Page 55 of Most Likely to Match
“I saw you RSVP’d.” She sounds so excited.
Dean turns away from me, glancing at the door like he might bolt.
“Uh. Yeah. Hold on.” I set the phone down on my desk and hit the speaker button. He can bail if he wants, but I don’t want his imagination to take any part of this conversation and run with it. We don’t need secrets between us anymore.
“It’s going to be so much fun,” Lauren G. says.
He turns back to me when he hears the clear sound of her voice, then smiles, a tight-lipped but genuine thank-you.
“How did you get my number?” I ask, watching Dean as he wanders toward my couch.
Lauren’s excitement falters with a long pause. “You filled out the RSVP form.”
Right.
I wave my hands at Dean as he starts to lower himself onto thecouch. He catches me, pausing mid-squat, before understanding dawns on his face. The noises that will emanate from that couch the moment he puts any weight on it cannot be explained away. He stands back up.
“Anyway, we can catch up more at the reunion, but I actually wanted to ask you about coming in to talk to my class.”
I slump into my computer chair. The sky outside is a gorgeous summer blue. I shouldn’t feel this bad when the sky is such a beautiful blue. “Isn’t the school year over?” Last time I checked, school still ended in June.
“I teach summer school,” she says, likeduh. I make my own version of theduhface at Dean, and he turns toward the window, too, his shoulders shaking. “We’re asking alumni who are coming to the reunion to take part in programming with summer school students, show off the Don Head success stories. I thought it would be really cool if you came in to talk to my grade eleven English class about being a woman in STEM.”
I close my eyes. The sky is giving me a headache. “You want me to talk to your English class about science, tech, engineering, and math?”
“I’m trying to fill some time, you know?” she says conspiratorially.
The headache migrates, spreads. A deep pressure behind my eyes but also a deep pit in my stomach, scraped out and raw.
“And I thought since you’re so successful, you’d be perfect, you know? Show them you can do nerdy things and still be pretty.” Lauren says this last sentence as if they’re not mutually exclusive.
Dean whips his head around, his eyes wide. I shake my head. This entire conversation sucks.
That pit in my stomach fills with sadness, pity, for this girl who was once my friend. She wasn’t the best person when I knew her. But she was also still a kid, lacking any pre-frontal cortex to speak of. The lesson I took from our teenage years was to do better, but it seems like Lauren’s only takeaways were about her value as an attractive person. I probably shouldn’t, but I feelbadfor her. Maybe that makes me a bad person, abitch, as the LKs used to say about any girl whomade them feel bad about themselves, even if that girl was just existing.
“I don’t know, Lauren,” I say slowly. My business is successful to the outside observer. But any recent success is due to Dean’s forgiveness. That’s not to say I haven’t worked hard, but I would be disingenuous if I pretended that he hasn’t been at least a small part of it. And, ideally, I’d like for him to stay a part of it.
To me, Dean isn’t a struck match, burning fast and fizzling out. He’s permanent.
“Don’t be modest,” she says. “You’re a Don Head High School success story.”
“Can Dean come too?” I blurt out and glance at him, then away when he shakes his head furiously. I turn away, loweringmyvoice, as if that will stop this conversation from reaching his ears.
“Who?” she asks, and if I could reach through the phone right now, I might throttle her. Not to hurt or maim, only recreational throttling.
“Dean Westlake,” I say slowly. “He’s a therapist. And he does a lot of work with couples and relationships. It would be good for a professional to come in to talk about healthy relationships for teens, right?”
“Wait, likeDeanDean? The guy you were at brunch with the other day? Didn’t you guys have a secret sexy relationship in high school?” she asks, as if she didn’t discover it and out us by stealing my phone when I left it on the lunch table and using it to convince him to take photos of himself on the stage as she pulled back the curtains for everyone to see.
“I…Yea— Dean and I work together.” My words trip over themselves in a race to come out. Because what I really want to say iswhat the fuck, Lauren?I don’t— Iwon’t— look at Dean; it’s just so fucking embarrassing. “He provides dating counseling to clients. He has a master’s degree. He’sgoodat what he does.”
Lauren hums. “It’s only…I don’t want this event to be a downer, you know?” she says with faux sympathy, and despite having not been friends for years, I can picture her face, the wincing smile.
“I won’t do it without him,” I say, resolute. I don’t want to do it atall, actually. Kids scare me, teenagers especially. I barely knew how to navigate high school fifteen years ago. The last thing I want to do is go back there in an actual academic capacity. But I will, if it means Dean gets to talk about something so important, something he’s passionate about. I certainly would have benefited from a talk like that when I was in the eleventh grade.
If I had, maybe things with Dean wouldn’t be the way they are now.
From the corner of my eye, Dean’s arms move in increasingly larger arcs. He shifts into my line of sight, but I push the chair around again to avoid him.
