skeptical, and rightly so.
What did I think? That I could just keep saying it and it would somehow make a difference? That it would be enough? I tried another truth. “I didn’t paint your phone number on the wall.” The little intake of breath that followed told me I was getting somewhere. “I dropped a bag with my paint in it near here last night. Someone else must have picked it up.”
“Royce,” she breathed.
“Seems likely,” I agreed.
“So what are you doing?” She gestured to the building.
I turned back to the work I was creating—the work we were creating, Curry and me. It was looking okay. I’d chosen to reproduce the sad version of her, because I thought it seemed more appropriate to the destruction of a building. I’d taped the original to the bricks near my feet and was doing a half-decent job copying it. And who knew Curry would be content to lower himself to lettering the text I’d given him? Except he wasn’t lettering right now. He seemed to be arguing with a bunch of old dudes who looked like they were in charge. I couldn’t hear anything the suits were saying, but Curry was yelling, and phrases like “protest art” and “artistically illiterate corporate BS” were wafting up.
Crap—this might actually work.
“What I am doing,” I said, going back to Jenny’s question, “is trying to get this piece-of-shit school to spare this old pile of bricks.”
She smiled then, as she stood there in her neon-pink sweatshirt and lime-green leggings. “I knew you cared about this place underneath all that bravado.”
“Actually, I don’t give a fuck about the art building.” I had looked her in the eyes and told her the truth when I said I loved her, and now I couldn’t seem to stop. The truth was addicting. “I’ve told you that. I’m just doing this for you. Because I love you.” I smiled. “As I said.”
She covered her face with her hands, and a little sob escaped.
I dropped my paintbrush and closed my arms around her. I’d wanted her to come to me, to freely choose me because I was worthy of that choice. But I couldn’t stand there and let her cry. “I made a mistake, see. A huge one.” She was permitting the embrace but not hugging me back, just standing there with her hands over her face while my arms encircled her. “Everything about Saturday was perfect,” I said, moving my lips against her hair. “The painting—the painting I finally got right.” I smiled now, to think that Curry’s lesson about harnessing emotion had been so simple, so obvious—and yet so impossible for me before Jenny. “The pub—well, the confrontation with Royce I could maybe have done without.” She didn’t laugh, but she did lean almost imperceptibly closer to me, and I seized the opportunity to tighten my grip on her. “And afterward. In my room.” I swallowed. It was scary as hell, but I had to look at her face while I said this. “I never cared about anything before like I cared about what was happening that night. I never loved anything, or anyone.” I swallowed. I didn’t want to presume, but it had to be said. “I don’t think anyone ever loved me.”
“Not even your family? Your mother?”
I was startled to hear her speak. She’d been so still up until now that I’d settled in for a long speech. I shrugged. “She sent me a card at Christmas.” When Jenny’s lower lip began to quiver, I softened my assessment. “I don’t think she ever got over it when my sister ran away.” I’d been trying again to just talk, to state my case without touching her. But I couldn’t help it. Her hair, which was a complete bird’s nest of a mess, was blowing in her face, so I reached out and tucked as much of it as I could behind her ears. “But don’t pity me. I didn’t consider it any great loss. I was making my way in the world.”
“Was?” she whispered.
“Yeah, until you came along with your goddamned cause. And now look at me.” I cast a glance over my shoulder and couldn’t help smiling even as I rolled my eyes. “What happened to me?”
“I loved you,” she whispered. “I think that’s what happened.”
I’d been trying to make a joke, to make her smile, regardless of w
hat the outcome was going to be, but her words hit me with as much force as if the building demolition had begun and left me buried in the rubble. But I ignored the churning in my chest and nodded. “Yeah.” My voice caught, and I cleared my throat, trying again. “And I panicked.”
“What do you want?” she asked me. The simple, blunt openness of the question startled me. One thing Jenny had shown me was that you could make yourself vulnerable and not die. Look at her, doing it right now, standing there before a man who’d broken her heart, looking at him with red eyes and tangled hair and asking him a question that meant everything.
“I want to move to New York with you,” I said, which was the first and truest answer that popped into my head. “I want you to forgive me. I want you to let me love you.” It was the scariest thing I had ever done, but I let the tear that I could feel hovering in the corner of my eye spill down my cheek. That I didn’t wipe it away, didn’t turn my face away from her… I hoped she could recognize these things as the offerings they were. “I want to let you love me…if you want to.”
She laughed then, a good laugh, without a hint of bitterness in it. And then she was kissing me but still laughing, so it was a big, sloppy mess. All I could do was try to keep us upright as my arms snaked around her. Relief and lust conspired with each other to make my legs feel like jelly, and I leaned back against the solid mass of the building, grateful for its support.
“Townsend!”
Jenny jumped away from me, as if she’d only just realized we were standing in front of hundreds of people making out as if we were drowning.
Curry stood at the foot of my scaffolding, hands on his hips, apparently done with his “discussion” with the suits. “This is now officially your senior portfolio,” he yelled up. “So unless you want to flunk out, I suggest you spend a little less time locking lips with your girlfriend and a little more time getting your ass in gear.”
The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom Page 9