by Alexis Bass
He crosses his arms. His impatience is growing even though it’s been approximately two seconds. This guy truly can’t be bothered.
“You have to remember the reason you’re there, the reason you need him. You’ll be convincing because you have to be,” Rosie told me before I left for Rutherford.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Now?”
I nod. I feel the tears rising again. They are summoned at simply the thought of all the work ahead of me, how I might not be able to do it. And also, I think they’re from shame for having to ask what I’m about to ask; fear that he’ll say no; that it will ruin his image of me even further.
“You’re crying?” He sounds confused but also a little concerned.
The raindrops come down harder, and I’m grateful they can mask some of my tears. He holds his backpack over his head to block the water, and I do the same.
“What is it?” he says, annoyance slipping back into his tone.
“Will you give me another overview?”
“What?”
The rain pounds down on us. The sound of the water splashing off the stones and brick grows louder. Other students rush past. We’re the only two standing in place.
“Please,” I say, raising my voice to be heard above the noise. “I’m behind. I’m so close to being on academic probation. You were right, okay? I’m having trouble keeping up. But I don’t want to leave.” I think of Mimi finally out of the country with Rosie and of how my friends back home have fallen into a new normal that doesn’t include me, and I wonder what kind of home I have to return to anyway. A place that’s already moved on without me. Mimi would have to come back. Rosie would say, “What happened? Why couldn’t you do it?”
“I need you,” I blurt out. And it’s true. He won’t like it. It’s the wrong thing to say to him. But it’s all I have to make him listen to me. “You’re smart and you’ve got the hang of this place and you understand calculus. Please. Just a few times a week. Just until I’m not so behind. I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t desperate, you know I wouldn’t.”
I’m surprised when he nods as if he does know or he at least gets it.
“Meet me in the library twenty-five minutes into dinner.”
“Thank you—”
He walks away before I can finish, without even confirming that the time he’s proposed works for me.
That night, promptly twenty-five minutes into dinner, after I’ve inhaled my burrito while listening to Theo, Ariel, and Anastasia discuss whether or not Anastasia should cut bangs and then have a lively debate about the problem of the criterion, a fundamental problem of epistemology, I leave for the library to meet Jasper.
He’s as no-nonsense as he was when we first met here, in the very room he reserved for us on that day.
“I’ll explain the principles to you, and then we can work here until it’s time to go back to the dorms. I’ve got my own stuff to do, but you can ask me questions as they come up.”
“If they come up,” I correct him before I can think better of it. He shrugs. He rotates the book my way and starts in on the first section I missed.
Questions do come up as I work on my own. A lot of them. So many that after a while I decide not to ask them anymore because I don’t want to disturb him. He’s a deep studier. More serious than I’ve ever seen him, which is saying something. As he types on his laptop, his eyes get this laser-focused gaze. Sometimes I’m not sure he’s blinking regularly.
When we leave, we walk together. I think this must mean he feels sorry for me, more than it means he is interested in my company. Or maybe, because even though the school is well lit, it is still dark outside, and he simply thinks escorting me is the right thing to do.
“That was helpful for you?” he asks as we move down the stairs toward the main hall and the exit.
“Are you kidding?”
But he doesn’t look like he is kidding. I have to remember who I’m talking to.
“It was very helpful,” I say. “Immensely helpful. Incredibly helpful.” Overdoing it a little, maybe.
“Meet again tomorrow?”
I nod. “Thank you.”
The clouds have parted, and the sky is clear. I stop to look up at the stars. I can’t remember the last time I saw them. From our house on the outskirts of Madison, I would watch them twinkling back at me all the time, maybe every night. Jasper keeps walking. I have to jog to catch up.
“So what do you do for fun?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. Fun. How do you have fun here?”
“I don’t know. The usual ways. The social nights. The game. Soccer practice. And I like the work, so, I guess, helping you.”
“But that’s not fun.” Is it?
He shrugs. We’ve reached the part in the path where I go right to walk down the hill to the girls’ dormitory and he must go the other way. Rutherford dorms are built toward the bottom of a steep hill; the paved trails are really the only way to reach them and, purposefully, I believe, these pathways only converge on campus.
“Hey, Jasper.” He turns around and waits for me to continue. “I used to go on long drives for fun. Down country roads. Fields all around. Passing silos and cows.”
He watches me for a moment. This was probably the wrong thing to say again. But I want him to know things about me, small facts at least. Even if he forgets them as quickly as he hears them.
“There weren’t a lot of cows where I live, but apart from the smell, that sounds nice enough.” He waves once and goes on his way.
When I get back to my room, Elena is already in bed. She left the lights on at my desk. I still have to finish the reading for English, so I slide into my chair. The Age of Innocence is sitting on top of my laptop, not where I’d left it on the shelf. I pick it up. It’s been tabbed with Post-its. I crack it open and see it’s been highlighted. There’s a note. It’s in Elena’s neat handwriting.
No use reading this whole thing when this is all you really need to read to draw themes for the assignment. The highlights. Get it?
It’s the nicest thing anyone has done for me since I moved here. And I didn’t even have to ask her. Maybe catching up academically won’t be as bad as I think. Maybe this is a challenge they’ve all been through, and this is Elena, throwing me a life raft. I’m not going to waste it.
Five Months Later
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” he says.
It’s easy to say it doesn’t matter now when he doesn’t know what I’m about to do. I start to talk, but my voice hitches.
“I want to say something to you,” he says. But I shake my head—can’t tell him not to say it, because deep down, I want him to say it. I do, and I don’t. If it’s I love you, this is the worst possible time. If it’s I love you, how will I respond?
“Please,” he says like he’s begging me. I go still in his arms, except for the trembling that I can’t help. “I want you to know,” he whispers, pulling me to him. “There was nothing before you.”
I kiss him one more time. And when it’s over, I take a deep breath, I brush away the last of my tears.
NOVEMBER
Twenty
I get this stomach-dropping doubt that creeps in at the same time nearly every day. Right when I’m walking up the steps to meet Jasper in the library.
“You are so smart; you can do this,” Rosie had said. She never told me that I was beautiful, but I know she thought I was because I looked like her and Mimi, and a lot like my dad, and I know she thought they were both beautiful. It was obvious in the way she’d gaze at them, watch them when they weren’t looking. You didn’t observe someone so closely if you didn’t like the view.
“You are so smart, and making someone love you is a challenge you should be up for, especially while you’re young.” I watched her long fingers, freshly painted red nails, twisting around the stem of her wineglass, and the way her eyes were so steady and relaxed as she spoke; her voice so assured, h
er mouth always serious. She was the most glamorous person I’d ever known. I believed with my whole being that she had made many, many people fall in love with her.
This is what I think about as I climb those stairs to meet Jasper. What if I’m actually not smart enough to do this? I’m barely passing here at Rutherford. What if I’m not good enough?
“Let me see,” Jasper says as I sit down across from him in our usual study room. I’d managed to finish my calculus assignment during the break between school getting out and field hockey. I try to get the assignments done, skipping any that totally stump me, before meeting him so he can check them over. This is the first time I’ve ever completed the assignment without having to bypass some of the problems.
He checks it over, with a red pen and everything, while I pull out Fences and start my reading assignment for English.
The two of us have sort of a routine for these study sessions.
“Good,” he says when he’s done—something he never says.
“Good?” I snatch the notebook from him. He smiles. It’s covered in red marks, but most of them are the word OK, which is basically a gold star from Jasper. “I only messed up three of them?”
He nods. “Very impressive.” He doesn’t sound at all impressed, but I’ve learned that while his tone may not show it, he never says anything he doesn’t mean.
“This is a relief!” I say, holding the paper to my heart. It would usually take me an hour or more to complete the corrections. It might only take thirty minutes this time.
“Pretty soon you won’t even need me at all.”
“Wishful thinking.” I smile at him, and he smiles back. We’re friendly, but I don’t know how to push past it; don’t have the slightest clue how to twist it into something more, how to intrigue it out of him or do what Rosie says and be the reflection of all his good qualities that he can’t look away from. And again, I don’t have the time to think about this when I’ve only just gotten my head above water in the pool of Rutherford academics.
As we’re packing our things to leave, he says, “I can’t meet tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Don’t panic. “Why not?”
“I’m going to try to sleep—to nap.”
“Huh. That’s not what I was expecting you to say.”
“What were you expecting me to say?”
“That you had a hot date, maybe?” Why not try to bring it up?
He chuckles. We walk out of the library. Per usual, we’re the last ones leaving.
“I figure, I’ve got the time, I should nap.”
“I get it.” We descend the stairs. “If I had extra time, I would definitely nap.”
We move down the hall, past the B wing.
“I think the next section on Taylor polynomials is going to be a real problem for you.”
“I love how confident you are in me.”
“I mean, we should get ahead of it. I’ll make you a study sheet.”
“You’d do that for me?” I bat my eyes. It makes him smile a little, as he always does when I’m being silly, more for my benefit than his amusement.
We walk outside. The air is frigid, but at least it’s dry. I exhale to test if I can see my breath, and sure enough, there it is.
“I probably won’t be able to nap anyway,” he says. He yawns.
“I believe in you,” I say as we reach the landing where the path separates.
“Good night,” he calls as he goes his way and I go mine.
I don’t know if comfort is a good thing to have with a person you’re trying to make love you. I’ve never been in love before. Not the real kind. Only the achy kind that comes from longing for someone you can’t have. I don’t know about the actual feeling, if it does require comfort and ease. Or if it needs intensity and fire and butterflies. I don’t know how I will ever learn about this unless I fall in love myself.
Twenty-one
“Dinner tomorrow?” Sebastian says as I’m on my way to the library after spending a mere ten minutes eating with Ariel and Anastasia and Theo. Jasper was right about how hard I’d find this calculus section. I could barely complete the first problem on the assignment. “You’ve been like a Rutherford whirlwind for the last few weeks—hard to catch. But if you’re free—”
“Are you free, Sebastian? Just breezy and laid-back and available?” I’m thinking of the calculus assignment I don’t understand and the paper on modern fairy tales due in my contemporary writing for media class that I need to make some serious progress on.
“Come on, say, ‘Yes, Sebastian, I’d love to take some time off to have dinner with you,’” Sebastian says, walking quickly alongside me. “We can eat in the B wing, under the windows. They open it up when it gets too cold to eat in the courtyard, and the sun lights up the stained-glass—”
“Tell me the secret.” I stop abruptly in the middle of the staircase. Sebastian’s eyes widen. That earth-smashing smile of his follows.
“Secret?”
“Yes. How do you do it all here? How do you study and finish your assignments, and fill out college applications and play on the soccer team and run the international club, and have time to eat and sleep and even date? And you have friends. And you get to hang out with them. And spend dinner actually eating dinner. And you play the game. How? How is it possible?”
“Whoa, Collins Pruitt. I think you need a recharge.”
His answer is so ridiculous that I start laughing. Frankly, my mind doesn’t know what else to do. A recharge. If only! If only anything were that simple—if only such a thing were possible and all I needed was a reboot, a little time plugged in. Sebastian at least seems to understand that my hysterical giggling isn’t actually funny.
“Come with me,” he says, offering his hand.
“I can’t come with you. I have to redo my entire calculus assignment and then write a paper on the 1989 Russian landscape and finish reading Cold Mountain and complete an essay about modern fairy tales.” But all the while he’s taken ahold of the sleeve of my itchy gray Rutherford cardigan and is leading me through B wing and out the side doors.
We walk outside, and the air has a chill to it, a bite from the ocean breeze and for being so high up. But he leads me to the edge of the courtyard, past all the tables and statues, past the open grassy area, right to where the retaining wall drops off behind a short hedge. You can’t see the shore from here, but you can see the ocean, the roaring water in the distance. The lowering of the sun. The green block of the forest cast in a shadow. He gently takes my backpack off, pries the history book I was clutching out of my hands, and sets them down on a nearby bench.
“Just for a second,” he whispers. I stare at him, he’s full of sincerity.
I close my eyes to collect myself and take it all in. The pine smell. The cool, fresh air. The proximity of him with his arm lightly touching mine. I open my eyes and admire the view. It’s breathtaking.
“It reminds me that I like being here,” he says, gazing out, too.
I feel a flood of gratitude for him, thinking of me, seeing my hysterics and trying to make me feel better. And for this place. The way the forest has a foggy quality to it in the morning and how quiet the ocean is before noon. The intricate stained-glass windows lining the halls, the cathedral ceiling in the library. And the classrooms with that used-book smell and the teachers who came from all over the world. The smell of fresh-cut grass in the fields before practice. The view from my bed. The shared giggles in the morning as we all get ready together in that lavender-smelling bathroom with the heated floors. I think of how Elena tried to help me study by marking up my book, for no other reason than she’s my roommate. I think of how nice it is having Anastasia and Ariel and Theo, to be able to take them aside in the hall and talk about nothing. I think of my father the weekend he dropped me off, sipping red wine in the square, his face lit up by twinkle lights as he told me, “Don’t go easy on them, kid.”
“See?” Sebastian says. He grins like he knows he did a good thing.
I nod. I feel tears in my eyes and feel embarrassed. I cry so much here, way more than I cried before. I’m blaming the altitude, but it’s probably the sleep deprivation and the stress. He leans in toward me and squeezes my hand. He kisses my forehead so casually and quickly that I almost don’t realize it’s happening.
“It’ll be okay,” he says quietly. He lets go of my hand and leaves me there with the view. I take another full breath before I walk to the library.
Jasper is waiting in the private study room. He nods at me as I take my usual seat across from him. I try to be quiet as I get out my stuff so I don’t disturb him from whatever he is reading so intently.
“Where were you?” he asks, not looking up from his book.
“I was … I got held up.”
“For a second, I thought I had it wrong and we weren’t meeting today.” When I don’t say anything, he looks up from his book. There’s something in his expression. Expectancy. This is an opportunity.
“I could give you my number in case you ever think you mixed up the dates again. And you could give me yours.”
He blinks at me, then says, “Yeah, okay.”
We take out our phones, even though they are technically prohibited in the library, and trade numbers.
“Look at you breaking the rules,” I say as he hands back my phone.
He doesn’t look at me as he says, “Some rules are worth breaking.”
If not for the lack of eye contact, this would be downright charming.
We work until the library closes, as usual. On the walk back to the dorms, Jasper yawns. I think he probably gets as little sleep as I do, but he seems more depleted than usual.
“Are you all right?” I ask him.
“I’m not sleeping well,” he says.
“I crash every night. I don’t even remember closing my eyes or lying down all the way before I’m asleep.”
“No need to brag.”
“You could try having hot milk before bed.”
He makes a face. “You’re from the dairy capital of the country; of course this is your solution.”