Chapter 14 #3
The waiter returned with their dishes, which he presented, sliding a pair of chopsticks beside each one.
“Can I have a fork?” Gen asked him.
Rory widened her eyes. “Were you raised by wolves ?”
“Fuck you,” said Emily. Silence struck the table. Her chest hurt with anger.
Rory said, “It was a joke.”
“You are not funny. You are a piece of shit.”
“Excuse me?” said Elizabeth.
Florencia put a hand on Emily’s shoulder but Emily did not want to be calmed, did not want to be cajoled out of her anger—which, she realized, she had held within her ever since her birthday.
Anger had been part of that night, too, nestled below the shame, a creature so timid that Emily hadn’t recognized it earlier, because she didn’t know that anger could be meek or helpless.
She had thought anger was always how it felt now: destructive.
“Don’t,” said Gen, and it took Emily a moment to realize that Gen had addressed her and not Rory.
“Don’t what ?”
“Don’t embarrass me.”
It was as though Emily had fallen out of a tree.
She couldn’t breathe. She felt her face pale, then flush.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She stood, Florencia’s hand sliding from her shoulder.
She walked through the restaurant, walked down the street.
It wasn’t raining anymore but it was cold, the sidewalk shining, cars slapping up puddles.
A hand touched her arm. Gen held out Emily’s coat. Emily was freezing but she ignored the coat and kept walking, though Gen’s long legs easily matched stride. “ I embarrassed you,” Emily said. “ Me .”
“It wasn’t a big deal. You made it a big deal.”
“I can’t win with you.”
“You got mad because I don’t look like your idea of success and they saw it.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it? I don’t like being your secret.”
“You’re not,” Emily said, though the lie was obvious. She added, “Not to them.”
“I know why you can’t tell your parents. That doesn’t mean it makes me feel good.”
“I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.”
“You want to fuck me but you can’t take me to dinner.”
“I did take you to dinner. I defended you.”
“I don’t want you to defend me. I can handle myself in front of your friends.” They stood outside Thayer. Its redbrick bulk held grids of lit, rain-streaked windows. Students heading for the entrance glanced at Gen and Emily but not for long; they wanted to get inside.
Panic rooted in Emily’s belly. She said, “You were mad at me before for saying nothing. Now you’re mad because I spoke.”
“Two totally different situations. It bothers me that you can’t see that. It bothers me that you tried to talk me into transferring to Harvard, like OSU is a crappy school.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s a Division I school. I’m happy there.”
“ I’ll transfer,” Emily said wildly. “I’ll come to OSU.”
Gen looked startled. Quietly, she said, “I don’t want you to do that.”
“We’d be together.”
“I’m not sure that would help.” Gen studied her feet. She still had Emily’s coat, held in the crook of her elbow, hands shoved into her pockets, shoulders hunched. A crowd of boys passed, laughing. “I need to tell you something. I got into Harvard. I was accepted when you were wait-listed.”
Gen’s words made no sense. They sounded out of order, wrong.
“I turned the offer down,” Gen said.
Emily still didn’t understand. “Are you making fun of me?” She had never known Gen to be mean, but maybe this was a satirical way for Gen to point out the snobbery of edamame and concentrations and quotes on buildings by pretending that she was above it all—had always been.
“I would never make fun of you.”
“But…you didn’t apply.”
“I did.” Gen looked so worried, even… afraid, that Emily realized with belated clarity that this was real. She knew it was real because her body did: she felt a boil of betrayal, right below her sternum. “You lied.”
“No, I kept something from you.”
“You kept a secret, and your secret was a lie !”
“Emily, listen. Will you please listen?”
“Did it make you feel good to know how much I wanted what you already had, that I was second-best, waiting on the sidelines, stupid me, to think that I deserved it?” Emily could see, as vividly as if she had been in the room when it happened, the admissions board’s decision.
They weren’t going to take two students from a no-name high school in rural Ohio.
Whom did they prefer? The girl who taught herself ancient Greek out of a library textbook or the girl whose grades and scores were also excellent, and achieved in the face of adversity that was poignantly, yet with no trace of self-pity, described in the personal essay: the double-mortgaged farm, the loss of a mother to addiction?
Look: a state champion in track. Look: this girl was finishing high school in three years.
“You are not second-best,” said Gen.
Emily didn’t care that Gen’s eyes were nakedly unhappy. Emily couldn’t remember being angry before tonight, or being allowed to be angry. Now it was all she wanted to be. “You used me.”
“I just wanted to be close to you. For years, I saw you in the halls, so…I don’t know…
alone, like your mind was always somewhere else.
And it was. Everyone knew how much you cared about school.
You convinced the history teacher to do a solo AP prep course for you.
The librarian gave you literal home-baked cookies .
I said one offhanded thing about wanting to graduate in the year I would have if I hadn’t been held back.
I said it to make conversation. That was all.
I didn’t know what else to say and I’d wanted to talk to you for so long.
I didn’t expect to get swept up in your ideas.
I didn’t plan for this, and if I’d wanted to go to some hotshot college, I would have gone.
I wouldn’t have even applied, except that I had this crazy hope that we’d be together. ”
“Then why did you turn down the offer?”
“Well.”
“You thought you’d just give me the spot? That’s not how admission works!”
“Except that kind of is how it worked.”
“Maybe I would have gotten off the wait-list anyway, even if you had accepted the offer. We could have both been here.”
“Maybe.” Gen drew a ragged breath. Though the rain had stopped, water dripped from the trees.
On a chilly night like this, decades ago, Thayer’s chimneys would have breathed woodsmoke.
Beyond Thayer’s roof stood the white spire of Memorial Church, sharp as a tool.
“I thought about that. It wasn’t obvious what to do. ”
“We could have discussed it.”
“Wasn’t it my decision where to go to college?” Gen’s voice was small. “My life?”
Emily felt like her own coat, still draped over Gen’s arm, flattened under one long hand that worked the lapel between anxious fingers, an object placed here or there, hung up on a rack, sometimes worn, nice enough but not ultimately valuable.
Sadness washed away her anger. She and Gen were returning, Emily knew, to the moment earlier when Emily had offered to transfer to OSU and Gen had refused.
“Yes, of course,” said Emily, trying to make her voice neutral. She didn’t want to cry.
“I had other reasons for saying no.”
“Okay. Tell me.”
“OSU has a great track team. And I didn’t want to go into debt for a degree. You knew that.”
“What else?”
“Emily. We weren’t together then, when I got the acceptance letter. You were just a crush who probably wasn’t even gay.”
That hurt, too: to be judged as less authentic. “I see.”
“Even now…I don’t know how much I should put into this.” Gen flipped a hand between herself and Emily.
It was humiliating to love someone who didn’t feel the same way, someone who was gingerly seeking a way out. “Because of tonight? Gen, what can I do? I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe sorry isn’t enough.”
What was ? Emily felt the impossibility of ever being what someone wanted.
There were standards; she always tried to meet them.
There was a promise of safety in meeting them, because that’s when people kept you, when they said, You’re mine, and you weren’t someone else’s, or no one’s, because you fit exactly into a specific hope.
It should be easy. She would do whatever Gen wanted.
Why wasn’t that enough? Gen wanted nothing that Emily could do.
People’s standards shifted; Emily inevitably outgrew their ideals.
The pain of this was impossible to master; she had never been able to master it, her whole young life, and she was, suddenly, too exhausted and wounded to try. “Then go,” she said.
“Go?”
“I want you to leave.”
In the terrible silence that followed, Gen gave Emily her coat and went inside to pack her bag. She left to catch the next bus to Ohio.
Florencia made certain that Emily attended class.
When Emily refused to go to the dining hall, Florencia smuggled food back to their room.
She even stole a plate and cutlery. Emily stared at the food.
Florencia cut everything into bite-size portions.
“Just a little,” she said, and kept saying it until Emily had eaten enough.
Every day, Florencia handed her a Tylenol and a glass of water.
That first morning after Gen left, Florencia had said, “Did you know that research has shown that heartache actually hurts your body? Apparently, acetaminophen helps.”
Emily took the pill and swallowed it.
The Ryall twins stood outside Emily’s door. “We are not pieces of shit,” said Rory.
“ We? ” said Elizabeth. “ You were the problem, Ror.”
“I wish I hadn’t said anything. I’m really sorry, Emily.”
Emily, who felt acutely that forgiveness should not be so hard, that she did not want blame to be unending—no one could live like that, with the constant cut of regret—and anyway, how can we not make mistakes, what are we, all-knowing, immortal, capable of averting the future and rewriting the past?
—atonement had to end, it should be simple, just ask, just give, this should be a grace—said, “It’s okay. ”
“Florencia said you’re not leaving your room.” It was Violet this time.
“I go to class.”
“You look terrible.”
“Well.”
“I’m going to practice. Do you want to come listen to me play?”
Years later, when Emily had season tickets to box seats at Carnegie Hall, she always hoped she’d hear again what Violet had played.
She didn’t know, that day in the practice room, the name of the piece or the composer, but she believed that she would recognize the music if she heard it again, by how gentle it had been, and kind.
Emily found a sheet of paper.
I went to the river this morning, she wrote, and watched the crew team scull across the water.
I watched traffic go over the bridges. It was cold enough that I wore a sweatshirt beneath my coat and pulled up the hood.
Thayer, when I returned, was quiet at that early hour, the hallway on my floor empty, and I saw something—understood something—that made me want to write to you, though as I’m writing this I know I won’t mail it, because if I think about you reading my letter and worry about how you might respond, it would be too hard to explain what happened.
I stood, looking down the windowless hallway, closed doors on either side, and thought that this was how I have always felt: like a corridor, a space people pass through to get somewhere else.
A muffled voice behind a door got louder and the door opened, letting a conversation into the hallway, and although no one stepped from the room, sunlight came from its interior, from an unseen window. The light cast itself on the door opposite the open one and lay on the hallway’s floor.
No one, given the choice, prefers an enclosed space with no window, but there was something special about the combination of this hallway and the kind of light I saw, loaned by a window from an adjoining room.
The light wasn’t reliable or enduring; that wasn’t its nature.
Shut the door and it’s gone. But it was beautiful.
It glowed. No matter how things ended, Gen, I’m grateful for you. You were my borrowed light.