Chapter 10
I met Lionel and Sarah for coffee Monday morning before our classes that day. Lionel had texted that he wanted to meet to tell us a crazy story that just couldn’t wait until later. We ordered our coffees and sat down before Lionel launched into the tale.
“So, I go to meet up with this guy Saturday night that I’ve been chatting with for almost a month onThe LuPone Zone”—which was apparently a dating app for die-hard Patti LuPone fans—“and he seemed perfect. We love all things musical theatre, we detest Lea Michele, and we both listed brunching as our favorite hobby.”
“Clearly soul-mate level status,” Sarah said, sarcasm front and center. “Continue.”
“Anyway,” he said, giving her the side eye. “He messaged me to say he had made it to Café JoJo’s and was sitting in the corner booth. I arrived fashionably late, only to walk in and see a student from my Sound Engineering class—sixthrow, great biceps—sitting in said corner booth.”
“What?” I gasped.
“Yes! He was looking down at his phone, so I hightailed it out of there before he spotted me.”
“So you ditched him?” Sarah asked.
“You bet your ass I did. Daddy can’t afford a lawsuit. I’m still paying off those Julliard loans from way back when I was going to be the next Baryshnikov,” he said, pointing his nose in the air. “All that got me was a couple hundred grand in debt… that and really great calves.”
“How did you not recognize him before that?” I asked.
“His profile was a shirtless pic. I didn’t pay much attention past his pecs. I knew those biceps looked familiar though...”
Sarah shook her head. “Why am I not surprised?”
Lionel responded by flipping her the bird.
“Also, how did he not recognize his own teacher?” I asked. “Didn’t you have your picture on there?”
He grinned sheepishly. “I may have put a slightly older photo on there.”
“How much older?” Sarah asked, her eyes narrowing.
“Let’s just say we both had our most recent college photos as our profile pictures.”
Sarah made a tsk-tsk noise. “Patti would be ashamed.”
“Patti got me into this mess in the first place. I should have just stuck with Queeries.”
“You’re still on Queeries? Isn’t that the app that lets you give your date a bedroom rating afterward?”
“Yes,” he answered, taking a sip of his coffee. “But I never pass up an opportunity to hurt my own feelings.”
“Why won’t you let me set you up with my friend, Mitch?” she asked.
“Because if I go on one more terrible blind date, I’ll be headed for a grippy sock vacation,” he said to her. “Besides, you lost your setting-up privileges with baby-talk Mike.”
“Mike’s not that bad,” she said without any conviction behind it.
“I showed you the text messages. Are you going to deny that you saw the words ‘sowwy’ and ‘pwease’ typed out and sent by a grown-ass man?”
Sarah didn’t deny it, and I was sure I had a disturbed look on my face. Ick .
“Exactly,” Lionel said. “But while we’re talking about it, I think you should try getting on a dating app, Ms. Samaha. You’ve been single for almost two years now, and you’ve gone on like three dates.”
“No, thanks,” Sarah said. “The only dating app I plan on using is my calendar.”
“How are you ever going to meet anyone? You stayed in your pajamas all weekend and watched The Bachelor.”
“Food Network, actually,” she corrected. “And I’m just in a dry spell. But it’s not enough to get me on an app where I might accidentally get set up with a student.”
“Two years isn’t a dry spell. That’s a drought. The Native Americans are going to start doing rain dances around your lady garden.”
“Gross.” Sarah scrunched her face. “Can we talk about something else? Hadley, what’d you do this weekend?”
Aw, crap . She had shifted the hot seat over to me.
I didn’t want to confess I’d been hanging out with the guys, because I knew they’d turn it into something it wasn’t. Maybe I could skirt around the truth.
“A couple of my neighbors helped me get a new car on Saturday because my old one finally crapped out. Then we went to lunch on Sunday and walked around the city a bit.”
“Don’t you live in the faculty housing?” Lionel asked. “What neighbors did you go with?”
Busted .
“One of the chemistry professors, Stuart Benowitz. And the other one you already know, Alexsander Strovinski.”
“Don’t try acting all formal now, missy,” Sarah teased. “She was calling him Lex just a few days ago.”
“Wait, are we talking about the hottie who gave the commencement speech at faculty night? Benson’s new show pony?” Lionel asked.
“Yep, that’s him. And he asked me to call himLex,” I said huffily, wrinkling my nose at her. “Anyway, they’re nice guys. We went to eat at this really great Mexican restaurant, La Carretta. We should go for margaritas one night. It didn’t feel right getting one at noon on a Sunday.”
“It’s never not the right time for margaritas,” Lionel replied. “But that’s beside the point. Tell us more about this poly date you went on.”
“It wasn’t a date. They were just being nice, showing me around town. We’re friends.” I think.
Sarah and Lionel exchanged“yeah right”looks.
“Wake up, Chita Rivera,” Lionel said, snapping his fingers at me. “They’re definitely trying to get in your pants.”
“No, they aren’t,” I said, dismissing the notion completely. “I mean, Stuart’s always over the top with the flirting, but you can’t take him seriously. And Lex barely manages to tolerate me most of the time.”
I looked to Sarah for backup.
“I’m with Lionel on this one,” she said. “You’re right about Benowitz, but there’s no way two straight guys are carting you around town ‘just to be nice.’”
“Maybe we’re completely missing the point, Sarah,” Lionel interjected. “I don’t know about this Stuart fellow, but Dr. Tall, Dark, and Brooding could definitely get it. Maybe our friend here wants him to find his way into her panties.”
“I gotta get to class,” I said, looking down at my watch to see if it really was time for me to go.
“Ooooooo,” they chanted together. “I think she does!”
I rolled my eyes. “Can we go back to talking about how Lionel might be a borderline criminal?”
“Hey! All parties involved were over the age of eighteen!” he shouted indignantly.
“How can you be sure? I hear people misrepresent their real age all the time on those apps.” I gave him a pointed look.
“Don’t you have to get to class?” he said, narrowing his eyes at me.
“Sure do,” I replied. I checked the time again and realized I did have to get going. “See you guys later. And don’t talk about me when I leave.”
“We definitely will,” Lionel called out after me.
I underestimated just how long it would take me to get across campus to my classroom at Braun Music Center. I made it to class with only a few minutes to spare and most of the students were already seated.
Once I finally caught my breath from rushing over, I looked around the room and smiled. “So, who wants to go first this week?”
The group project I had assigned was going really well so far. It had been just the thing I needed to engage them in the lessons and had the unexpected benefit of helping me reconnect with composing again. I had essentially stopped writing since my mom’s diagnosis. All my guitars and journals had been sitting abandoned in the spare bedroom since I first moved here. I only recently picked them back up again, feeling little sparks of creativity that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I spotted a red-headed girl who couldn’t have been older than twenty tentatively raising her hand.
“Ms. Kennedy, right?” I knew she was the music major in her partnership because she was also in one of Sarah’s classes. Sarah had told me she was an incredible violinist.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said shyly.
“Who’s your partner?” I asked.
Another young female, who was so small I could barely see her seated behind the taller gentleman in front of her, stood up.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Maya Chen,” she said.
“What’s your major, Maya?”
“Nursing,” she answered.
“Wow. That’s amazing,” I said. “One speck of blood and I’d be on the floor.”
She smiled and stood a little more proudly.
“Show me what you guys came up with.” I gestured to the board.
They made their way to the board and wrote out the loose structure of a 32-bar form. I was genuinely impressed by their composition, especially since half the group couldn’t even decipher musical notations. I sat at the piano and played the first two A-sections and discussed how they could clean up the second half of the song.
“Overall, very nice, ladies! It has a little Jerry Lee Lewis thing going for it,” I told them.
“Who’s that?” Maya asked with a puzzled expression.
I clutched my chest like I was injured. “Maya, thank god you’re a nurse. I may need medical attention after the way my spirit was just crushed harder than the ‘I’ in Pixar.”
She giggled, and I started playing the one Jerry Lee Lewis song most people knew, “Great Balls of Fire.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I do know that one. My dad likes all that old stuff too.”
I gave her a deadpan look. “Anddddd that’ll do it for team Kennedy and Chen.” I shuffled them back to their seats.
Maya continued to giggle. “I didn’t mean it like that, Ms. Olivier.”
“Huh? What was that?” I said loudly, cupping my ear. “You’ll have to speak up. I don’t have my hearing aids in.”
They were both chuckling as they made their way back to their seats. I was about to call for my next set of volunteers when I saw John-Luke raising his hand with a mischievous grin on his face.
“Ms. Olivier?” he called out. Internal sigh. What was he up to? “Is it true you know Phoebe Bridgers?”
I could tell he was working some angle, and that this wasn’t just genuine curiosity. I hesitated to answer, knowing the other shoe would eventually drop.
“Yes, it’s true,” I confirmed when excited murmurs broke out. “I helped write a few songs on her last album.”
I could see his faithful lackeys gearing up for the joke to come. “You think you could give her my number? I think we’d really hit it off,” he said, bravado on full display.
There was that other shoe . “And what makes you think that?” I asked, flexing my sarcastic muscle.
“My dad and I bumped into her at a restaurant in LA once. He told her I was in law school, and she said she could always use a good lawyer. I think she was giving me the green light, Teach. What do you think?”
“I think that’s a bigger stretch than MJ’s arm at the end of Space Jam. Now, you and your partner come up here and show me what you’ve been working on.”
He grinned wider than the Cheshire cat as he and his partner made their way to the board. Their composition was actually decent, but I hurried to give them their feedback to avoid any more flare-ups.
When class finally wrapped, some of the students stopped to thank me and asked a few more questions about my work with Phoebe. Despite John-Luke’s continued attempts to distract me, I still felt really content about the day as I drove home. It was the first time I considered the possibility that I might actually be able to pull off this teaching thing.
◆◆◆
“You have all the paperwork Dr. Gremillion gave you, right?” I asked my mom when I called to check in on her later that evening. She had an appointment first thing in the morning, so I wanted to be prepared.
“What paperwork?”
“Mom…”
“Just kidding. Lighten up, kiddo. It’s just a little chemo.”
I sighed. I was glad she was feeling so lighthearted about the whole thing, but I was feeling more anxious than ever, not that I wanted her to know that.
“I can’t wait to show you Agnes,” I said. “She has a lot of character.”
“If she’s anything like her namesake, I’m sure we’ll get along splendidly.” Agnes was the name of her eldest sister, who passed away a few years ago, but they were always extremely close.
“I’ll be there first thing in the morning, okay?”
“For what?” she teased.
“Good one,” I said, eye roll implied. “See you tomorrow. Love you, Mom.”
“Love you too, baby girl.”
I tossed and turned all night, unable to get even a few minutes of sleep. Statistics, survival rate numbers, and every other daunting fact about my mom’s prognosis were on a continuous reel running through my mind. The 65% five-year survival rate was the number that seemed to stick out the most. Was she destined to be a part of the other 35%? I pushed the thought away before I worked myself up into a full-blown panic attack. I decided I might as well get out of bed since sleep eluded me.
I looked at the clock to see I had plenty of time to get coffee and breakfast before heading to my mom’s. I walked outside to find it was still pretty dark out, the sunlight barely peeking out over the horizon. I crossed the street and saw a figure in the distance jogging toward me, and I thought I recognized the silhouette.
It seemed pretty early to be out, but I guess I wasn’t one to talk. As the figure came closer, there was no mistaking who it was. I waved at Lex when I thought he spotted me, but he crossed the street and continued up a different path. I guess he didn’t see me, or the more insulting but also more likely scenario was that he did see me and ignored me anyway. I didn’t have the energy to decipher Strovinski’s behavior today, so I moved on without giving it another thought.