Chapter 19
Ren
“It really is a fascinating game from a statistics and mathematics perspective.” Imani nods fervently, eyes glued to the TV hanging above the crowded bar before she carefully marks something down in her notebook.
My gaze lifts from my laptop. “This baseball obsession is getting a bit out of hand, no? Don’t tell me you’re—” I lean across the worn, scratched wood of the table, snatching her notebook to get a better view. “Oh, thank god, I thought you might have been gambling. Never mind, carry on.”
Imani taps her pencil against the table with a frown. “Do people bet on baseball?”
“I think you can bet on just about anything.” I drop against the cracked vinyl seat.
Something lights up behind her eyes, but she gives her head a small shake. “I’d be quite good at that, but I’m not sure it’s for me.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have guessed baseball was for you, and here we are, at a college sports bar one of your students told you about so we can watch the game.” I squint to get a better look at the television. “Who’s playing?”
“Oh, not Miller. Their series finished last night.” Imani starts scratching something out on her notebook again.
“I know.” The words rush out before I can stop them.
Embarrassment burns across my cheek, and disappointment rises in my throat.
I try to stamp it down with a swallow, half-heartedly flashing her the photo Miller posted with our shared custody dinosaur trophy in the dugout in Boston on my phone. “He took our trophy for good luck.”
She peers at my phone. “That raptor looks shockingly accurate.”
I laugh, glancing back at the post. “For a cheap trivia night trophy, it does look pretty good, you’re right.
” My eyes linger on the screen, but they don’t snag on the anatomically accurate golden winglike forelimbs or sickle claws.
They get caught on the wave of damp, postgame hair curling across Miller’s forehead.
On the swirls of navy in his eyes—brighter than usual—as he holds up our trophy in one hand, with a singular finger in the air on his other.
The ridge of his thigh muscle running under the material of white baseball pants, and the cords of muscle roped around his forearms.
They get stuck on the caption, too.
my good luck charm couldn’t come to boston, so she sent a surrogate instead
Imani gingerly sets her pencil down, folding her hands over her notebook with a furtive glance around before asking, “How is your . . . arrangement going?”
I blink, my eyes unsnagging from all things Miller, and that wave of disappointment from the other night on the beach comes closer to shore.
Dropping my phone face down, I chew on my bottom lip, whispering, “Am I doing what I’ve always done?
” But Imani’s brows knit behind her glasses, and I try to clarify, “With Miller? The list?”
She frowns. “I’m not following.”
“We’re each working through these lists, and you know, he said something the other day and it made me realize I’m not .
. . being very independent about this whole thing.
” My shoulders curve inwards, and not along the trajectory of a beautiful smile this time.
Along the old one—the one that belonged to the Ren Jacobs I so desperately want to leave behind.
The shell of a former girl who couldn’t, wouldn’t, be alone. “I’m relying on someone else again.”
“But you’re the one who came up with the list, and you took the leap to decide to work through it.”
I widen my eyes, voice turning almost shrill. “Yes, but he suggested it.”
It’s her turn to blink, surprised, before realization dawns, and slowly, she asks, “You think . . . you think that asking for help equates to a lack of independence?”
“Doesn’t it? By its very definition?” I flatten my palms on the sticky surface of the table, almost desperate.
She adjusts the frame of her glasses on the bridge of her nose and shrugs. “Well, if you want to get technical—
“I don’t.” My voice turns pleading, and I feel my shoulders droop. “I just . . . want to know what you think.”
“I think the only person who can decide that is you,” Imani says softly before cocking her head. “What did he say? It couldn’t have been that bad.”
“We went thrift shopping—the second thing on my list.”
“Of course Scott hated thrift shopping,” she mutters with an exaggerated eye roll.
“Right?” I sniff a laugh. “I put it on the list because I used to love it. It felt fun and silly and frivolous, but he always made me feel . . . stupid. For liking it. For wanting to be all those things. He didn’t really like the playful side of me so .
. . I just . . . stopped being like that after a while. ”
“I like that side of you.” Imani offers me a gentle smile and soft words. “I bet Miller liked that side of you.”
Chewing on the inside of my lip, I nod, tears starting to nip at the back of my eyes.
“Afterwards . . . we went for ice cream down by the lake, and he was telling me that it’s looking good, like he’s going to get his trade at the end of the season.
He asked at the start, but his GM seems like he’s coming around. ”
“That is very unorthodox,” Imani interrupts, pursing her lips. “To trade away a star like him?”
“So I’ve heard.” I snort. “But then . . . when he was talking about what’s important to him, he said that I was. Helping me was important to him.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Ren, you’ve lost me again.”
“Trying to help me.” I tap my chest, like everything I really am sits just beneath the plate of bone, in all that muscle tissue of an organ that has a very specific biological function. “Shouldn’t I . . . be helping myself?”
Her lips form a small O, before they pull into a taut line, and the analytical scientist version of Imani takes over with an assessing tip of her head.
“I see,” she murmurs, her thumb tapping against the back of her hand before she leans across the table, closer to me.
Her usually warm eyes shift to shrewd. “You’ve created a hierarchy. Your own little taxonomic structure.”
“No, I haven’t,” I sputter. “I don’t see how taxonomy applies to my feelings.”
“You have, and it does.” She nods and readily starts ticking things off on her fingers. “Domain? Eukarya—you’re still an organism with complex cells, after all. Kingdom—”
“Now I’m not following.” I narrow my eyes at her. “You can’t just apply a random biological classification about evolutionary relationships to personal growth.”
Her brows rise, triumphant. “Evolutionary relationships. You’ve classified how you feel about your own evolution and what you think is a valuable, and valid, way to grow.”
“And that does not a taxonomic structure make.” I tip my chin up, thinking I’ve won the invisible game of tug-of-war stretching across the table between us.
“Maybe it’s not a perfect analogy.” She waves a hand, like we’re debating known facts about migration paths of sauropods.
“But think about the hierarchical ranking. You’ve assigned value in your head to how you grow, and therefore, yourself.
It’s only valuable to you if you do it independently, which you’ve also redefined to be a solo endeavour, and one without help.
Why can’t Miller help you? Why can’t it be important to him? ”
I start to shake my head.
“Herd behaviour, then.” Imani slumps back in her seat, folding her arms across her chest. “That’s an analogy you can easily wrap your head around.”
“The last time I was in a herd of two, I stopped being an individual at all,” I say flatly.
She rolls her eyes with a snort. “Oh, so you’d like to be a tyrannosaur? Live out a solitary life just to prove to yourself you can?” A slim shoulder lifts, and her voice turns sad. “Sounds lonely.”
“How am I supposed to tell the difference between growth and me reverting to old patterns?” My voice cracks, and one of those tears finally manages to break through and trails down my cheek.
“I’ve never . . . I wanted to be loved and chosen so badly I didn’t care by who.
I gave the wrong person . . . everything.
And now . . . I’m only trying to find these things again because a man gave me the idea. ”
“I think you’re leaving out a few crucial details,” she says tentatively, and she turns from scientist to friend again.
“Those things may be true. But four years ago? You looked in the mirror and realized you wanted—deserved—more, so you packed up. And you think you waited for a man to tell you it was time to pick up the pieces of yourself? Ren? Look around.” Her mouth wobbles into a smile, and I think tears might sparkle behind her eyes, too.
“You found yourself a job. You carved a life for yourself here. You started going to therapy. You have a beautiful—but messy—home. You offered to help Miller first. He got the idea from you. He just . . . wanted to help you back.”
Giving her a watery smile, I shrug, trying to avoid the pull on my shoulders back into the line of a grin, even though that might have become their default setting the first time Miller smiled at me.
That same smile—wide, stretching with dimples hidden underneath a dusting of dark stubble—flashes behind my eyes, and I feel my face warm when I whisper, “I just don’t want to repeat the same mistakes. ”
She starts to shake her head, but her eyes land on the flush searing across my skin and her mouth pops open. Leaning forward, her voice turns into a strangled shriek. “Do you—are you—do you have a crush on him?”
“No!” I shake out my shoulders, slapping my hands to my cheeks. “He’s—he’s obviously very attractive.”
“Obviously!” Imani jabs a finger towards my phone, still face down on the table. “He was named the sexiest shortstop last year, you know.”
Fires light across my cheeks, and I try to give her a flat look. “By what reputable publication?”
She lifts her chin. “Sports Illustrated.”
“Oh.” I deflate, petulant. “I wouldn’t exactly call that reputable.”
“Sorry, were you expecting to find him in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology?” Her shoulders roll with barely contained laughter.
Leaning forward, I arch a brow. “Imagine the stir that would cause in the scientific community.”
“Graham would have a fit.” Her laugh turns into a snort, and she covers her mouth, but it’s not embarrassment flaring behind her eyes. It’s something like joy.
My smile turns soft, and I think I’d like to be more like my best friend.
Casting a glance over her shoulder, like Graham might be lurking amongst the college students and could have heard her, she turns back, whispering, “Would it be the worst thing in the world? To have a crush on Miller? Crushes can be harmless fun.”
I don’t think a single step leading down the path of falling for someone like Miller could be considered harmless.
At least, not for someone like me.
“It’s a time-limited thing, really. Us helping each other out. He might move, and I might . . . too.” I finally turn my attention back to my abandoned laptop, turning it around so she can see the job posting in Halifax. “Graham offered to put in a good word for me.”
“They don’t have a very big collection.” Imani’s brows draw together when she frowns at the screen, but she looks up at me, curious. “Is that . . . The title is something you want so badly you’d give up access to one of the biggest collections in the country?”
“Well, I didn’t get the job here so . . .” I trail off. “Going back to school is on my list, but I don’t know . . . this makes sense. It would be the next step, career-wise.”
I wait for her to tell me dreams can change and that doesn’t mean you’re not growing, but she murmurs a single word, almost sad, “Hierarchies,” before straightening her shoulders and closing her notebook.
“Well, your CV must be up-to-date. You can repurpose your application from the role here. I can look over it, when you’re done. ”
“You don’t think I should apply?” I blink at her.
“I didn’t say that.” She shakes her head, slow, bottom lip soft and a wrinkle to her nose. “And it only matters what you think. But you know how sometimes we’re so set on a singular hypothesis, we overlook something else?”
I nod with half a laugh. “Sure. Researchers and scientists are just as fallible as everyone else.”
“Kind of like someone being so careful not to repeat a previous mistake, they end up making an entirely different one.” She exhales, motioning with her hand, leaving her scribbles about whatever mathematical assessment she was doing of professional baseball entirely abandoned. “Here, let me see the job description.”
I slide my laptop across the table towards my best friend, who I love so very much, and I know loves me, even when she thinks I’m going in the wrong direction.
But she’ll never understand that there’s this other hierarchy, and it might be the most important one of all: Some mistakes are so horrible and so harmful, you’d do anything and everything to avoid making them again, no matter the cost.