There’s that odd look again, and I’m not sure I want to deal with it so I point at the forest where there’s an old, downed log about thirty feet in.
“Start there?” I ask, and Levi rubs his hands together.
“Good as anywhere,” he says, and we enter the woods.
I told Levi the truth about Kat because I’ve never bothered lying to Levi. Even though he did it to me, once, because he was fucking my sister and thought I didn’t know and wouldn’t find out.
Things were a little weird between us for a while, but I went to a lot of therapy and finally told Levi the truth once I figured it out myself: I was never really worried for my sister, I was angry that she might take my best friend away. We eventually talked it out and I officiated their wedding a few years ago, so I guess I approve of the union.
For a while, we work in old, comfortable silence, clearing fallen branches and dead wood from the forest around Levi’s house and stacking it in a pile. With him, I never feel the urge to fill the silence. Maybe it’s because I know he doesn’t need it. Maybe it’s because, by now, we’ve said pretty much everything there is to say to each other.
“You’re over college, then?” Levi asks, nearly half an hour later, as he stomps around the trunk of a fallen tree, surveying it.
I nudge the trunk with one boot instead of answering.
“If she’s sleeping on your couch,” he goes on. “That was her, right?”
“That was her.”
I complained to Levi a dozen years ago when I was in Kat’s Introduction to Earth Sciences class, and I complained about her again the day we shared an elevator in our office building and I realized she’d moved to Sprucevale. I didn’t think I complained that much, but maybe I’m wrong.
“I admit to liking her better now,” he says, then points. “Grab that end, I think we can get it out without having to saw anything.”
I do as he says, lifting with my legs even though it’s not that heavy because my back isn’t very forgiving these days. Together, we maneuver it out of the forest and onto the growing pile, and I wait until we’re done to speak.
“You didn’t like her before?”
“I wasn’t inclined to,” he says, shrugging. “You didn’t exactly endear her to me.”
“That’s not—” I start, and then stop. “Just because we didn’t get along.”
Levi looks at me like he’s waiting for me to say more, but I don’t. I’m still scattered, sleepless; the hard work of clearing brush is helping, but I’m unusually lost for words. I’m especially lost for this word, something to describe the subtle wrongness in hearing Levi say he doesn’t like Kat.
“You did once call her the ruthless fucking architect of your goddamn destruction,” he says as we head back into the woods.
“I was probably drunk.”
“You were.”
“She’s a little less ruthless now,” I say, even though I’m not sure it’s true, and it gets an amused snort from Levi.
I don’t remember saying it—I was drunk, likely blackout—but I believe I did. Back then I thought Kat Nakamura was the worst part of the worst time in my life.
My first semester of college I was twenty-five, older than almost everyone else in my classes, and fresh out of six years in the Marines. My classmates had study parties and called their parents to ask how to do laundry; I had nightmares most nights and panic attacks if I couldn’t sit in the back row of a class. I stayed drunk most of the time to cope, could only sleep when I blasted sitcoms on the TV, screamed at my housemates for playing Call of Duty. I kept getting in fights. I woke up places I shouldn’t have been: a stranger’s front porch, the roof of a building I didn’t know, the front yard of a frat house.
And three times a week, I had to suffer through Introduction to Earth Sciences at nine o’clock in the morning, taught by Kat Nakamura, who was more icicle than human. Her attendance policy was Draconian. God forbid you miss a homework assignment or need to make up a quiz: the rules were there for a reason, she told me more than once. The worst was asking questions, the way she’d look at me for daring to do such a thing in her classroom. Her answers, slow and pointed, like I was some sort of moron.
She never gave an inch. She never let me redo a single assignment, or re-take a quiz, or have an extension, things other professors did without a second thought. Kat seemed bound and determined to ride me into hell, even more so after I missed the deadline to drop her class.
I did try to bribe her into a passing grade by taking a six-pack of beer to her office hours once. Didn’t work. One of the dumber things I’ve ever done. It wasn’t until it was all over I realized she was still an undergrad.
Later, Levi and I sit on his front porch and drink iced tea. I’m covered in sweat and dirt but it feels like something’s been scoured out of me, like the faint rattle and buzz in my bones is gone.
“You staying?” he asks.
“I’ll be all right.”
“You sure? You know you can.”
“I’m not sure I’ll survive another night on a couch,” I tell him, and he laughs.
The sun goes down. My sister June comes back home and joins us, trading gossip and news and idle chatter in the warm August night. I drive home in the quiet, get home to the quiet, shower in the quiet. I find myself thinking about Kat in those places: my passenger seat, my living room, my shower.
I have a hazy, sleep-dulled memory from last night: on the couch, my head in her lap, her fingers stroking my hair. I’m not sure if it’s real or invented, dream or reality.
I fall asleep thinking of it anyway.