Dream of You (41 page)

             
A second to fire me?
“Sure.” He minimized the Excel spreadsheet in front of him and folded his hands over his desk, good and braced for what was to come.

             
Vaughn did not, this time, go through the elaborate routine of pulling up a chair and settling into it. He jammed his hands in the pockets of his track pants and gave Jordan a steady look from under his graying, caterpillar brows. Whatever he’d come to say, he wanted to say it fast and get out.

             
“I wanted to, um - ” He pursed up his mouth like he’d tasted something foul. “Apologize for a couple weeks ago.”

             
Jordan blinked. “Apologize?”

             
“You know, about that whole…well, what I said about…one of your students.” He scratched at the back of his neck and grimaced. “Turns out I had some bad information and well…I’m sorry about all that.” He shot him a glance that said he hated being wrong. “We’ll just forget it ever came up, okay?”

             
“Okay,” Jordan heard himself say, numb.

             
“You all ready for our trip this weekend?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“Good.” Vaughn smiled finally, drummed his fingers across the edge of the desk before he backed toward the door. “We’re gonna do great. I’ve got high hopes for your guys.”

             
“Yeah…me too…”

             
When he was gone, Jordan stared at the empty doorway a long, stupid moment. “What the hell was
that
?”

**

              “What did you do?”

             
Anton put his back up against the brick face of the convocation center and ducked down deeper into his hood, his phone coming out of the front pocket of his sweatshirt. The wind was angry, gray, and howling; and Jordan mirrored his stance, one foot propped back against the wall, his hair getting tugged and whipped against his head. He pulled his own hood up, scanned the sidewalk and flat, brown grass in front of them for suspicious lookers-on, and then let his eyes fall to the phone in Anton’s hand.

             
“Big surprise,” Anton said as he pulled up Facebook on the web, “Kyle isn’t creative with his Facebook password. Lane hacked in and, well…” He thumbed across the touch screen and then passed the phone to Jordan.

             
It was Kyle’s page, and the wall was covered with Ellie.

             
The first shot was Ellie and Lane, the two of them posed on a bench around the campus green, smiling at the camera. The caption read:
Happy 2 share, bro. Njoy her! Lmfao!

             
The next had been taken from a distance: two male students he didn’t recognize standing beneath a tree on the sidewalk with Ellie. He knew it was her – the chocolate hair tumbling in the wind, the black tights and gray pencil skirt, little heeled boots. The caption was:
totalllll slut!

             
They were unending: Ellie all across campus, talking to dozens of people, most of the shots candid, the captions damning. And down at the very bottom was the original photo of the disastrous Thanksgiving. There was a comment on the picture from Lane Goode:
dude, u know he’s her cousin
.

             
“How…” Jordan started to ask, shaking his head. He glanced up at Anton’s victorious smile. “
How
?”

             
“Lane said he could hack into Kyle’s Facebook. So then all we had to do was take some pics and make the douchebag look like a total stalker.”

             
“So
you
stalked Ellie instead?”

             
“No. Whoa.” He held up a hand. “Totally not creeping on your girl. We went and asked her and she totally agreed to help us. She wrote out all the quotes for the pics, even.”

             
If he had one more shock today, he was going to be convinced he’d been struck in the head and this was all a dream sequence. “She helped?”

             
“Oh, yeah. She was all over it.”

             
“And by some miracle, Vaughn just bought it?”

             
Another white, proud smile cut across Anton’s dark face. “Kyle’s getting investigated, man. For stalking. Ellie walked right into the president’s office with his page pulled up on her phone and told him she was, get this, ‘concerned for her safety.’”

             
For days afterward, in his mind’s eye, he kept seeing Ellie marching into the president’s office, chin tilted up, gray eyes big with concern, shaking on the outside and fearless on the inside as she saved his career.

33

             
I
n so many ways, Ellie wished she was a different person. But more than anything, she wished she was someone who had all her emotions safely under lock and key, detached from her physical being, separate from all the little decisions she made. Decisions like smiling at Coach Walker the afternoon they’d walked the campus green, like meeting him on the track that first dew-soaked morning, like inviting him into her home. She wanted to be a person who walked away from a Thanksgiving screaming match with a shrug and a keen eye out for her next bed warmer.

             
She didn’t want to be the person who found a Nike sock poking out from under her bed and then dissolved into fresh tears. Didn’t want to be a person who woke from a nightmare with his name on her lips, the weight of realizing he wasn’t there so crushing she could hardly breathe.

             
When he didn’t respond to her text the first day, she gave him space. When he hadn’t responded in three days, she knew he wasn’t going to. When she shivered with false fright in the president’s office, doing all that she could to save the job she’d cost him, she thought he might reach out…just might…but when he didn’t, she realized the worst thing of all. Yes, he was angry, yes he was wounded, yes she’d almost lost him his career. But the reason he hadn’t responded – the true, heartbreaking reason – was a reality she didn’t want to face: he didn’t love her. Her family, that horrible dinner, Kyle’s treachery…all of that had been sprinkles on top of the bad news sundae. She’d doomed them the night he’d asked her if she was in love with him and she’d said
yes
.

             
Because in so many ways, she wished she was a person who someone else could love, because she didn’t want to face a childless future alone.

             
She’d wanted, Halloween, as he’d traced his fingertip across her eyebrow, her body molded against his in a way that had become so familiar, for Jordan to be that someone, and she hated how naïve she was for that.

             
Friday, an empty, ragged shell after all her tears and a week of gathering up the shattered pieces of her romantic dreams, she buttoned up her pea coat against the harsh gray of a blustery afternoon and headed up the walk of her grandmother’s nursing home.

             
Abigail was in the common room, the large space looking naked without its Thanksgiving decorations. She was in the same slipper chair as the week before, a very professional looking man in his forties wearing a suit and tie in a chair beside hers.

             
“Hi, Grammy,” Ellie said, and it came out sounding more like a question than a greeting. She leaned down to hug her and shot a curious glance at the suit. He was busy scribbling something on a yellow legal pad. “What’s going on?”

             
“Oh, sit, sit, sweetheart.” Abigail waved her to a third chair, the same one she’d crumpled into on Thanksgiving. She sat. Abigail straightened the halves of her sweater and the way her oxygen tube rested between them. “This is Alex. You remember my attorney, don’t you?”

             
Vaguely. “Hi.” Ellie nodded him a hello and he nodded back.

             
“Do you have any cash on you, dear?” her grandmother asked. “I’m afraid you’re going to need a whole dollar for our little transaction.”

             
The phone call before, despite Abigail’s cheerful tone, had been somewhat alarming. “Something pressing” that required her attention before work that night was not the sort of thing she wanted to hear about her ailing relative. “What sort of transaction are you talking about?”

             
“Well.” Abigail folded her small, veined and spotted hands in her lap, a very prim, matter-of-fact light coming into her eyes. Under her wrinkles, despite her O
2
supply, a regal glimmer of her younger self came shining through to the surface. “Last week was the last straw.”

             
“Last straw?”

             
“I raised a Stevie – I thought he’d grow up to be the kind of son mothers dream of.”

             
Ellie winced.

             
“No, no, don’t go feeling sorry for him. I’m at the end of my life, I can be brutally honest. I raised a Stevie and instead he’s a Stephen, and even if he is my son and I love him, I can’t be proud of the way he’s treated you.”

             
“Grammy, I’m sorry about crying the other day. Really - ”

             
Abigail cut her off with one lifted finger. “I will not excuse him. Or your mother, for that matter. You should not be
in tears
on a holiday. It’s absurd.

             
“You, my little novelist,” she continued, “are a very rare and special little girl.”

             
Oh, God
. The punch of tears at the backs of her eyes was swift and sudden. She didn’t want to be the poor, pitiful creature who needed lifting up. Really she didn’t. She knew exactly how special she
wasn’t
…but damn if it wasn’t nice to hear someone say it.

             
“I don’t know,” Abigail sighed, “if I’ll get to stick around and see you get married, see you have children.”

             
“Grammy, you don’t - ”

             
“But I can do something for you now.”

             
Ellie dashed at her eyes with her fingertips and wondered if she would ever be able to stop crying. “You don’t need to do anything for me,” she assured.

             
Abigail sat up straighter in her chair, adjusted her sweater again. “Oh, but I do. Get out your dollar, sweetheart. I’m selling you my house.”

**

             
“
Your
house? As in, you
own
it? All of it? It’s in
your
name?
For a dollar
?”

             
“For a dollar,” Ellie said as she propped her elbows on the kitchen’s center island and set her chin in her hands. Paige was sprinkling mini M&Ms into a bowl of confetti cake batter and she snitched three from the bag.

             
“Do you mean to tell me - ” Paige set her wooden mixing spoon aside so her erratic hand gestures wouldn’t be impeded. “That I am standing, right now, in
your
kitchen?”

             
“Indeed.”

             
“Hooooly shit!” She bounced up and down on rigid legs like a little girl. “El, this is huge!”

             
“I know.” It was too huge: it was the worst kind of gift – one given in pity – and exactly the sort of thing that would bring her mother, her father, and her sister’s wrath down on her like laser-guided missiles.

             
“Oh my God, we soooo need some champagne.” Paige went to their hideous but somehow charming avocado circa 1970-something fridge and began rummaging through the top shelf. “Which we - ” dramatic sigh “ - don’t have, but…ooh, here we go.” She returned to the island with a half empty bottle of pink Moscato – the one Jordan had brought her. “This’ll have to do,” she said as she pulled two mismatched glasses down from the cabinet. “Where did you even get this? I don’t remem…oh.”

             
Ellie studied her fingernails.

             
“Shithead brought it, didn’t he?”

             
“He has a name.”

             
“I know. I just said it.”

             
She glanced up at her friend, nibbling at her lower lip. Paige had her hands on her hips, head tilted as if to say
really? You’re gonna defend him?

             
“El, he was a giant ass to you. Do yourself a favor and forget he ever existed.”

             
Which would have been decent advice if that wasn’t impossible. She studied a stray glob of strawberry icing that marred one of the white tiles of the stovetop backsplash and, for maybe the first time in her life, struggled to find the words.