Friday Mornings at Nine (12 page)

Thursday, September 23

T
he MapQuest directions informed Jennifer that it would take precisely ninety-two minutes to reach the C-IL-U campus from Glendale Grove—her first time returning since graduation. The MapQuest directions did not take into account, however, her shaking hands, her three dire rest stops or her bizarrely inconsistent driving speed, which had her racing sixteen miles per hour above the speed limit, then crawling at thirteen miles per hour below it, depending on the nature of her thoughts.

She’d tried to block out those thoughts—first with talk radio and then with music. She’d switched from the talk station to the music after ten minutes because they were discussing some sports thing that bored her so much she’d tuned it out and begun daydreaming about David.

Unfortunately, after a trifecta of brokenheartedness on the easy-listening station (Jackson Browne’s “Love Needs a Heart” followed by David Soul’s “Don’t Give Up On Us” and, finally, to round out the maudlin set, the Carpenters’ “Hurting Each Other”), she figured her own reflections couldn’t be as damaging as what she was hearing. She snapped off the radio completely and drove in silence for most of the way there.

Five minutes from campus, however, she felt as though she’d been abducted by youthful aliens in a time travel assault, then forced into captivity in their parallel universe. There were places that looked familiar, only they weren’t. There were groupings of people she had once been a part of, only they now had a wholly different membership.

That corner grocery store on the way out of town—Kirby’s—was still standing, but its colors had all changed. The distinctive green door was now beige. And who knew what the shopping was like there these days? Used to be they’d had the cheapest peanut butter and generic bags of chocolate chips on campus for when she and David were in the mood for a late night dessert pizza. They’d get all the other ingredients there, too: the mix-n-bake pizza dough for the crust, the bananas, the occasional bag of mini marshmallows.

The video rental place that had once been right across the street from Kirby’s now had a “Verizon” placard where the neon “Hot Video” sign used to be. That was where she’d first gotten a copy of
The Abyss,
which almost made her breath stop watching it. And David, perv that he was, always rented
A Clockwork Orange
just to torment her.

She slowed as she approached the campus proper. She spotted two sets of couples. One pair loitered in silence by the Fine Arts building. One pair held hands on the walkway toward the Catacombs, the student union.

There was a clique of girls clumped together who—Jennifer’s heart clenched—looked barely older than Veronica and her friends. Oh, God. Her little girl would be huddled in a group like this and giggling over similar nonsense in just a few years. She felt a sudden and very deep pang of empathy for Tamara, who’d been experiencing this teen-to-adult transition with Benji.

She saw a dozen different girls of all variations, including one twenty-something with glasses, dressed in a premeditatedly sloppy way, surrounded by a small cluster of boys. The girl was cute-ish but far from a beauty queen type. However, she had a presence Jennifer could detect from half a block away. She stood with such a confident posture that the unified gaze of all four guys was fixed on her.

Jennifer suspected from the number of students roaming the sidewalk that a class session had just ended and that this girl was in one of the heavily male-dominated courses. Nothing caught a geek boy’s eye faster than a woman who could hold her own in a ten to one male-to-female ratio class like quantum physics, actuary science or computer programming.

And something else Jennifer noticed—or, rather,
felt,
which was always a surprising sensation: The air outside her car practically hummed with the breath of possibility. All these kids—the princesses, the jocks, the computer geeks—were on the verge of a great unknown. They were
alive
in a way she was not.

She rolled down the window to inhale the aching scent of Uncertainty mated to Excitement—the act flooding her lungs with both oxygen and the intoxication of youth. It’d been so long since she’d felt the latter, she scarcely recognized herself. Like a former version—Jennifer 2.0 BETA—even though she’d been upgraded to the well-tested but safe and uninspired Jennifer 5.0.

Just to be sure there was no match between her emotional rush and her appearance, she flipped down the driver’s side visor and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Nope. She was no longer twenty-two. No longer single. No longer free to consider the world a 3GB hard drive full of possibilities. And yet—

“Watch it, lady!” a college boy on a skateboard shouted, his expression pissed off, his accompanying hand gesture decidedly rude as he skimmed through the crosswalk she’d been obliviously driving into. Hmm. She glanced to her right, only now noticing the stop sign.

She waited until he and a handful of other kids passed by, forcing herself to concentrate on this last leg of what had become an eighteen-year journey. It wasn’t just driving to a library in another town and finding a parking spot. It was returning to David and the life of possibility they’d left behind.

Like a programmer doing a code check of a new design before going live, Jennifer did a full analysis of all her parts before stepping out of the safety of the car. Head. Body. Style. The CSS of her physical and emotional state. What was consistent?

In her expert opinion as a designer, there were too many emotions competing for precedence within her, crashing discordantly, like when there were too many fonts on a Web page. Only one, maybe two, should be dominant. Choosing the style of type to be used for the header, subheader, small text was always a critical design task. Selecting a lead emotion should, likewise, be expected. No more of this mishmash of feelings. Was Anxiety her primary emotional font or merely the subheader? Where did Curiosity, Excitement and Relief fit on the page of this strange, long-awaited day?

Finally, she ought to get some answers. Perhaps that was her key to these odd sentiments and internal signals. She felt that peculiar vibration deep in her gut, like the sensation she had right before launching a new site. She may have designed it and have had a strong sense of what the final outcome would be, but she never knew
exactly
what it would look like until she viewed it live for the first time.

Jennifer jumped out of her car, feigning an air of spontaneity. She skittered along the small path to Hooke Library, wondering if she blended well enough with the coeds on the walkway, or if they were as acutely aware of her inability to fit in as she was.

Stepping at a brisk pace up to the front doors, she scanned as surreptitiously as possible for someone as equally anachronistic with the current time and place. After studying a score or more faces—and David’s not among them—she began to feel a whole new sensation. One that was a mighty leap up from mere anxiety.

But she fought her worry. She’d give him five minutes, maybe ten. She glanced at her watch. Well, okay, maybe fifteen. She’d driven the whole way here, after all. But she somehow had to find a place to stand where she could be at once watchful and inconspicuous. Visible to David, if he should materialize, but neither overly eager nor unduly apprehensive in the eyes of the library staff (she was trying hard not to look as though she were casing the place for a break-in), the students walking by or David himself when—or, heaven help her,
if
—he spotted her. Somehow she had to control the first impression he might have of her in nearly two decades, provided, of course, that she could project all of these semicontradictory qualities at once.

She shuffled to the side of the outdoor entranceway, repositioning herself with her back to the bricks and her body poised to pay riveted attention to a steel pole with flyers taped to it.

She skimmed over the offerings for what felt like an hour, though only a few minutes in reality: a punk band playing the next night at the student union. A request for a second-semester roommate. A pet iguana for sale.

Out of the edge of her vision, she spotted a figure moving inside the library, on the other side of the panes of the nearest window. A hovering, distinct figure. One that craned between shadow and light to watch her.

David.

She couldn’t see the significant details of him—the color of his clothing, the expression on his face—but she could feel his intensity piercing her. She posed for it, for him. Reaching out to smooth down the edge of a flyer for a university trip (“Spend Christmas in Cozumel!”), she snuck a glance at her watch and considered making her impatience visible.

After another two minutes of feigning fascination with calculus tutors and auditions for
Man of La Mancha,
and still not having him appear, she deliberately checked the time on her watch. He was a full twelve minutes late. Ah, now she understood. Thirteen.

Fine. He was up to his old games, but she didn’t have to put up with it. Thirteen minutes was one minute longer than she was prepared to wait out his game. She took a few steps out of his viewing range and, with the acuity of her peripheral vision, noticed the instant the dark figure swished past the window to his next hiding place. Still observing. She pretended not to notice.

Thirteen minutes past the hour. Time to call his bluff.

She checked her watch conspicuously one last time, tapped the face of it and strode with forced purpose back toward her car. She’d barely cleared the library’s walkway when her cell phone beeped. A text message from David. Shocker.

It read:
Look behd U.

She sighed and turned slowly around, cell phone in hand. Sure enough, he was leaning up against the pole with the flyers as if he’d been the one waiting for her all along. She paused before beginning her approach, suspecting this was what he’d wanted from the start. Her walking toward him. Him manipulating the game.

She didn’t say his name when she reached him, just raised one silent eyebrow and waited for the forthcoming explanation.

“Hi, Jenn,” he murmured. “I was running late. Had trouble finding parking,” he lied, pointing vaguely toward Lot C. “How’re you doing?”

She raised the other eyebrow and shook her head. “How long, David?”

He blinked. Shifted positions. Then grinned at her. “C’mon. You already know. A good eight inches at least.” His grin broadened, obviously enjoying the opportunity to twist her words.

But David was in for a surprise if he thought she’d react like the easily deceived college girl he’d left behind. The one who always refrained from asking him direct questions. “How long were you waiting in the library and watching me from the window?” she said evenly.

His expression registered astonishment.
Good
. He inhaled. “I—um—” And then the smug, overconfident look reclaimed his face. “I couldn’t find a space in Lot E, so I—”

She swiveled on her heel and headed again toward her car. Screw him.

“A half hour, Jenn.”

She stopped. Waited.

“Forty minutes, maybe. I didn’t want to take the chance that I’d miss you, okay?”

She pivoted back and could see the truth of it floating across his eyes, knew the tone in his voice—on the “okay?”—when he’d stopped struggling to be the cool Dungeon Master in this real-life game of D&D.

“Don’t lie to me again, David.”

He nodded but didn’t reply, and she didn’t push him any further. This was the first opportunity she’d had to look at him—
really
look—and the compare and contrast, past to present, was unmistakable. When he was in the library, she’d sensed the aura of him, which had remained unchanged. The specifics were, of course, a different story.

She laid the image of her twenty-year-old mental snapshot side by side with the reality of the forty-something man standing before her. Receding but still dark brown hair. Slightly paler, more washed-out complexion. Marginally puffier in the face, especially around the eyes. Body still slim but not that sinewy lean of her memory. Clothes far more stylish than the threadbare jeans paired with “The Who” T-shirts of their college years. The squinty lines at the corners of his brown eyes were deeper, too, than they had been, but the purpose behind them was the same. David was studying her, taking an inventory of his own.

“You look…good,” he mumbled.

“Thanks. You, too.” Undoubtedly, they were both far more adept at being insincere these days.

As if by extreme force of will, he pushed away from the pole to join her. He motioned for them to walk toward the center of campus and fell into step alongside of her.

A new class session must have been just about to begin because students were being siphoned off the paths and into the various buildings like dwindling streams of liquid. They were abandoning her.

David laughed suddenly, an almost violent release. “I hadn’t expected it to be this awkward, you know? After all the times we’d talked online and texted each other. The in-person thing, it’s, well—”

“Weird?” she supplied.

“Very. Though I imagined us doing this—more than once. More than a hundred times, really.”

“A hundred raised to the power of thirteen,” she murmured, remembering this was something he used to say. Something he’d said the first time he told her how much he loved her.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t add anything further, and they kept walking.

Finally, she halted. “Do you have any specific spots in mind that you want to check out?”

He nodded and dug into his pocket, retrieving a creased piece of paper. He unfolded it and rattled off a list of locations painfully familiar to her. Each would seem innocuous enough to a casual observer but, in her case, every one of those places came complete with an accompanying photo scrapbook tinged with a sound track only the two of them would recognize.

“How about we start at the Weaver Center?” he suggested.

The Weaver Center. Home of the campus’s best strawberry milkshakes. Comfy, ratty chairs great for all-night study sessions. That spring dance they went to where the DJ kept playing Supertramp because he thought it was funny.