by Andra Brynn
“So,” I say. “You made pastries and planned a picnic. You must have something really big to tell me.” I steal a glance at him from the corner of my eye, but he’s looking down at his kolache box like it contains a turd sandwich. I’ve never seen a man look so dejected about breakfast pastry.
“Let’s eat, first,” he says.
I don’t like the sound of this. At all. When a guy says let’s eat first, what he’s usually saying is I’m going to break up with you, but first I need to get my chow on so at least I get something good out of this. It’s an asshole move.
But Daniel and I aren’t dating, so it can’t be that. It must be something else. Something really bad. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what it is.
I look at my kolaches. There are cherry, and something that looks like fig, and definitely apricot or peach. I like all of those things. What I don’t like is getting jerked around.
“Nooooo,” I say. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong, first?” But I’m too late, because Daniel has already shoved a pastry in his mouth. At least half of it. As though he is afraid he will spill the beans on whatever his great secret is.
I scowl at him and he gives me a sheepish look. It takes a long moment for him to chew through the pastry and swallow it, and when he’s done there’s cherry filling on his nose.
“For God’s sake,” I say. Grabbing the grocery bag, I look in and am relieved to find a small stack of paper napkins. “You have fruit on your schnoz.” Snagging a napkin, I rise up on my knees and lean forward, reaching for his face.
My fingers barely touch him, and then his hand comes up and snaps around my wrist.
A jolt of fear goes through me. So he’s a serial killer after all, I think. No one will find me up here, the buzzards will eat me long before anyone figures out what’s going on...
But his eyes are sad and pained, and the feeling of dread in my belly curdles.
“Wh... what’s wrong?” I say.
“I’m a priest,” he blurts.
I drop the napkin.
“What?” I must have misheard him.
But he looks utterly miserable. “A priest.”
I blink. “Like... a Catholic priest?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
I feel very... strange. Not shocked, perhaps... but sad. Disappointed, perhaps, that he has been lying to me. I thought he was different. “What are you talking about?”
“Remember when I said I was taking a sabbatical? I’m enrolled in the seminary on campus. I’m taking a break right now... I mean, I’m not a priest yet, I’m just studying to be one... Father O’Reilly is my adviser...”
Well. That explains why he was filling in for the good Father last Tuesday. And why he has a “background” in counseling.
I tug on my wrist, and he lets me go. Sitting back on my heels, I stare at him for a good long while.
Pieces start to slot into place, and now that he says it, yes. Yes, it makes sense. A guy with a lot of time on his hands. Always well dressed, as though adhering to a dress code. Embarrassed to see tits. Awkward. Doesn’t know what’s stalkery and what isn’t.
Yeah. Perfect sense.
“Oh,” I say. I look down at my hands. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Probably because I thought it might scare you away.”
He’s right. I would never have agreed to this if I’d known he was a holy roller just like my mother.
Except he’s not like my mother, or like any of those other overly pious, pinch-lipped Puritans back at home. He’s... well, he’s nice. And he doesn’t talk about God. I can’t stand it when people tell me about God. As though every single person in the Western Hemisphere hasn’t heard about the good news of Jesus Christ or whatever.
And now his comments about things being professional and appropriate are starting to make sense.
I can’t help it. I giggle.
Daniel looks at me as though I’m crazy. “What are you laughing about?” he says.
I shake my head. “Oh, nothing. It makes total sense. I’m surprised I didn’t realize it.”
He frowns. “Why?”
“Because you act like such a virgin.”
A flood of color crosses his face, and he is burning beet red. “I... I’m not... it’s not like...” He’s stammering and I want to take pity on him, but I just can’t. It’s too funny.
I laugh harder, and maybe I should feel betrayed, or lied to, or something like that, but really, what I feel is relief, and a bit of secret glee.
I’m relieved, because this is finally one guy I don’t have to worry about fucking. I can’t fuck him. He’s a priest, or going to be. I don’t have to worry about anything with him. There was never any danger of dates, or of feelings fucking things up between us. He’s pure in the Lord.
And I am pure as the driven mud.
I’m free from the threat of having to fuck him, but it is going to be fun to fuck with him.
He’s staring at me askance. “You’re... you’re not mad at me?” he asks.
I try to get myself under control, shaking my head and wiping the tears from my face. “No,” I say. “No, not really.”
The relief in his eyes is almost a tangible thing. “Really?” he says. “Because... after what you said yesterday about your mother, I knew I couldn’t keep it from you any more.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I say. “But why did you keep it a secret in the first place?”
He looks down at his hands. “I don’t know,” he says. “I think, maybe, because I don’t feel right calling myself a priest, or telling anyone I’ve been a seminary student. Not while I’m taking a break.”
Taking a break. From becoming a priest. I raise my eyebrows at him. “Hey, you know you can’t take a break from being a priest after you are one, right?”
He nods. “I know that. I mean, why do you think I’m taking a break now?”
“To fuck bitches?”
The horrified look on his face makes it all worth it, and I laugh again.
“You’re making fun of me,” he says.
“Of course I am,” I tell him. “You’re funny.” I shake my head. “And really... you’re going to tell me how to straighten my life out? You have no idea how to do that, do you? Because you haven’t even had a life.”
“I’ve had a life,” he says.
I just shrug and pick up a kolache. The dough is flaky and buttery, and when I bite into it, it’s still warm.
“So...” Daniel says. “You aren’t mad at me?”
I think about this for a moment while I let the heavenly little pastry melt in my mouth. “No,” I say at last, “but for a guy studying to be a priest, you sure do have a habit of making things seem like dates.”
“What?” He sounds half-aghast, and half-guilty, as though they were dates and he didn’t want to admit it...but that’s stupid. Priest, remember? His face is cherry red by now and I laugh at him again. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.
“‘I’m going to take you out for dinner,’“ I say. “‘Here, eat this picnic breakfast with me on the roof.’ A girl could totally get the wrong idea.” I give him a little smirk, and his color deepens. A guy who blushes. Good grief. I should have seen the signs.
“I wanted...er...I mean, I didn’t give you the wrong idea, did I?” he says.
“I didn’t want to fuck you anyway,” I tell him, which is only half a lie. “You aren’t my type.”
“Ouch.”
“Don’t worry, that’s a compliment. You don’t treat me like trash. Obviously I could never be attracted to you.”
“You like guys who treat you like trash?” He seems utterly taken aback.
“I wouldn’t say I like them, but I sure as hell sleep with a lot of them.”
To my chagrin, his face sort of falls. “Why would you do that to yourself?” he asks.
I stare at him. He really doesn’t understand much. “Are you sure you’ve had a
background in counseling?” I return.
He has the decency to look away. “Pastoral counseling,” he says.
I shake my head. “I am way out of your league, man. You have training wheels on. I’m a rocket of crazy headed straight toward the sun.” It’s weird, but now that I know he doesn’t have magic answers, that I don’t have to keep hoping, I am relaxing around him. I can never be open with someone trying to help. I’ve done it enough times to know it doesn’t work. I couldn’t stand getting my hopes up again just to be let down.
With a smile, I sip some coffee. It’s good, though I usually like a ton of sugar and cream. Black coffee is for people who aren’t bitter enough. I always need to be sweetened.
“So... do you want to keep meeting?”
I purse my lips. “I would like to be friends,” I say. “I don’t want a counselor. I really don’t. I do need a friend who doesn’t drink, or do drugs, or sleep with a lot of guys.” A thought strikes me. “You don’t sleep with a lot of guys, do you?”
His expression is priceless.
“Just asking.”
Daniel stares down at the campus for a moment, the wind playing with his sandy hair.
A thought occurs to me. “It’s not, like, inappropriate for us to be friends, is it?”
He shakes his head. “No. It’s not inappropriate.”
“Good,” I say. “Go exploring with me next weekend.”
Daniel frowns. “Why me?”
“Because you take good pictures and Alice and Jibril are a team. I don’t want to ask someone else to go because it would just be weird. We’ve already done it. Let’s go find somewhere else.”
A faint smile crosses his face. “You sure you’d never done it before Friday? It seems like a natural pastime for a history major.”
I shrug. “I’m sure I’d never gone before Friday, but I’m not sure why. I mean, when I was little and got into something that I wasn’t supposed to I’d get whooped, so maybe that fear kind of held over. I’d drive Jibril and Alice to their locations and sometimes I’d sit and watch out for cops and sometimes I’d just wander off and go get coffee or something, but I never felt like I should actually do it myself.”
“But you like it?”
I take another sip of coffee. “I do, yeah. It’s kind of soothing.”
The corner of his mouth turns up. “Soothing?”
“There’s no one else there but you and me, and you know when to shut up.”
Tilting his head, Daniel appears to think about this.
“That’s a compliment,” I tell him. “Knowing when to shut up is like the most important thing anyone can ever learn.”
“I know that,” he says. “I was wondering if you knew when shut up.”
I scowl at him, but he’s smiling. “I don’t have to shut up,” I say. “Every word from my mouth is like an apple of gold.”
“Useless?”
I crumple up the napkin I’d almost used on his nose and throw it at him, but before it even gets halfway there the wind picks up and carries it away.
He just grins at me. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll go. It’s a not-date.”
I grin back. “A not-date.”
“And a new start?”
I think about it. “A new start,” I agree.
He extends his hand and we shake on it. His hand is so warm that for a moment I have a lovely vision of shrinking down and curling up in his palm like a kitten, sleeping away my worries, but then the contact breaks and I’m stuck being me again.
The rest of our not-date is spent shoving pastries into our mouths and shutting up for a while, and I feel peace start to steal in, as quietly as the cold.
.0.
New starts are rare in this life, and they become rarer the older you get. When you are little and everything is before you, you can become anything, anything at all, but as you get older, you calcify, get stiffer, less able to stretch and bend. Before you even realize it, your personality is a habit. Your mistakes are habits. Everything about you is a habit, and the chances to break them are slimmer and slimmer.
I’m in the habit of being a slut. A drunk. A coward. I’m in the habit of running away, of lashing out, of hurting the hand that feeds. I’m in the habit of self-destruction. Fucking it all up comes as easily to me as breathing. Like a ghost caught in its final moments, everything I do is already ordained, a path with no branches. All my bad decisions have already been made. I’ve jumped from the cliff, and the outcome is as inevitable as the sea below.
Some days I wake up and think, today, I will be someone new. I will fake amnesia. I will start over with all the people I love. I will be smart and sweet and kind. I will hold my friends up. I will face the future without a past.
But I never do. The memories come back, whether I want them or not. They will always haunt me, will always come through in all I do or say. They will always catch me, and give me away.
.12.
Daniel spends another few hours with me in the student lounge on Sunday, quizzing me with the lists of important names and dates I wrote down yesterday. Then he has to leave and I take a nap—the most comfortable nap I’ve had in ages—and keep studying into the night. I sleep with my textbooks and notes under my pillow.
On Monday, I am nervous, biting my nails, unable to keep anything down, and not because of any sort of alcoholic indiscretions. I have no tests on Monday, and even though I speak briefly on the phone with Daniel, his calm, quiet demeanor is not enough to anchor me, not with my fate hanging in the balance. I can’t skip my Monday classes, so I go, but I’m such a frazzled mess, jumping at every little sound, that I hardly absorb anything.
On Tuesday I take my Holocaust midterm—the easiest for me, since it requires thoughts on morality and religion and the nature of evil. Afterwards I stumble out to the quad, sit under a tree, and try not to hyperventilate.
No one seems to notice me, or maybe I really am a ghost to the people passing by, so I call Daniel on my phone, and when he picks up I want to sob, though whether I want to cry with relief or despair I don’t know. I don’t cry, anyway.
“Bianca?”
“I just took my midterm in my Holocaust class,” I say.
“How do you think you did?”
My breath hitches. “I have no idea!”
He is quiet for a moment. “Did you study on Saturday?” he asks me.
I frown. “You know I did. You were there.”
“On Sunday?”
“You were there then, too.”
“How about on Monday?”
“Yes! What does studying have to do with doing well on a test? One does not guarantee the other!”
I almost hear him smiling at me. “No,” he says. “But you did what you could. That’s enough, right?”
“But what if what I could do wasn’t what I should do?”
He is quiet about that. “Tell you what,” he says to me. “You did your best, the final is what’s really important, and in between now and then there are a hundred things you can do to fix your GPA. I know lots of tricks about that.”
Now it’s my turn to smile. “Tricks?” I say. “That doesn’t sound like a very holy thing to know.”
“Photographers and Art students are pretty far from holy,” he replies. “I know some good ways through the system from undergrad. If you do bomb your tests, I’ll help you in whatever way I can to bring those grades up. Does that make you feel better?”
I think about it, and, weirdly enough, it does make me feel better. Less panicked. “Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”
“Good. Now don’t go turning me into a sinner by failing your midterms.”
On Wednesday I bang out a ten page paper on the structural supports of the Nazi party in Vichy France. Thursday I sit in my Myth and Life class and write an essay comparing origin myth types and their social impacts. Friday I take a quiz on enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophers and their various stupidass ideas. My only lucky break is that Dr. Schuster, who teaches my
Environmental Archeology class, is too lazy to come up with a midterm for us. I know this will bite me in the ass later because it means everything rests on the final, but when at last I stumble home at three in the afternoon I am too fried to care.
I open the door and a tennis ball goes flying past my face, ricochets off the wall and then bounces back into the living room. Quiet hours in the dorm have been rescinded, and everyone must be getting it out, letting their anxiety flow out of their fingers like sand.
“That was pathetic,” Marc says from the living room. “Pathetic.”
“Prepare to be de-balled,” Mason replies.
Ah. The guys are playing crotchball. I have no idea how this game was ever conceived, but it’s simultaneously stupid and hilarious. The freshmen boys this year came in all knowing each other from high school, and their favorite game to unwind is sort of like a cross between golf and playing chicken with a train, except it’s a tennis ball aimed at your nuts courtesy of your bosom buddies. I drag myself into the living room where Mason, Marc, Justin, and two other guys from a different dorm, whose faces I recognize but whose names I can’t remember, are sitting in a circle with their legs splayed open. I walk in just in time to see Mason take aim and bounce the tennis ball against the ground.
It arcs through the air, falls to the floor, then bounces up in a perfect parabola. It lands squarely on Marc’s testicles. He screams and doubles over and everyone in the room laughs.
I can’t help but laugh, too. I wonder what my Anthro professors would say about this game. It’s almost as though the participants are vying for the right to mate, but at the risk of voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool. It’s no Maasai lion-hunting, but it surely comes from the same place.
“You guys are idiots,” Lana says. She’s sitting at the piano, tinkling out a melody that I don’t recognize.
“Idiots, maybe,” Mason says. “But not ball-less idiots. It takes balls to play crotchball.”
Lana just shakes her head and keeps plunking away. At the table in the corner a couple people are playing Bullshit, and upstairs someone is blaring music. It’s poppy Euro-trash garbage, so it’s probably Christine. I tease her all the time about her terrible taste in music, but I never tell her to turn it down. I kind of like it.