Page 9 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

Nine Years Ago

Oxford, England

Pemberton College is one of the smaller of Oxford University’s colleges. But smaller doesn’t mean any less impressive. Thalia and I wheel our luggage across the cobblestones from the bus station, about half a mile away from the college. I can’t help but notice how nice her luggage is compared to mine—hers a sleek black Samsonite, mine a ratty thrift store affair, the fabric patterned with seventies-style roses and vines. Every step across the uneven cobblestones makes the wheels rattle. I’m half expecting them to pop right off, leaving me to heave it up onto my shoulders and stagger all the way to my fancy new college. I wonder what Thalia would do then. Leave me, probably. I won’t blame her. Or rather, I will, but only secretly, and the blame would be tinged with so much want that it wouldn’t matter anyway.

I shake my head. Try to focus on the beauty that’s around me. There’s so much of it, even all the way back at the busstation. Who’s ever known a bus station to be beautiful? But Gloucester Green is surrounded by Gothic Revival–style buildings, so different from the laid-back, slouching buildings I got used to in California. Everything around us is built in that same elaborate style, all impressive stone buildings with stained glass windows. Huge red buses trundle down the narrow streets, charming English names emblazoned on their sign boards: Kidlington, Almond Ave, Cowley Road.

I am charmed by it all, in a way, but in an even bigger way, I’m too absorbed by Thalia to really take in any of it. I sneak glances at her as we walk, trying to inhale the tiniest details about her. The way her hair turns into spun gold when the late afternoon English sun hits it. The way she licks her lips, moistening them ever so slightly with her impossibly pink tongue. Her lips are pouty in the way that most girls would have to rely on fillers to get; two full pillows that speak of innocent lust. If I were a guy, I would be obsessed with those lips.

Ugh, what is wrong with me? Why would I think that? But there’s something about Thalia that makes me want to defile her, to see her kneeling before someone, her face awash with lust and shame, tinged with anger underneath a thick layer of pleasure, begging for more.

“Phew, I was not expecting such a long walk,” Thalia says, and I nearly jump because holy shit, what the hell was going through my mind?

“Uh, yeah, me neither.” I take in a deep breath of the brisk Oxford air to try and un-crazify my crazy thoughts. Even though it’s only the start of autumn—mid-September; the end of summer, really—Oxford has a head start on the weather, and already I can smell the breath of winter on the edge of the wind.

“Still, I guess it’s a nice walk,” Thalia continues. “Though ifI break the wheels of my luggage, my mom’s going to murder me.”

There’s a beat before I realize it’s my turn to speak instead of staring at her like I’m hoping to see the insides of her. “Yeah, same.” I go over the words I just said, making sure they’re appropriate under the circumstances, that I haven’t just given myself away.

“Your mom’s a bitch like mine?”

That startles me enough to snatch me out of my anxiety spiral. I don’t know why it should; it’s not like I know Thalia. We met two hours ago, and the whole bus ride here, we only made small talk about the master’s course. Why should I be surprised that she doesn’t like her mother?

Because. In the past two hours, I’ve concocted this entire image of Thalia. Thalia comes from a family with 2.5 children and a golden retriever–Lab mix named Ginger or Biscuit or Cookie. Definitely some kind of food, anyway. Her mother is a “homemaker,” not a housewife. She makes rhubarb tarts from scratch, using locally sourced butter that comes wrapped in wax paper and twine. Her father is an architect / lawyer / finance manager who owns a little bachelor pad in the city so he can work late nights and fuck his secretary without staining the high–thread count sheets at home. Mom knows about it but turns a blind eye; she’s benignly happy in suburban heaven, plus she can twist Dad’s guilt into a new pair of princess-cut diamond earrings or maybe an emerald necklace surrounded with leaf-shaped diamonds. She hasn’t decided yet. Thalia is the baby of the family; you can tell because she’s so innocent and unspoiled. Totally unprepared for the likes of me. Ripe for the plucking.

But now, with that one little question, Thalia’s ripped apartthis image I’ve built of her family. I can’t tell if that pleases or angers me. I don’t like having to rearrange my thoughts, to reorient them like this. It’s confusing. Unnerving. And what do I say to that? It’s not normal interaction to call your mother a bitch, especially not to someone who’s effectively a stranger, surely? I want to encourage further interaction without revealing too much of my own bitch of a mother.

“I can relate to that,” I say finally. I read once that this is something you say as a form of commiseration, an updated version of “I understand.” Saying, “I understand,” opens you up to backlash, because you can’t, in fact, “understand” what someone else is going through, not even when you’ve gone through the same thing yourself. Because everyone processes things differently. Or some such bullshit, I don’t know.

It works, anyway. Those porno lips stretch into a smile. She has a dimple on her left cheek. I hadn’t noticed before because I’d been sitting on the other side of her, but wow, that dimple. “I had a feeling you might,” she says.

I’m about to ask her more about her mother, her father, and her 1.5 sibling(s), but Thalia says, “I think we’re supposed to turn right here,” so we do, down a narrow side street, and suddenly, Pemberton is there.

It’s like going through some enchanted passageway. The noise of St. Aldate’s is muffled by the closely packed buildings, and Pemberton is so much bigger than I’d expected. What the hell have I landed myself in? I’d read that it was one of the smaller Oxford colleges, meant only for graduate courses, large enough to house only a hundred students. About fifty more students live off campus, but I’ve scrimped and saved, existing only on ramen, and taken out staggering loans. I had to have the full Oxford University experience. No off-campus apartments forme. I wonder where Thalia’s staying, and the thought sends a jolt of excitement through me. Maybe we’d be roommates, and I’d be able to observe her all the time, catch a glimpse of her shedding that skin of perfection at night, because there’s no way that anyone can be this wholesome, this brilliant, all the time. But no, I recall belatedly that Oxford only has single rooms, a fact that I had celebrated when I found out months ago, but now detest because it means there is no chance of Thalia and me rooming together.

There’s a giant wooden gate at the entrance of Pemberton, and a side door carved into the gate that has been left open. I let Thalia go through first, because I’m half-certain guards are going to swarm us at any second and tell me I’m a fraud who needs to be deported back to the US. Right through the gate is a guard’s office with the words “PORTER’S LODGE” above it. We go inside, and a self-important guard wearing a black suit and a bowler hat says, “New students, are we?”

I am, technically, a new student here, but when this man in a black suit and a black hat asks that, the answer screams out of my head, leaving me with Mom’s voice.What do you think you’re doing, sweetie? Going to that posh school with the posh kids? You’re going to the same school the kids I raised go to. They’re gonna know you’re not one of them right away.

I know she’s not wrong. When I was little—I don’t know how old, but definitely too little to be left alone at home—Mom was called in for a weekend because the people she worked for had to travel someplace suddenly. An “emergency” golf trip, maybe, or an “urgent” ski trip, who knows. They needed Mom to come in to take care of their kid, and they didn’t care that she had to find a caregiver for her own kid on such short notice. None of the neighbors or the aunts could watch me, so after shecame to the end of her frantic search, Mom got this determined look and said, “You’ll just have to come with me. You and Nectarine are about the same age. You can play with each other.”

These kids’ names are always some such ridiculous ones—some sort of fruit, or a color (always Blue, never Pink, to show defiance toward gender roles), or an emotion (one of them was called Jubilation).

Anyway, Nectarine took one look at me and knew I was “the help.” The entire weekend, we “played together” as in she’d play with her toys while I waited patiently, at the end of which she’d point to the mess and say, “Clean.” And I’d clean.

“So cute! You kids play so well together,” Mom said, and I’d think,You stupid bitch.

The worst part of it was how naturally picking up after Nectarine had come to me. I didn’t even hesitate when she’d point and tell me to bend over and clean up her mess. Go on my hands and knees and gather the strewn Duplo blocks. Inside, I seethed, wanting to fling myself at Nectarine and claw at her little face, feel my fingernails rip apart her soft, moisturized skin. But my body listened to her demands without a fight. It knew, even then, that I belonged to one class of people, and that there I would stay.

This guard—this Oxford porter—is looking at me like he knows exactly what I am. Like he knows I’m only able to afford being here by taking out massive loans and grants. I swear he’s this close to telling me to go round the back, to the entrance for “the help.” Thank god I have Thalia with me. She says, “Yup!” and gives him one of those smiles and you can just see the spell working on him. He blinks, his stern expression melting away, and his wrinkled cheeks turn rosy.

“Just uh—write your names down in this book here then, luv.” He pushes a guest book toward us.

I watch her write her name down. Thalia Ashcroft. An elegant cursive spelling out an elegant name, nothing as stupid as hearts over the i. She hands the pen to me, her fingers brushing fire across mine, and I have to swallow before writing my own name down. Jane Morgan. A name as plain as I am, the letters ugly and stark underneath Thalia’s cursive.

“Through this way,” the porter says to us—to Thalia, really; he can’t take his eyes off her either, as he leads us outside of the porter’s lodge. “This is the Old Quad. Built in the fourteenth century. Have you seen anything more beautiful?” He points to a pristine quad surrounded by ivy-covered sandstone buildings on all sides. Both Thalia and I shake our heads obediently. I haven’t, actually, been anyplace this impressive. The buildings around us look like a palace from a fairy tale, bursts of flowers hanging beneath every window. “Here you are: this is Highgate Hall, and the common room is right in there. All right then?” He smiles at us, twinkly eyes still on Thalia.

“Thank you,” she says, shaving another ten years off his face. I swear he practically skips away from us.

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