Authors: Brandi Megan Granett
Triple Love Score (2 page)
“No,” he whispered, squeezing her fingers tightly back. He didn’t let go. He kept her upright for the entire service of music and through all the goodbyes in the foyer of the church. He held her hand until the driver opened the door to the town car and ushered her inside.
“Thank you,” was all she said to him.
He only nodded in reply.
C H A P T E R
M
IRANDA STOOD ON THE STREET CORNER admiring the brightly dyed flowers arranged in so many buckets in front of the bodega. With the dreary gray of fall about to be winter hanging in the sky, the flowers struck her as even more improbable, even more abstract, something her undergraduate students could write a poem about. She snapped a picture with her phone and emailed it to everyone in her afternoon section of Intermediate Poetry. “Bring a pencil and paper to class,” she added.
The campus already felt empty with the approach of Thanksgiving as she took the long way from her car to the classroom. The fitness tracker she kept clipped to the inside of her belt, hidden from view, reminded her that her footstep count for the day lacked about five thousand steps from her ten thousand goal. Miranda didn’t want to go crazy about the exercise thing; too many women her age did that as if exercise could stop them from turning thirty. They took Pilates and spun, did yoga and now Zumba. She couldn’t bring herself to really even say the word, such an ugly-hybrid, nouveau word, commercial speak, let alone put on skin-tight spandex and “have so much fun” you will forget you are exercising. Nothing about dancing under fluorescent lights in a musty exercise room sounded like fun.
Dancing, however, a rumba proper or a tango, or some other Latin-flavored, romantic dance under the light of the moon or the black lights of disco in Ibiza—now that sounded fun. Miranda let her thoughts wander as she stepped carefully on the damp cobblestones, slicked with leaves. She imagined phoning Avery, her stepmother, and saying, “No, I’m not coming for Thanksgiving this year. I’m going to Ibiza.”
But she remembered Avery’s email all too clearly. “The Cramers are coming! Scott, too!” Only Avery used about twelve exclamation points, excited to have everyone back together again. But Miranda didn’t share her enthusiasm. At least not anymore.
After her mom died, Miranda tried everything possible to be someone else, but with Scott, she had no choice. He already knew who she was. With him, she could relax and stop pretending to be fine or to like horses or to love school or even to be happy. She loved how he listened to her stories. She loved how he made everyone laugh. She loved how he made her feel like everything would be just fine after a round of Frisbee. And Scott liked her; Miranda knew that. But not liked her-liked her. He was a big brother, an older cousin, a family friend. Even if she had once hoped it could be more than that.
Like when she was sixteen to his eighteen and finally filled out her red and white Polka-dotted bikini, and he didn’t take his eyes off her all day, not even while he was eating. Or the time they both got drunk on cheap beer on the back deck of his parents’ house in Rhode Island after her seventeenth birthday party and sat under a full moon listening to the waves in the distance, their fingers dangling centimeters apart, electricity flowing across the slight divide. Or the time he came to her place at NYU unexpectedly, bringing takeout Thai and Scrabble, six years ago. She buzzed him up to her apartment, and he walked in as if he visited her all the time, flinging his coat over the back of the futon and pulling a bottle of wine from a paper bag, while she tried to act casual and set about picking up stray hair-ties and empty soda cans from the tiny area she and her roommates called the living room.
“I hope you have a corkscrew,” he said.
“Yes, but I hope you don’t mind serving a minor. My birthday isn’t for another two weeks.”
“I thought it was the twelfth,” he said.
“Reverse that,” she said. “Twenty first.” She fidgeted through the kitchen drawers looking for the corkscrew. Suddenly it seemed like nothing in the kitchen belonged to her. He shifted her entire world off its axis just by showing up.
“Oh,” he said.
“It’s not my first or anything,” she said, pointing to the rack of wine and assorted liquor behind her. “And you know that. You gave me my first beer when I was only seventeen.”
“No, it’s not that. I just wanted to do it right.”
“Do what right?” She moved as if in a dream, still fumbling with wooden spoons and mismatched yard sale measuring cups, until the sharp tip of the corkscrew pricked her index finger.
“Nothing. I brought Scrabble. Let’s play.”
With the wine opened, they settled down on either side of the coffee table. Well, at least he settled down. He sat on the futon, his basketball-playing body taking up the full space with knees spread wide. She sat on the floor across from him, wishing for all the world that she had washed her hair that morning; she felt a few escaped strands from her ponytail press against her cheeks. She hoped it wasn’t too greasy; each year it grew darker and darker, the blonde of her youth disappearing to mouse brown. Grease only amplified the effect.
But he didn’t seem to notice her hair or that she was in her pajamas. He handed her a container of Pad Thai and shook out his seven letters.
And after a few minutes and few sips of wine, she stopped caring, too. He launched into a story about selling bonds that ended with a bad joke about handcuffs.
She laughed at his joke. With him, she didn’t have to be so grown up.
“So,” he said, “has this writing program made you any better at Scrabble?”
They played with focus, only stopping to pass out a second round of spring rolls and to steal a bottle of wine from her roommates’ personal stash.
Miranda played mystery on a double word score with a blank tile. “Bingo,” she chorused. “Fifty points.” She hopped up to do a victory dance. As she did, her foot clipped the table, and the tile bag toppled over.
They both bent to pick them up. He smelled like Old Spice, the way her father did before the chemo made her mom’s nose too sensitive. “You,” Miranda started to say, to ask or to explain why she couldn’t stop staring at him.
“You,” he said in reply.
Then he leaned in closer and pressed his lips against hers. His eyelashes stirred against her cheeks as he closed his eyes. She leaned in closer. And neither one moved to stop. For a very long moment, lips slightly parted, they breathed in the same air, as they hovered in the sweet spot right after a kiss.
Then his phone went off, startling them both.
He snapped backwards and patted down his pockets for the source of the interruption. He stared at the number. “I think I have to take this,” he said. “Some kind of hospital.”
As he stood up, his pant leg caught on the edge of the board, bouncing all the letters out of place as he slipped out of the apartment and into the hallway.
For what felt like an hour, she strained to hear his footfalls in the hallway outside.
When he pushed back in, she almost didn’t recognize him. He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end like a man electrocuted. The color in his cheeks disappeared.
“I have to go.” He kissed her cheek and grabbed his coat. “I’ll be back after your birthday,” he said.
Too stunned to say anything, she just watched him go.
She expected him to be back. Her birthday came and went. Her emails and calls went unreturned. She thought for sure that he would show up at Avery’s next party with some excuse about work. She would pretend to be mad, but knew she would get over it just to talk to him again. If he didn’t want to kiss again fine—well, not fine, but she would deal with that—but it wasn’t okay to walk out on their entire friendship.
“Where’s Scott?” she asked as Bunny enveloped her in a hug at the front door.
“Scott?” Bunny asked.
“Don’t be funny,” Miranda said. “You know, your son? I saw him a few months ago, but lately he’s been MIA.”
“Dear,” Bunny called over her shoulder, “do we know a Scott?”
Before Linden could say anything, Stanton stepped into the foyer. “Scotch,” he announced. “Did I hear someone request Scotch? I just so happen to have the best bottle right this way. Come along.”
Linden shrugged his shoulders at Miranda and followed his wife and best friend into the other room. For the rest of the party, no one mentioned Scott at all. Before she left to go back to the city, Miranda cornered Avery. “Seriously,” she asked. “Where is Scott? Why is everyone being so strange?”
Avery put a manicured finger up in front of her lips. “Quiet. Don’t let Bunny hear you.”
“Why not? What is going on?”
“They say he quit everything and flew out to Oregon. But don’t ask. They refuse to speak about it. Linden even talked to your father about redoing his will.”
“But why? Why would Scott quit everything?”
“Some trouble with a girl. Drugs.”
“A girl? Drugs?”
“It happens,” Avery said. “I never expected it from him, but well, sometimes you never know what’s going through a person’s mind. Please just don’t mention it. Let’s just hope it blows over.”
But it didn’t blow over. Or hadn’t for the last six years. Until that email from Avery announced his return.
She tried to conjure up some righteous indignation at the email. A few times, “how dare he” escaped from her lips with barely a whisper as she paced around her apartment the night before. But she wasn’t mad at him. Mad, the burning feeling mixed with embarrassment and shame, was an emotion she reserved for herself. What if she was the reason he left and never spoke to them again? What if some girl meant her? With her needy groping of a childhood crush? What if he spared them both further embarrassment with his disappearance? Once again coming to her rescue by being a gentleman. She longed to get on a plane and run far, far away.
She pushed these thoughts from her mind as her students filed into the room. She expected a smaller batch because of the holiday, but this was ridiculous. Out of the eighteen assigned to her section only six sat around the table.
“Hello,” she said. “Let’s just give everyone a few minutes to arrive.”
Clementine, a girl who favored brown sweaters and overly sensible Earth shoes, sat at one end of the table. The red-headed Ronan took up occupancy two seats over from her. The stoner hippie kid who went by Tad sat two seats over from Ronan and so on. No one talked. They pulled out their phones and stared deeply into their radiant screens, content to ignore her and each other.
“Did everyone bring paper?” she asked. This was her fault if they hadn’t. At the beginning of the semester, she declared her classroom a paper-free zone. She held her hands over her head, her cell phone sitting majestically in front of her on the table. We will “ping” each other our poems in real time, she proclaimed. The students just nodded, undergraduates, already jaded. Now she could never tell if they were reading the poems their classmates had just sent or if they were surfing for porn or Facebook memes.
“Paper,” she said again, waving a few pieces that she pulled from her purse.
Everyone but Tad produced the required sheets and pens. She handed Tad the stack from her purse.
“Pen?” he asked.
Ronan flicked one at him across the table.
“Thank you, Ronan,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he said, his brogue thick with just a few scant syllables.
Sometimes she picked him to read aloud just to hear him speak. When he did, she could close her eyes and imagine a weekend in Dublin, sitting in a pub, ordering a round of pints for mates and watching football on the television. They cheered in all the right places. When the home squad captured the final victory, the bloke next her let out a whoop in his brogue before sweeping her up for a kiss. When she leaned back to look into her Irishman’s eyes, his face always transformed into Scott’s.
She shook her head to pull herself back to the present moment. “So did you get my email about the flowers? Let’s use those to free write. Open form. Twenty minutes.”
She pushed the timer on her phone and left it at her place at the table. Normally she wrote with them, using the exercises to push herself, maybe even to compete against them. But today, with just these six, her heart wasn’t in it. Instead, she stood by the window and contemplated the growing darkness of the evening. Again, the lure of cancelling on her family and just showing up at the airport pulled at her. She could just book a ticket right there for the next plane out, even if it was headed for someplace unexciting like Cincinnati. She wouldn’t have to think about Scott Cramer in Cincinnati.