Chapter 2 Sloan
Sloan
“Professor Joseph!”
I don’t hear the shout the first time. It’s a bit hard, over the music and the drunk graduate students standing huddled around sticky, worn tables and the clink of glasses, beer frothing and foaming over the rims.
“Professor Joseph!”
I hear it the second time, though. I glance over my shoulder when I shrug on my coat and spot not one, not two, but three of my grad students, who, judging by the rosy hue on all their cheeks and shining eyes, have had a few too many of the three-dollar beers.
“Do you have to leave?” Salome, the one in the middle, whines. On a good day, she can make a convincing argument to counter just about anything, but today, her words tumble together into one long, almost intelligible string.
“Right now? Yes. I need to get home.” I give her a flat smile.
I don’t mind the conversation—but I’m trying to spare her. I know what I’d feel like if I woke up the morning after a night at the Grad Club, realizing I’d drunkenly spoken to one of my professors for too long.
But not everyone’s brains are as mean as mine.
“No,” she pouts, tipping her head back before levelling me with wide, unfocused puppy dog eyes. “Leave the program! We’re going to miss you.”
“Adjunct Professor.” I lift my palm, moving it up and down in space like I’m holding the merit of position—all my worth there—before raising my other, sending it skyrocketing past. “Assistant Professor. I think you know which is better.”
But my palm holding up my current role has all this other baggage they can’t see.
It’s weighed down by these impossibly heavy things, anchoring it to the floor and making just about anything in the entire world better than staying here for a moment longer.
A boy with golden-brown hair and grey eyes who used to love me.
A girl who loved him back and wanted a life with him so desperately she’d have followed him to the ends of the earth.
One hand holds a life marred by Bohdan Novotnak.
The other holds a fresh start.
“Boo!” Salome shouts, gesturing downwards with her thumb before knocking her beer over and sending the entire group of them jumping back so their boots don’t get splashed.
Holding my hand up, I wrinkle my nose with a small smile and take the opportunity to duck out while they try to mop up the deluge.
All the music and all the shouts fade, nothing more than the muffled thump of dull bass once the door closes behind me.
The University of Washington campus is about to be beautiful, objectively speaking—we’re right on the precipice of spring, which means the cherry trees are about to blossom.
Twisted branches with their peeling bark are about to be hidden behind clouds of white and pale pink.
This was never where I wanted to be—I’d always planned on moving back home to Toronto after I graduated from Michigan State.
But I ended up here all the same, and it felt a bit like something out of a movie—how beautiful the campus was, blossoms pluming along the trees, with ancient brick buildings peeking out from behind them.
Bohdan’s hand in mind, eyes on me and nodding quietly, sunlight hitting the planes of his face, studying me in that funny sort of stoic way only he ever did while I showed him around.
I thought it was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen back then.
I can’t really stand the sight of it now. I keep my eyes down, firmly on the toes of my worn leather boots. Each step is one step closer to leaving this place, this godforsaken city where it gets harder and harder to breathe each day because Bohdan took all the oxygen with him when he left.
Alone. Left behind. Disposable.
Each word echoes alongside the sound of my heels hitting the stone.
I stop abruptly, wincing when I reach into my pocket for my headphones.
“Shut up,” I whisper, but it’s not quite loud enough and the melody continues, with colourful new notes.
Abandoned. Awful. Not enough and too much all at the same time.
My phone rings before I can find something else to listen to.
“Tia.” I smile into the phone, thankful, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, that my best friend called me.
“Sloan,” she croons, and I can just make out the resounding tap of her heels against marble. “What are you doing?”
“Leaving campus. What are you doing?”
“Leaving work.” The symphony of her heels is joined by car horns and inaudible conversation.
Enough to tell me she just stepped out of her office, right by that stupid golden bull on Wall Street.
“Thought I’d give one last shot at convincing you to come on my brother’s sad little Peter Pan–esque, ‘I’ll never grow up’ cruise before I catch the subway. ”
I snort, starting my walk across campus again, the nefarious sounds of my footsteps chased away by the sound of my best friend. “It’s a good thing you went into accounting, not advertising. Your pitch needs a bit of work.”
“I do believe in faeries, I do, I do!” Tia shouts into the phone, the lilt of her laughter warm before she tries again. “You don’t want to board the ship, hit the second star to the right, and head straight on till morning?”
“Not only does the idea of a cruise in general sound unappealing, but the guest list really isn’t doing it for me.
” I pause, the phantom ache from that empty place where Bohdan used to live making it hard to breathe, but I take a shaky inhale and keep talking before Tia can interrupt.
“And it’s like you forget, I’m moving. It’s a lot to move from one apartment to another, let alone to an entirely new city in a different country. I can’t just call a moving company.”
“And what does our therapist think about this big move?”
I roll my eyes. “Lu isn’t our therapist, she’s mine.
And I’ll have you know that she thinks it’s a great idea.
” She doesn’t, not really. It kind of goes against the basic tenets of Exposure and Response Prevention therapy, and it’s a bit more like avoidance for me to run away to a place Bohdan never touched.
Tia snorts, all laced with disbeliefs and the truths she knows about me and my brain. “Well, she’s always felt like my therapist. I’ve gained so many insights second hand. Lu is your third-longest relationship, you know. Are you going to keep doing video or . . . ?”
“We’ve severed ties. She’s sent me on my way with a list of practitioners she knows in Toronto, and when I get settled, I’ll find someone.” I tip my chin up in a swallow, cross my arms, and ready for the inevitable.
“Does a break in therapy seem like the best idea?” Tia asks softly. I picture her lips twisting to the side, eyes clouding in concern.
I blink. Tipping my chin up further even though she can’t see it. “It’s only temporary. I’m perfectly capable of managing on my own for awhile. I’m fine.”
I hope the emphasis on the word that certainly doesn’t describe anything about me is enough to get her to drop it.
It is.
Tia changes tune, her voice rising again. “You know, I’d have made a bigger fuss about this move had your relocating to Toronto not brought you closer to me. Despite the short flight time between New York and Toronto, I can’t believe you’re leaving. You loved Seattle.”
Loved. The tense being operative and entirely telling of why it doesn’t bother me at all to leave.
I don’t tell Tia that, I try to deflect instead. “You forget I’m Canadian. It’s where I’m from. It’s where I grew up. It’s not shocking. It’s where I wanted to be before I was . . . brought here.”
It doesn’t work. She gets right back to the heart of the matter anyway.
“Sloan. Don’t rewrite history.” I don’t have to see her to know she’s tugging a curl in exasperation, that she’s shaking her head slowly, something that looks like pity painted across her face. “Bohdan didn’t drag you by a leashed backpack to Seattle.”
I’ve stopped walking again, feet silent against the cobblestones. But I hear what those footsteps would tell me all the same.
No. You followed him, nothing but a little puppy. And in the end, it still wasn’t enough.
“What is love if not a leashed backpack?” I raise a hand, trying to be laissez-faire for once in my life.
“You’re my best friend. I love you. Is that a leashed backpack?”
Sometimes the words I love you sound a bit like someone dragging an axe along a whetstone, sharpening it, readying it to take another piece of me.
Bohdan didn’t take my ability to feel love when he left—even though I wish he did. It might have made things easier.
I love Tia. I love my parents. I love my grandparents. I love Talon and Jay, even though we don’t talk as much because they were his to begin with.
I still love him, even though I like to pretend I don’t.
He didn’t take any of that.
But the pieces of me that he watered and grew and cherished—those pieces of me that believed I were worthy of love—they left with him.
I stay silent, and it hangs there, heavy and taking all the air out of this phone call with my best friend.
I think some of the cherry blossoms even furl their petals inward.
Tia sighs—all sad and weary and like someone so much older than she is.
“It’ll be good for you. He’s not coming, Sloan.
He never answered. You can deal with Talon and Jay for a week.
I’ll ban them from uttering his name. I’ll go as far as banning them from even using words that start with the letter B. ”
My eyes prickle and I scrunch up my nose. I wish it didn’t hurt me, but it does.
Because the only version of Bohdan I know who wouldn’t answer his best friends is the Bohdan from a year and a half ago—this impossibly sad, impossibly hurt boy who felt like a shell of the man he used to be.
I swallow. “Shouldn’t Jay be—I don’t know? Skating? Scoring goals?”
“Season ended.” I can picture Tia shrugging one shoulder, full lips tugging into a resigned line. “They didn’t make the playoffs. Which you’d know if you turned on the TV. Bohdan actually commented on the—”
“I don’t watch TV.” A lie. I watch so much reality TV.
I know everything there is to know about the so-called hottest bartenders in LA in the early aughts, every housewife who has ever graced the screens, and all there is to know about what happens below the deck of a ship.
It keeps my brain quiet. “And if I did, I certainly would not watch my former boyfriend watch a bunch of grown men chase a tiny rubber puck around a rink.”
Tia scoffs. “Funny, you used to love watching anything to do with that boy and rubber pucks and rinks.”
“New year, new me,” I say, forcing myself to start down the path again. I’ve started and stopped abruptly so many times someone’s probably about to call campus security.
“Alright. If it’s really a new year, a new you, then you should have no problem coming with me. Don’t make me beg—I’m about to go onto the subway. I’m not above calling you back as soon as I get to my stop.” Her voice turns pleading.
And if there’s one thing I’ve never been able to do, it’s tell Tia Valdez no.
“Fine,” I concede, and her answering shriek does make me smile for real.
Tia talks for longer than she should, excitement rising in her voice, not a care in the world that she’s probably blocking the entrance to the subway, that she’s taking up all this space, but she can’t seem to help it because she just has so much to look forward to, and her life is so wonderful, so good—that she won’t apologize for it.
And she shouldn’t have to.
It’s always been like that. I can picture an eighteen-year-old Tia smiling at me when I opened the door to our shared dorm room at Michigan State—happy, exuberant, and inviting me into a world that, despite what it would look like to an outsider, felt a lot quieter than the one I occupied.
It’s a stupid thing to think about, us back then. Because the memories of Tia, Talon, and Jay are all tied up in my memories of Bohdan.
Those memories are sort of like those cherry blossoms, stubborn and desperate to poke through and find the sunlight.
But they’re beautiful and wonderful, and all the things I thought were beautiful and wonderful aren’t.
And I wish they’d stay in the dark.
Fortunately for me, I don’t remember the exact moment I fell in love with Bohdan.
I just know that I did—quickly and all at once, in that big, giant way you do when you’re young.
But I do remember the moment I prayed and prayed and prayed to whoever might be listening to please, please, please make it stop.