The Distance from A to Z

by Natalie Blitt

  His smile falters.

  “Well, we each have two consonants and two vowels. And if Abby is short for Abigail, then even our full names have the same number of letters. Seven each.”

  I’d dispute whether y is really a vowel but I can’t remember the rule, and I have a bad feeling that not only will he know the rule, but it will be in his favor.

  I turn to our last names. Nope. Martin and Berman, same number.

  “Yup, six letters,” Zeke quips and winks. It’s the wink that drives me to desperation.

  “I’m Jewish,” I blurt out, as though I’m exposing a deep, dark secret, like I have seven toes on one foot.

  Based on the sly smile that extends across his face, I can’t believe that I thought I might have won. So before I can answer, I pull out the only thing I can say with certainty we don’t have in common. Though with my luck . . .

  “Well, you’re a boy and I’m a girl.”

  His eyebrows rise, and I know I’ve lost. Because that was ridiculous, even for me.

  I pull in a deep breath. By now he’s probably no longer interested, I can back off of the crazy-lady act. “I’m sorry. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

  “Was it the comment about the Cu—”

  “Don’t say it. If we can stay away from the team that shall not be mentioned, we should be able to make it through the summer.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” He smiles. “I’d hate to have made a mortal enemy on my first day.”

  I need to relax before I become known as the freak who despises the Cubs instead of the freak whose family adores the Cubs. I just want a summer without baseball. How hard can that be?

  “How about we try this again?” I say, holding out my hand this time. A winner has been declared in the room, with fifteen similarities between two random students. But I don’t care and neither does Zeke, it seems. I can be friendly with him because there are a hundred other students in this program. We don’t need to be best friends; we don’t even need to see each other on a regular basis. “I’m Abby Berman. I’m from Chicago, and I’ll be doing the intensive French language program here this summer.”

  Zeke’s mouth widens, like a lovely dance between a smile and a laugh. Does he think it’s funny that I’d elect to study French—

  “Zeke Martin, from San Diego.” His hand grasps mine and there’s something gentle in the way he holds it. “And I’ll be doing the intensive French language program here this summer.”

  I let out a chuckle. “No, this is when you’re supposed to tell me what you’re taking. I’m doing Intensive Intermediate French. It counts for both of my classes.”

  His grin doesn’t falter and suddenly the impossible seems like . . . No. What would someone who looks like him care about French?

  “Me too. So I guess we’ll be practicing our French together.” And then, in a move that couldn’t possibly be more clearly designed to make me want to hit him, he gives me an exaggerated wink.

  Merde.

  Kill me now.

  TWO

  WHEN I GET BACK TO my room, there’s a thin girl sitting in the far corner of the other bed, scrunched up into a tiny space. With only her bedside light on and the curtains drawn, it’s almost as though she’s sitting in a spotlight, her long hair slipping down her arms and chest, her bangs blending into her thick black glasses.

  She doesn’t look up when I enter; her hand is furiously writing in what appears to be a black Moleskine notebook. She’s using a fountain pen.

  I think I’m in love.

  “Sec,” she whispers, more to herself than me.

  I’ve found my spirit animal.

  I know this moment for her like it’s mine. I know the feeling of being so deeply invested in something that the idea of forcing yourself out feels like a tooth extraction. Like the tight grip of a book you don’t want to put down. So I don’t say a word. I slip onto my dark bed even though I’d only come in to grab some money to go find something to eat. I sit on my bed and wait.

  It takes almost four minutes until she’s done. Four minutes that allow me to quietly place my pile of French novels on the top shelf of the small bookcase, then add my verb books, and my oversized French-English dictionary. On top of the shelves I place the gilded wooden frame I brought with me. It holds a picture of my family, the only one I could find where nobody was wearing baseball paraphernalia.

  “Uh, sorry.” Her voice is quiet. She’s slipped off her bed and made her way to mine. She—Alice Tremberly, according to the email I received from the college when I got my rooming assignment—is now standing in front of my desk, smiling nervously. “I wasn’t ignoring you before. It’s just that when—”

  “I totally understand.” I don’t move forward, don’t close the distance between us. She has one hand on my desk, fingers resting gently on the worn wood, but she’s biting the edge of her lip.

  She’s nervous.

  “When I write,” she continues, “I need to get it all out or sometimes I lose it. I know it sounds stupid but when that happens, it’s worse than if I never thought of the line at all. Because suddenly there’s this empty space where something is supposed to go. Or sometimes, I try to put something else there but there’s the ghost of that perfect line and then no matter how good the new line is, it’s never as good as the perfect line I can’t remember. . . .”

  Her face is shaded since the only light in the room is behind her. But even in the darkness I can tell she’s blushing. “I’m sorry, I’m being a dork. I’m Alice. Your crazy roommate.”

  She flips her hair and squares her shoulders, like she’s steeling herself for my laughter.

  “I’m Abby.” I smile. “And I think we’re going to be great friends.”

  Maybe Zeke Martin will be in class with me for hours every day, but I can tell right now that whatever comes my way, the fact that I’m sharing a room with Alice Tremberly is going to make it all okay.

  By the time Alice and I make it downstairs to the lobby, we just catch the stragglers at the end of the line of students heading out into town to get a tour and find some pizza. It takes us four flights of stairs to discover that Alice is also from Chicago (Hyde Park to my Evanston, downtown Chicago separating us), doesn’t follow sports at all, chose Huntington because of its award-winning poetry seminar, lives with her dad and little sister, and has been writing three poems a day for the last seven years.

  Seven years.

  I have a million questions about that and the only thing that keeps me from asking them is a bellow from the hallway: “Last call for the best—and only—pizza in town!”

  “That’s Mike.” I smirk. “The loud RA. C’mon, I need some pizza, though coming from Chicago, I’m not quite sure what New Hampshire can offer is even in the same league.”

  But pizza is the furthest thing from my mind as I think about the poems Alice writes. Three poems a day, even when she’s sick. Even when she feels uninspired.

  I try to do a rough calculation in my head. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Times three, and that’s just over a thousand. Times seven . . .

  Merde.

  “Seven thousand, seven hundred and fifty-eight.” Alice shrugs. “I had my seven-year anniversary last month.”

  “Do you always know your number?”

  Alice nods. “It’s helpful. When people hear I write three a day, seven years, they start trying to do the math in their head. And the number is too big so . . . it’s just better when I can tell them.”

  “Do you go back and read any of your poems?”

  Her nose scrunches up, like she’s deciding which truth to tell. I know that feeling: the easy line (yup, fell in love with a French movie and wanted to know more, who knew it would become a passion?) and the harder truth, the one that exposes everything, the one you can’t untell.

  “Here’s my thing: I’m a nut about French,” I confess. “I love the language, the sound of the letters, the way they feel in my head. The fact that in Fren
ch you don’t say I miss you. You say tu me manques: literally, you are missing from me. Because when you miss someone, it’s more than just the active feeling of missing, it’s like they have actually taken a piece of you with them when they left, the piece of you that was theirs. But more than that, I love French because it’s all mine. And you don’t know me yet; you don’t know my crazy family who are fabulous in eighty-five million ways but who really and truly eat, sleep, and breathe baseball. But I don’t care about baseball, and I needed something to keep me company in all that loneliness.”

  I wait a full beat of silence, a full, long beat, and then I start to worry that as much as I feel like I’ve known Alice since we built blanket forts in preschool and spent all year reading our books in there, I’ve been known to be wrong before. And she might think I’m a freak for freely confessing all that stuff, especially since she didn’t—

  “I do read them over sometimes,” Alice says quietly. “They’re all in my notebooks and sometimes a poem comes out so perfectly, so right, that I rewrite it in a special notebook, one that I carry with me in addition to my current one. And some of them I never read again; they’re just there so I can continue to practice the craft, hone my skills, and—”

  “Heads up!” someone shouts behind us, and I grab Alice around her shoulders and duck down.

  I’ve probably attended as many baseball games from T-ball to the majors as Alice has written poems. So I have killer instincts when it comes to a heads up.

  “What the—”

  A football sails through the air and a guy in a Harvard: the Ithaca College of the South tank top jumps in front of us, catching it in midair.

  “Effing hell,” I snap, when he gives us a sheepish half smile.

  “You don’t need to thank me for saving you guys.” He laughs, tossing it back to someone in the front of the pack.

  “Come on, this time across the street!” the unseen guy yells. “Run!”

  “Awesome!” Tank Top Boy shouts, dodging cars to get to the other sidewalk. “I’m clear!”

  The football shoots back, this time crossing the intersection diagonally to land a few feet behind Tank Top Boy. Tank Top Boy narrowly misses getting hit by a car as he dives to catch the football. Laughing, he waves to the car that had to stop suddenly, as though to make amends. And then tosses the football back into the group.

  “I don’t get why someone would risk injury by hurling a football across an intersection.” Alice frowns.

  “I have to write a love letter to the person who put us in the same room,” I say, putting my arm back around her thin shoulders. “But first, are you a morning person?”

  “Not until I’ve had coffee.”

  “I may need to marry you.”

  I know there are many interesting people in the program, but I’m also entirely sure I’d be perfectly happy not to speak to any of them as long as Alice is around.

  As it turns out, I don’t need to talk to a soul until we get to the pizza place. Alice and I cover everything from favorite movies (foreign movies for me, romantic comedies for her, bad action movies for both of us) to favorite bands (songs where we can hear the words for both of us) to favorite desserts (ginger cake for Alice, gingersnaps for me). I try to convince Alice that the last point makes us the same person, but she maintains it’s as much as two people can have in common without being the same person.

  “If you loved ginger cake more than ginger cookies,” she says as we wait in line to get into the pizza parlor, “there’d be something suspicious.”

  I only wish she’d been the one sitting beside me instead of Zeke. We’d have won the grand prize.

  Except there’s something radically different about us when we actually get to the front door. Alice takes one look inside and everything that was easy about her demeanor hardens. She pulls herself inward, until I almost believe she might be able to make her shoulders touch each other in front of her.

  “I think I’ll wait out here,” she says, trying to fake a chuckle, but it’s dry and off. Very, very off.

  “I don’t mind eating standing up,” I say, glancing in the window. With what appears to be our entire dorm in the pizzeria, there are no free tables. In fact, I doubt there’s much free standing space right now, but I’m hopeful by the time the pizza comes—

  “I’m really not that hungry.” Alice isn’t looking at me. In fact, she seems to be staring off into the distance, like she’d pay money to be there instead of here.

  “But your stomach growled when we were in our room.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she insists, and I know she’s lying. But even though we both love ginger desserts and bad action movies and songs with deep lyrics, I can’t call her on it because I met her less than an hour ago. And I hate the fact that she looks so frightened that she’s practically shaking.

  “Really, neither am I,” I say, moving away from the door. “And plus, hello, we’re Chicago residents? It’s practically illegal for us to be in a non-deep-dish pizza environment.”

  Alice blinks rapidly and presses her lips together. She looks up at the sky and shakes her head. “It’s hard for me to go into places that are supercrowded,” she says, her voice quieting as a group of people walk out of the pizzeria and head back to campus. She glances at the empty sidewalk and her stomach growls again.

  “Can I get you some pizza from inside?” I offer. “We can eat it and walk back? And that way, if it’s really sucky, we can toss it and find something else.”

  The sides of Alice’s mouth curl up slightly but she looks more sad than anything else. “I should be able to go in,” she insists. “But so many people in such a small space . . .” Her lips press together again as though it’s hard to keep the words from tumbling out. “I don’t want to be like this.”

  There’s a sadness so thick around Alice that it almost hurts to watch. I know it’s only been a few hours but I can’t help but want to make her okay, help her get through this.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she says, her voice shifting from soft to sharp in a heartbeat. “Don’t look at me like I’m pathetic.”

  “You’re not,” I insist. “I know you’re not.” I try to think of how to put it, how to explain how I feel. “You’re trying. We all have things that are hard for us but most of us run away from them. But not you. So maybe it doesn’t happen today. That’s okay. We’ll keep working at it, together.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I want to.”

  She slips her arms around me. “How did I get so lucky to have you as a roommate?”

  “I don’t know, but I think we should make it this summer’s task to find that exceptional person who knew we’d be soul mates.” Her vanilla shampoo makes me think of chocolate chip cookies, which makes my stomach rumble even more. “But first can I grab some pizza for both of us? Because deep dish or not, I’m really hungry.”

  THREE

  LEDERER HALL IS AN ENORMOUS stone building on the easternmost point of campus, just across from a small, picturesque lake. With ivy climbing the rocks and an enormous grassy park in front, it screams old, pompous, British-inspired college. Which is to say that I love it on sight.

  I quickly snap a picture and text it to my mom. Even though she’s just as much a baseball fanatic as the rest of my family, she has a secret softness for old buildings. And last night on the phone she seemed a little sad that she hadn’t been able to take the time to bring me here.

  I didn’t say a word. I was shocked she even felt bad.

  Clutching the coffee I’d grabbed from the cafeteria, I make my way to the fifth floor and to the small classroom at the end of the hall. Room 512. With fifteen minutes until class is set to start, the room is still empty. I swing open the door, dazzled by the bright sunlight streaming, the view of the water beneath. I’m never going to want to leave this place.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  The voice is so startling that I jerk backward, narrowly averting the spray of coffe
e that comes from the sudden movement. It may have missed me, but my coffee, my beloved full cup of coffee, is now mostly all over the floor. “Merde!”

  “God, I’m so sorry! I thought you knew I was here.” There’s a scraping of a chair and then the owner of the voice comes into view. Slightly taller than me with stick-straight blond hair that reaches his chin and round John Lennon glasses, he grabs some napkins from his messenger bag and joins me by the door.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I mutter. I drop down to my knees and work on cleaning the mess before anyone gets here. I can just see it: the professor and each student walking into class and tumbling through the doorway on my spilled coffee, a veritable Slip ’N Slide on the fifth floor of Lederer Hall.

  I can’t help it. I giggle. At first it’s more like a snort and then it bubbles up in my chest until it’s full-on laughter. Emo Boy frowns at first and then lets out a small laugh. “Well, glad you aren’t mad at me.”

  I want to explain about the Slip ’N Slide but the words are having a hard time getting past the laughter and I’m not completely sure he’d think it was funny—based on the odd looks he’s currently giving me. It only takes a minute or so to clear up the remaining coffee, just about enough time for me to get my laughter under control.

  Almost. I still snort one more time as I grab the bunched-up soiled napkins.

  “Again, my apologies for startling you,” he says, his voice slightly colder now.

  I drag a big breath in and smile. “No problem. Sorry, it’s sometimes hard for me to stop laughing when I start. But thanks for helping clean up the mess. I’m Abby, by the way.”

  “Drew,” the boy says, reaching for my hand. At first I think he means to take the napkins, but then I realize he wants to shake my hand. “Enchanté, as I’m sure we’ll be encouraged to say in this class.”

  My hand now in his, I giggle, even though I’m still on my knees. Merde. I’ve got to stop.

  “Abby, you okay?”

  And that stops me. Zeke, in a St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt. Before I can remember that we’re not in Chicago, that there’s nothing wrong with a non-Cubs fan wearing a Cards shirt, I hiss. I actually freaking hiss.