Amy Inspired (42 page)

“What do you think?” I asked.

He bobbed his head.

“I agree.”

Enough was enough.

I found Anonymous working in the copy room.

“Lonnie, can I talk to you a second?”

He started. “Sure. Absolutely. I was just clocking out.” He rushed to clear a spot for me on the chair beside his. I sat down across the table, careful to keep a barrier between us.

“Working all summer?” I asked.

“Monday through Friday. I work at Blimpie’s now, too. You should come by. I give out free chips.”

I said I would have to think about it. In the ensuing pause, he took, predictably, to memorizing his sneakers.

“Since last semester started, I’ve been getting a lot of things in my mailbox—books and poems. I’m assuming they’re from you.”

“They’re not mine.”

“You’re the only person I know whose printer ink always fades two inches from the bottom.” I held up the poem, Exhibit A.

He bowed his head. His cheeks reddened, neck to ears. It was more a full-body hive than a blush. “I have to send them to a scholarship competition,” he mumbled. “I thought maybe you could edit them for me.”

I slid the poem across the table. “I’m not your English teacher anymore, Lonnie. And I think that—interacting—in this way is unprofessional.”

He snatched the poem. The folded paper disappeared under the table with his hands. “Ms. Gallagher, you shouldn’t think I meant anything. I didn’t mean anything, really … I like you and all, but I didn’t …” He blushed an even deeper shade of crimson.

Another professor walked in the room. Lonnie’s eyes darted nervously from me to the professor and back to the floor. I’d already thought of numerous ways to discourage this childish flirtation once and for all, but in the moment the rehearsed speeches failed me. I hated to shame him more than was necessary. “It must be ninety degrees in here,” I declared. “I was actually on my way downstairs for something to drink. Some company would be nice.”

At the snack machines Lonnie gave the off-brand animal crackers his highest recommendation. We took our crackers and Mountain Dews and sat beneath the overbearing oil portrait of Dr. Hoover, the building’s beneficiary and (some said) ghost.

“I have a theory about you, Lonnie.”

“Yeah?” He shook his hair out of his eyes. He was wearing a Ghost Busters T-shirt, stiff as the papers in the copy room and emanating a floral odor of Snuggle dryer sheets. My first kiss smelled of laundry. It was as if all the young men I’d known worked overtime to compensate for the funk of their bodies, that chemical party surging through their mind and limbs.

“You were born a romantic.”

He snorted. Either he disagreed or he thought the label funny. As usual, he was not a kid whose language—verbal or physical—I could translate.

“You want a girlfriend, don’t you?”

“More than anything,” he said with unabashed desperation.

“Have you ever had one?”

“In the second grade.”

“You don’t waste any time.”

“Annie Dobbins,” he said.

“What was she like?”

“Super smart. She had red hair and freckles. We got married on the playground. ”

“That must have been interesting.”

“Everybody came to see. At indoor recess we named our children. Spring and Autumn. Those were the girls. Lephen for a boy. We made that one up.”

“So what happened to Annie?”

“She moved. Her dad got a new job in Michigan. But I tracked her down in high school. Now she’s in Sacramento with her boyfriend.” He stuffed a few animal crackers into his mouth. “She works at a Clinique cosmetics counter at the Florence mall.”

Creepy stalker knowledge. Fleetingly, I imagined Lonnie in his dorm room Googling Amy Gallagher.

“Lonnie, the difficult thing about being a romantic is that there’s only one person out there for you. One. Out of millions. So you shouldn’t be surprised if it takes a few years to find her.”

“How will I know if I find her?”

I parroted what my mom always told me, because for the first time I think I understood what she meant: “You’ll know.”

He took a last gulp of his soda before tossing the empty can at the wall above the recycling bin. It missed the bin and fell to the floor with a clatter.

“It’s not fair. I’ve been single for like forever. I haven’t even gotten to third base. I’m not even sure I know what the bases are.” He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms, pinched his eyes shut. “The girls in my hall don’t even know I exist.”

“You don’t know that.”

“They think I’m just some geek. Like I’m in love with Buffy or something. Don’t get me wrong, she’s about the most premium girl there is, but I’m not in love with her. I know she’s not real.”

“I’ve been in love with a lot of fictional men,” I said. “It’s easy to fall hard for people, for things, that aren’t real.”

“What about your guy?”

“My guy?”

“That dude with the tattoo who used to walk you to class.”

It was my turn to be embarrassed. “We’re not together.”

“That’s not what it looked like,” Lonnie persisted.

“He’s just a friend.”

“Yeah.” He closed his eyes again, leaned his head against the wall and nodded back and forth slowly. “Whatever.”

For one absurd moment I was actually tempted to ask him if he thought I had a chance.

Back in my office I gave him the campus dance recital tickets one of the professors had passed off to me. I’d been holding on to them in the hopes I would have someone to go with.

“Listen, Lonnie. I want you to find a nice girl and take her to this concert, and I want you to do it for fun, okay? She doesn’t have to be your soul mate to be a nice date.”

He turned the envelope in his hands, studying it as if it were a complicated piece of machinery.

“What if I ask a girl and she says no?”

I genuinely hurt for him. Of all the students I’d befriended, of all the aspiring writers I’d coached, it was when looking at Lonnie— Lonnie of the Battlerstar Galactica T-shirts and the cherry berry ChapStick—that I saw myself.

“Then you smile, shrug your shoulders, and ask someone else,” I replied. “And, Lonnie—no poems. Not right away. Your readership may not be ready for them just yet.”

“Okay,” he said, stuffing the envelope in his backpack. “I promise, Ms. Gallagher.”

As soon as he left, I returned to my office and dug through the trash until I found the postcard Eli had sent. I folded it in half, slipped it in my jacket pocket.

From the office window I watched until Lonnie appeared on the sidewalk below. Maybe the next object of his love would return the interest. Maybe she would even be his age. But what can you do with a romantic, really? They’re called hopeless for good reason.

“This is just like the last one; his work’s not even on here,” Zoë said. She handed the postcard back to me. “That’s not a good sign. They always put the best stuff on the card.”

She carried the dishes I’d stacked to the sink. “You know, the problem with Eli is that he waits too long and farts around and doesn’t get the big projects done. It’s the lack of discipline that most hurts his work.”

When her criticism of his procrastination didn’t cheer me up, she went on, “I’ve been thinking that it’s a good thing you and Eli didn’t work out.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s not the settling type.”

The phrase sent bells off in my head. I heard Adam breaking up with me all over again.
“You were born settled.”

She left the room complaining about e-mails. I stayed in the kitchen and copied recipes from
Vegetarian Weekly
. I lay in my bed and tried to read. I did a Luna Lady face peel. I reorganized my closet. I put my sweaters in the boxes I used to store journals and organized the journals by date on top of the shelf where my sweaters had been.

When I tried to throw one last notebook on top of an already too heavy pile, the rest fell down on my head. I hollered some unnecessary obscenity before throwing myself backward on the bed.

Zoë tapped on the door.

“Are you all right?”

“Mmm-mmm.”

She peered in the closet. “What happened in there?”

I had my eyes closed. I waved my hand dismissively. “Something fell.”

“You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”

I shook my head.

She lay down on the bed beside me. “I got my work schedule for next week. Did you know it’s already the twenty-first? I can’t believe it’s been more than a year since we moved in together.”

She said this with a strangely nostalgic tone. It annoyed me. I couldn’t think of a single excuse she had to remember this year fondly. Because I was exhausted and because I was anxious, I said as much to her aloud.

“I don’t know. It had its moments.” She cracked up. “Remember when you set the fire alarm off? When Eli was first here? I think he nearly peed his pants.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

“Who knows what he thought of us,” she said. “Fighting over checklists, over that stupid magazine.”

For no good reason we both got the giggles. Then we started to laugh, really laugh, until our sides hurt. When we’d recovered, she sidled up to me, skin sticky with sweat, and laid her head on my shoulder. When her wig brushed my skin I shuddered.

“Zoë, how long are you going to wear those things?”

“As long as I need to. They smell like her, you know.”

“You could just keep her clothes,” I said. “I’m sure they smell as good.”

“But that would be so much less interesting.”

A cool breeze rustled the curtain. Two blocks away a car rumbled by on the cobblestones. Kathryn’s wind chimes jangled in that discordant way that always sounded so lonely to me.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been thinking about Eli. I know you miss him.”

I started to protest, but she stopped me.

“You’d think losing a parent would be all the hurt a body could handle. But there are still nights when I think of Michael. I miss him, too, in all his stupid ways.”

I put my arm around her shoulder, forcing myself to not mind the wig and how alarmingly real it felt. “He did have a way of reducing the collective intelligence in a way that was entertaining,” I agreed.

“What I said about Eli—I didn’t mean for that to upset you. It’s just that I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“It’s all right, Zoë,” I said. “In a weird way, you said exactly what I needed to hear.”

“So can I go to bed now without worrying about you?”

The irony of her question was almost funny. If she had any idea how many sleepless nights I lay in bed waiting for her to wake from nightmares and call my name: I’d never been so worried for anyone in my life.

“You can go to bed,” I reassured her.

But she was asleep before either of us found the motivation to get up.

I kissed her brow, relieved. The narrow bed was a ship in the night and sleep the safest passage to morning. I thought of Jesus in the boat with His disciples as they tried to cross the sea in a nighttime storm. Whenever ministers preached from that story, they always focused on the disciples’ unbelief: If only they had truly trusted the Lord, they wouldn’t have been so afraid of the waves and lightning.

What struck me, however, was that Jesus was asleep despite the violence of the storm. I was taken by the thought of a Savior who could be so utterly exhausted.

Because she was in my bed, it took me twice as long to pack. Every drawer I opened creaked too loudly. Every light was too bright. I didn’t want to wake her, because I didn’t want to explain.

At two in the morning, a small duffel bag in hand, I gently clicked the bedroom door shut. I studied the directions I’d printed out, memorizing the route. I set my alarm for five. I lay down on the futon fully dressed. In my head I did the math: The exhibition was from seven to ten. If I left by six, if I only took three half-hour breaks, and if there were absolutely no traffic jams, accidents, or unexpected breakdowns, I would arrive in time to get dinner and freshen up before the show.

The night dragged on. I held my eyes tightly shut, but like a child on Christmas Eve I was too excited to sleep. At the very first hint of birdsong, I threw off the blanket and reached for my shoes.