Chapter 13
Ren
I lied.
I couldn’t only think of five things.
I thought of six things, too.
But the last one felt too personal, and it didn’t really feel like the kind of thing I could share with an almost stranger—even if we are both adults.
It feels too personal to be thinking about now, surrounded by a wall of over one hundred plated fossilized fish while I work through a regular inspection.
“You didn’t have to stay,” I say, trying to blink away the blush on my cheeks. “Museum closed half an hour ago. I think that signals the end of your workday.”
Imani shrugs, adjusting her glasses where the frames have slid down the bridge of her nose. “I have an hour until I have to be on campus for my seminar.”
“How’s the rotation going?” I ask, looking up at the endless stretch of fish.
“Not great. Turns out not many biology students are very interested in invertebrates. They all think paleontology is an easy elective they can use to pad their GPAs before med school applications.”
“Did you tell them invertebrates make up 97 percent of animal species? Pretty important, if you ask me.” I toss a smile over my shoulder before squinting at a coelacanth. “I should rotate this one out, see? There’s flaking starting around the vertebral column.”
Imani cranes her neck towards the low, mounted lighting behind the glass. “Is there something wrong with the display?”
“The consolidants are probably just aging. This is the oldest one in the collection.” Frowning at my tablet, I click through the records and documentation for the fish, before peering back up at the display.
Everything looks normal, environmentally speaking.
“I’ll have facilities run an audit just to make sure nothing tripped, and the temperature stayed steady since the last one.
” I give Imani a wobbly smile. “That’d be my luck—some sort of massive malfunction of the temperature and the humidity that destroys our fish collection.
Scott would have a field day with that. Imagine how he’d walk around.
I wouldn’t even get to touch our new collection when it arrives. ”
She makes a face, clenching her fists and rounding out her shoulders in some horrible imitation of Scott, and her laugh rings out, endless, and so much bigger and louder than the frame that contains it.
I wonder if the way my best friend’s laughter sounds to me is the way mine did to Miller the other night.
Stop apologizing. It’s cute.
“Yeah.” She nods fervently, adjusting her glasses again. “Let’s double-check everything before you’re done. We don’t need to give him any other reason to walk around like—what did you say you called him the other day in the fossil lab?”
“I was about halfway into calling him a puffed-up penguin before I crumbled, like usual.” I sniff a sad laugh.
“Hey—” Imani wraps a hand around my arm. “None of that. You’re working on it. I’d like to see anyone else get up and dust themselves off after a decade with him and resume normal activity.”
Shame gnaws at something in my chest, and I mumble, “Most people wouldn’t have spent a decade with him.”
She tries to give me a stern look. “We’ve spent the better part of the last four years working through those types of things in therapy. And that was before he slithered back into your life. We can allow some grace for that.”
“We can?” I ask through a laugh that’s half dry, half hopeful.
I know she’s right, logically speaking. When I finally worked up the courage to leave Scott behind, I found this job. I found a therapist. I found new friends.
I tried to start finding myself.
But then he found me again, just because he could, and it feels so much like I’m back at square one. He stole another dream from me when he took the job, and it’s hard not to wonder whether I’m the type of person who should have any dreams at all.
“We can.” Imani gives me a proud little nod before she pulls her phone from the pocket of her pants, glancing around surreptitiously, like Scott might pop out from behind the model of the anglerfish. “Speaking of things that Scott might have a field day with.”
She shoves her phone directly under my nose, and I have to pull my head back to see what’s on the screen.
I almost laugh.
It’s a picture of Miller and me, standing in front of the produce.
“That didn’t take long.”
Imani smashes a finger against the screen. “What’s going on? I saw you talking at the gala, but I didn’t think—”
“Nothing,” I tell her, but disbelief purses her lips. “I drank too much after my run-in with Scott. He walked me home. We came to a . . . mutually beneficial agreement to help one another out.”
“Mutually beneficial agreement?” Her eyes narrow, and she leans forward again. “You know what the press says about him, right? What people say online?”
“I’m not really interested in what the press says about him. And I’m certainly not interested in what people on social media with nothing better to do with their time say about him.” I give her a pointed look. “And you shouldn’t be either.”
Her words rush out in a correction. “I’m not. That’s not what I meant! I just want to make sure you’re okay with—that you know who you’re . . . with.”
“We aren’t with each other. It’s not real.” I wave a hand towards her phone. “People can take pictures and say whatever they want. That’s kind of the point.”
“Like fake dating?” Her eyes light up.
“No,” I tell her, but she looks skeptical again, so I repeat myself with a laugh.
“No, Imani.” Her shoulders sink with an exaggerated sigh of disappointment.
A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth.
“But we agreed to help each other with a few things . . . and if people think we’re dating while we are, so what?
It helps Miller and it’s not like I have a hiring committee to impress.
” I force the smile to stay in place. “They found me distinctly lacking.”
She straightens her shoulders. “You wouldn’t be doing anything against the rules, anyway.
If it were true. He’s not a donor. You aren’t soliciting him for funds.
” She puts such a heavy intonation on the word soliciting, she might as well throw me an exaggerated wink.
“He’s an employee of one of our philanthropic partners to support our educational programming.
” Seemingly satisfied with her outline of all the ways I’d be following the rules even if I was dating Miller, she tips her chin up.
But then her mouth tugs to the side in concern. “And Scott?”
“Scott already thinks so little of me, I assure you this wouldn’t make a difference.” I force another smile and pretend that even though it’s been four years and I don’t love him anymore, that it doesn’t hurt me—the waste of my youth and my love and my dreams.
Imani throws another glance at the anglerfish model before she whispers, “Screw Scott.”
“Screw Scott,” I repeat.
She gives a satisfied nod before she turns curious again. “What kind of things are you helping each other out with?”
“Uhm,” I mumble, teetering forward on my heels.
“He has all these things he doesn’t really do anymore because of .
. . He just doesn’t like doing them. Like going in public.
” I clutch my tablet to my chest, tipping an elbow towards her phone as she shoves it in her pocket.
“So, I went with him to the grocery store. He’s got a list of six things he wants to try again, and I have this list of five .
. . things.” Swallowing, I shrug. “We’re going to help each other work through them.
When he’s in town, obviously. Did you know baseball season was so busy?
He plays like, six games a week. Usually, he’s away so he only has one day off to travel home. So just . . . whenever.”
“Five what?” she asks softly, sidestepping my rambling explanation of the regular baseball season.
I’m about to call it what it was—this list of things I let someone steal from me and find all kinds of fault with. All the reasons why I wasn’t good enough. All the reasons I shouldn’t just be me.
But I think of the other name for it.
The new one.
“Reasons why it’s not so bad to be me. Things I like. Old hobbies,” I whisper, something soft and real tipping up the corners of my mouth. “Ren’s Reasons to Be Ren.”
My list of reasons to be me didn’t include coming to terms with the fact that as much as I don’t think I’m the emotional mess Scott painted me out to be, my organizational skills leave something to be desired.
At least at home.
At work, I keep the best records of any collection across any department.
I led the digitization of our fossil mammals when there wasn’t even a standard software being used across types of vertebrates.
There wasn’t even a question about whether I’d be able to manage the new family of Saurolophus we’re getting in a few weeks.
But here? Where I live?
Things are everywhere. I’m everywhere.
Books are tipped over on shelves. Vinyl records sit in haphazard stacks on the sideboard.
Half-burned candles litter every surface with struck matches beside them.
My keys are on the kitchen counter, and my purse sits spilled on the coffee table.
My dress from the gala did make it off my bedroom floor, but never made it further than the chair sitting in the corner where most of my laundry gets abandoned until I need it.
I think, when I take it all in, these pieces of me I’m supposed to love, I could try to be a bit more systematic about it.
But I give up when I realize the drawers I was going to start shoving things into so I could pretend I wasn’t the type of person who left remnants of themselves all over every surface of their home were full of junk, too.