21. Imogen
Imogen
Two weeks back in my own apartment, and I’ve almost talked myself into believing I’m a whole person again.
The place is the size of a generous closet. The radiator bangs like it owes somebody money, and the window gives me a clear view of a brick wall four feet away, and I have never loved a brick wall more. Nobody tracks my snacks here and there’s no code on the door.
I had a life before Ashton Fraser. I keep saying it to myself, because for a while there I lost the thread of it.
The thesis, the defense in March, the friends in a group chat I went quiet on, the plan I built for myself one scholarship and one bad apartment at a time.
It was all still sitting here when I got back.
Dusty, a little offended I left, but here.
The tutoring runs on rails now. A car I don’t pay for takes me uptown, Lola hands me the day’s notes at the elevator, I get my two hours with Luke, and another car brings me home.
No marble, no rulebook sliding across it, no man in a doorway fixing the blinds.
Just the job I thought I was signing up for in the first place.
I haven’t seen Ashton once in two weeks.
He’s at the office when I come, or the site, or anywhere that isn’t the room I’m in. The penthouse is always emptied of him by the time the elevator opens, like he checks a schedule to be sure of it, which he probably does.
Luke’s the part that gets under my ribs.
He walks me to the elevator every time and watches me go like he’s waiting to find out if today’s the day the door closes for good, but every time I crouch down and tell him which day I’m coming next such as Wednesday or Friday, and he writes it in a little notebook he’s started keeping. A list of when I’m coming back.
“Is that a new notebook?” I asked him on Wednesday.
“It’s for important things,” he said, not looking up from writing.
“What else is in there?”
He held it against his chest. “Just the important things.”
Bex shows up Thursday with a bag of Thai gone soft and see-through at the bottom, plops onto my floor in her work clothes, and starts setting out containers like her life depends on it.
“Drunken noodles, yours,” she says. “Spring rolls, also yours, because you’ve lost weight and I’ve decided being annoyed about it is healthier than being worried.”
“I haven’t lost weight.”
“You did a little. I’m very observant, it’s ruined my life.” She hands me a fork. “Eat the roll so I can stop obsessing about it.”
“I’m fine. I’m great, actually. Thriving.”
“You’re on the floor of a closet eating my takeout at nine on a Thursday.”
“Yes. Living the dream. Try not to be jealous.”
Bex chuckles and returns to her noodles.
What she doesn’t do for the whole hour, is tell me she warned me.
She sat on this floor weeks ago, read his printed rules, called the thing a red flag in a good suit, and she’s been right about every laminated page since.
She doesn’t cash a single chip of it. That’s what people miss about Bex.
She isn’t keeping score against me. She’s keeping it for me.
What she does do, when I’m scraping the last of the sauce out of the container, is put her fork down and look at me head-on.
“One thing,” she says. “Let me say one thing, then I’ll go back to pretending I’m dead inside.”
“That depends a lot on the thing.”
“I watched you shrink in there, Genny. Every call, less about you, more about his calendar and his kid and what you were allowed to want. By the end you were talking yourself out of opinions before you’d finished having them.”
“I wasn’t”
“Still going.” She lifts the fork at me like a baton.
“I kept quiet because you’d have defended him and dug in harder.
But I’ve had you back two weeks, and you’re loud again.
You fought me about a movie for forty-five minutes.
You’ve got theories about strangers on the bus.
I didn’t know how much I missed the noise till it came back on. ”
I don’t have a comeback for her, which is how I know she’s got part of it right.
“I didn’t feel it happening.”
“That’s just it. Nobody feels it.” She slides the rolls toward me. “Eat. You’re allowed to take up the whole place again. Your floor, your food, your entire gigantic personality. It’s good to have you back.”
I eat the roll, and for the first time since I hauled my duffel up those stairs, the apartment feels like mine and not like a bunker.
The feeling lasts for about a day and a half.
By Friday my body’s been hit by a virus.
I’m tired in a thick, underwater way that two coffees don’t touch.
My chest aches like I’m wearing the wrong size of everything.
Food’s gone strange, faintly metallic at the edges, and when I heat up the last of the Thai for lunch the smell of it puts me over the bathroom sink with my hands braced, waiting it out.
I blame the leftovers, the move, the stress…
I go uptown for Luke’s Friday session regardless, because he counts on Fridays, and I don’t break my word to that boy for anything, not even a bug I must’ve picked up from one of my classmates.
We do fractions with apple slices. He walks me through, in enormous detail, why a great white dies in a tank, and I keep to myself that I got this same lecture on a beach a lifetime ago, because getting it twice is the best thing that happens to me all week.
“You look tired,” he tells me, between fractions.
“I’m fine.”
“Dad looks tired too.” He lines up his apple slices in order of size, biggest to smallest. “He’s been doing the nose thing a lot.”
“The nose thing?”
“With his fingers.” Luke demonstrates, pressing two fingers to the bridge of his own nose. “He only does that when something’s wrong.”
I look at my worksheet. “Finish your fractions.”
“I’m just saying.” He picks up his pencil. “You both look tired in the same way.”
Then I get on the train home, and somewhere halfway, it catches up with me.
The car’s full and rocking and overheated.
A man near me is eating a sandwich thick with onions, and the smell, the heat, and the swing of the train all hit at the same second, rolling my stomach straight over.
I catch the pole, forcing myself to breathe through my mouth while staring at a singular spot on the floor, but the second the doors open I’m out, up the stairs, hauling cold air into my lungs on the platform like I came up from somewhere deep.
I don’t go home. Instead, my legs turn me toward Bex’s, six blocks out of my way, and I’m on her buzzer with no plan for what comes out of my mouth when she opens up.
She takes one look at me, her eyes widening.
“Okay. Come in, come on.” She gets me by the wrist, shoulders the door shut, puts me down on the couch. “What happened? Tell me.”
And I start crying, which I haven’t done once through this whole wreck. I carried through all of it dry-eyed, and now I’m falling apart on Bex’s thrift-store couch because a stranger ate an onion.
“Hey.” She’s got both my hands, her thumbs moving over my knuckles, every trace of the joking gone out of her. “You’re really scaring me now. What’s going on?”
I look at the one person who’s told me the truth through every part of this, and I finally say the thing I haven’t been able to say to my own face and have been calling it a bug instead.
“I think I’m pregnant.”