Testing Kate

by Whitney Gaskell

  “Why couldn’t we get one that played VHS tapes?” I asked my dad, when—yet again—the sole copy of Sixteen Candles in Betamax was checked out, although there were three VHS copies sitting right there on the shelf.

  “Betamax is a superior technology. Just wait and see—it’ll only be a matter of time before VHS is phased out and everyone has a Betamax,” my dad predicted.

  He was a broad man, with a round face that was always ruddy—in the summer from the sun, in the winter from the wind—but he wasn’t fat, just solidly built. His sweaters always smelled like cedar chips, and his voice was deep and full, like a news anchor’s. I loved his voice, loved it when he’d read to me when I was a little girl. I’d rest my head against the crook of his shoulder and listen to the words vibrating through his chest.

  My dad resisted buying a VHS player for years, caving in only after the local video store stopped carrying Betamax movies altogether and refused to special-order them for him.

  Later, after the accident, when Caroline and I set about packing up the house, making decisions about what to keep, what to donate to charity, I found the Betamax squirreled away high on a closet shelf, the cords wrapped up in neat, symmetrical coils. I ran my hand over the black plastic, leaving a trail in the dust that had settled there, and knew that my father had stashed it away so that when Betamax videotapes made their triumphant return to the store shelves, he’d be ready.

  My dad never gave up hope. It wasn’t in his nature.

  By the time I got to the Rue, I was exhausted. My shoulders and neck ached, my back had a crick in it from bending over my books, and my head hurt so much, it felt like someone was sticking needles into my temples. At least now that it was October, the muggy heat was finally starting to break, although the seventy-degree temperature still seemed ridiculously warm to me. When I was a kid living in central New York, we had to wear snowsuits under our Halloween costumes.

  Everyone was already at the Rue when I got there. Dana, Lexi, and Jen were sitting at our usual table, and Nick and Addison were over talking to Scott Brown and Pete Berkus, who had also started studying at the coffee shop.

  “Does that work?” Lexi was asking Dana as I arrived at the table.

  “Does what work?” I asked. I pulled out my books and notepad and dumped them on the table in front of me.

  “I bought a book-on-CD version of a Criminal Law study guide, and I play it while I sleep,” Dana explained. She shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s helping yet, but I figure it can’t hurt.”

  “Studying while sleeping. Now, that’s hard-core,” I said.

  “I’ve thought about sleeping with my casebooks under my pillow,” Jen said.

  “What good would that do?” Lexi asked.

  “I thought that the case law might seep in through osmosis,” Jen said.

  Nick and Addison walked back over.

  “Oh, good, all of my chickadees are here,” Addison said. “So, I was thinking of starting a harem. Anyone in?”

  “In your dreams,” Lexi snorted.

  “Hey, Kate,” Nick asked. “I stopped by your place before I came over.”

  “I wasn’t there,” I said.

  “Yeah, I noticed. When did you get here?”

  “Just a few minutes ago. Sorry I’m late. I was at the library, and I lost track of time,” I said.

  “See, I told you. Law school is like a black hole,” Jen said.

  “It’s a whirling vortex of insanity,” Addison said. “Finals are still months away, but people are already freaking out.”

  “The library was packed. Every seat in the reading room was taken,” I said.

  “I can’t study when it’s like that,” Jen said. “It’s too distracting.”

  “Hey, Nick, can I see your Contracts notes from Friday’s class?” Scott called across the coffeehouse. A few of the patrons glanced up from their papers and books and looked at him disapprovingly. Scott, oblivious, bounded over to our table.

  “Hi, Scott,” Lexi said, smiling at him.

  “Hey, guys,” Scott said. He was wearing a white baseball cap that was turned around backward. Tufts of shiny dark hair poked out over the plastic adjustable strap.

  “You should borrow Kate’s notes. She’s more thorough than I am,” Nick said.

  Scott looked at me. “Do you mind? I only need them for a few minutes. I’ll give them right back.”

  I rifled through the stack of binders in front of me and pulled out the black one. “Sure, here you go,” I said, holding it out to him.

  Scott stepped around the table and took the folder.

  “I like your hair like this,” he said, holding on to my ponytail. He pulled it playfully, so that I had to tip my head back, and then rested his other hand on my shoulder.

  “Um, thanks.”

  Scott began kneading my shoulders. “You’re really tense,” he remarked. “You need a massage.”

  His thick fingers dug painfully into my skin. I shrank away from him, but his hands moved with me.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “I’ve probably had too much coffee.”

  Scott stopped rubbing, but his fingers lingered on my shoulders. “What did everyone do last night?” he asked.

  “Nick and I went to the Boot again,” Addison said. “And I went home alone.”

  Addison looked at Nick in a pointed way that made it clear that Nick had not left the Boot on his own. Nick grinned, but the tip of his nose turned pink.

  “Laundry,” Jen said.

  “Studying,” Dana said.

  “I had a date,” Lexi said, still smiling flirtatiously at Scott.

  “I stayed home,” I said. Armstrong and I had spent the afternoon shopping again—this time for a sofa for his living room—and then I’d curled up in bed with my Torts textbook. Big excitement.

  “I thought Graham was flying in this weekend,” Jen said.

  “He had to cancel. He’s cowriting a paper with another professor, and they had to work on it all weekend,” I said. I still hadn’t seen Graham since the weekend we’d decided to get back together. We tried, but we were both so busy, it wasn’t as easy to fit in the weekend trips as we’d initially thought.

  “Who’s Graham?” Scott asked.

  “My boyfriend. He lives in Arizona.”

  “Oh, right—your boyfriend,” Scott said, with a wide grin, taking his hands off my shoulders. He winked at me. “Thanks for these,” he said, gesturing to my notebook. “I’ll bring them back in a minute.”

  After he was out of earshot, I muttered, “Okay, that was weird. Did he think I was lying about having a boyfriend?”

  “Jen, care to fill her in?” Lexi said.

  Jen cleared her throat and suddenly became absorbed in her notes.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Jen said, still refusing to meet my stare.

  “Tell me!”

  “Well…Scott might have sort of, kind of gotten the idea that you might…be into him,” Jen said. She took a sip of her hot chocolate.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because…I…uh…sort of told him you were,” Jen said. Her pale skin flushed, and she finally looked up at me, her expression sheepish. “It just slipped out.”

  “Slipped out? But I’m not interested in him!” I said. “Why would you tell him that?”

  “Because I thought you guys would make a cute couple,” Jen said.

  “She thought that if Scott was under the impression that you were interested in him, he’d ask you out,” Lexi explained.

  “It was weeks ago,” Jen explained.

  “Nice,” Addison commented.

  “Jen! You have to go tell Scott that I don’t like him,” I said.

  “I just had a flashback to the seventh grade,” Nick said.

  “Why, did a little girl tell you she liked you and then do a take-back?” Lexi asked, smiling at Nick.

  “No, all the little girls loved me. I used to get notes shoved in my locker all
the time,” Nick said. “They were decorated with bubbly hearts and would say things like Kelli thinks you’re cute!”

  “Huh, I never got notes,” Addison mused. “Although there was this one chick who kept calling my house. She’d giggle when I answered, and say, ‘I love you!’ But then she’d hang up on me.”

  “Yeah, that used to happen to me too. Those little girls can be really aggressive,” Nick said.

  “You guys!” I said, louder than I meant. I noticed that Scott was looking over at me. He grinned and nodded when he saw me looking at him. I waved weakly, and then hissed, “Jen, undo whatever it is you’ve done.”

  “I can’t do that,” Jen said. “It will hurt his feelings.”

  “Besides, it sounds insincere,” Nick said. “If I heard a chick liked me, and then the same friend who told me she liked me came hustling over and told me no, it was just a mistake, I’d assume it was bullshit.”

  “Which part?” Lexi asked.

  “The part where she did the take-back. I’d think that she was still really into me but was worried that I didn’t return her feelings,” Nick said.

  “I wouldn’t think that,” I argued. “I’d just assume that it had all been a misunderstanding.”

  “That’s because you’re a woman,” Nick said smugly. “Men are always ready to believe that women are interested in us. We also don’t sit around asking each other if our jeans make our asses look fat.”

  “I don’t do that,” Dana said.

  “You are infinitely more sensible than most women, Dana,” Addison said, and Dana blushed from the praise.

  Chapter Ten

  I finally survived a Socratic grilling by Hoffman without humiliating myself. I answered all of his questions until he grudgingly moved on to his next victim. After class, Jen and Lexi took me to the student union to celebrate.

  “I was terrified Hoffman was going to call on me today. I didn’t do the reading,” Jen said, once we sat down with our pizza slices and sodas.

  “I thought you were going home last night to study,” I said. I’d seen Jen just before she left the library the night before, with Addison—who shamelessly sponged rides off all of us—in tow.

  Jen shrugged. “I was tired, so I went to bed early,” she said shortly.

  I looked at her. Jen had been preoccupied all morning and hadn’t been her usual chirpy self. “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Fine,” Jen said, giving me a quick smile before gazing at a group of undergraduate men at the next table. They were wearing fraternity T-shirts and flip-flops and kept calling each other “Dude!” in loud voices.

  “Hot-guy alert,” Jen said.

  “They’re babies,” Lexi said.

  “Hot babies,” Jen replied.

  “I’m off the market,” Lexi said smugly.

  “When do we finally get to meet the mysterious Jacob Reid?” I asked. I’d seen Lexi’s law-professor boyfriend around school but hadn’t yet been introduced.

  Lexi made a face.

  “I tried talking Jacob into coming out with us one night, but he’s worried about how it would look if someone saw us together,” Lexi said.

  “Then why is he dating you?” I asked. “If he’s so worried that it will get him into trouble?”

  Lexi smiled happily. “Because he can’t help himself. He’s smitten,” she said.

  It occurred to me—not for the first time—that Jacob might just be using Lexi. As far as I could tell, their relationship boiled down to her going over to his apartment and sleeping with him.

  “Don’t look now, but you’ll never believe who just came in,” Lexi said in a hushed whisper.

  I turned…and felt a jolt of dread. Professor Richard Hoffman. He was waiting in line to order food.

  “He’s the last person I want to see right now,” I said.

  Hoffman stood with his arms crossed and his pelvis shifted forward and looked peevish as usual. He glanced around the room, and when his eyes fell on our table, we all jumped a little and quickly looked down at our slices of pizza.

  “Did he see us staring at him?” Jen asked.

  “God, I hope not,” Lexi said. “It’s bad enough that he’s seeing us with Kate.”

  “Hey!” I said.

  “No offense, but Hoffman hates you,” Lexi said. “And I don’t want him to associate me with you.”

  “Who’s that with him?” Jen asked.

  “I’ve never seen her before. I don’t think she’s a law professor,” Lexi said.

  I looked up and saw that a petite woman had joined Hoffman in line. She was wearing a brown suit with a nipped-in waist and pencil skirt, and a pair of killer brown crocodile high heels.

  “Oh, my God,” I whispered. “That’s Dean Sullivan. I saw her a few weeks ago. Remember? She was the one I talked to after Hoffman told me that law school wasn’t the right place for me.”

  “Really? They look awfully…cozy. Do you think they’re dating?” Lexi said.

  “I think she’s married,” I said, remembering the family photos I’d seen in her office.

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not seeing each other,” Lexi said.

  We scrutinized the pair, looking for signs of romantic interest. Sullivan kept finding reasons to touch Hoffman’s arm, I noticed, and he laughed heartily at something she said, throwing his head back as he guffawed. It made him look almost…jolly. In a creepy way. And while we watched them, I started to feel an uneasiness spread through me. I’d trusted Sullivan. I’d told her how much I hated Hoffman, how I knew he was gunning for me. Even worse, I’d believed her when she said she’d help me if Hoffman continued to harass me. But now that I knew that at the very least she and Hoffman were good friends, and possibly even more. For all I knew, her relationship with him was the reason she hadn’t done anything to help me. Or…

  “Oh, no,” I groaned.

  “What?” Jen asked.

  “Do you think she told Hoffman that I told her he’s out to get me? And that I tried to get transferred out of his class?” I asked.

  “No. I’m sure she wouldn’t,” Jen said soothingly.

  “Well,” Lexi said, a knowing look crossing her narrow face, “what would you do if you were sleeping with someone, and a third party came to you with a complaint about your lover. Would you tell him?”

  We all pondered this for a minute.

  “Yes,” Jen said finally.

  I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I probably would too. Which means I’m screwed.”

  “Not necessarily,” Jen said. “Up until today, he hadn’t called on you in weeks.”

  Sullivan and Hoffman had moved up to the counter and were ordering their food.

  “It’s definitely a date,” Lexi said knowingly. “He’s paying for lunch.”

  “Not necessarily,” Jen argued. “Colleagues treat each other all the time.”

  We were still watching them closely when Hoffman and Sullivan turned, each carrying a tray with a salad and beverage cup. Their eyes scanned the room for an empty table, and then, at the same time, they both looked directly at us. Lexi, Jen, and I all froze. This time we’d definitely been caught staring openly at them.

  “They’re coming this way,” Jen whispered weakly.

  Hoffman was walking toward us, Sullivan right behind him. Neither one looked particularly guilty about being seen out together.

  “Ladies,” Hoffman said graciously, nodding his head toward us as they passed by to claim the booth just behind ours.

  “Hi,” we chimed together, each one sounding more guilty than the other.

  Teresa Sullivan smiled pleasantly at me. I returned her smile, although my cheeks felt hot and tight as I did so.

  I was so unbelievably screwed.

  Chapter Eleven

  The first time I saw Graham, I instinctively didn’t like him.

  What a pompous ass, I thought, taking in the almost too-pretty face, the vintage tan corduroy jacket with leather knot buttons on the sleeves, the haughty
pinch to his lips.

  I was on my lunch break, eating a bowl of watery onion soup in the Cornell student union cafeteria, when I spotted him. He was crossing the room, striding between two rows of tables with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and a leather folder tucked under his arm.

  “Wow, he’s gorgeous,” my friend Donna, who worked in the admissions office with me, breathed. She looked at him wistfully, brushing her dark curls away from her round face.

  “You think?” I said noncommittally. I’d never been attracted to pretty men, so I couldn’t see the appeal.

  “Uh, yeah,” Donna said.

  Graham didn’t look our way, didn’t seem to notice any of the women who were glancing at him. He sat down and pulled out a newspaper, oblivious to the attention.

  He was probably used to it, I thought. What must it be like to go through life as one of the beautiful people, to have people like you and want to be near you just because you were blessed by a genetic quirk?

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I heard a voice behind me say. I turned and saw a thick, meaty guy with a buzz cut stand up, his hands gripping his stomach, his face a pasty white-green and damp with sweat. He’d been sitting at a table with four other guys, all of them large and muscular. Athletes, I assumed. They began to laugh at their friend’s distress.

  “Here it comes,” one of them crowed.

  “Fire in the hole!” another hooted.

  “Hey, Fitz, you shouldn’t have done all of those Jäger-meister shots last night!”

  I think it was the mention of the liquor that did it. The expression on Fitz’s face as he turned toward me held a mixture of nausea and horror as he realized what was about to happen. And then his body convulsed, and he started to gag, and a second later he was bent over and hurling up the five slices of pepperoni pizza and forty-two ounces of orange soda he’d just consumed.

  Right down the front of my shirt.

  I stared down at my vomit-soaked body. I could feel the sticky wetness seeping through the fabric onto my skin, and I plucked the top away from my body, trying to keep it from touching me.

  “Ack,” I said, wondering if I was going to start vomiting too. The smell alone was enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. “Gah.”