“Remind me again of what you said,” Larkin asked her mother.
“What I said?” The two of them were at their usual places in the kitchen, or what had once been their usual places before Larkin got a part-time job that required her to leave the house before dawn four days a week. This was one of the days she got to sleep in, a term that had now been modified to include waking up at 7 a.m.—which is how she and her mother ended up making coffee and toast together, just like the old days.
Not that Larkin could justify thinking of the previous summer as the old days. But they were, in a sense; Larkin had been new to Pratincola, new to living with her mother, new to Ed and Anni and Claire and Ben and Mitchell and everyone else, new to an entire life that no longer fit the routine she and her mother had once shared.
But today it did—and so Larkin twitched her nose at her mother, reminding her of their other shared routine. “You said there were three things you needed to do to have an important conversation.”
“Right,” Josephine said, twitching her nose back. “And wrong.” Larkin watched her mother push at the toaster lever until the bread popped high enough to pull out. “These are tips to help you have a difficult conversation.” She put one of the slices on a plate for Larkin. “All difficult conversations are important, but—”
“Not all important conversations are difficult.”
Josephine held up the remaining slice of bread, toasting her daughter. “Well done.”
“Well,” Larkin said, opening the tub that contained her mother’s favorite butter substitute, “let’s say this conversation is both important and potentially difficult.” She applied just enough not-butter to her bread to cover the burned spots. “And let’s say I’m not going to tell you what it is, so don’t ask.”
“Fine,” Josephine said. “Jam?”
“Not if you can help me get out of it,” Larkin said, accepting the jar of strawberry preserves and adding just enough to her toast to cover whatever the butter wasn’t. “What are the three things?”
“Four things,” her mother said. “You decide what you want to say, you stick to what needs to be said, and you say it. Then you listen.”
Larkin bit into her toast, leaning over her plate to ensure none of the residue would end up on the table. She was nearly thirty-six years old and she still hadn’t figured out how to eat a piece of toast without leaving crumbs—or, in this case, a blob of jam. She couldn’t be blamed for not knowing how to have a difficult conversation. “And then after you listen, you decide what to say next, stick to what needs to be said next, et cetera?”
“If you want,” Larkin’s mother said. “But there’s one more thing you need to know.”
“A fifth thing?”
“If you want,” Larkin’s mother said again. “Before you begin a difficult conversation, you need to know when—and how—you’re going to end the conversation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Josephine said, “you need to decide both what you’re going to say and when you’re going to walk away.”
“What if you don’t want to walk away?”
“Then you’re not ready to have the conversation.”
This was one of the times when Larkin really, really, really wanted to ask her mother about her father. Her parents had been married, before Larkin had been old enough to remember them together—which meant that one of them must have started a difficult conversation that ended with one of them walking away.
But Larkin’s mother wanted to finish her toast and finish her coffee and get to campus, and so Larkin spent the rest of her morning thinking about what she wanted to say to Ed and whether she was, in fact, ready to say it.
* * *
They met, this time, in the Howell College cafeteria. Larkin knew from experience that she couldn’t walk into The Coffee Shop on a day she wasn’t working, because then it would become a day she was working—and although she needed the money, she needed this meeting with Ed even more.
Not that she should think of it as a meeting. That wasn’t the kind of thing you did, with a boyfriend—but what they were doing couldn’t really be called a date, not with the plastic chairs and metal trays and the cereal bowl Larkin had filled with honey-colored Os, rainbow-shaped marshmallows, a peeled banana, and chocolate milk.
Ed had a salad.
Larkin began chunking her banana into bits with her spoon. Decide what you’re going to say. She couldn’t ask him, straight out, what existed between them. It was obvious. The two of them went together like salad and cereal. The only thing they had in common was that they had once found a dead body together.
That wasn’t true, though. Larkin knew that wasn’t true as soon as she thought it. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t known it wasn’t true before.
“Here’s what we have in common,” Larkin said, aloud, without deciding what she was going to say first. Her mother wasn’t always right about everything. Neither was Anni. Neither was she. “I mean, I should ask you what you think we have in common, but I bet we’re going to come up with similar answers.”
“Okay,” Ed said. He was affable, unflappable, the only person Larkin knew who could eat a salad without ending up with a fork full of lettuce that had to be contorted into an open mouth. Did he cut the lettuce beforehand? Or fold each leaf onto the tines of his fork? She really should pay better attention to her maybe-boyfriend.
“First of all, we’re both artists. You more than me, right now, and maybe I was never much of an artist in the practitioner sense, but we’re both interested in what art can do.” She carried a spoonful of cereal towards her mouth. A chunk of banana fell off and splashed into the milk. “Like, the capacity of art. The ability to connect with people through ideas.”
“All right,” Ed said. “Although I think you’re more of an artist than you realize.”
“In what way?”
“In your ability to put things together,” Ed said. “You’re an excellent director.”
“You’ve never seen me direct.”
“Yes, I have,” Ed said. “I saw what you did with your mother and Claire, the way you brought them together and got them to trust each other. I see you working with Ben on his opera, nudging him to make it better, helping him understand what connects and what doesn’t. I watched you sit next to Anni, during all of those rehearsals for Beethoven’s Ninth, and every time the two of you were together she got better at interacting with people.”
Ed took another bite of salad. Larkin watched to see if he did anything unusual with his fork. “Also, Ghoti stopped me in the music building the other day to inform me that you were one of the few people in Pratincola worth knowing.”
“Well, that makes me sound pretty great,” Larkin said, “although I’d take anything Ghoti said with, like, twelve grains of salt.”
“And a squeeze of lemon,” Ed said.
Larkin smiled. Ed smiled back. He had the tiniest piece of spinach stuck between two of his teeth. “Okay, second of all, we both like the same kinds of jokes,” Larkin said. “We’re clever, which is fine, you can have a lot of fun being clever, but—”
She was about to say but it’s not enough to build a relationship on, but decided she didn’t really want to say that. Not yet, anyway. Maybe not at all, depending on how Ed responded.
Say what needs to be said.
“Third of all, we’re both outsiders.”
Larkin watched Ed, to see if he would take this the wrong way. She had made the mistake, early on, of assuming that he hadn’t grown up in the Midwest. She wondered if Ed would tell her she had just made another one.
But he watched her, and he read her face if not her mind, and he finally said “You’re right. You and I—for different reasons, of course—don’t quite fit in here.” He poked his fork into his salad bowl, extracting a piece of lettuce, a sliver of green pepper, and a slice of black olive. “Not yet, anyway.”
“And neither of us are sure we want to,” Larkin said.
“No,” Ed said, after chewing and swallowing his vegetables, “I think I want to.”
“Which means you aren’t completely sure you want to.” Larkin was sure of this. Ed didn’t make sense otherwise. She-and-Ed didn’t make sense otherwise.
“No,” Ed said again. “Pratincola is a good place to live. Howell is a good place to teach. I’m a few hours away from my parents, we’re a few miles away from a major regional orchestra, there’s always something interesting going on in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City.” He smiled again. The spinach was still there. “There are good reasons to want to make this part of the world your home.”
“Okay,” Larkin said. “But when Anni talks about living in Pratincola, she makes it sound like the best city in the entire world. She loves it here. She’ll never leave. You’re looking for reasons to love it here.” Larkin didn’t need to watch Ed to know she was right. Not this time. “And if you get the chance to leave, you’ll take it.”
“Yeah,” Ed said. This time, the tiniest drop of ranch dressing fell off the end of his lettuce leaf, hitting the table before the fork hit his mouth. Larkin waited for him to chew, swallow, and wipe the spot with his napkin. “If something else comes up, I’ll probably take it. But I submitted my tenure file to Howell this week, and if they want to keep me on, I’ll probably stay.”
Something about those two statements didn’t make sense. Larkin tried to remember what Anni had said about logical fallacies. “So you’re going to continue applying for other jobs?”
“Academics always apply for jobs,” Ed said. “It’s part of the game.”
“Are you applying for other jobs now?”
Ed tried to spear a cherry tomato with his fork; a spray of juice spurted out, and he set his silverware down. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course I am.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why would we want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know,” Larkin said. She stirred at the soggy Os in her cereal bowl. She had barely eaten any of it, and now it was inedible. “Because it’s your life? Because it’s something you care about? Because you and I both know how the academic job market works? That’s another thing we have in common.”
“I know,” Ed said. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.” He looked away—past Larkin, and towards the discussion they’d never really had. “I didn’t want to make you feel bad.”
Larkin felt terrible. Not because Ed had been trying to protect her—she’d be able to think of that as sweet, or something like that, when she gave herself time to process it—but because she had wanted to be more, to her maybe-sorta boyfriend, than a failed academic. All-but-dissertation, no letters before or after her name, no possibility of a tenure-track job. On the plus side, that meant they’d never have to deal with the two-body problem, assuming they stayed together—Ed could get a faculty job anywhere in the world and they wouldn’t have to worry about whether the institution could offer Larkin an equivalent position. On the minus side, it meant that Ed assumed there was still a problem to be dealt with.
“You don’t think I wish I were doing the academic job thing, right?” Larkin asked. “Because I don’t—or, wait, do you think I should be doing it?”
“I don’t know,” Ed said. “You’re fairly noncompetitive at this point—”
“Thanks—”
“But you’re going to need to do something, right?”
“I am doing something,” Larkin said. “I’m starting a business.” The words, when said aloud, sounded uncomfortably familiar. Like I’m finishing my dissertation. “And I’m helping people.”
“And you’re good at that,” Ed said. “Which is why—”
“So why did you assume I’d feel bad that you were doing the academic thing and I wasn’t?”
“I don’t know,” Ed said. “It just seemed like something we didn’t need to talk about.”
These words were also uncomfortably familiar. “I guess that’s something else we have in common,” Larkin said, knowing she was breaking all of her mother’s rules at once—and a few of Claire’s. “I’ve also got something that I didn’t want to have to talk to you about.”
Ed considered this. Larkin wondered if he already knew what it was. “You know,” he said, “you don’t have to tell me.”
“Well, I probably shouldn’t,” Larkin said, “because I’ve been specifically asked not to tell you. But before that, I could have said something—and I didn’t.”
“I know,” Ed said. He had to know exactly what she was talking about, which meant that everyone on campus probably knew, which meant that Larkin’s mother was less safe than she realized. She should probably tell her mother, as soon as she and Ed were done with lunch—but they hadn’t even started the difficult part of their conversation, and Larkin still wasn’t sure she’d decided what she wanted to say.
So she made her choice. All four of them, one after the other. It was easier than she expected.
“I think I love you,” Larkin said, “because you’re smart and kind and you have integrity and you’re really interested in what you do and you’re really good at making people better.” She paused, ready to make a joke about Ed also being extraordinarily good-looking, but she stuck to what needed to be said. “I also think I’m dating you for the wrong reasons. I mean, you can’t be someone’s girlfriend just because the two of you both like music and art and theater and stuff, and you shouldn’t be somebody’s girlfriend just because you’re looking for someone else who isn’t sure they want to stay in Pratincola.” She paused, again. Ed was watching her. She waited to see if he would do anything else. Then she continued. “I also think that you think I’m interested in you because you have something that I want. That might be true, a little bit, but it’s also a little insulting.” She paused, a third time, to see if Ed would take the accusation injuriously. “I mean, I don’t want to fight.” Say it. “I just mean to say that I’m a really interesting person on my own, and so are you, and that doesn’t necessarily mean we ought to be together.”
Larkin stood up, picking up her tray, trying to keep her hands from shaking. “Because I don’t know what we are together, and I think that’s something we should know.”
Then she walked away, just like her mother had told her to do, sloshing milk over the edge of her cereal bowl and trying not to cry.
* * *
Larkin had both removed and reapplied her makeup by the time she made it to her mother’s office. She was not going to tell her mother that she and Ed had broken up, first because she wasn’t quite sure how that could affect Ed’s tenure file and second because she wasn’t quite sure that they had. Could you break up with someone without saying the words? Weren’t there other words both of them needed to say first, like do you want to break up with me and no I don’t and well maybe I don’t either—or maybe do you want to break up with me and yes I do, either way, but there were sentences that needed to be issued.
Not that they’d needed sentences when they’d started courting. They’d shared enough of an understanding, in what Larkin was still thinking of as the good old days, to assume that they would continue to understand each other. Sentience had overruled, turning objection into objectification. The two of them withheld judgment, withheld argument, withheld anything that would not stand cross-examination. They held each other, with or without witnesses. They postponed discovery.
The thing was that nobody else had said a word. Not Ben, who might have noticed Ed’s unhappiness; not Anni, who definitely noticed Larkin’s. Not Larkin’s mother, who had chosen to withdraw from the proceedings due to a preceding conflict of interest. Not even Ed’s mother, who had taken just enough of an interest in Larkin to make her comfortable.
The only people who had commented on their potential incompatibility had been people like Bonnie, who said everything that needed to be said with a single physical gesture—and people like Ghoti, who had been careless enough to say it aloud. You like him because he’s hot and he pays attention to you.
Larkin and Ed went together like sexual tension and contextual release, in other words—and everyone who saw them knew that, and only one person who knew it had said it, and that person was currently sitting on the couch outside of Larkin’s mother’s office, driving penholes into the smiling faces shining out of a high-gloss Howell college brochure.
“Hello,” Ghoti said, without looking up. “I set up the meeting.”
“Oh,” Larkin said. She had forgotten that both she and her mother had asked Ghoti to get this particular task done. “You probably shouldn’t deface that,” she said, taking the brochure out of Ghoti’s hands. “Pun intended.”
“Fine,” Ghoti said. “But only because you actually made a pun.”
Larkin examined the damage. Ghoti had speared the smiles, not the eyes or the throats or the hearts—and although the majority of the student body had been defanged, a few representatives remained untouched. “Why’d you spare these people?”
“Because they’re the only ones who aren’t two-faced,” Ghoti said.
“That isn’t a pun.”
“It wasn’t intended to be,” Ghoti said. They picked up a second copy of the brochure and displayed it to Larkin. “If you were in high school or something, and somebody gave you this brochure, maybe you’d think you were going to a place where everyone smiled all of the time. Maybe you’d think it would be better than high school, where everyone looked at you like you were weird.”
“Ghoti,” Larkin said. “You didn’t enroll in Howell because of this brochure.”
“You are correct,” Ghoti said. “I did not enroll in Howell because of this brochure.”
Larkin flipped through the first three pages. “But you put penholes through all of the people who don’t smile all of the time? Or just the people who don’t smile when they see you?”
“Same difference,” Ghoti said. “Depending on how you look at it.”
Larkin continued to look through the brochure. She wanted to see whether Ghoti had punctured her mother’s photograph. The brochure was designed to feature the student body, which meant that only a few features belonged to faculty and staff—and although Ghoti had ravaged nearly as many of those visages, Larkin spotted one face that was still fully visible.
“You don’t think Ed is two-faced,” she said.
“Dr. Jackson,” Ghoti corrected, “is integrated.”
Larkin was about to ask Ghoti whether the double entendre was intended—she hoped it wasn’t, but with Ghoti, one never knew—when the door opened and a slim, efficient, perfectly put-together teenager stepped out of Larkin’s mother’s office.
“Aubrey?” the young woman said, ending her question with just enough authority that it didn’t need an answer. “The Dean is ready to see you.”
Ghoti—and Larkin could suddenly see the years of being Aubrey, the toll they must have taken—stood up. “Thanks,” they said, before turning to Larkin. “I’ll tell your mom you’re here, if you want.”
“I’ll just text her,” Larkin said. She took out her phone and sat down in the seat Ghoti had relinquished. The young woman lingered, malignantly, at the door.
“You can make an appointment with me,” she said. “Larkin, right?” As before, the question was aimed to intimidate.
“Nah, I got this,” Larkin said, keeping her face focused on her phone. “Janessa.”
It didn’t take long for Larkin’s mother to text back. It didn’t take long for Larkin to find Janessa’s photo in the brochure. The student-leader was singularly beautiful and multiracial—which meant that Janessa Martin Lee appeared in either the foreground or the background of nearly every page.
Every single one of her smiles had been stubbed out, which was what Larkin was expecting.
She wasn’t expecting to see the picture of Janessa and Ghoti side by side, arms slung over each other’s shoulders, the former in a brand-new Howell sweatshirt and the latter with a crumpled Howell sticker pressed into the center of their forehead.
Our students show their spirit in many different ways, the caption read. How will you Howell?
Ghoti had pushed the inkpen through both of their faces.