Addicted

by Amelia Betts

  Not surprisingly, the two got along like old war buddies.

  “Oh my God, why have you been keeping us apart?” Gracie demanded while passing Isabella’s e-cigarette back to her. They were sitting at the patio table as I brought out a tray with six glasses.

  “I haven’t been keeping you apart. You were always too hungover to come with me, remember?” I said.

  “That’s my girl,” Isabella cheered, giving Gracie a high five.

  “Okay, here we go.” I placed three glasses before each of them.

  “Okay!” Gracie clapped her hands. “The Mischa Jones soon-to-be-patented juice cleanse!”

  “That’s right. So it’s a juice in the morning, a juice in the afternoon, and a smoothie at night. Water all day. Herbal tea optional.”

  “Sounds like my own version of hell. Hit me!” Gracie picked up her first glass of juice and held it up to toast Isabella. “Here’s to new friends.”

  “Yes, my dear, and to our dear Mischa.” Isabella thrust her glass toward me. “May this juice not suck.”

  “Hear, hear!”

  Before drinking, Gracie sniffed at the glass like a picky child. Isabella, on the other hand, downed hers quickly.

  “I want you to be brutally honest,” I said.

  Gracie held up a finger. “I will reserve comment until I have finished all three.”

  “This one tastes like grass, but I do not hate it,” Isabella declared before moving on to the next.

  “So, let me tell you what my plan is—the idea came to me the other day, and I think it’s a good one. I’m going to present this to Sasha as something she could sell at her spa. Like have them in a refrigerator by the front desk. People go in, they get a massage and a facial—they feel all clean, then bam! Clean living, at their fingertips, upon checkout.”

  “That’s kind of genius,” Gracie said, sipping from her second glass.

  “I figure I’ll make a few batches at the beginning of the week, put them in glass bottles. They’ll be expensive, but the clientele is rich… ”

  Isabella tried the smoothie, which was a slight deviation on the peanut butter smoothies I had been making her. “Delicious,” she said.

  Gracie looked up at me after trying the smoothie. “Mischa?”

  “Gracie?”

  She pounded the table. “Five thumbs up!”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yum! And the juices have kick! And I have a distinct sense that they’re doing something for me. I’m buzzing.”

  I blew the hair out of my face demonstratively. “Phew.”

  “I wanna take this shit to Washington. Straight to the top!”

  “I know it’s not a future plan, per se, but at least it’s something, right? I mean, I still have to figure out my life.”

  “Don’t we all?” Gracie said, suddenly wan.

  “Oh, you girls have such a flair for the dramatic. Call me when you’re incontinent like Carl over there,” she said, pointing to a house across the street.

  Gracie and I burst into laughter at the same time and Isabella raised her smoothie for another toast. “To Carl!”

  “To Carl,” we all said in unison.

  In two hours, I would be sharing a tearful goodbye with Gracie, but the fact that she was here now felt like a small miracle. As we left Isabella’s, I thanked her so many times for coming to Oceanside, she threatened to knock me out. But I truly felt like she had saved me that weekend—she may as well have shown up with little angel wings jutting out from her vintage acid-washed jean jacket. Even though she had come to Oceanside needing me, I had needed her right back.

  * * *

  Monday morning was like a cold splash of water to the head. I felt as though I had just returned from a long, exotic vacation—except the “vacation” had been nothing but heart-wrenching drama. Despite the emotional hangover, I was ready to get back to the grind and face the good, the bad, and the ugly of my life. In a way, I was back to where I’d started in June, when I’d first been faced with the existential questions about my plans for the future, or lack thereof. Only now, I was eight pounds lighter and actively heartbroken. Oh well, was all I could think. Time to switch into survivor mode.

  First thing after I woke up, I sent an e-mail to Sasha about the juice cleanse, asking if she’d be open to a presentation. It had to be worded just right—this was a woman who liked to be fooled into things, and luckily I knew how to make Sasha feel like I was trying to help her instead of the other way around. Writing the e-mail also bought me some time so I wouldn’t run into Julien in the kitchen; he had recently established a pattern of leaving for the office before nine a.m., while I had started showing up to campus around ten. I had been so frustrated, initially, when he’d started sending me off to the library to spend entire days at the Xerox machine. But now, having to face Julien alone for the first time since our kiss, I could not have been more relieved by my little hardship post. It meant I would only have to endure a few awkward minutes of niceties with him before retreating to the library where I could mope in peace if need be.

  After breakfast, I packed my lunch, which consisted of green salad and grilled chicken. At some point I was going to need to get more creative about my healthy diet instead of eating the same boring things over and over again, but not today. Like they often said in OA: baby steps!

  A punishing heat wave had descended early that morning and my car was sweltering when I got inside. It must have been 110 degrees in there. Feeling the first trickles of sweat spotting my T-shirt, I rolled the windows down and cranked the air-conditioning self-indulgently as I mentally prepared for a face-to-face with Julien.

  The drive to campus went by too quickly for my liking, thanks to the empty roads and stoplights that seemed permanently green. It was as if everyone had gone out of town just in time to escape the weather. Arriving at the Lit building, I climbed the front steps and another flight of stairs to the second floor where Julien’s office was tucked away at the end of the hall. The trek was not enough to warrant how out of breath I was by the time I appeared in his open doorway. Nerves had taken over and I was nearly panicked, but I tried my hardest to look indifferent. The truth was, I had no interest in talking about things; I didn’t need him to tell me that he was seeing somebody, for I knew now that whatever we had had was over before it even began. “Knock, knock!” I announced myself, my feet stopping at the wooden divider between the hardwood floors of his office and the granite-tiled hallway.

  “Mischa. Can you come in for a second?” Julien looked up from his laptop and placed his hands on his lap. He seemed grave.

  Nope. Not a good time, is what I wanted to say, but as I tried to come up with a proper excuse, I heard myself practically gasping for air. “Sorry, I’m a little winded from climbing those stairs. I was just stopping to check in actually. I have plenty of copying left to do from Friday, so—”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” He gestured to the chair across from his desk. “It won’t take long.”

  “Well, there’s nothing for me really to go over. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t have anything else that needed prioritizing before I went to the library.” I added a nonchalant wave of the hand to make clear how absolutely indifferent I was as my cheeks burned bright red.

  “If you don’t mind, Mischa, I think we should talk.” He nodded to the seat across from him, and I looked at it for a few seconds as my feet seesawed on the wooden divider. I tried, and failed, to come up with some reason why I couldn’t stay, then finally relented.

  “Do you mind closing the door?” he said after I’d started to move inside.

  Glancing behind me at the open door, I feared that once it was closed, Julien would launch into some insufferable speech about how we could never be together and how absolutely perfect this visiting professor was for him and all the ways that she outshined me. Perhaps he would stick a few extra nails in the coffin by using phrases like “I don’t know what I was thinking,” or “It’s not you, it’s me.” But
at the end of the day he was still my boss, so I closed it like he asked.

  “So!” I sat down with a freshly applied fake grin, placing my hands on my knees in a solicitous pose. “What’s up?”

  Julien leaned forward in his chair and snapped his computer shut. “We need to talk about what happened between us.”

  Right. That. “No, we really don’t,” I said. “I’ve seriously totally forgotten about it.”

  “Mischa—”

  “Seriously! I’d tell you if I wanted to talk about it. I’m not really a big talker, in general.”

  “Cecile mentioned you were upset when you heard about my date on Saturday. I didn’t even tell her I had gone on a date, and I certainly didn’t want you to hear it that way. I can’t imagine how it must have felt, after what we shared on Friday.”

  Tears started to well in the corners of my eyes. I licked my lips and squinted, squeezed my thighs with my hands, anything to keep from crying. Tears would make it look like I cared about him more. He would get the wrong idea. But nothing could stop the determined little droplets as they started to trickle down my cheeks. “I didn’t tell Cecile about us, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said. “And whatever she told you about that text… it’s not what it sounds like.”

  “I know. I’m not worried about Cecile right now. I’m worried about you.”

  “Well don’t be worried. I’m fine. Believe it or not, you’re not my real heartbreak of the summer.” I wanted to sound harsh and dismissive, but my cracking voice and dampened cheeks betrayed me. “I wish nothing had ever happened so we wouldn’t have to have this conversation,” I said, succumbing further to my heaving breaths that bordered on sobs.

  As I worked to even out my breathing, I noticed his eyebrows had scrunched up toward the middle of his forehead, and he was biting his lip. It seemed like a studied look, one that he’d used before, no doubt, to beg forgiveness.

  “Mischa, I just want you to know that I care about you, and I never meant for things to go as far as they did. You deserve to be with someone who’s right for you, someone who’s not your teacher.”

  “Were. You were my teacher.”

  “It’s more than that. There’s a lot of reasons we can’t be together. For one thing, I’m leaving. I took a new position in New York.”

  “What?” I braced the sides of my chair, rocked by the news. Regardless of what had happened in the past few days, I had come to view Julien and Cecile as a sort of surrogate family in Oceanside. The thought of them up and leaving felt like a betrayal.

  “I’ll be here through fall semester. We’ll move in the winter. Cecile doesn’t even know yet.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. A million questions swirled through my mind. How long had he known? Was it going to be a permanent move? Would he sell his house? “Does she know?” I finally asked, sounding unintentionally jealous.

  “Who?” he said.

  “The woman you’re dating.”

  “Andrea? She’s from New York, actually. She’s only here as a visiting professor.”

  “Well, that’s perfect,” I said. It was like some bitter ex-girlfriend of Julien’s had taken over my body. It wasn’t that I was so hurt by him, specifically, just that everything with Liam and Julien combined had left me so disillusioned.

  “Mischa, listen to me. You have an amazing life ahead of you, and I have no interest in bogging you down. Yes, we were drawn to each other, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense.”

  “Right, like another professor makes sense,” I said, still digging in, unable to stop myself fighting for something I hadn’t even wanted in the first place. “Because we should all be with people who are exactly like us. What about all the great love stories that we read about, the ones that you teach? What about… what about Janie and Tea Cake from Their Eyes Were Watching God?” I was grasping at straws, still trying to impress him with literary references.

  “Because we’re not living in a novel, Mischa! Because Tea Cake got rabies and had to be shot!” Julien’s voice had become stern and loud and he was leaning forward in his seat impatiently.

  “Fine.” I stood up from my chair, my eyes searching the ground as if my pride were something I had accidentally dropped there and just needed to be picked back up. “I shouldn’t be here. I’m gonna go to the library. I’ll find another place to stay as soon as possible—”

  His face softened. “What are you talking about?”

  “If you don’t mind, I want to keep the job until I find something else.”

  “You don’t have to move out. You’re welcome to stay through the fall if you want. Cecile loves having you there, and so do I.”

  “Yeah, it’s been real convenient for you, hasn’t it?”

  “Mischa, that’s not fair.”

  “I have to move, Julien. I have to move on with my life.” I wiped my face with the backs of my hands and walked slowly to the door, careful not to trip or do something else embarrassing in my fragile state.

  As I opened the door, Julien called out to me and I turned to look back. “Mischa, I wanted to be a mentor to you, but I screwed up. I’m sorry, okay?”

  I nodded, tacitly accepting his apology but offering nothing in return.

  He smiled and bit his lip again—this time, not so studied. “See you back at the house.”

  I looked at Julien a few more seconds before leaving. This was the face that sent butterflies aflutter in my stomach a mere forty-eight hours ago. Now it just made me sad, and I couldn’t bring myself to return his awkward smile.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I made my way down the second-floor hallway of the Lit building like a convict who’d just been released from prison, with no idea where to go. I was thankful, at least, that the building was completely empty. All summer, I had only seen one other professor there, an older white-haired woman named Dr. Dixon who taught Russian literature. I had never had a class with her, but I’d heard she was tough. As a person, though, she seemed nice enough, and I always smiled and waved into her office when she was in. Passing by her office, I saw it was closed and figured she had finally gone on vacation, but then, in the stairwell, I heard a set of footsteps coming and realized it must be her. I didn’t want to be spotted with my puffy eyes and wet cheeks, but unless I turned and ran at that very moment, there would be no avoiding her.

  “Oh, dear,” I heard her say when we crossed paths on the landing between the first and second floors. Much to my chagrin, Professor Dixon was staring at my face with a look of concern.

  “Yes?” I said, pretending not to know why she had greeted me in such a way. Her face was pretty up close, artfully wrinkled and very pale for Florida.

  “Come here,” she said, motioning toward herself.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I said. Although, before I knew it, I was obliging and walking into her arms to accept her embrace. I must have looked like one hell of a mess, or perhaps she had a heightened perception of other people’s feelings and like many old people, couldn’t care less about appearances. Either way I was surprised by how easily I fell into this stranger’s arms, the chemical-y coconut scent of her sunscreen hitting my nose as I let my head rest on her shoulder. We stayed that way, huddled together on the landing, for what seemed like a long time but was probably less than a minute.

  “Things seem so important when you’re young, don’t they?” she said, echoing Isabella as I finally pulled away.

  I nodded, drying my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “I guess they do.”

  “I’m sure everything’s going to be all right, whatever it is.”

  “Thank you,” I said. A few fresh tears had collected in the corners of my eyes, and I was fighting them back.

  “Good luck to you.” Professor Dixon winked and patted my shoulder as I stood there frozen, waiting for her to inquire more—to ask what had caused the tears or offer her unsolicited opinion on Julien Maxwell. Most people wouldn’t come upon a scene like this, I thought, and not have a morbid curio
sity about it. But she didn’t seem to have any curiosity at all. On the contrary, she waited only a few more seconds, then continued up the stairs without another word.

  It was a bizarre experience to say the least. I kept thinking about it as I crossed the quad on my way to the library and wondered what it meant that I had become so pathetic-looking that old ladies were compelled to reach out and hug me in passing. The thought made me laugh. Instead of going straight to work, I decided to sit down on a bench to collect myself.

  When I tried to go over what had just happened with Julien, I couldn’t seem to recall the conversation very clearly, as if I had already blacked it out to save myself the embarrassment. I knew that he had told me he was moving to New York and that we weren’t living in a novel. I could vaguely recall him saying something about “the amazing life I had ahead of me” and how he didn’t want to “bog me down.” If you were so concerned with my future, I thought, then why did you complicate things by kissing me in the first place? Part of me wished I had shouted at him back in his office and let him know it wasn’t okay to toy with people’s emotions, even though I knew it was better that I hadn’t.

  The fact of it was, I hadn’t been initially attracted to Julien, probably for good reason. And now he had found somebody that sounded like a reasonable match, someone he could start a new life with in New York and forget all the dark history he left behind in Oceanside. It made all the sense in the world, whereas whatever brief little connection we shared seemed born out of mutual loneliness more than anything else. I thought about Isabella’s story; how she had, at a young age, come to look at love as a business transaction. And then I thought about my good friend Gracie’s currently jaded point of view, that guys are, more or less, inherently evil. I didn’t want to feel either of those things, no matter what. I didn’t want the sum total of my experiences—starting with Bradley and ending with this summer—to be perpetual bitterness, although it would be hard to shake the bitterness for a while. Eventually, though, I wanted to be a person who believed in love, even if I thought I might never find it.