Down and Across

by Arvin Ahmadi

  “Pfffaw,” I said, unleashing a spray of spit. “She wouldn’t even talk to me. I’ll never be gritty. No grit material here. Grit. Shit. Maybe if I say it enough times, I’ll ruin that word, too. Grit, grit, griiii—”

  Fiora cupped her hand over my mouth.

  “Shush. This is the most ironic wimp-out ever. Tell me, what exactly is grit?”

  I sobered up a little. “Perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”

  “Exactly. So go back! Don’t let one pathetic no push you away from something you care about. Believe me, if I did, I wouldn’t be writing crossword puzzles or still in a relationship or . . .” Fiora’s words trailed off. “That’s the whole point of grit, right?”

  I stared past Fiora at a red, hexagonal sign that said STOP. (Yes, I was so drunk that it took me a few seconds to piece together the color, shape, and letters of a regular old stop sign.) Everything around me was spinning, again, for the second time that day. I whispered to the sign, “Fuck you.” I’m not stopping.

  “What?” Fiora said.

  “No, not you, I was talking to . . . What time is it?”

  “I dunno, like midnight?”

  “Shut up.”

  Fiora pulled out her phone.

  “What? Look. It’s twelve twenty-three a.m.”

  “Let me see that.” I snatched the phone from her hand. She was wrong.

  12:24 a.m.

  It was Wednesday. Professor Mallard held office hours on Wednesdays from 8 to 10 a.m. I had to stay gritty about grit—that was the point. I’d do exactly what she wanted me to do, even if it was the opposite of what she told me in her office.

  The reality of my recklessness hit me like a ton of bricks. Fiora had distracted me. I handed her the phone back and took off without so much as a goodbye. I shouted far too many expletives far too loudly and publicly as I sprinted down New Hampshire and back to the hostel and made it into my bed, somehow, because it was all a blur after 12:24 a.m.

  THIS TIME, I knocked first.

  “Come in,” she said. Her voice sounded distant—thank God, since one cup of spilled coffee was enough. I took a second to check my breath. It wasn’t so bad anymore. I woke up that morning with a throbbing headache and some nausea, but the worst offender was the foul stench that had taken over the inside of my mouth.

  “Ahem. Come in,” she repeated. I twisted the doorknob and pushed before I had the chance to second-guess myself.

  Professor Mallard was wearing another white blouse, clearly unfazed by Monday’s accident. This one even had ruffles. We stood face-to-face, with ten feet of narrow office space between us, and her expression immediately dropped. I could feel everything from our last encounter stirring inside me—along with the hangover—but I held my ground. I ignored the stop signs. I locked eyes with her.

  She raised a finger to speak, but I beat her to the first word.

  “Hear me out,” I said. “I came all the way down from Philadelphia to speak with you. This is important.”

  Professor Mallard crossed her arms and really looked at me. She lifted her chin slowly and assessed my face. I could pinpoint the exact moment when she noticed the fresh cuts under my left eye and against the side of my jaw.

  “Remind me of your name . . . ?”

  “Scott Ferdowsi.”

  “And why, Scott, must you speak with me?”

  “I took your Grit Quiz and failed miserably. I give up a lot. I’m sixteen. I have no passions. I guess what I’m trying to say is . . . I need your help, you know, to get gritty.”

  Knowing I had a problem was one thing, but admitting it out loud was another. I couldn’t bear to look at Professor Mallard as I rattled off my list, so I let my eyes scan her desk in a spontaneous game of “Spot the difference!” The abacus beads had been spread out, and the picture frame with her husband was facedown today.

  “Have you read my research, Scott?”

  “I practically devoured it last week,” I blurted. “I’m a bit obsessed with your work.”

  Professor Mallard leaned back in her chair. She took a moment to tie her hair into a tight but ultimately messy bun. Slowly she faked a smile.

  “Then you should be the first to know that a person doesn’t get gritty overnight,” she said. “I admire you for making the journey to Washington, and I’m glad you’ve taken comfort in my findings around grit. But I’m a psychology professor, not a psychologist. I can’t help you.”

  “You can,” I begged. “I’m passionate about grit. I’m desperately passionate. Doesn’t that mean something?”

  Professor Mallard gave me a thumbs-up. “That’s wonderful. Call me in a decade when you have your PhD.”

  “But I failed the Grit Quiz. What if that doesn’t work out—”

  “Scott, have you heard of a growth mindset?”

  “You’ve talked about it in a few of your interviews, yeah. It’s the idea that failure isn’t a permanent state.”

  “Precisely. Why would you get hung up over that silly Grit Quiz? Or anything else you might have failed at? Everybody fails. We deal with failure and disappointment and other feelings that are far more damaging. That’s how you grow. Don’t go thinking my research will make you grittier. All I’ve done is prove a few hypotheses: There is no correlation between natural ability and grit. There’s a strong correlation between grit and success.” Professor Mallard set the picture frame upright, then immediately picked it up absentmindedly. “What you need is thicker skin, Scott. Get over your failures and . . . I don’t know. Go live your life.”

  I looked down at Professor Mallard’s fingers, which were clutched tightly around the frame in her lap. Something was off. I decided it would be best for me to leave.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said. Before stepping out I added, “I’m sorry if I bothered you. I hope everything is all right.”

  Back at the hostel, I found the door to my room slightly ajar. I opened it slowly and heard the sound of turning pages from the top bunk—not mine, but the other one. I could make out a female of the blonde species lying in the bed, probably one of my French roommates, her face buried in a book.

  “Bonjour?” I said with hesitation.

  “Ah, Saaket! You never mentioned you spoke French. T’as bien dormi?”

  Fiora.

  “Uh, no, my French is pretty crappy . . . ?” My words slurred and trailed off and generally conveyed a What the fuck are you doing here? kind of tone. But the more perplexing question, which I actually asked, was, “How the fuck did you get in here?”

  “Eh, it was a breeze,” Fiora said. “I complimented the front-desk guy on his Ron Paul shirt and chatted him up about some laissez-faire shit. Then I told him I was your sister, and he gave me your room number. Your roommates let me in, the French ones. Real friendly folks. Totally not snobby at all . . . But I convinced them I was your half sister, since they actually know you look ethnic-ish, and they let me chill here. Those guys are checked out now, so it’s just you and me. I came over to wake up your hungover ass and give you a wet willy or something but—”

  “Hey. Hey. Fiora?” I climbed up to my own bunk and sat crisscross. “This is creepy.”

  “Chill out, dude. I just wanted to make sure you were still alive after your first night getting plastered.”

  “You know, Fiora, I’m starting to think you might be the one with the crush on me.”

  “All right, Saaket. You got me.” Fiora jumped down from the other bunk and ran up to mine, craning her neck over the rail guard. “I have a massive crush on you, the sun is actually a huge-ass dandelion, and you, my love—you really kept it together last night.”

  Crap. My memory of Tom’s Foolery wasn’t exactly perfect. “How bad was I . . . ?”

  “Let’s just say I had to help you hopscotch your way out,” she said.

  “Uggghhhh.” I fell over sideways
like someone had yelled timber, my legs still crisscrossed and arms covering my mortified face.

  Out of nowhere, I laughed. “You know, Fiora, people aren’t like this.”

  “Like what?”

  I sat up, clutching a pillow between my arms.

  “Like . . . you. Real people don’t give free bikes to strangers and get them drunk and surprise them in their hostel room,” I said. “You’re a caricature of a real person.”

  “Do not mansplain me,” Fiora snapped. “So what? I’m a bunch of different caricatures. You’re a bunch of caricatures. This is the one I am right now. You didn’t see me in Spain over winter break. You didn’t see me last summer when I wrote puzzles obsessively. Every day—sometimes multiple puzzles a day! I didn’t stop until the Times finally accepted one.”

  “I didn’t mean it like—”

  “I know you didn’t,” she said, her eyes weary. “No one does. I’ve got my shit, and you’ve got yours. We’ve got our own grids, remember? And just because I don’t fit into this perfectly themed grid you have in mind for me . . . it doesn’t mean I’m not real.”

  “Well, for a girl who’s only taking one class this summer—” I said. Fiora’s eyes turned fiercely hostile. “You definitely just schooled me.”

  Her expression lit up, and we both giggled.

  “So how’d you spend your first ever hangover day?” Fiora asked.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “Professor Mallard. I saw her today,” I said. “That’s why I ran off at the end of last night.”

  “No way,” Fiora said, her eyes wide in disbelief. “There’s no way you weren’t painfully hungover this morning.”

  I shrugged, and Fiora gave me a different look. The best way I could describe it was with an equation:

  Look = (Okay WOW + Okay + Okay fine) = Okay x (WOW + 1 + Fine) ≈ Unexpected Surprise with Eventual Acceptance

  “And you thought I wasn’t real,” she said. “So, how’d it go?”

  “Not good. She doesn’t want to help me. I think Professor Mallard has some personal shit going on, because she went off on a rant and told me to ‘live my life.’ I don’t want to be an asshole and keep bugging her.”

  Fiora smiled. “Why do you even care about grit, anyway?”

  I cracked my knuckles and let my eyes wander to the corner of the room, right above where Fiora had been sitting a few minutes ago. A wire stuck out at the edge where both walls met the ceiling.

  “I don’t know,” I said, staring at that wire, “I just do. Everyone cares about random stuff. Like, why do you care about crossword puzzles?”

  “Easy. I’m desperate.”

  “Well, that’s not the best way to promote yourself . . .”

  “Not what I mean,” Fiora said, rolling her eyes before focusing intensely on the floor between her two feet. “My grandmother used to live in Virginia Beach. We’d drive up from Charleston and visit her when I was really, really little—just me and my dad. Grams lived right off the beach, which was funny because I was terrified of sand. Like, absolutely scared shirtless—I mean, shitless. Ha. Words. Speaking of . . .”

  Without realizing it, I zoned out and followed the torn wire around the edges of the ceiling. I wondered what would happen if I touched it. How much charge would be emitted through my body? I wondered if the sloppy coat of white paint on the outside of the wire would protect me, or if I’d blow into a million smithereens, my ashes—I stopped myself. I was being rude to Fiora. I tuned her back in.

  “. . . every morning. It was insane. They were insane. They started each day with a pen and a copy of the New York Times, and five minutes later they had a grid full of answers. I always perched my head over the edge of the breakfast table to sneak a peek, so freaking fascinated by their teamwork—counting boxes together, passing the pen back and forth. Eventually they let me join when I was six or seven, but I wasn’t so good. Not as good as them.”

  “Are you better now?” I asked.

  “Not really. I’m still only a decent solver,” Fiora said. “But I’m really fucking good at constructing them.”

  “That’s so cool,” I said. “I never realized that people actually, you know . . .”

  “What? That there were people who took the time to come up with grids and clues for something as trivial as a crossword puzzle?”

  “I guess you could say I’m a bit . . . puzzled,” I said, smiling.

  Fiora got up and bolted for the door.

  “I’m sorry! Sorry!” I giggled. “Bad pun.”

  “Don’t pretend you wouldn’t love it if I walked out right now.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, shaking my head the way you do in an unreal situation. “Anyway, how does all of this make you desperate?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Her voice crumbled to something more vulnerable. “I’m desperate for answers. Desperate for a connection to my dead grandma. To my dad who fucking sucks now. For complexity with some clarity at the end. For clues.” Fiora went silent. I couldn’t even see her anymore. I realized she was sitting directly beneath me, on the bottom bunk, when I heard the mattress springs creaking with every breath she took.

  “A lot of things changed after my grandma passed away,” she said, almost whispering. “My dad got depressed. My mom’s drug problems got worse. Turns out all those trips to Virginia Beach were to distract me whenever Mom was ‘visiting her sister.’ After Grams died, well . . . You know how these stories go. My therapist keeps trying to connect the dots, but I don’t really care. All I know is for some reason or another, I’m desperate to keep doing puzzles—solve them, build them—until the day I die.”

  I lay on my back and gazed at the ceiling, daydreaming about my parents, who were less complicated but who would love it if I felt so desperately about anything.

  “Maybe that’s what it takes, Saaket,” Fiora said. “Some massive, life-shifting event to force you into your passion.”

  “Boy, do I hope this is the one.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  “Then I’m screwed. My parents will keep pushing me to study medicine or engineering or another ‘safe-enough’ field I have no real interest in.”

  Fiora began to say something, but she stopped herself at “I.”

  Smithereens. If I touched the wire, I’d blow into a million smithereens. My ashes would scatter along the walls and the ceiling and the floor—the downs and acrosses of this room I existed in.

  “ONE MORE NIGHT, please.”

  After Fiora left, I went downstairs to pay for another night at the hostel. The lobby was eerily quiet, and the floor creaked as I approached the front desk. Behind it sat the same guy who had checked me in on Monday. He was wearing a fisherman’s hat, and his messy brown curls slipped out from underneath.

  “Just one?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  Fiora had convinced me stay in DC a little longer. We agreed to meet later that night at Tonic, a restaurant on GW’s campus where Trent worked as a bartender. She promised we would concoct the perfect plan to get Professor Mallard to talk to me and help me get grittier.

  Personally, I wasn’t convinced that Fiora and I would come up with anything game-changing, but what else was I going to do? I couldn’t give up in front of her or I’d look like a loser. Besides, I had already quit my internship back home, and without any specific direction from Professor Mallard, I’d have nothing to do around an empty house.

  “What’s your name again?” the front-desk guy asked.

  “Scott Ferdowsi.”

  His laptop was turned slightly toward me, and I could see him open an Excel file. There were four entries on the entire spreadsheet. Makes sense, I thought. Other than my French roommates, I’d never encountered another soul in that hostel.

  “That’ll be thirty-five bucks,” he said. />
  I pulled out my wallet, handing him my second-to-last hundred. He reached under the desk for a tin box and snapped it open.

  “My name’s Scott, too,” he mumbled, counting my change.

  “Cool,” I said. He thumbed through the bills with intense precision. I stood there tapping my heel. What was one Scott supposed to say to another? “Nice shirt,” I said, because apparently that worked for Fiora. His tight gray V-neck had a massive cartoon of Ron Paul’s face with the quote There is only one kind of freedom and that’s individual liberty.

  Scott perked up. “You a fan of Ron?”

  He handed me sixty-five dollars, and I lingered for a moment.

  “I’m a fan of individual liberty.”

  Tonic looked like every college bar you see in movies, with a long row of wooden bar stools and flat-screen TVs playing ESPN and a female bouncer at the door who politely asked for my ID. Yes, my under-21, 20, 19, 18 . . . ID. I froze. Not only because I was embarrassingly underage, but because she was hot. She had wavy strawberry-blonde hair, with locks draped over her freckled boobs—which were super visible through the low-cut tank top she was wearing. Did I mention that I froze? Fortunately, seconds later, Trent appeared out of nowhere and latched onto my shoulders from behind.

  “Scott-ayyyyy!”

  He smelled like a combination of Abercrombie and pot.

  “Hey, Charlotte, this guy is with me,” Trent told the hot bouncer. We stumbled to the bar, Trent’s arms wrapped around my chest and his chin resting on my shoulder from behind like we were old pals. “I always show up exactly when you need me, man.”

  Trent gestured at an empty bar stool right before sliding under the bar top. I took a seat between a gaggle of girls and a middle-aged man drinking by himself.

  “Nice shirt,” Trent said from across the bar. I looked down. I was wearing the same Model UN shirt that I had sweated through the other day. I should have felt more embarrassed, but I saw this coming. I’d only packed two outfits with me to DC, and I wasn’t going to risk spilling on my polo and corduroys if there was a chance I might see Professor Mallard tomorrow. I had already hand-washed them once after my bike accident.