“Can I call you when I’m driving back?” Zeke asks, and I want to say no. I want to stop myself from playing the familiar game of waiting up and having him maybe call or maybe not call. But then he says, “Please,” in a quiet voice, and I relent.
“Did you take the CDs or did you download the music?”
“Both. I’ll try to listen to them first and then maybe we can talk about the vocabulary together,” he says, and once again I hear the clattering of dishes and the sound of a restaurant in the background. I’m about to ask him where he is when he promises to call me in a couple of hours. Promises.
He doesn’t call until almost eleven. I’m already in bed, reading, convinced he was going to stand me up again.
“I’m so sorry,” he says as soon as I say hello, the dinging seat belt indicator in the background.
“Are you still in Boston?” I ask, trying to swallow the yawn that overtakes me.
“I left a little while ago. I just stopped to grab some coffee,” he says, his voice pretending to be upbeat when really he sounds completely exhausted.
“Are you okay to drive?”
There’s a pause, and I wonder if I lost the call, but then I hear the GPS voice, and I know he’s still there.
“Zeke?”
“I’m okay,” he says, but he’s not certain. And that scares me. “Are you in bed already?” he asks. “We can talk in the morning.”
“No, no,” I say. Alice is fast asleep, and I know that as long as I keep my voice down, she’ll sleep through everything. I point my desk lamp to the wall to mute the light and sit up. “I’m here.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m here,” I repeat. I don’t say: I’m afraid of you falling asleep driving. “Do you want to go through the songs?”
“Sure,” he says. “I listened to them a bit on the ride down but then I got a call—”
A call. Always a call. What’s with the calls?
But I don’t say anything; instead I pull out the papers on which I’ve created vocabulary lists for each song. “Let’s go.”
We talk for almost an hour as French music plays in the background. We discuss each of the songs on the list, from the ultra heavy metal to the slow folky songs my parents might have once listened to, if they were those kind of parents. Which they’re not.
We review the vocabulary words, Zeke testing me on the ones he can remember, me reviewing the rest over and over until he can almost predict which I’ll say next. And even though I’m in the safety of my warm bed with the sounds of Alice sleeping across the room, and Zeke is alone on a dark highway, the French words draw us together. They make me feel like it’s just us up in the middle of the night, a world of only us. I want to snuggle down into that world, let it lull me to sleep, but I’m responsible for making sure that Zeke doesn’t do the same, and the thought keeps me sitting upright, keeps my voice from getting wispy.
“You must be exhausted,” he says when we’ve gone one more time through all the words and neither of us even pauses. Épuisée, exhausted.
The clock reads midnight, and I wish I were the type to stay up until whenever, to get my second wind, but apparently I’m more the type to be able to sleep through anything, because I don’t even remember what we were talking about.
“It’s okay,” I mumble, stifling a yawn.
“Merde, tu va me faire bailler.”
You’re going to make me . . . yawn?
“How did you know—”
“Your voice changes when you yawn. And it makes me picture your mouth going long, like an oval, the way you scrunch your eyes together when you finish.”
He can see me in his mind. . . . He remembers—
I don’t know what to say. I want to be in the car next to him so I can see his eyes, so I can tell if this is just a thing that Zeke notices or something . . .
“I should probably let you go to sleep.” Zeke’s voice is quiet, smooth like caramel, and I don’t want to lose this Zeke. I don’t want to let him slip away, to see him tomorrow morning in the cafeteria laughing with some girl, see the way his arm so casually rests around her shoulders.
I want us to slip into this universe of darkness outside, the two of us alone in this make-believe world.
“Where are you now?”
I hear the catch of his breath and he’s right: I can picture him yawning, the way he thrusts out his chest a little, the way his chin comes down to his clavicle. I know what he looks like yawning.
“I’m about twenty minutes away.”
“I’ll stay with you, then—”
“You don’t need to. I’ll be okay.”
“I know. I want to.”
I don’t say that it doesn’t matter how far away he is, that he could have been slipping his key into the front door of the dorm, walking up the stairs, and I’d still want to stay on the phone with him. That I won’t give up this . . . this whatever it is . . . until I absolutely need to.
There’s a pause, and I don’t know what he’s going to say.
“What do you do when you go to Boston anyway?”
Zeke’s exhale is loud enough for me to hear, and I know he’s about to shut me down, get off the phone, tell me it’s none of my business. My fingers grip the hot phone to my ear and I scrunch my eyes shut. I want to know. Even though it might involve another girl. Or drugs. Or money laundering. Or—
“I’m seeing doctors there. For my shoulder.”
Oh. Apparently I watch too much television.
“What happened to your shoulder?”
There’s a chuckle but it isn’t laughter; it’s discomfort all rolled up into a filthy little ball. “I was in a car accident. It wasn’t serious but the way the seat belt pulled across my shoulder and the way I jerked forward caused significant injury. That, and I sprained my ankle. It’s all mostly healed, but I’ve been doing rehab in Boston, trying to make sure my shoulder isn’t . . . permanently affected.”
“Oh. Are you going there alone?”
When I banged up my wrist in volleyball during gym class, either Si or Jed came with me to every appointment if Mom or Dad were at the store. Which was ninety percent of the time.
I couldn’t imagine doing those painful exercises on my own, never mind having to drive back and forth more than an hour before and after.
“Uh, I have a friend who meets me there. A friend of the family.”
There’s an odd squeak in his voice when he speaks these words, like he isn’t altogether comfortable saying them, like they balance on a sharp blade and he isn’t positive where they’ll land.
Like he’s lying. Like my suspicions are correct and he’s involved in something nefarious.
Except that wouldn’t make sense. Zeke would have no reason to lie to me.
It must be the exhaustion.
But before I have a chance to really think it through, he’s changed the topic to favorite comfort food to eat when you’re on the road (me: licorice, him: chips; me: caramels, him: candy corn; me: Coke, him: coffee). And while there’s something niggling at the back of my mind, it’s quickly replaced by the realization that Zeke has terrible taste in snacks.
SIXTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING I WAKE up to find Alice sitting on her bed, biting her fingernails and staring at me.
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I mutter, rolling over and stretching my blanket over my head. “It’s creepy.”
“I wanted you to wake up.” Alice’s voice might be muffled, but I can hear the need in her voice, which makes me quickly flip over and peek my head out.
“What’s going on?”
I’ve got the tone down pat. Casual and easy, but present. Not like I’m thinking of other things. Because while Alice doesn’t want a panicked response when she asks for help (though really, who does?), she wants to know that I get what’s going on, that I’m taking it seriously.
That she’s working hard.
She drags her top teeth over her bottom lip and her knees bounce
nervously in her cross-legged position. “I’m supposed to be reading a poem in public tonight and I thought I could do it but really I can’t.” She speeds through the words so quickly, it takes me a couple of seconds to sound back through them, try to figure out where pauses need to be inserted.
“Can I come with you?”
Alice’s shoulders cave forward, like if she tried hard enough they’d meet in front of her chest. “You don’t need to,” she whispers.
I want to raise my eyebrows, ask why she wanted me to wake up if I didn’t need to go to the reading. But while there are a million places where teasing is appropriate, this isn’t one of them.
I shrug. “Eh. Truth is I have nothing going on tonight. So it’ll give me something to do.”
A giggle escapes from Alice’s lips and I’m quite sure that if she wasn’t so tense, she’d jump the ten feet separating our two beds and give me a tackle hug. “Thank you,” she says instead, and I know it’s the same thing.
“What do you want to do today?” Zeke asks. My brain is buzzing from the discussion we’d just had in class and especially from the part I played in it. We’d been looking at a series of children’s books and I’d mounted a strong argument as to why French children’s books—often darker and more morose than their American counterparts—do a better job building children’s emotional landscape than cute and shiny American books. Which is when Zeke and I discovered that we share the same favorite children’s story—the always-popular Where the Wild Things Are—though we have distinctly different views on the meaning of the story and the importance of Max’s dinner remaining warm at the end.
It became a full-on class debate and for the first time in class, I stopped translating in my head and just felt the words rise up inside. And while I’m sure I made mistakes, it didn’t matter. Especially when Marianne pulled me aside at the end of class to tell me how pleased she was with my progress, how I should forward her the forms for the Paris School.
Which lit up every nerve inside my body and made me want to turn cartwheels down Main Street.
“What do you want to do?” I turn the question around, my smile so wide it feels like it might swallow my head whole.
Zeke picks up his bag and starts walking toward town. “Well, I don’t need to go back to Boston today, so I’m pretty flexible.”
I think back to Alice, to the way Zeke talked her through the hard time she’d had at Chutes and Lattes. She wouldn’t mind if he came too. “You can totally say no, but what about a poetry reading? There’s an open mic night at the Upper Deck and—”
And even before I have a chance to explain, to say that it’s Alice reading, that we’d just be there for moral support, he shrugs. “Sounds good to me.”
He pauses, and it’s only because I know him, know how he works, know when to expect the unexpected that I brace myself. “You’re going to read, right?” he says.
The look on my face clearly says it all, because he widens his eyes and dips his chin.
I shake my head. “It’s for Alice—”
“I’m sure. But if we’re going, you need to read. Unless you’re too scared . . .” The challenge is there in his eyes, and I feel my competitive nature rise to meet it.
“You going to read?”
“Of course.” He smiles. “A French poem, bien sûr.”
Merde.
Standing outside the bright blue door of the Upper Deck, it’s hard to know who’s more nervous, me or Alice. It’s not a date, I remind myself as I check the time again. Zeke and I do these events all the time. And the truth is, if he doesn’t show, it’s even better because then I won’t have to read the poem I spent the afternoon slaving over. It’s just ten lines, but that’s ten lines more than I’m comfortable reading up there in front of the crowd, in front of Zeke.
I’m just about to give up, to tell Alice we should go in and save a table, when he saunters up. He’s actually sauntering. Like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“Hey, Zeke!” Alice says. She wraps her arms up around his shoulders in a hug. Shoulders that are nicely dressed in a royal-blue button-down shirt tucked into a pair of chinos. “Thanks so much for coming tonight.”
“I appreciate the invite.” He smiles.
“I have a table reserved by the front”—she nods—“like you suggested. And I spoke to the manager so hopefully we can keep a little bit of extra room around the table without making me look like some sort of pariah.”
“Wait.” I frown. “When did you guys talk about this?”
“This morning, after you left.” Alice turns to face me. “Didn’t he tell you?”
I glance over at Zeke, who’s smiling mysteriously. “And ruin the fun? No way.” He laughs, and then pulls open the door for the three of us.
There’s an endgame in this that I haven’t yet figured out. But I’m puzzling through it as Alice walks over to a middle-aged guy in a black leather jacket with a shaved head and thin copper glasses.
If this is her teacher, no wonder Alice makes it to class almost every day. If I weren’t so in love with French and Marianne and Zeke—or rather, hanging out with Zeke—I’d transfer programs. That and if I could actually write poetry. Which, based on the hours that went into the pile of crap I’m about to embarrass myself reading, makes the plan very unlikely.
“Is Colin coming?” I ask Alice when she comes back to the table. Zeke pulls the empty chair between us so Alice can sit. It suddenly occurs to me that as much as I love hanging out with Colin, I like the feeling of it being me and Zeke here to cheer Alice on. Like we’re in this together. Which is dumb, but . . .
“He had something else to do,” she says as the lights dim and the emcee takes the stage. Then Alice turns to Zeke and he whispers something to her, something long and calming, based on the way she closes her eyes to listen to him.
Zeke and I both applaud wildly as Alice is called up first, and I squeeze her hand before she disengages from the table.
“She called me to get my sister’s number earlier in the week,” Zeke explains. “I thought that Olivia could help her with some performance stuff, since she does it all the time and she knows the difficulty of living with anxiety. And then Olivia gave me some suggestions of things I could say to Alice before she goes onstage.”
My mouth has rounded to form the letter O, but just then the audience quiets and Alice gives our table a small smile and begins to speak.
I can’t tear my eyes away from her. She reads four poems, each one sharpened to perfection, the images rich and harsh and gorgeous. She talks about the cold in Chicago, the freezing of limbs and words, and then switches to a short poem about young boys watching girls jump rope in the summer’s heat, and I feel like I can taste the dripping orange Popsicles. Her third poem continues the light mood as she describes the interaction between two teenagers on a date on the subway, their banal conversation at odds with the movement of their bodies, the way they drift closer as though there were tiny hidden magnets pulling them together. She recites them all with precision, her words never faltering, her gaze never dropping from a point of focus at the back of the room, each pause choreographed beautifully.
But it’s the fourth poem that leaves me reeling, that sucks the oxygen out of every hidden crevice in the room. In “When I Fell in Love with You,” she dissects and lays bare the complicated love between two best friends, a love not quite sexual and not quite platonic, a love that overwhelms them both in its intensity and devastates them when they are separated as one girl moves across the ocean.
A silence falls over the audience when she finishes reciting it and then, together it seems, we take a collective breath before applause overwhelms the room. Which is the half second after I realize that I’ve been holding Zeke’s hand tightly throughout Alice’s reading.
Zeke turns his head toward me as Alice accepts hugs from her classmates. “That was unbelievable,” he says, and I don’t know if it’s the emotion of the reading or the strength of Alice’s poems or
the collective energy of the crowd, but I shiver at the sensation of his breath on my ear. And more than anything I don’t want to get up and recite my poem about leaves on the city pavement; I don’t even want to hear anybody else’s poems, even Zeke’s. It’s like the room has become too much, and I just want out.
I can’t believe Alice has this feeling all the time.
“Do you think it would be okay for us to get out of here?” I ask Zeke, and he nods.
“Why don’t you head out and I’ll make sure it’s okay with Alice? I’m guessing that she’ll be fine given she’s now sitting happily with her classmates, but I’ll check if she wants to leave too.”
I gulp and bob my head, feeling the intensity of the room build and grow as the next person stands up and begins to read. His style doesn’t have the same fierceness, but I’m still overwhelmed by the emotions in the room, all these people with their soul-exposing poems, all their fears and longings and hurt. I was grateful the place was only half-full for Alice’s sake, but I can’t imagine what it would be like if the room were full to bursting. I blink back tears and do my best to move to the front door without vaulting over the tiny tables littering my path.
I’m curled up in a ball on the bench two stores down from the coffee shop when Zeke finally makes it out.
“That was a lot,” Zeke says in French, plopping beside me. If he notices my body language, he doesn’t mention it.
“Alice was incredible,” I say, trying to relax my body into a less crazy pose. “And I’m so glad she was able to get up there. You really helped her.”
He shrugs, but there’s a tint of blush creeping up his cheeks. “I know a few things from growing up with my sister, so I gave her all the suggestions I could. And then hooked her up with Olivia.
“As for her being a great poet, I wouldn’t have doubted it, given that she’s in this program. According to my sister, it’s really hard to get into. But that was a whole different level of incredible right there.”
“It must be amazing to have a gift like that. To be able to get up and do things most people can’t, especially at our age.”
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