“Fuck,” he muttered, slamming the top drawer closed and wrenching the second one open, fingers sifting with brutal purpose through the flotsam. Packages of staples and paper clips, scraps of paper with seven digit numbers scrawled across in different hands, hair ties and packages of chewing gum and eraserless pencils, a battered copy of Sophocles’ plays, a broken ruler and a tiny turtle carved out of pale jade –
“Fuck,” he repeated, forcing that drawer closed as well. Where was it? It had to be here somewhere… her roommate had dropped an injudicious remark about it in the course of their only conversation to date. Somewhere here in this desk was the answer to his question, and he’d come much too far to leave without it.
He sat back on her straight-backed wooden chair, eyes scanning the spines of the books along the top shelf for the third time. Her usual eclectic collection of reading material presented itself, and he could almost feel the books smirking at his ineptitude and vain hopes.
It had taken him two months without her presence to correctly diagnose the hollow feeling that had plagued him since August. When the revelation hit, he thought that he might now understand what she’d been trying to explain to him about inspiration. Out of nowhere, she’d said. Out of the blue, and if we’re sticking with clichés, like a bolt of lightning. One minute you’re walking to class, or talking with friends, or shampooing your hair or something like that – and the next, you’re somewhere completely different, listening to conversations that will only ever occur in your head until the moment you put pen to paper and record it as best you can remember.
He’d never thought the muse she always spoke about was so concerned with the mundane romantic affairs of humans, too.
But writing, she had once argued, is life. And I’m not just talking about my obsession with it. All writing serves to tell a story, or analyze a story; all life is one long story – or maybe, each life is an anthology of shorter pieces and character sketches – and human nature is to analyze those stories and try to make some sense of it. See?
Then he had just smiled and shaken his head, laughing at her futile attempts to convert a mathematically-minded teenage boy to the ecstasies of the written word. She’d thrown the nearest pillow at him for laughing, but couldn’t hide her own smile at his amusement. She’d never been one to hide.
The thought only brought another surge of guilt. He’d known, back in sophomore year of high school, that she had had feelings for him. Hell, she’d admitted it to his face – blushing and stammering though she was, he’d at least been able to extract that much meaning from her almost incomprehensible murmurings. Back then, he’d only had eyes for one person – and it wasn’t the clear-eyed girl in front of him. The look of hurt that flickered across her face when he rejected her had stung more fiercely than he’d expected; it had been a relief when the next day she’d taken her usual seat beside him in world history with a smile. He’d happily erased the memory of that conversation from conscious thought, and she’d never brought it up again.
Despite this return to his preferred status quo, though, their mutual friends didn’t stop dropping hints and exchanging significant glances. He ignored it; they were obviously just behind the times.
Now though, as he snooped through her dresser drawers and averted his eyes with bashful intent from the unmentionables he found therein, he could very clearly see the signs he had then missed. A tightening of the muscles in her jaw when, as they meandered the darkening streets, his gaze flicked appreciatively over a passing beauty; a certain hollow quality to her smile, a glassiness to her eyes when she congratulated him on procuring a date with his latest crush. He’d seen then but hadn’t comprehended; but oh, he’d grown up in so many ways since they posed together in their graduation robes.
He sorted through a disorganized mess of papers and texts on her desk, carefully replacing a half-finished paper entitled Simone de Beauvoir: What is Woman? on top where she could find it.
Woman, he thought, is about five foot three, has curling hair she couldn’t control if the fate of an endangered species depended upon it, and has the softest, smallest hands that fit perfectly in my palms. Woman has a wicked sense of humor and a well of compassion that runs at least to China, and possibly the whole way through to the Moon. Woman is so much stronger than me.
Woman, it seemed, also had a class that had ended roughly five minutes ago. He looked up, panicked, as a key scraped in the lock. Muffled cursing ensued after a few minutes, and he remembered from earlier that morning how her roommate (and his unwitting partner in crime) had struggled with the stubborn door. He ought to take advantage of those few precious seconds, he knew, to close the journal he’d been looking through – just a collection of her favorite poems, much to his disappointment – and eliminate as much incriminating evidence as possible.
Instead, he remained there, turned towards the window with the narrow notebook open in his hands, and stared at the door as it finally lurched open. She fell inward, muttering mutinously, and wrestled her key from the lock. It was deposited upon her dresser, and the bag on the floor at the foot of her unmade bed, before she even looked up.
Her clear eyes moved from his guilty face – he never could lie well, he realized too late – to the notebook; she turned slowly away from him and tugged a heavy sweater over her head, letting it fall near the closet door. She straightened the gray tee shirt underneath and took a sip of water from the bottle on the dresser before turning around, her hair utterly disarrayed from the hasty divestment.
“I keep that notebook under my mattress,” she said in greeting.
“That’s where I found it,” he said, his throat dry. She just closed her eyes and released a slow breath; he wondered briefly when the purple shadows beneath those eyes had become so pronounced.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
“Well, obviously. Why?”
He couldn’t understand the edge of bitterness in her voice. The last time they spoke, she’d cheerfully regaled him with stories of her naïve – and eccentric – roommate, and all of their misadventures. That had been almost two weeks ago, he realized with a jolt; before his realization. Before he called up her roommate and concocted a bogus story so she’d let him into the building and their room. What could have happened since then?
“You’re upset,” he said slowly. She looked at him sharply, but nodded. “With me.” She didn’t respond to this statement, only turned her back to him and began to put the disheveled bed sheets in order. “Why?”
“I’m not upset with you,” she said. When she looked at him again, there was a smile on her face. “I’ve just had a rough few days; you took me by surprise. You didn’t mention anything about coming up, did you? I must’ve forgotten.”
You didn’t forget, he thought. I just remembered.
“How was Myrtle Beach?” she asked with the same smile, bustling about him as she attempted to tidy up the room he’d been thoroughly probing for the last hour and a half. Last time they’d talked, he’d told her about his plans to spend a long weekend at the beach with his latest girlfriend, who had only lasted about a week. When he’d told her, he had thought it was true love. Funny how quickly those things change.
Funny how quickly I grew up.
“I was wrong,” he replied. “It wasn’t love. I wasn’t in love with her.”
She dropped the book she’d been replacing on a high shelf, and it took her longer than necessary to retrieve the book and then put it in its place. His eyes scrutinized her tense shoulders, her consciously relaxed hands. She’s telling herself that there’s no use hoping, he reflected, wonder and pain and guilt preying upon his newly reincarnated heart.
“That’s too bad. She seemed really nice, from what you told me. She was certainly very pretty.”
He winced again; the girl who now turned to face him never could believe that her own face was beautiful to him, no matter how many times he repeated it: she wouldn’t believe him now, either.
“Look, I…”
“Don’t.”
Their eyes met, and he was besieged and numbed by the sheer force of the emotion in that clear gaze. Her lips trembled, then pressed tightly together, then parted to utter that agonizing syllable again. “Don’t. Please don’t. Not now – I… I can’t do this – ”
“But I – ” How could she know? How could she know, and still refuse to hear him?
“No!” she burst out, her expression an alloy of fear and anger that made him want to throw himself bodily out of the dorms. When she looked away, staring with concentrated force at a lone photograph pinned to her corkboard, he swallowed hard. It only took him five steps to cross to the door, but he stopped there.
“Why?” he whispered.
She didn’t look at him. “I loved you for almost three years. I never stopped; I never made a secret of it. You – oh I know you didn’t mean to, you’d never hurt me if you could help it – but – no. I could survive all the false hope, all your girlfriends and your ‘sleepovers,’ I could survive the rumors… but please. I’m just starting to heal. It’s only just starting to not hurt. Don’t… don’t start this over again. Not now; not when we live eight hours apart.”
He stared past her and out the window at the swaying tree branches there, their green-veined, amber skins catching sunlight and glowing. Then, his eyes swung to the photo. “Who is he?”
She swallowed as she turned to face him; the noise was audible in the otherwise silent rooms. “Michael. We’ve gone out four times now. He introduced me as his girlfriend this morning.”
He remembered something she’d said years before. First loves are meant to hurt. You know a child won’t recognize the danger behind a flame, no matter how many times her parents warn her, until she’s stuck her finger in it and felt the skin begin to die? That’s what first love is. It’s the hand in the fire.
She’d also said that first loves, despite the inherent pain and the doubtful probability of success, last forever.
She was right.
“I love you,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended; it came out a growl.
“I loved you,” she returned, her face carefully expressionless. His eyes traced the contours of her jaw and nose, the wispy tendrils of hair that lay askew, tangled and enmeshed by a day out in the October wind, the smattering of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, and nodded.
“I’ll just see myself out then.”
She didn’t move to stop him, and when the door closed on an emptier room, leaned against the wall, her forehead pressed against the cool, industrial white surface.
The door opened again, long after he’d left and long before she’d had time to wrap her mind around that afternoon’s events. Her roommate Ellen entered, carrying a cake with unlit candles; she broke off during the first line of the birthday song and looked around, perplexed.
“He said he was going to put up streamers and balloons,” Ellen said. “And why didn’t you tells me it was your birthday today? I had to run out to the bakery between Intro to Lit and Statistics.”
The shorter girl retrieved her sweater and hastily shoved her feet back into the abandoned sandals. “My birthday’s in March,” she said in valediction, closing the door against her roommate’s confused queries. She didn’t stop running until Michael accepted her into his arms, murmuring anxious questions and soft comforts into her hair.
