7. What Aaron Was Doing Instead
WHAT AARON WAS DOING INSTEAD
His room was the small one over the kitchen and it was about eighty degrees in there, which I'd been complaining about all year from the other side of the argument.
Bed made. Actually made, hospital corners, in a house where the rest of us slept in nests. A desk under the window with a lamp on a hinged arm, three textbooks standing between two bricks, a mug of pens, and a stack of index cards banded with a rubber band.
Top drawer: pencils, a protractor, a roll of quarters, and a bottle of generic ibuprofen, which is what I'd come for and which I took two of, dry.
And under the ibuprofen, flat on the bottom of the drawer, a spiral notebook.
I want to be honest about this too. I didn't open it by accident.
There was no moment where it fell open at a page.
I stood in a hot little bedroom holding a bottle of painkillers and I looked at a notebook that was clearly not coursework, because coursework doesn't live under the aspirin, and I thought: no, I'm absolutely going to read that.
The first page was dates.
Not appointments. Two columns, ruled by hand with the edge of a ruler, going back to the last week of September.
The left column was a date. The right column was a code. D1. D1+3. D1+12. D1+14, and that one was circled, and next to it in small block letters, EST, and a question mark.
I stood there for probably fifteen seconds not understanding, and then I understood so hard I had to sit down on his made bed.
It was me. He was charting me.
Seven months of me, in pharmacy shorthand, in a spiral notebook under the aspirin.
Day one, day one plus three, day one plus fourteen circled.
He'd been tracking my cycle since September, and he'd been doing it from the outside, from a shared bathroom and a shared trash can and a girl who wandered around a rented house in a t-shirt complaining about the thermostat.
Some of the entries had a line of observation next to them, and the observations were where the floor went out from under me.
9/29 D1+2 approx. Confirm from bathroom. Adjust.
10/17 D1+13. She did the pot cabinet twice. Left kitchen.
11/04 D1+? Cycle irregular or my estimate is bad. Probably my estimate.
12/08 D1+14 EST. Announcement in front room. Did not turn the page for eleven minutes. Library tomorrow.
1/14 D1+15. T. told me. Went to library till 11.
1/29 D1+9. Basement. Heard it. Left the house and walked to Zeb's and did not want a sub.
2/11 D1+13 EST. Peak window opens tomorrow. Do not be in the house after 6.
2/12. Was not in the house after 6.
Page after page. Every time I'd thought that boy was fleeing a room because he was shy, or disgusted, or too decent for the rest of us, he had been leaving because he'd done the arithmetic that morning and the arithmetic said go.
Seven months of a man getting out of a building on a schedule.
And then, near the back, past the columns, there were four pages that weren't a chart at all. Different pen. Written fast, no ruler, some of it crossed out.
I'm not going to reproduce all of it. Some of it is his.
But there was a line that said, the problem is not that I want to sleep with her. Todd wants to sleep with her. That's normal and it's fine and it will be fine for him afterward.
And under that: the problem is what I want to do at the end of it, and how much I want it, and that I have thought about it every day since September 29th. I have thought about it in a lab. I don't think it can be had once.
And under that, in the flat declarative voice with all the hedges stripped off, the voice I'd heard exactly once in my life, across a kitchen table in February:
Get the rule made. Then it isn't up to me.
I sat on Aaron Petry's made bed in the hottest room in Ohio and read the words get the rule made about nine times.
He hadn't voted with them. He'd written it. He'd sat in that meeting and let Scott propose his rule for him and said four words in support of it and gone up the stairs, and every man at that table thought they were protecting me from an accident.
They were protecting me from him. And he'd asked them to.
I'll tell you what I did not feel, and it surprised me, and it's the reason I'm not sure I'm the heroine of this.
I did not feel frightened. I did not feel spied on.
I have been asked since, by the one person I ever told, whether that notebook should have scared me, and the honest answer is that if I'd found it in the desk of a man who'd been touching me all year I'd have burned the house down.
That's not what it was. It was the diary of somebody who had spent seven months building a wall around himself and putting himself on the far side of it, and had made a written note of every single time he'd walked away.
The most careful man I have ever met, taking minutes on his own restraint.
What I felt was the thing I imagine people feel when the lottery number comes up on the television and they already have the ticket in their hand.
Because the second-to-last entry was from the previous Sunday.
3/09. D1. Cycle start confirmed. Peak window 3/21 to 3/24. Six weeks left on the lease.
And the last entry, from that morning, was one line, and it did not have a date code on it at all.
I don't know what I'm going to do in May.
I put the ibuprofen back exactly where it had been, because I am not a monster, and I took the notebook, and I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table with it in front of me and waited four hours for him to come home from the library.