Mostly MyBoss

by Doyle, S.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  Daniel put his cup on an available surface—there weren’t many—and left the house. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw that it wasn’t midnight yet. It was lame wanting to go home before twelve, but sweater or not, it appeared I still wasn’t interested in picking up random guys. And there was always work I could be doing.

  “I’m going to call a cab,” I told Ethan.

  He reached out to grab my hand. “Wait, so early?”

  “I know, your plans with that girl probably aren’t until later, but I really don’t feel like hanging around just to be her placeholder.”

  He winced and so did I. That had sounded super bitter.

  “That came out bitchier than I meant it to. Sorry.”

  He looked at me like he sometimes did when a professor was saying something that I could tell he was connecting with. As if, through all the noise, he’d singled out the most important fact.

  “Does it bother you? Me hooking up?”

  “No,” I spat. “Of course not. Don’t be insane.”

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  “We’ve already well established exactly what we are. And we are not the hooking-up type. Besides, I’m mad at you, like, five times a day.”

  “Yes, I know. I irritate a lot of people. You’re the only who seems to stick around.”

  I smiled and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “You’re probably feeding into my subconscious desire to fix the people in my life. But whatever. So I can go?”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said and pulled out his own phone, presumably to call us a cab.

  “What about the girl?”

  “There will be others. You’re the only who’s going to cook me Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “It’s just turkey, stupid.”

  Then he looked at me with a serious expression, one that brought out a wrinkle between his thick eyebrows. “It’s everything, Jules.”

  I tried not to think too much about what that meant.

  * * *

  A few weeks later

  “Mom, no. It doesn’t make sense. A ticket is going to cost too much, and no one has the time to drive across country to both pick me up then bring me back.” I sighed into the phone and simultaneous kicked Ethan, who was sitting on the edge of my bed trying to doodle on the top of my foot.

  Nicki was hanging out in the room, too. Although I knew it was just because Ethan had chosen to stay in with me this Friday night as I was currently dealing with the head cold from hell. Thanksgiving was long over (Ethan nearly went spastic over my green bean casserole, which was the same recipe everyone who bought a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup had, but whatever) and now the long holiday break was ahead of us after a few more finals.

  Mom wanted me to come home for Christmas, which meant it was up to me to be the adult and explain why that couldn’t happen.

  “Fine, you can look into it, but you’re not going to find anything for less than three hundred dollars round trip. I don’t have that kind of money and neither do you.”

  I glanced at Ethan who had lost interest in his doodle and looked at me with speculation.

  I listened to my mom talk about how she was doing really well with the budgeting, then I said the ugly thing. The thing she didn’t want to acknowledge because it meant she wasn’t going to see her youngest child at Christmas.

  “If you have extra money, you know where it needs to go, Mom. The bank is being patient. It won’t be patient forever. If they see you’re making an effort, that will help.”

  She wanted to know if I was going to be lonely.

  “I’m not Harry Potter left behind at Hogwarts, okay? There are going to be a ton of people here doing what I’m going to be doing, which is getting a head start on the next semester.”

  I could hear the tears in her voice, but I could not let myself be moved by them. This was the smart thing. The responsible thing to do.

  “I’ll FaceTime on Christmas day. I’ll send you guys a package. It will almost be like we’re together. You’ll see. You have to the embrace the technology.”

  After a few hiccups and a few more promises to call more often she let me go.

  “That sucks that you can’t go home, Julia,” Nicki said, not even pretending she hadn’t eavesdropped.

  “It’s fine. It’s no big deal. I’m not even a little bothered by it.”

  Ethan looked at me with that expression I was coming to really hate. Like he could see through all my bullshit and knew every lie I told. But he glanced over at Nicki and I could tell whatever point he wanted to make, he wasn’t going to do it in her presence.

  “You guys are really just going to hang out here tonight?” she asked us.

  “I am,” I said, reaching over to my nightstand to grab another tissue. I was at that stage where it hurt to blow my nose because I hadn’t sprung for the extra-soft tissue brand but I’d had no choice. “You guys should go out, though.”

  “Ethan, Dara’s pulling a bunch of people to go see that old black-and-white retro movie playing at O’Neil’s. We should go.”

  “Casablanca,” I supplied. “It’s a classic.”

  “No, thanks. I’m going to hang here. I’m taking care of Jules.”

  “Do not use me as an excuse. It will make me feel guilty,” I said, blowing what felt like was an endless amount of snot into my tissue. Seriously, who could possibly want to be around me when I was like this?

  Nicki got up and waved her phone at us. “Text if change your mind, Ethan.”

  “Yep.”

  She left and I looked down at my foot to see what he’d drawn. “Your name? Seriously? I have your name on the top of my foot in black magic marker.”

  “Some might call it my signature,” he insisted, then blew on it so it would dry.

  I yanked my foot away from him. “Some might not!”

  “Why aren’t you going home for Christmas?”

  “You heard why. I can’t afford it and my family can’t afford it.”

  He shook his head. “That’s a lie and we both know it. The money I’ve paid you over the semester for your notes would more than cover a plane ticket.”

  “I have other expenses, Ethan.”

  Another shake of his head. “No you don’t. You don’t spend money on anything other than the occasional transportation or hot dogs. I know you pretty well and my guess is you’ve saved hundreds of dollars.”

  Eight hundred and thirty dollars, to be exact. However, five hundred of it was earmarked for the bank. I hadn’t been lying about that. If I could continue to make quarterly payments in addition to what my mother was doing, the bank would be less likely to pull the trigger on foreclosing. So yes, I’d saved money. And, yes, technically I had enough for a plane ticket. But none of that was going to change the fact that there were better things I could be doing with that money.

  However, that wasn’t the reason I wasn’t going home. I’d looked into the bus and could probably make the trip in two days for less than a hundred and twenty dollars.

  “Going home would mostly be about me trying to fix everyone’s shit in the two weeks I was there. An impossible task that would only frustrate me. If I don’t go home they might have to figure some things out on their own. Besides, I wasn’t really lying. I’m going to get started on my computer science coursework.”

  Our schedules were already set. We had three classes together, but he was taking a business ethics class while I wanted to add some tech classes to my résumé.

  “I still don’t get why you’re taking that. It’s going to be a bunch of wannabe coders.”

  “Exactly. Which is only going to increase my stock. You know how rare it is for women to graduate with STEM degrees. An economics major with a computer science minor is going to put me on top for any of the major recruiters.”

  “What are you talking about?” His forehead bunched in a way that almost made his eyebrows touch.

  “Uh, the job that I’m going to
need when I graduate so I can pay off my debt.”

  “I’m going to give you that job. I’ll have my idea by then.”

  He was irritated and, having known him for a couple of months, I knew there were two directions I could go: I could either

  a) humor him

  b) pull him back down to reality because sometimes I was the only one could.

  “Well, in case you don’t have the big idea by then. This is just a backup.”

  He stood up and paced the room. “You don’t believe in me yet. I get it. I haven’t really proven anything to you.”

  “Ethan, you don’t have to prove anything to me. But you have to appreciate I can’t plan my life around some idea you might have. I won the lottery already. I got into Harvard. I’ve got to turn that degree into money sooner rather than later.”

  His lips thinned out and I knew there was more he wanted to say but he had to know I was right.

  “You should come home with me for Christmas,” he said instead. “Just a few days over the holiday to New York. It will be…well, my family and pretty horrible, but at least you’ll be able to say you have plans.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  He laughed. “This isn’t for you, Jules. Trust me. Having you there will give my mother something to focus on besides me and might make dealing with my father a little more…bearable.”

  A chance to meet his family. To see what spawned him. Yeah, I was not going to pass that up. It would also make my mother feel less guilty if she knew I was going home with a friend.

  “Okay.”

  He nodded. Then he pulled out his phone and typed out a text. “I’m going to meet up with Nicki.”

  I didn’t ask him if he was mad at me because he had no right to be. Not for making future career plans without him. Not for my class schedule. Not for thinking I might actually need to find a job he wasn’t going to provide for me.

  So I didn’t ask if that was really why he was leaving. Because that would be ridiculous.

  “Sure. Good. Have fun.”

  He stared at me hard, but in the end I pulled out another tissue to distract myself and he left.

  As soon as he was gone I got up and went to the bathroom, but no matter how hard I scrubbed it, I couldn’t get his stupid name off my foot.

  * * *

  New York

  Julia

  “We’re so excited Ethan decided to bring you home to meet us. We wanted to him to have the real college experience with friends that would really be there for him, do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  Ethan was right. Mrs. Rachel Moss had been very excited to meet me. She’d been fawning over both of us since we walked through the door. Now we were seated at the table for Christmas dinner and I’d never seen dishes and glasses like this. So fancy I was almost afraid to touch them.

  Candles were lit on the table along with a bowl of fresh pine cones arranged as an artful decoration. I was glad I’d brought the only skirt I owned and paired it with my blue sweater. Both Ethan and his father were wearing ties.

  It was interesting. His father was handsome in the traditional sense and his mother was also attractive, if a little buttoned up, but I didn’t think Ethan looked like either one of them. No burnished red hair or green eyes to be found.

  “So are you two dating?” Mrs. Moss asked, as if she was looking for some gossip from me.

  “Mom,” Ethan groaned and I smiled at his obvious discomfort.

  “That’s not what they do these days,” his father corrected Rachel. “They don’t date, they hang out. Isn’t that right, Ethan? Are you two hanging out?”

  I smiled again because Mr. Moss used rabbit ears around the words hanging out and Ethan closed his eyes in utter embarrassment.

  “No,” I said, letting Ethan off the hook. “We’re not dating or hanging out. We’re just friends.”

  “Just friends,” Mrs. Moss repeated. “Well that’s good too. And are you eating Ethan? You don’t look like you’re eating.”

  “I’m eating.”

  And if he wasn’t, all the food being served at this meal would set him up for the rest of the year.

  “And sleeping?” she asked. “Are you sleeping regularly?”

  “Do you need a prescription?” his father asked. “I can write you one.”

  “No, I’m sleeping fine. Everything is fine,” he said tightly.

  Silence settled then but it wasn’t comfortable.

  “Tell me, Julie—”

  “Julia,” Ethan corrected his father.

  “Sorry,” he said, bending his head in his son’s direction. I noticed, though, that his jaw was ticking as if Ethan had annoyed him with the correction. “Tell us why you’re not at home with your family over the holiday?”

  I glanced over at Ethan, surprised he hadn’t told them. Was he worried about what they would think? About me or my family? We didn’t have money. It wasn’t something I was thrilled with, but I wasn’t going to be embarrassed by it, either.

  “My father died of a heart attack a few years ago. Since then it’s just my mother and brothers running the farm so money is tight. I couldn’t really afford to go home.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Mrs. Moss smiled a little awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable with the discussion of money at the dinner table. “Ethan told us. A farm...in Idaho. Potatoes.”

  “Iowa. Corn. But…close.”

  Ethan shook his head in disgust and I had to bite my lip.

  “But you earned a place at Harvard,” Ethan’s father chimed in. “So that’s all that matters now.”

  “Not just earned her place. Jules made the Dean’s List,” Ethan supplied.

  I was about to explain that I hadn’t exactly escaped from the farm, it was my home, when an elderly Hispanic woman who’d been introduced as Esmeralda entered the dining room with another tray of food. This was after a solid hour of what Mrs. Moss referred to as cocktail snacks before in the living room.

  “Ah, the fish course,” Ethan’s mother announced. “Excellent.”

  “Not to discuss shop over the holiday,” Ethan’s father said. “But I’ve looked over your course selection for the next semester and I’ve made two corrections. I really feel you’re not challenging yourself the way you need to. You’ll need to notify the dean as soon as possible.”

  I leaned back as Esmeralda served some piece of fish I didn’t recognize and couldn’t possibly eat after the last course and waited for Ethan to contradict his father. I knew the careful planning he’d put into his class selection. There was no way he was making any changes.

  “Of course,” he said instead. “I’ll need to wait until after the holiday. No one will be around these next few days.”

  Ethan held up his glass and Esmeralda brought some of the red wine over from the serving table and filled it.

  “Ethan, you shouldn’t be drinking,” his father said with obvious disapproval.

  “A couple of glasses of wine. It’s Christmas.”

  His father’s expression darkened. “The day doesn’t care about your condition.”

  Condition? That seemed harsh.

  “It’s important, Julie, when you’re with him at school, to make sure he doesn’t drink,” his mother told me. “He reacts poorly to alcohol when he’s on his meds. He needs to be very careful.”

  I didn’t bother to correct my name. I looked at Ethan. “I thought you were only on one medication.”

  “He’s on six that I’ve prescribed,” his father said. “Although I don’t understand why I haven’t had to sign for any refills.”

  “I’m actually doing quite well without them,” Ethan said to his father. “The Adderall has been the only one I’ve needed. And only periodically.”

  Mr. Moss set his silverware carefully down on top of his plate, the ticking in his jaw now more pronounced.

  “I didn’t realize in your spare time you’d earned a degree in medicine.”

  “Of course not, Dad
. I simply haven’t needed—”

  “I’ll write the scripts,” he interrupted. “You’ll fill them before you leave to go back to school. Now push that glass of wine to the side so Esmeralda knows to take it away on her next trip.”

  Which happened ten minutes later.

  “Ah, the meat course,” Mrs. Moss proclaimed.

  * * *

  “Holy fuck!” I said once we were in his room with the door closed.

  “I told you it would be bad,” he groaned. “We can head back tomorrow after breakfast.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” I told him. I kicked off my loafers and climbed up on his ginormous bed to sit next to him. “Your mom’s a little overanxious, and your dad’s a little on the stern side…”

  He raised a brow. “A little? Not quite. He was on his best behavior with you here. The grilling would have been far more intense if I’d come alone. I suspect it’s not over, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was about to answer me but stopped. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Are you going to change your classes?”

  Ethan huffed. “No. That’s not how it works. I’ll simply lie and tell him I couldn’t get into either class. He’ll make a few phone calls, but I’ve lined up enough support with the administrative staff to have them back me up.”

  “Seriously?” I asked him.

  “My father doesn’t like not getting his way. So to get my way I’ve had to develop methods of getting around him. Bribery can be very effective.”

  We were sitting on the king-sized bed in his big bedroom, in his parents’ large Upper East Side apartment (I now understood that Upper East Side was code for money) and I thought maybe he had it way worse than I did. My family was difficult on their best day but they were loving and supportive. At least, John was when he was sober.

  No one could accuse Ethan’s mom of not being loving, but it was tainted with a hint of what felt like obsession. And his father…it felt like Ethan was a disappointment to him but I didn’t see how that could be. Ethan was a freaking genius.