Effortless
(Book One)
Marina Raydun
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the author.
Copyright © 2015 by Marina Raydun
Cover art created by Rahul Philip. For more information visit: www.rahulphilip.com
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, dialogues and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and therefore are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
First Paperback Edition: 2015
For more information please visit:
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Books by Marina Raydun:
-One Year in Berlin/Foreign Bride
-Joe After Maya
-Effortless (Book 1)
DEDICATION
For my child, who I hope will love to read.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Vadim—you are my one-man support system, my one-man entourage. Without you, little is possible. I love you.
Donna Rello, my proofreader, my friend, my confidant—I appreciate your work and value our friendship.
Thank you, Rahul Philip, for designing another fantastic cover for me. And to think you came up with this masterpiece from my brief description of the scene! I want to frame this work of art (seriously). I cannot wait to work with you again in the near future. You are brilliant!
My sister—your faith in me is a source of inspiration.
Dr. Michael Yuryev, a sincere thank you from the bottom of my heart for hearing out my repetitive (and obviously layman’s) questions about untimely heart attacks and sui—. Oops, almost left a Book Two spoiler here. It goes without saying that, should any medical detail contained herein be stated in a way that is scientifically incorrect, it is my fault alone.
My beta-readers, my friends, thank you! Your input is invaluable. Irena, Alina—thank you for always wanting to read one more chapter, for asking what happens next.
Julia and Tania, thanks for your help with the Spanish and French tidbits. I appreciate your time.
My friends Ray, Chelsea, Tania (yes, again!), Igor, Michael—thank you for always asking about my writing. It means the world.
Last but not least, a huge thank you to my parents for believing that I can indeed do anything.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
New York
Paris
London
NOTE:
Effortless was conceived as the first installment of a two-part series.
Stay tuned for Inevitable (Book Two).
NEW YORK
Chapter One: What Say You?
Plucking stray hairs out of your chin is a humiliating exercise, even when you are engaged in the activity in the privacy of a windowless room, with no one there to witness your shame. I suppose “emasculating” would not be the most appropriate adjective to describe the procedure, but the process, as well as the mere reminder of the need for it in the first place, leaves you feeling embarrassed and hollow. And, if that weren’t enough, you are also fully aware that you’re only wasting your time—all along you know that you will be right back where you started within a matter of days.
That’s what I was doing (namely cursing the heavens I could not see from where I was for the three hairs that insisted on poking through my sensitive skin week after week, despite my disciplined plucking) when Veronika knocked on my office door that spring afternoon. “Office,” of course, is too mighty a term for the closet I shared with two fellow history teachers, our desks forming an awkward letter “T” in the claustrophobic space that was painted a pale shade of pink, but it was my space, nevertheless. I rarely kept my door open, so if you wanted to interrupt me while grading papers, poking at a salad, or at my half-baked attempts at cheating in Words with Friends, you had to knock. I’d been told years ago by somewhat of a mentor, that young teachers would always have to try doubly as hard as the older ones to maintain any status of authority with the students—it began with not wearing jeans to work and always keeping your door closed. I was not copied on the memo regarding the cutoff age for the said self-imposed policy.
“Ms. Levit, you have to come with us! They need one more chaperone,” Veronika begged the second I opened the door and ushered her in.
Routinely lectured by the same friendly advisor on ways to protect myself against various allegations of impropriety, I always kept my door open when a student actually visited me. This time, however, I let it fly closed behind Veronika. I knew what trip she spoke of and had heard the rumors of the last minute change in the chaperone lineup that morning. Timing was perfect. My interest was piqued.
“Mr. Sola is going now, so all we need is one more cool, young teacher to join. This can actually turn out to be the best school trip ever! Come on, won’t you miss us when we graduate in a couple of months? Don’t let that middle-aged perv Abbott bring another octogenarian,” she continued, undeterred by my silence. “Oh, oh, and you won’t even have to pay, I don’t think! Just promise you’ll consider it—Paris, London, and some of your favorite students....”
My heart jolted at the sound of his relatively generic name: Jamie Sola. Nothing else about the man seemed generic—not his broad smile, not his delicate, long, ash-black hair, not his worryingly thin frame, not his intense brown eyes, not his full, buttery lips. He was too dark, too exotic to befit such a throwaway name.
Of course, if I’m already being chin-hair-honest here, I have to admit that I knew I would wind up saying yes the second I heard his name listed as one of the chaperones. One utterance of it, and the rest was only a matter of superficial hesitation I felt compelled to display. No matter the impracticality of it, no matter my real life, I knew I was already onboard.
If you were to ask George, I would imagine he’d probably say that I wanted to go solely to escape—to escape him, to escape myself, to escape my aforementioned “real life.” And, maybe even Jamie would agree, if you could ask him now. But no, I think it was simpler than that—more primal and much more juvenile. It was really just about a cute boy. I would’ve still left George, of course, but the actual transatlantic adventure would’ve never happened but for this Jamie Sola. On the other hand, I must say, it’s pretty hard to parcel it all out now, to be precise; I’m not sure if hindsight is indeed as 20/20 as it is often advertised to be.
“What makes Mr. Abbott a perv?” I asked with a chuckle aimed at disguising the blush I felt taking over my cheeks. At the very least, I was hoping it’d distract from it.
“I don’t know, I guess he was born that way,” Veronika shrugged, rather summarily, as if it were settled business, not up for debate. There was something in her voice that sounded resigned to the fact. It was convincing enough of a gesture for me to laugh again.
“Are you in his French class?”
“No, Ms. Levit! I take Spanish. Paz is, though, so I get all my latest intel from her,” she reported, proudly.
“I’ll think about it, Veronika, I promise you. Thank you for thinking about me, for letting me know,” I placated the girl with a smile, hoping she couldn’t hear my heart’s disjointed rhythm. “So, who’s Mr. Sola, again?” I wasn’t sure which one of us I was trying to fool, really, but I felt obliged to try.
“Oh, he’s this great new teacher—guitar and vocals. Well, he’s been here since the fall, but that still makes him “new,” right? Anyway, he’s kind of cute! I think you two would get along,” she stated, her wide grin of crooked teeth beaming up at
me. “I really hope you go. It’d be fun with you there! Go talk to Abbott about it so he can fill you in on everything.”
Good ol’ Veronika: her chin-length brown hair always just a little greasy, her nose always peeling skin at its bridge. She was right—I would miss her next year.
I had made one false assumption going into teaching against the wishes of every single member of my family—I’d presumed that all my students would be just like I was at their age, which is to say that I pretty much expected them all to be needy, insecure perfectionists. Instead, in a school full of students constantly reminded of their bottomless talents, I was often stuck with kids whose parents encouraged the belief that a part of a cadaver on Law & Order was more important than a midterm paper on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Rarely did these children ever show up on time, often immediately requesting permission to step outside for some allegedly much-needed coffee, as if my first period classes were merely inconvenient layover stops on their way somewhere better.
But Veronika was different (and not only because her immigrant parents had gifted her the burden of having people misspell her name for the rest of her life by insisting on spelling it with a “K”). Were she not, by all accounts, incredible on the guitar, I guess she’d be labeled a nerd—always asking for extra credit, as if her steady As needed improvement, her hand always up, always prepared, her baggy, Disney character sweatshirts straight out of the early ‘90s and paired, surprisingly appropriately, with shiny Doc Martens (unfortunately all worn without a trace of irony). There was this familiar neediness about her, that ache to appear effortless, be unconditionally loved or, at least, accepted, tolerated. I recognized it. More than that—I related.
I suppose, I could always say that I wanted to go on this trip on Veronika’s account, but that would be a lie—she was merely icing on the cake. I knew full well that, had she not confirmed what I’d heard and mentioned Jamie Sola, I would’ve immediately said no and that would be that. I would’ve finished plucking those hairs out of my soft chin, eaten my yogurt at my squeaky, scratched up desk (whilst scrolling aimlessly through Pinterest), and gone on to teach my next class—anything to take my mind off of my impending homelessness. But that’s not what happened.
The way history stands now, as soon as Veronika was out of my sight, I was on my way to the Foreign Languages department to see the abovementioned “octogenarian pervert,” who also happened to be my quasi-mentor (as well as the school’s most popular French teacher). Of course, the girl disappeared into the stairwell across from my doorway only after flashing at me a draft of the paper she’d written for my government participation class, and not a second earlier. I smiled to myself as I jogged down the stairs, thinking about that class. Government participation—a class full of the same recycled civics they’d been taught annually since elementary school and still were not likely to take with them into adulthood. I hardly ever saw the point any more than most of my students, but Veronika was excited. This made me feel momentarily guilty for ushering this brilliant child out of my office the way I did, anxious to safeguard myself that last chaperone spot next to Jamie Sola, but I shrugged it off; I’d see Veronika in two periods anyway.
“Sweet Levit, what can I do you for?” Abbott exclaimed when I poked my head in, impatient as a schoolgirl myself. His office lacked a window, just like mine; unlike me, however, he didn’t have to share his with any other teachers. Behind him, I could see Sophie—our most petite cellist, who always seemed to dissolve into her instrument, become one with it at recitals, her untamed hair swaying in its continuous attempt to frame her delicate features just so. She was gathering her belongings at Abbott’s desk. “Okay, Sophie, you got it? Now, I don’t want you to worry about anything, because that extra credit project you’re working on will make up for the midterm, my darling,” Abbott briefly turned to coo in the girl’s direction as she shuffled past me and out the door. Her tiny face was expressionless. That midterm grade probably left much to be desired, I thought to myself.
“So I hear you’re short a chaperone for that infamous Europe trip of yours. True or false?” I leaned against the edge of Abbott’s wooden desk to ask this, hoping that it would read as if I were just so nonchalant about the whole thing. My office keys dug into the skin of my right fist as I waited for a reply.
“Yes! Oh God, yes!” Abbott cried. “It’s less than a week away and I just lost two of those! Sophie over there, she’s supposed to be going, but the damn thing may never happen now. Check this out—one’s appendix bursts and the other just finds out that her passport application was lost in the mail. I told her that she can just go to the passport agency downtown, but she’s too afraid to take the chance. Jamie, God bless him, stepped up as soon as he heard, but I still need one more—and preferably female, to keep it even. Goodness, this is just serendipitous! You know, I was just telling Jamie, earlier, that I was going to ask you to join!” he eagerly rattled off. For a man in his very late forties, he was in good shape. He was handsome even. He was, I suppose, on a slightly shorter side of average, and he most certainly lacked an adult’s appreciation for personal space, but he was unquestionably not unattractive.
“Jamie who?” I had to play coy for fear of appearing pityingly obvious. It’s not so cute to be baselessly infatuated with a virtual stranger at the tender age of twenty-eight, whether you’re engaged or not. Frankly, it’s borderline committable.
As a teenager, ever self-aware and full of self-loathing, I’d hated this helpless feeling—this vertigo, this arrhythmia. My sole wish growing up had been that these crushes would eventually cease to manifest themselves. I’d always hoped that, with age, I’d miraculously acquire some shatterproof sense of self-control.
For a while there, I was sure that I’d been cured, never again to suffer at my own behest, my own weakness. Never again would I lay my eyes on a new boy and have to feel the symptoms so strongly associated with an acute stomach virus, I believed.
And then, at least as I like to insist on telling myself, Jamie Sola happened.
It was an unwelcome surprise to feel what I’d felt when I saw him waiting for the bus one day a few months ago, just around the corner from the school—his guitar case in hand, his hair wet in the pouring, straight-out-of-Hollywood rain, backpack on his back, his already slightly tattered umbrella breaking further, his leather jacket at least a size too large and all shiny with moisture…. To feel those familiar tinges around my heart was pure letdown. I had somehow failed myself. Maybe George, too, though really we’d been over for too long a time by then, regardless of Jamie’s hypnotizing eyes. The comfortable warmth I’d felt in my lower stomach wasn’t worth it, but it seemed inevitable that I should feel it all.
Waiting for my own bus to take me (and my bicycle) in the opposite direction of wherever it was that he was going that day, I’d stood mesmerized. Nothing mattered but his deep-set brown eyes shining bright even in the gray light of that winter afternoon, and his night-black, precisely layered hair sticking to his gaunt face. I did not feel the rain as it filled my shoes, nor did I see countless people hurrying to and fro between us, their umbrellas bending and breaking with the elements. I did not mind the wind tearing my own umbrella apart, either. I’d even managed to forget that there was still a ring on the ring finger of my left hand—the one with three tiny diamonds on it: one for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. Even now, it’s difficult not to roll my eyes at the memory of the proposal that left me with that joke of a promise.
Paralyzed. I’d stood utterly paralyzed until a bus sped by, bypassing my stop on account of too many lucky passengers already aboard, covering me in dirty puddle water. I did not come to until I realized that my bike had fallen to the ground, my grip having failed it. I needed that shower, I suppose. By the time I’d looked up from behind my soaking wet hair, my red umbrella now at my feet, he was gone.
In that moment, I was certain that my own eternal need for distraction was the culprit—faced with a major dec
ision, there I was, crushing on a pretty stranger. I suppose George wouldn’t be completely out of line to want to explain my choosing to go to Europe by blaming it on my need to escape, but then again, he blamed just about anything on my apparent inability to be happy. Or was it my unwillingness to be happy—my utter lack of know-how to stay present, in the moment? If only I’d slow down enough to breathe, to give thanks, then maybe—
“Jamie Sola, the guitar and vocals coach. He’s relatively new here—just started last semester. He’s a young guy, maybe around your age. He’s, let’s say, of ambiguous ethnicity. I suppose, he’s vaguely Mediterranean looking. Not too hard on the eyes, if you know what I mean,” Abbott remarked with a grin and a wink.
“Oh yeah, I remember him, I think,” I replied with a nod, wishing I wasn’t feeling so damn nauseous. “I think we may have met at one of those meetings back in September,” I lied.
It was true that I saw him at one of those administrative gatherings, but we hardly met then. I remembered that meeting clearly. Still do. I was sitting with the History Department, up in the mezzanine, far from Jamie Sola, who sat with the exponentially more popular Performing Arts in the front section of what they call “center orchestra”—downstairs. We were all stuffed inside our state-of-the-art auditorium, but where you sat made a difference; Abbott, for example, was somewhere in orchestra left.
Jamie was introduced as a newcomer, and when he was asked to stand up and wave, I’d just happened to look up from my iPhone screen, from my tighter than usual Words with Friends game with Javier (or as my friend Jessica calls him, my plan C), and registered my heart jolt. That time, I had blamed it on my annual anxiety, given that every September I felt more nervous than any of my talented students had ever allowed themselves to appear. It wasn’t until I was in that office, talking to Abbott, that I finally became convinced otherwise. At once, I knew that all of this was somehow connected, predestined. Yes, I silently nodded to myself, from the very first time I laid eyes on him, it was a pull—a cosmic, invisible, undeniable, unreasonable, disorienting, irrational pull. Bring on the vertigo. Bring on that arrhythmia. The way a strand of his thin hair was loosely braided to keep out of his face that day was enough for me to turn over my engagement ring even back then, in that auditorium, forcing the round stones into the flesh of my palm with surprising nimbleness. I should’ve known then and there that that was the beginning. Perspective is key, as I often remind my students when we discuss historiography: history, of course, is always written by victors.
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