A few days later, the sun is soaking through the walls and the daffodils are out and the birds are singing and inside my stomach it feels like horses are running, which I assume is just the biological thing that happens when your chemicals combine with someone else’s. Stuart had asked me to meet him outside on the benches after school, because apparently he lives near there, and he figured we could walk into town.
I was wearing my favorite outfit besides my debate pantsuit, a dress my mom bought for me for church two years ago, a light blue cotton thing with a V neck, and I had let my hair go without the dryer this morning so it hung loose and curly near my shoulders. I didn’t know if I looked hot, but after an imaginary conversation with Maddie, I decided I didn’t care. I remembered her looking at herself in the mirror and saying, According to whom?
I had just finished my calculus homework, and Stuart walked up right as I closed the textbook. He was wearing his usual black and sunglasses. He walked quickly.
“Sammie!” he said. “Hi!”
I stood, shoving my work into my bag. “Hey.”
When he was close enough to touch, he stopped. He took off his sunglasses, and I could tell he was looking at my dress. I followed his eyes, hoping I hadn’t spilled something on it. When we met each other’s gaze again, he seemed nervous.
“It’s been a while,” he said.
“A week,” I said.
He smiled. I smiled back.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Walk somewhere?”
“Yeah.”
And then we couldn’t shut up. We walked close, arms touching sometimes, first along the footpaths, then in town, Stuart waving occasionally to people he knew. He asked questions one after the other, like a nice reporter. What schools did you face? Where did you stay? Had you been to Boston before?
When I told him about the loss (leaving out some possibly pertinent details), I could see him wince. He put his hand briefly around my shoulders and squeezed, which sent a confusing combination to my gut: a punch that would happen whenever I thought about the loss, along with a fluttering that happened whenever any part of Stuart’s body got within six inches of my body.
“That sounds terrible,” he said, and told me about how on the last night of his run of Hamlet, he forgot an entire soliloquy. “On the last night! I’d done it a thousand times!”
“I didn’t hear about that,” I said, trying to remember if I actually hadn’t.
“Yeah, because no one noticed.”
“No?” I asked.
“Nope! And even if they did, they wouldn’t have cared.”
“You just went on with the show?”
“Yep, and no one was the wiser. But I’ll remember it forever. Because I failed.”
“Yeah. I’ll remember the debate tournament forever, too.” I think, I remember adding silently.
Stuart and I moved out of the way for two Dartmouth students skateboarding down the sidewalk. “Maybe we depend too much on other people for what we think of as success,” Stuart offered. “Like, maybe we share too much. Maybe that’s why good things lose their good feeling because we give it all away.”
“As in, success can’t just be when people notice you.”
“Right. That’s the funny thing about caring about stuff as much as we do,” he said. “We have to get used to the idea that no one cares as much as us, because guess what, they don’t. Succeed, fail, whatever, no one is going to give you a pat on the back for spending all hours of the day studying, or researching, or giving up everything to write. So we’ve got to just do it for ourselves.”
By the time his speech was over, Stuart was standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He could never seem to walk and talk at the same time, especially if he was passionate about the subject. It was cute.
Then I realized he was contradicting himself. “But you did get a pat on the back!” I said. “You’re published!”
He stopped walking again, and this time he was more serious. “But what if I hadn’t been published?”
“You…” I swallowed. “Yeah, all you would have to fall back on is whatever you liked about what you did.”
“Exactly. And I would probably be working twice as hard now,” he muttered.
“I know what you mean,” I replied. I thought of Mom and Dad, and that awful phrase, recognize your limitations. Maybe what he was saying went the other way, too. All the limitations Mom and Dad were talking about were just the limitations put on me by other people. I was going for my own goals.
We continued walking, quiet. Heavy stuff, I guess.
I had gone in trying to keep it super casual, Future Sam. Like rel-a-a-a-xed. No big deal. But that wasn’t me. And I wanted to melt with relief to discover that it wasn’t him, either.
He broke the silence with, “What are you reading?” and of course, the flow was back, because I’m reading a book about this amazing alternative to capitalism called “heterodox economics,” which basically says that economics as we know it is tied to… oh, wait. Sorry. Anyway.
We stopped for iced coffee and sat on the grass on the Dartmouth campus. I saw the spring-clad bodies everywhere and thought of that SAT word, languid.
“So how do you get around New York?” I asked.
“If I have time, I just walk everywhere. The subway is only faster if you have to go between boroughs.”
“Really? That doesn’t seem physically possible.”
He put up his hands in surrender. “Okay, that’s not always true. I just like walking.”
“But you’re able to get everywhere on time?”
“I don’t have a very, uh, strict schedule.”
“You just write all day?”
He squinted, almost as if it were painful that I asked. “I try. I also work as a barback a couple nights a week at this place downtown. Basically it’s just wearing all black and listening to rich people’s conversations, so it’s ideal. It’s what I would do anyway,” he said, and laughed.
Stuart did an impression of a snobby woman ordering a cocktail. “And make sure the lime juice comes from a locally sourced lime tree, I don’t care if limes don’t grow here.”
“And the ice is from a glacial stream…” I added.
“And the glass from a Swedish glassblower…”
We laughed so hard I snorted.
I was feeling the echolocation again, the waves of energy coming off his body as he leaned on the earth while I remained upright, conscious of the shaving nicks on my bare legs.
His nose, straight except for one bump near the end, where he must have broken it.
He has a freckle on his collarbone.
He gave me a sip of his iced coffee and I just did it, I just put my mouth on the straw, and he didn’t care.
I am learning:
There is no secret language, Future Sam, that you have to speak in order to talk to someone you like. You just talk to them. Bonus points if they can speak intelligently about life and work and the best coffee shops in Manhattan.
I had imagined Stuart moving down the sidewalks of New York with his long strides, passing everyone, head down, thinking of settings and dialogue and characters, but here he was now, very different. Softer. More relaxed.
And maybe there might be a softer version of myself, too.
You don’t have to be a robot, Future Sam. What you’re doing doesn’t have to be going toward something. Sometimes you can stop, or at least pause. Sometimes you can just be.
Anyway, eventually Stuart had to leave to work at the Canoe Club, where he was picking up a couple of bartending shifts while he was back in Hanover.
We stood up.
He looked at me for a long time with those wet black eyes, and bent slowly toward my face. Oh my god, he was getting very close. Radioactive burns imminent. I gasped.
He stepped back quickly. “Sorry. Can I kiss you on the cheek?” he asked.
“Is that standard?” I asked, and immediately blushed.
“Standard for what?” he asked.
“A standard good-bye for what we… for what just happened?” Remember how you had just decided that you don’t have to be a robot?
He didn’t answer right away. Now he was nervous. He played with the hair on the back of his head, looking around. “What just happened?”
“I mean, what we did today. Hanging out.”
“Uh…” Stuart tried to hold in a smile. He shrugged, looking off into the distance, then looked at me. “We don’t have to categorize it.”
“Let’s categorize it,” I said quickly, and waited. Stuart opened his mouth, puzzling, and I felt guilty, briefly, for pushing him, but then I didn’t. A kiss without context or meaning is the kiss equivalent of small talk. And what would happen if he didn’t want to categorize it, and just ran away forever and didn’t talk to me? I’d go back to my work, to my little room above the attic, pining for him from afar. Big deal. I’m used to it. What else is new? “Sorry,” I continued. “I just have too much up in the air right now to fuck around.”
“You do not…” he said, laughing, shaking his head. “You do not fuck around.”
He put on his sunglasses against the setting sun, and the lenses lit up with two blazing spheres. He took one of my hands with both his hands and said, “I want to kiss you on the cheek because I think we had a nice date.”
Date. Date. I nodded in agreement.
He bent again and pressed his lips on my cheek, barely an inch from my own lips—one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three—and let go.