Page 25 of Yours

He starts to get dressed and I look up, realizing that he’s leaving. I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it.

“You get some rest,” he says, buckling his fuzzy costume around his waist. He leans down to kiss me but it’s a light peck compared to what we were doing earlier.

“Okay,” I say. “See you tomorrow?” I ask, eager for some kind of reassurance. He didn’t just wantthis, right?

“Yeah,” he says with a grin. “I’ll call you,” he adds, and is gone from the room before I realize that he doesn’t have my number.

Ellis doesn’t call. I can easily get his number, and his address. Should I just show up at 1:00 the way we’d planned? Did he just get busy and forget to call? I imagine that as a pre-law student he’s got a mound of homework on a Sunday.

Last night, Tiffany arrived home a little while after Ellis left. She knocked on my door. “You home?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I wasn’t even sure what I was so upset about. Ellis seemed more focused on his own pleasure than mine, so what? It wasn’t as if he’d forced me to do anything. I just wished we’d talked about it more. I wish he would have slowed down a little. It was like he’d forgotten I was there.

I stay in my pajamas all morning, wondering what to do. Tiffany sleeps until noon and then rushes out for a study group before I can ask for advice. One o’clock comes and goes. I try to focus on my own mound of classwork and forget about everything. He probably just forgot about his invitation. He’ll probably call me later and apologize.

My phone rings at around 5:00, and I get a jolt of adrenaline, thinking it’s Ellis. But it’s my dad’s check-in call.

“How’s your week?” he asks like usual.

“Pretty good,” I say, settling into the couch with a cup of tea. My headache from the night before has been lurking in the back of my head all day and chooses this moment to move to behind my eyes. “How are you feeling?” I ask.

“Fine,” he says, a little too quickly. “I watched the game today, did you hear about it? Holy mackinoli, the Packers crushed it.”

A rising bubble of sadness breaks loose inside my chest. “I was going to watch it with a friend, but it didn’t work out.”

“Oh?” my dad says. “I thought you’re too busy writing essays to watch TV all day.”

“I am,” I sigh.

“Huh, well, not much else to report on my end. Brian’s been a big help. In fact, he’s still here. The water heater’s on the fritz.”

A sudden image of Brian’s sideways grin cuts me off at the knees. “I wish I could have stayed longer.”

“Nah,” my dad says. “We both have work to do.” I hear something in the background, and then my dad says, “Here, say hello to Brian,” and before I can protest, Brian’s voice is on the line.

“Hey, Darce,” he says.

It takes me a moment to respond. My tongue can’t decide which emotion gets to talk first. “Hi,” I say, my voice wavery.

“How’s school going?”

Can I tell him that I miss him? “Okay,” I say, shoving memories from my night with Ellis into the bottom corner of my mind. I tell Brian about a biology project I’m doing where our class went out on the river to collect samples, and the grueling make-up exam I took on the use of poetry as a communication tool in eighteenth century Poland. “How’s everything there?” I ask to get away from the sensation that I’m babbling.

“Pretty good,” he says. “I’ve got my first final exam coming up. I’m a little nervous,” he says.

I love that he’s shared something like this with me, but it makes me miss him even more. “I’m sure you’ll do great,” I say.

“We’ll see. I’m not the scholar like you.”

“At least the stuff you’re learning is relevant to your life.”

“Sounds like you’re saying yours isn’t,” he says in a quiet voice.

I think about how learning about poetry has opened a kind of portal to a part of myself I didn’t know existed. “No, I’m just saying that, for you, maybe the test will be easier because you’re actually using the material.”

“Let’s hope that’s true,” he says, sounding more anxious than I had originally realized. I wonder if he’s truly afraid of failing at school, and if so, where this comes from.

“Well, I gotta run,” he says. “Be good, okay?” he adds.

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