So it’s not a surprise when he picks up as soon as I ring. There’s a flurry of gray and green pixels on my watch, resolving themselves swiftly into my dad’s face. His eyebrows, thick and bushy, draw down.
“Blake,” he says.
“Hey.”
“Everything okay?”
“Great,” I say. It’s not a lie for once. Even though the rest of this conversation will be nothing but a string of falsehoods, that at least is not a lie. It’s weird, but he’s not just my father. He’s also one of my best friends. I don’t like lying to him, and I hate feeling like I have no other option.
We look at each other, our last conversation still separating us. I don’t think that grim line will leave his forehead until I tell him I’m leaving school and coming back for good.
I’m going to make it all better. I just have to get outside my head, get a rest from Cyclone, and put myself back together again. I’m going to fix everything, I promise him silently.
I almost believe it this time.
“Do you have time for lunch this weekend?” I ask.
He tilts his head to the side. “Late. 2:30 at Sakshi’s work for you?”
“Sure.”
He looks away, tapping, no doubt inputting this into his calendar.
“Is it okay if I bring my girlfriend?”
He blinks. His eyebrows rise, and then he turns his head back to me. “Really?”
He’s not surprised that I’m seeing someone. I’ve told him about women before. I just haven’t been cruel enough to introduce any of them to Dad since I took Sheila to the prom in high school.
“Really.” I cross the fingers of my other hand behind my back.
“Sure,” he says after a pause that’s far too long to be natural.
“Her name’s Tina.”
I hear him tapping a keyboard on his end.
“Tina Chen,” I tell him.
“Fine. Bring her.” He doesn’t say he’s looking forward to meeting her.
“Dad, don’t be a dick to Tina.”
He looks up and gives me a little smile. “Give me credit, Blake. I’m not always a dick.”
This is not a promise, and we both know it. There’s a reason I’ve never introduced anyone to him since Sheila, and it wasn’t because he was too nice.
I shake my head. “Fine,” I tell him. “Be that way. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’re actually going to like her.”
Dad snorts in disbelief. “Really.” It’s not a question.
That is the one thing I am sure about. “Really.”
TINA
My shift in the library after my lunch with Blake is something of a disaster. I’m shaky—so shaky that I don’t hear my boss talking to me, so shaky that I run a cart of books into a pillar. It’s so bad that my boss finally asks me what’s wrong.
I can’t tell her. After a moment of fumbling, the best I can come up with is this: “I got an offer for an internship.”
“That’s great!” She smiles at me.
It isn’t. “If I do it,” I tell her, “I have to start immediately. And that means…”
We both know what it means. She looks at me with a much less friendly expression on her face.
I’ve been working in the library since I was a freshman. It’s familiar. It’s safe. My boss likes me, and if I leave her in the lurch mid-semester it will mean not only that I have no job, but that I have no references.
“I see,” she says with a sigh of surrender. “That’s less great for me. Good for you.” She doesn’t quite sound like she means it.
When I get the books back in place, I text Maria. Will you still be on campus when I’m done or back home? I need to talk.
Her response comes moments later. I’ll meet you here.
She comes and finds me at five.
Maria and I don’t look anything alike. I’m short, and I only ever wear sneakers. She’s a hair over six feet tall and she wears heels all the time, except when she goes to the gym. She has glistening hair, cinnamon with frosted highlights and a wave. She always looks put together. She never gets carded.
My mom still gets carded, and she’s in her forties.
“Hey,” she says as she approaches my desk at work. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything is weird,” I tell her. “Really, really weird.”
“Let’s blow this joint.”
My boss gives me the okay to go, and I grab my bag. There’s a bit of wind blowing inland when we step out into the last remaining sun. I pull my coat around me.
“So,” I finally say. “How would you feel about moving?”
She looks over at me and her face falls. “No,” she says in a flat voice. “No, Tina. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how bad things are back home. But we can’t go much farther down, you know?”
My hands are shaking. She takes one and we start walking aimlessly.
This is the first year that Maria and I have roomed together. Her sophomore roommates were a disaster: the kind of disaster that involved yelling matches, a multitude of undone dishes left in unsanitary places, and an illicit mealworm farm. She agreed to move in with me, because—in her words—a shitty apartment was better than a shitty roommate. Maria has enough screwed-up drama with her family. She doesn’t need it anywhere else in her life.
She’s never said anything about moving out—yet—but it was my budget that determined where we lived, not hers. I’ve always suspected that deep down, she regrets living with me. Now I’m sure of it.
“I know how you feel about taking help,” she says, “but you are not going home and you are not getting evicted mid-semester. We can make this happen.”
Before I can explain, she turns to me. “Here,” she says. “I got you a present.”
She rummages around in her shoulder bag and takes something out. White flashes at me; thin plastic glints in the dying sunlight. I take it from her.
It’s my favorite sweater. Wrapped up in plastic printed with the name of some local dry cleaner. I turn it over, examining it. The sleeve is pristine, clean and white. Just like new.
It probably cost her five times as much to clean the sweater as it did for me to buy it in the first place.
“I knew it would come out,” she says. “You just needed to bring it to the right place.”
For some reason, that makes what I have to say seem so much worse. She knew what my sweater meant to me, how much hope I let myself invest in it. And… And the gesture is so sweet, but it’s just not the same. It has never been about having a clean sweater. It was about believing that when I wore it, I couldn’t get dirty.
I’m better off without that illusion anyway.
But she doesn’t need to hear that, not when she went to all that trouble. “Thank you,” I tell her, and I give her a hug.
“See?” she says. “Whatever’s happening, whatever is going on—it can’t be that bad. We can make it work. So tell me, Tina. Why do you think we have to move?”
“I didn’t mean that we need to go somewhere worse,” I tell her. “I was thinking somewhere better.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Better in what way?”
I don’t actually know. I have no idea where Blake lives. Even thinking about this, even taking as tiny a step as telling Maria, scares me.
“Somewhere the heat works?” I venture.
She turns to me. And then, very slowly, she smiles. “Oh my God,” she says. “This is not a my-world-is-ending kind of thing, is it? This is a I’m-so-happy-I-can’t-express-myself kind of thing.”
I don’t answer.
“You’re the only person I know where I can’t tell the difference. What happened? Did your dad find a full time job?”
“Not that.”
“Sudden inheritance from an unknown relative?”