Much better to have a breakdown while eating a waffle cone, so I head to Walter’s.
Walter’s Ice Cream Shoppe—the e on the end is necessary—is the kind of place that people are thinking of when they talk about how great small towns are, a little ice cream stand that’s only open from February through November, only takes cash, always has a line, makes three flavors of ice cream, and has not changed one single thing about its recipe, presentation, or process since about 1955. Also, the ice cream is really fucking good.
I’m sitting on a bench in the courtyard, eating a large chocolate cone in peace and actually starting to feel better, when my phone buzzes and all the dread comes rushing back.
Silas:I need your address
I could lie. I could refuse. So what if he tells Evan that he barely knows me and went along with me calling him my lover because everyone in town knows I’m the new, crazy girl and it’s better to indulge my weird whims or I might really freak out and oh, God, that raw, crushing anxiety feeling hits me right in the chest when I think that.
I take a deep breath and eat some more ice cream, focusing on how creamy and chocolatey it is. How crunchy the cone. How hot the day. Et cetera.
Silas:You’ve got read receipts on
I close my phone and leave him on read, just to give the asshole something to think about, because someone needs to tell him off once in a while, and also because if I give him my address this will all suddenly become real.
I do not, in the least, want to spend any amount of time pretending that I am Silas’s girlfriend. Yes, it was my idea in the first place, but that was a very bad idea borne of panic and desperation and I really shouldn’t have done it because Silas is intolerable. He’s always smiling and slippery. He laughs too much. He acts like everyone’s his best buddy. He ignores the rules he doesn’t want to follow—like the ones about fire doors or paying for water—and somehow seems to get away with it every damn time, simply because people like him or something.
He made my last year of college a total nightmare.
I was a senior in the geology department, and since something happened with one of the graduate students who was supposed to be teaching a section of Earth Sciences 101, the job got offered to me. I jumped at the chance to put it on my grad school applications and also get a head-start on teaching experience. It was great.
And then Silas Flynn happened.
I was already nervous about teaching, about talking in front of a classroom, about whether I’d be taken seriously being young and female, and the first day of class he sauntered in five minutes late with sunglasses on and proceeded to noisily search through his backpack for a pen for another ten. Then he borrowed a pen. Then he borrowed paper. Then he came to the table at the front of the class where I was standing, grabbed a syllabus, and sat back down.
The semester went downhill from there. Most non-traditional students—he was twenty-five, three years older than me, and (I’d learn later) fresh out of the Marines—were studious, hardworking students who took their studies seriously. Silas showed up hungover half the time and still drunk the rest. He reeked of whiskey even though he sat in the back. He had black eyes on two separate occasions and a split lip once. He hardly ever bothered with homework, routinely turned quizzes in half-blank, and seemed to absolutely delight in asking me questions about whatever I’d just finished explaining.
The worst part was that the other students liked him. They’d happily chat with him while I was trying to teach, smile as they lent him pencil and paper, sometimes laugh at the dumb bullshit he said when my back was turned. By mid-semester I was barely sleeping the nights before I had to teach and throwing up before class, because I had no idea what to do. The lead professor told me to fail him, but that wouldn’t solve the continued problem of his existence.
It got really bad near the end of the semester. At that point I’d been warning Silas for weeks that he was failing, but suddenly he seemed to notice. He showed up at my office hours and tried to charm me, and when that didn’t work, he tried to bribe me.
When that didn’t work, he suddenly got the Office of Students with Disabilities involved, claimed mental health accommodations he’d never once mentioned before, and the whole thing ended in a disastrous meeting with the Dean of Physical Sciences where I burst into unprofessional tears.
So yes, I’m leaving his text on read and he can suffer. I finish my ice cream in peace, crunching the cone and trying not to think about anything but how blue the sky is today. I sit there until I feel a little better; not like I can actually fold my laundry, but maybe like I can consider folding the laundry without crying. It’s progress.
I’m walking back down the sidewalk, feeling lighter than I have all day, when the people heading toward me come into focus, and I slam to an awkward stop right in the middle of the path.
Evan doesn’t stop. He walks right up to me, a pretty, smirking redhead at his side.
“Kat,” he says. “You remember Olivia, right? She came down for the weekend to see me off.”
And there it is again, the crushing weight that I thought I’d escaped. The snakes beneath my skin, the bright sickly feeling that I need to escape my physical being and I can’t. I want to throw up. Instead, I take a careful breath and hold out my hand.
“Of course,” I say, and my voice doesn’t even sound weird. “Kat. Good to see you.”
“Same,” she says, her hand a delicate offering in mine, like she thinks I might kiss it or something. “I didn’t know you’d moved here.”
“Yep. Did,” I say. I pull my hand back, nod, step away because I’m not prolonging this one second longer than I have to. “See you around, I guess!”
Then I’m off, and whatever Evan says, I don’t hear it. Instead I open my phone as I power-walk away, sweat already gathering at my hairline, and send Silas my address.