14. Adriana
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Adriana
I want a job.
That’s the thought I wake up with, two weeks into living in Enzo’s apartment, and it won’t leave me alone all morning.
Not his money. Not the black card that still sits in my wallet like a thing I borrowed and keep forgetting to give back.
My own money. Something I earned, that nobody can hold over my head or take away to teach me a lesson.
I bring it up over coffee.
“I’m going to look for work,” I say. “A job. Something I can do without a degree, since I don’t have one. A café, a shop, anything. I just need to start somewhere.”
Enzo sets his cup down very carefully. “No.”
“No?”
“You’re not waiting tables.”
“Why not? People wait tables. It’s honest work.”
“It’s honest work that pays nothing and runs you into the ground, and you’d be doing it to prove a point you don’t need to prove.
” He leans back. “You want your own money, fine. I’m not going to argue with that.
But don’t start at the bottom of a ladder when you could just go to school and skip the climb. ”
“I can’t afford school.”
“You can. Stop.”
I open my mouth and he holds up a hand, and it doesn’t make me feel small the way it would have from anyone else. He’s not telling me to sit down and be quiet. He’s telling me I’m aiming too low, and the strange thing is, no one has ever accused me of that before in my life.
“College,” he says. “Try it for a semester. If you hate it, get your café job and I’ll never say another word about it. But try it first.”
I think about it. I think about it for the rest of the day, actually, turning it over while he’s on calls in the other room.
The truth is I want it. I’ve wanted it for years and never let myself say so, because wanting things was how you got hurt in my family.
A degree. A reason to be in a room full of people my own age.
A version of my life where I’m learning something instead of waiting for someone to decide what I’m allowed to be.
So that night I tell him yes. College. But on one condition.
“Not the one you’re going to suggest,” I say, because I can already see him reaching for the name of some place with ivy and a four-hundred-year-old crest. “A normal one. A local one.”
“I can get you into anywhere you want.”
“I don’t want anywhere. That’s the whole problem.”
“You say that now.” He sets his jaw, and for the first time all morning he actually pushes. “You go to a real school, you graduate into doors that are already open. You go local, you’re starting from nothing with a degree nobody’s heard of. I’m trying to make this easier for you, not harder.”
“I know. I just don’t want easier.” I pull my knees up onto the couch. “Every room I’ve ever been in, somebody else picked it. Because of Dad, the name, whatever.” I pick at the hem of my sock. “I’m so tired of it. I just want to go somewhere nobody knows me. Be a normal person. Is that stupid?”
“You could get that and a name that means something.”
“I don’t want the name to mean something. That’s the whole thing.” I look at him. “I’m trying to get out from under it. Not, like, climb further in.”
He doesn’t fire back. I watch the argument go out of him, watch him actually hear what I said instead of just waiting for his turn to talk. It’s not a thing the men in my old life ever did.
He looks at me for a long second. Then he lets out a breath and nods.
“Okay,” he says. “Your call. I’d have done it differently. But it’s your call, not mine.”
I’m starting to get used to that. It still catches me off guard every time.
***
I enroll for the spring term at a community college a twenty-minute drive from the apartment, and within a week I have a thing I’ve never really had before: somewhere to be that has nothing to do with my family or Enzo or any of it. Just me, a backpack, a schedule.
I make a friend almost by accident, a girl named Lucia who sits next to me in the intro lit class and talks to me like I’m nobody, which is the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in years.
She works two jobs and rents a place a few blocks from campus with a roommate who’s moving out at the end of term.
“You should take the room when she goes,” Lucia says on the second day, like it’s nothing. “It’s cheap. The landlord’s not a creep. You’d be close to everything.”
“I’m sort of staying somewhere right now.”
“Sure. Just throwing it out there.” She shrugs and goes back to her notes. “It opens up end of term. If your situation ever changes, you know where to find me.”
I tell her I’ll keep it in mind. I don’t think much about it, not really, not then. But I tuck it away somewhere in the back of my head, the way you keep a key to a door you’re not sure you’ll ever need to open.
The two weeks have been strange in a way I didn’t expect. Good-strange.
We live together like two people who actually like each other, which I keep waiting to turn out to be a performance and it never does.
He makes coffee before I’m up and leaves it by the machine, still hot, like it’s nothing.
I learn that he reads at night, actual paper books, and pretends he doesn’t when I catch him.
We argue about what to watch and he makes a show of hating everything I pick, and then I look over twenty minutes later and he’s leaning forward, fully in it, telling me the lead is an idiot.
One night I sit down at the piano in the corner of his living room before I think about whether I’m allowed to.
I haven’t touched one since I left Rafael’s house, where mine sat in a room I wasn’t supposed to make noise in.
My hands remember more than I expect. When I stop I realize Enzo’s standing in the doorway, not saying anything, just watching me with a look I can’t name.
“You play,” he says.
“I used to. There was a whole list of hours I wasn’t allowed to touch it.”
“You can play whenever you want. Day, night, doesn’t matter to me.” And then he goes, like he knows leaving me to it is the kindest thing he can do right then.
He’s touchier than I thought he’d be. A hand at the small of my back when I pass him in the kitchen.
Fingers in my hair when I’m reading against his side.
Like he just wants to know I’m there, wants the proof of it under his hand.
I thought I’d mind. I keep checking, the way you’d check a sore tooth, and I keep finding I don’t.
It feels like having a friend who happens to also take me apart on the living room floor when the mood hits. I don’t have a word for what that is. I’ve stopped trying to find one.
Rafael calls. Texts. His lawyer sends letters asking for a meeting, for a sit-down, for a chance to “discuss terms.” I say no to all of it.
He’s dragging his feet on the divorce the way he drags his feet on everything, and every day he doesn’t sign is another day my lawyer gets to ask for more, so honestly he can take his time.
***
I meet Amelia for lunch on a Thursday.
She’s already at the table when I get there, and she stands up and hugs me hard, holds me out at arm’s length to look at me.
“You look good,” she says, surprised. “You look really good. Disgustingly good. I hate it.”
“It’s the not-being-married-to-Rafael thing. Very good for the skin.”
She laughs and we sit, and for a while it’s just normal, just us, the way it’s always been. Then she leans in over her coffee with that look she gets when she has gossip she’s been holding.
“So. You want to know what people are saying.”
“Do I?”
“You do.” She ticks it off on her fingers.
“Everyone knows you left Rafael. Everyone knows you’re with Enzo, after that little show at the function, which by the way is all anyone has talked about for two weeks.
” She grins. “And everyone knows why you left. The cheating. The sister. It got out, Ana. All of it.”
My stomach does something complicated. “How?”
“Does it matter? It’s out.” She shrugs. “And here’s the part you’ll like.
Viviana is getting buried. Nobody’s defending her.
She ran out on her own wedding and then came back to take her sister’s husband.
People are calling her things I won’t repeat at lunch.
She’s not getting invited anywhere. The girl who spent her whole life being the prettiest one in every room just became the cautionary tale in all of them. ”
I wait to feel something. Triumph, maybe. The hot satisfied thing I felt at the function.
It doesn’t come. There’s just a small, quiet, almost-sad flatness, because for all of it she’s still my sister, and some stupid part of me will probably always flinch a little at hearing her torn apart.
“You don’t look happy,” Amelia says, watching me.
“I am. I think. Mostly.” I turn my cup in my hands. “It’s weird, hearing it. That’s all.”
“Be careful, okay?” Her voice softens. “Not about them. About you. You jumped out of one life straight into Enzo’s and I just don’t want you to wake up one day and realize you traded one set of walls for another.”
“He’s not like that.”
“I didn’t say he was. I said be careful.” She squeezes my hand. “You’re finally choosing things for yourself. Don’t stop, just because the person you’re choosing is nice to look at and good in a fight.”
I laugh, but it sticks with me, the way her warnings always do.
***
It’s that afternoon, walking back to the building, that Viviana finds me.
I don’t see her at first. I’ve got my keys in my hand and I’m thinking about nothing, about what to make for dinner, about whether I should email the college today or wait until I’ve slept on it. Then someone steps out from the side of the entrance and says my name like it’s a curse.
“Adriana.”