by Lara Avery
I took a little from my glass of water and poured it on her head. Davy gasped.
“No sauce, please!” Davy said, giggling, wiping the drips from her eyes.
“Can I have a fork from your collection?” I asked.
She took one from the floor. I wiped it on my jeans. Clean enough.
Bette’s voice rose from under the table. “Who’s Stuart?”
I ducked down. She was cross-legged, holding my phone, as casual as could be.
“Give me that.” I reached out.
Bette giggled, shaking the phone. “Stuart says…” she started, staring at the screen. “How about you come to the Canoe…”
“Who’s Stuart?” Mom asked.
“Give me it!” I yelled.
“You don’t have to raise your voice,” Mom said.
“Fine…” Bette said, and tossed the phone on the ground.
I shoved the phone in my pocket. We ate in silence for a while. I thought they had forgotten until Harrison yelled from the other room.
“Who’s Stuart?”
Stuart: How about you come to the Canoe Club while I work tomorrow night? It’s a Tuesday so it’ll be slow. You could sit at the bar and do your hw. Keep me company.
Me: Yeah!
Later, I ask Mom and Dad while they’re reading in the living room, Mom’s feet propped on Dad’s lap.
“Can I go to the Canoe Club tomorrow night?”
Mom turns her head to look at me. “Will there be a trained first responder in the building?”
I consider this. Technically, most people who work at restaurants are, like, legally required to be first responders.
“Yes,” I said.
“Who?”
I’m terrible at lying. God, I’m awful. Whenever I try to lie, my tongue dries up. I’m like a messed-up version of Pinocchio. I hope you get over this, Future Sam. I am not unaware that lying is part of the legal profession. I just always hoped that it never had to come to that.
“Whoever the manager of the Canoe Club is,” I say.
“Who is that?” Dad counters.
“I don’t know, but whoever it is, that person is legally required to be a first responder.” Then I add, “I think,” very quietly, because my tongue was starting to get dry again.
“I don’t think so,” Dad says, looking back at his Stan Grumman novel.
“What, you think I’m going to have a seizure in the middle of the Canoe Club? Come on.”
“Yes,” Dad says without glancing up from his book. “That’s the risk.”
Not my best, I’ll admit it. I regain composure.
“Sammie…” Mom sighs. “Don’t you want to concentrate on school?”
“Yes, but I also don’t want to be a robot who has one week of high school left and will graduate having never gone on one date.”
This time, both parents turn their heads. Mom is smiling. Dad is not.
Everything else out of my mouth sounds like I’m trying to sell a curling iron on late-night TV. “I’m just doing homework while my friend works! He said it’s slow on a Tuesday! I was going to walk over there after school! You can pick me up right after!”
“Okay,” Mom says, and starts nudging Dad with her elbow.
“Really?”
“Yeah!”
“Gia…” Dad says to my mom quietly.
I clear my throat. Of course, I had saved a little tidbit as the clincher. “In the event of an emergency, the medical center is closer to the Canoe Club than it is to this house.”
“True!” Mom says, elbowing Dad again.
“Ow!” Dad looks at me. “Fine.”
COME ON
On the drive to school today I passed three fishermen walking next to 89 through the scrub in their Carhartt overalls, carrying their red bait coolers, waders slung over their shoulders. They were on their way to the Connecticut, probably, and when I crossed over the bridge outside of Hanover, I had an urge to pull over and take off my shoes. I didn’t, because I had to finish some calc, but I realized I hadn’t waded in the creek by our house since the summer when I was eight or nine.
Anyway, I was sort of floaty through the halls at school, wondering about life and Stuart and how fishing actually works when I noticed Maddie sitting on the floor next to her locker with a few people and the same sort of easy feeling came over me, so I walked up to her and said hello, as if I had done it every day, or as if we hadn’t fought the last time we saw each other.
They were in the middle of laughing, and Maddie nodded, smiling.
“Hey,” she said back, friendly enough.
Super casual. Re-l-a-a-a-x.
“Guess wha-a-a-at?” I said, holding my hands out.
“What?” she asked, glancing at the people around her.
“Stuart and I are going on a date!”
“Cool,” she said in a monotone, and smiled with her lips closed.
I don’t know what I expected, I guess some form of recognition, maybe something that sounded like it included an exclamation mark, considering she was there and mostly responsible for the first time Stuart and I actually spoke.
“Yeah…” I said. “It is!”
Maddie pulled out her phone, which, as we know, means this conversation is over. But I wasn’t ready for it to be over. Things were finally looking up for me. I wanted her to be there to see that. I wanted to share it with her.
I bent nearer. “So, like, can we talk?”
Maddie was still scrolling through pictures.
“I feel like your mom was right,” I started. My mouth was feeling Zavesca dry. “That we needed some space, and I just wanted to apologize.”
No response. Her thumb moved faster. Maybe I wasn’t getting my point across.
“I’m trying to say I’m sorry for not telling you about…” I looked at her friends, who were also scrolling. “You know.”
“Damn, girl,” Maddie said suddenly, putting her arms to her knees. “Can you not read social cues?”
I stood straight. I remember making a noise that I hated, like a child who is told they can’t have dessert. “I can…” I started, then stopped, and kind of just stood there, staring.
Maddie stood and pulled me aside a few feet away. I could tell that she was still mad at me, but it was just a relief she was even responding.
“I’ll say it for you directly into your face. You hurt me by not telling me.”
I tried on a smile. “And I’m sorry! We’re on the same page! That’s what I’m trying to say!”
“Sammie, I’m not done.”
“Okay,” I said. She could keep going forever, as long as we were friends again. I breathed a sigh of relief (prematurely, as it turned out).
“I don’t know how to handle you being sick.”
I sucked the air back in, letting it sink through me with her words. But they didn’t land anywhere that made sense. “What do you mean?”
Maddie put her hands into a prayer position. Her nails were painted deep purple. “Suddenly we’re friends, right when you get sick? You never wanted to hang out with me before, outside of debate. But now it’s like, you need someone to bring all your woes and sadness and realizations about life to, and I’m the most convenient instafriend.”
“That’s not—”
“I’m just saying… I made a huge effort to be real friends, and you can’t even tell me the truth of what’s going on in your life? No, you’re too obsessed with your own stuff, too busy with the Sammie show.”
I threw up my hands. “The Sammie show?” Me? The person who could barely peel herself off the wall at a party? The person who talked to a computer instead of people? What the hell was she talking about?
“I mean, you aren’t always like that, Sammie,” Maddie said, closing her eyes briefly. She opened them again. “I was exaggerating. But I avoided you because I was afraid you would use me as, like, emotional support, whenever it was convenient for you, without giving any back. And of course I could never question you, because you�
��re sick and you should have what you want…”
“I would never do that,” I said quietly.
“People do it without realizing it,” she replied. “It’s not their fault.”
I just looked at her, waiting. Now I was afraid to talk, for fear I was dumping something on her.
Maddie put her hands on the side of her face and sighed, looking at me. “Does what I’m saying make sense? I don’t know. Maybe I’m putting too much of my own shit into this.”
I swallowed and said the smallest thing I could think of. “I’m really confused.”
“Me too,” she said, and the bell rang for first period.
JUST A TUESDAY, LIKE ANY OTHER TUESDAY
I AM FREAKING OUT. Stuart texted again, telling me he gets off work at six p.m., so I would be heading there after school toward the end of his shift and hanging out with him for three hours at the very least. AT THE VERY LEAST.
Okay, I text him.
“What time will you be coming in?” he asks.
If I respond within five minutes, is that too eager?
What if I’m trying to do to Stuart what Maddie said I was doing to her?
But I wasn’t doing that to her. I swear to you and all the saints, Future Sam, that I was never trying to use Maddie.
I can’t tell Stuart about NPC. Who knows how he’ll react. If he freaks like Maddie, then I’d be down to no one.
Is ten minutes too long, like I’m not interested, more of a friend thing?
I go with eight minutes, because he had taken the initiative to text me first, but I realize I pretty much forced him into saying it was a date the last time we hung out. So, right in between. Statistically sound.
Oh my god, I only have one nice outfit, which I already used. My glasses are smudged. I’m wearing clogs, cutoffs, and a huge sweatshirt that says DAN & WHIT’S SURPLUS because Puppy threw up all over the clean laundry this morning and my only other option was a shirt my dad bought me as a joke that says GOT CHOCOLATE MILK?, which, of course, has a chocolate milk stain by the collar because, yes, I do “got chocolate milk,” thank you very much.
This is an outfit that says, “I am just a normal, ambitious, laid-back young woman who does not have a debilitating disease.” Right?
It is not traditionally feminine, but if Elizabeth Warren worried about what she wore, she wouldn’t have time to condemn corrupt banking practices. Oh god, he said, “See you in a bit.” Okay, I will see him in a bit. I will see him in a bit for the second date of my entire life and perhaps the last because watch me forget my own name. Watch me enter the Canoe Club and everyone I know is there, like an intervention. And the entire NPC Clubhouse (as I have taken to calling them after receiving two newsletters) is there with their wheelchairs and tropical shirts to say, Surprise! We paid your crush to pretend to like you so that you wouldn’t feel more socially alienated than you already are! But you’re one of us now! You’re a shooting star!
Maybe I should be nicer to people.
Maybe I should have worn the chocolate milk shirt.
Oh god. Screw him. I mean, it. Sorry. I meant “screw it.” Freudian slip.
HUMANS HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR CENTURIES: A LESSON IN ANATOMY
The Canoe Club used to be a place I had only walked past, that my parents had only gone to on anniversaries, that Dartmouth students take their grandparents to when they’re in town. But now it feels like mine forever.
The sidewalk in front of it is mine forever.
The turn we took to Stuart’s house is mine.
His driveway is mine.
I’ll start from the beginning.
When I walked in, Stuart was wiping down the lacquered wooden bar with a white rag in front of rows and rows of bottles that stood in the interior of a giant, hollow canoe hung on the wall. He was wearing a black button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. When he noticed me, he came around the bar and gave me a hug. I remember how long he held me, and the way my fingertips felt on the muscles near his spine. I had never been this close to another human, in that way, at least. Never contemplated someone else’s bones.
I set my backpack on the leather seat next to me, one seat over from a middle-aged woman who was reading a book, drinking a pint of dark beer under the green-shaded hanging lights, the only other customer at the bar.
“How was your day?” Stuart asked.
“Fine,” I said, trying not to let my teeth chatter with nerves, or maybe it was just cold—why did every place have to keep the AC set to freezing? I watched his hands, twisting a glass under a streaming tap of water, and shaking it dry, adding it to a stack. “How was yours?”
“Just doing this,” he said, glancing at me, shaking dry another glass. “And trying to write.”
“Are you on a deadline?” I asked, catching his eyes again as he began to slice up one of a long row of limes and toss the wedges into plastic bins.
“Always,” he said, giving me a little smile, which filled me with relief for some reason. “What are you working on? Finals?”
“Almost,” I said. “Preparing.”
“Must be hard when the weather’s this nice,” he said.
“It doesn’t make much difference to me,” I said, pretending to play with my coaster.
“No more parties?”
“Ha! No. Ross’s was my first and last.” Remember, I told myself. You don’t have to be a robot. “Probably.”
Stuart finished, wiping his hands on his apron. “What about graduation? I went so crazy the night before mine, I almost overslept. I had to run to the stadium with nothing on under my robe but my boxers because I didn’t have time to get dressed!”
“Well.” I swallowed. “That’s definitely not an option—I have to wear more than underwear under my robe—”
We both blushed. Stuart looked at my sweatshirt.
“—because I’m giving a speech,” I finished.
“That’s right,” he said, shaking his head slowly.
“What?” I asked, looking at him.
“Nothing,” he said, and kept his black eyes on mine. “That’s so cool.”
Those words coming out of his mouth, out of his body under his clothes, he might as well have written them on my skin again.
The middle-aged woman cleared her throat. “Could I bother you for another, Stu?”
“Oh! Yes. Of course.” As he refilled the woman’s glass, Stuart said, “What a day for you to come in, Sammie, because this is also—well, this is Mariana Oliva.”
“Hello,” I said, and we shook hands across the seats. The woman had gray streaks in her long brown hair, and laugh lines on her copper-colored skin.
Stuart gestured toward her as she took a sip. “She’s one of my idols.”
“Oh, do you teach at Dartmouth?”
“No, I live in Mexico City,” Mariana said. “I’m just here to do a little reading later this week.”
Stuart kept looking back and forth between me and the writer. “Her book Under the Bridge is probably one of my favorites of all time.”
“Thank you,” Mariana said, lifting her glass to Stuart. “You’re kind.”
Stuart and Mariana got deep into a conversation about first-person narration versus third person, and I felt like what I guess sports fans must feel like when they watch their favorite team play, but the sport they played would change every few minutes, and the ball would change, and the arena.
Mariana and Stuart had something to say about everything under the sun.
On Shakespeare: “He was not one man. A group of sexually confused friends, trying to one up one another.”
On small dogs: “Little rats. Little neurotic rats.”
On the moon landing: “I believe it happened. Then again, I also believe in astrology, so take that with a grain of salt.”
On novels as a dying art: “Novels reflect a country’s consciousness. If we say they are dying, then we admit failure. It depends on if you’re ready to do that.”
“I’m not,” Stuart
said.
“Me neither,” she said, and they shook hands.
They included me, and I spoke up when I could, but mostly I listened. “What do you think, Sammie?” Stuart would ask.
And eventually I just had to tell them that most of the time, I didn’t know. “I’m sort of a sponge,” I said, and could feel my mouth get dry. “I have a few strong opinions, but they might change. I just want to find out everything I can.”
Mariana reached over and took my hand. “That’s wise,” she said, and squeezed. “Very wise for a girl your age.”
I could sense Stuart smiling at me, and we looked at each other, his eyes running up and down my face.
Mariana continued, sipping her beer. “I would love to be your age again. I would have spent so much less time chasing men, so much more time absorbing.”
Stuart coughed a little, and I could feel my cheeks getting hot.
“Oh!” Mariana laughed, looking between us. “I’m sorry. No, love is a beautiful thing. Don’t ever avoid it. And I regret nothing. But my work is my love now.” She turned to me. “What do you want to study?”
“Economics and public policy. Then law school,” I said, and sat up straighter.
“Good. But don’t put yourself in a box. Study everything.”
“Like what?” I said, and I almost wanted to bring out my notepad, to write everything down.
Soon the three of us got into talking about politics, and then living wage conditions, which as you know I have a fair amount to say about, and when the three of us looked up, Stuart’s manager had his hand on Stuart’s back, telling him his shift was over.
Stuart counted his drawer and cleaned up the bar.
Mariana said good-bye to me with a kiss on both cheeks and told Stuart she’d see him at the reading.
Finally, he came out of the bathroom in just a T-shirt, his button-down shirt slung over his shoulder, wearing his sunglasses.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. My hands were twitchy and my stride was strong and my thoughts were chatty as we walked out into the setting sun, and that is how I hope I will remember Stuart forever, as he was last night, his skin almost orange in the sunset, the rays again reflected in his lenses.