Page 25 of Guy's Girl
“I miss you, Gin.”
Her heart skitters. She doesn’t look back at him. “That’s absurd. We live together.”
“You know what I mean.”
She does. She remembers their walks by the Charles. She remembers listening as he sang for her, usually Eric Clapton or John Mayer. She remembers talking for hours, never running out of things to say.
He was her best friend those first few months at school. Not Clay. Not Tristan. Finch.
Finally, she meets his gaze. “What are you saying, exactly?”
“I want to try again.” Finch scoots closer to her on the couch. “I want to be friends.Realfriends, like the way we used to be.”
Ginny looks down at the empty bowl on the coffee table. She considers the soy sauce staining its sides, the bit of red pepper clinging to the rim. At last, she looks back up. “Okay.” She smiles. “I want that, too.”
But even as she agrees, even as she thrills at the image of Finch smiling goofily at her, a voice switches on at the back of her mind, a whisper that asks:Were we ever really friends?
Freshman Week, Harvard. Ginny moves in below three boys who quickly adopt her as their fourth roommate. She spends almost every night on their futon, drinking Keystone Light, playing Mario Kart, and ordering Domino’s at 2 a.m.
She does not miss her brothers. She has found three more.
Freshman Week, Harvard. Adrian doesn’t cry when his mother drops him off at his dorm. He tries to picture his dad standing beside her, the way he often does, but the image wobbles and quickly vanishes, shaken by the guilt that bubbles up within him whenever he thinks too long about the man he never met. He wishes his grandparents were there.
As soon as he’s moved in, he sets up his computer and calls hisnagyanyaon Skype.
During their weekly Skype calls, Adrian and his grandparents always cover the same three subjects: the weather (cloudy), their relatives (fine), and Hungarian politics (corrupt). After a decade of having the same conversation, Adrian could easily beg off these calls. Say he’s too busy, that he’ll try again next week.
But then he would miss the sunlight streaming through the kitchen window. The jars of pickled vegetables lined up along the sill. The wrinkles around his grandmother’s nose, the squeeze of his grandfather’s hand on her shoulder, knuckles calloused from building the house in which they live. The proof that love does exist. The glimpse of a life he could have led.
Freshman fall. Finch starts to pursue Ginny. She avoids collision for as long as possible, going home early, skipping nights out, begging off with excuses of homework or exhaustion. She doesn’t want to screw up the dynamic of their friend group. She doesn’t want to lose the first best friends she’s ever had.
But Finch is persistent. He works for her.
And there’s just one other problem: she likes him, too.
Freshman fall. Girls like Adrian. They like him a lot. They fall all over him at parties. Twice in the span of a month, a girl cries because he doesn’t want to have sex with her.
His new friends look at him sideways. Why doesn’t he take what he could so easily have? They don’t understand. They don’t know what it’s like to live inside his body, a vine on a river, following the current of life, rarely driven by desire.
Freshman fall. Finch and Ginny have sex. He is her second, the first she’s let inside her since Andy.
Afterward, they lie twined together on his twin dorm bed. Finch sings her to sleep.
Freshman fall. Adrian sleeps with three different women, all of whom he tells he doesn’t want anything serious.
At his age, most people have already been in love—or, at the very least,thoughtthey were in love. Adrian knows he hasn’t. He’s only just beginning to suspect what will later feel obvious: that he’s incapable. That love is a coarse handful of sand that will slip right through his fingers, no matter how hard he tries to keep hold.
Freshman fall. Everyone goes home for Thanksgiving break.
Finch gets back together with his ex.
He tells Ginny on their first night back on campus, seated cross-legged on the bed on which they had sex a week before. As he speaks, a roaring fills Ginny’s ears, like the sound of a summer storm rolling across Lake Superior.
Ginny tells Finch that it’s fine. That they’re fine. She tucks it away, all the pain and hurt. Stuffs it into a pocket somewhere. She does it for the sake of their friend group, for the sake of not losing her boys.
The next day, she eats one hard-boiled egg for breakfast and nothing else until dinner.
The first time they meet, it’s for lunch at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. NYU Med School is in Gramercy, Ginny’s office in Flatiron. They opt to meet in the middle.
