Chapter Twenty-Four Bram
Chapter Twenty-Four
Bram
No, no, of course it’s fine,” I’m saying as I push my way out of the Eco meeting room where Ali Darwish and I have given everyone their final marching orders for the seminar this weekend. “The girls miss you, but we’ll keep up the calls, and it will be okay, I promise.”
Sara lets out a groan-whine thing that sounds like a ghost on a toilet.
“I just—I hate being away from them for so long, and what if the twins forget who I am, and what if they make bad choices as teenagers, like playing organized sports, and it’s all in a desperate bid to fill the void I left in their little hearts while they were six?
What if they try to replace a parent’s love with expensive shoes and travel tournaments and we have to learn what offsides is, because you know I can’t do that, I’ll never understand what offsides means! ”
“First, Letty can’t play team sports, she’s too much of a tyrant for that. She’s going to end up as a drum major or a stage manager, or maybe she’ll get a job as a judgmental teen barista at one of those coffee shops that has only four things on the menu.”
Sara makes a small, barely comforted noise.
“And right now Berry only wants to bring caterpillars inside and name them elaborate names from her made-up fantasy world, so I don’t think sports are in the picture quite yet.”
Even without the benefit of modern technology, I’d be able to hear Sara’s sigh all the way from Alaska. “I hate this,” she says in a small voice.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, having this grant extended another four weeks, and you know that I don’t mean that figuratively.
This glacier won’t exist in another five years.
This is important. Your work is important.
And it’s for Letty and Berry and Fern and the world they’re going to live in too. ”*
“But also, are you going to be okay for another month? I won’t be back until Thanksgiving!”
I reach the stairs going down to the floor my office is on, hearing the distant whoops and chants of students somewhere in the building. Loud-ass kids. “I’ve got help, Sara. Maddie has been fabulous, and she won’t mind being kept on until Thanksgiving, I’m sure—”
Sara’s voice is suddenly mischievous when she says, “Oh, I bet she won’t.”
I pause on the stairs. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” she hums.
I narrow my eyes, even though Sara’s not here and it’s a poster for a creek-bed cleanup getting the brunt of my suspicion instead. “The other Andromedas aren’t gossiping behind my back, are they? This isn’t like a back-channel text thread thing?”
“Does this mean there would be a valid reason for a back-channel text thread?”
I groan. “I’m saying goodbye, Sara. We’ll tell the girls about your extension on your call tomorrow.”
“For what it’s worth, I really like Maddie!
” Sara gets in before I end the call. I blow out a long breath, still glaring at the cleanup poster, and gather my thoughts.
It’s fine, it’s fine, if Maddie and I were actually together, like have to disclose it to HR together, then I’d tell everyone.
But since we’re just fooling around, since it’s our secret bad idea, it’s not anyone else’s business.
And . . . I don’t think I can talk about it with anyone else.
I don’t think I can explain. Because then I’d have to explain that it’s going nowhere, that it means nothing, and whenever I even think about how it’s going nowhere, my chest hurts and my ulnar nerves thrum and the nape of my neck prickles with a prescient kind of fear.
It’s going to end at some point. It’s going to end, and I’m going to be left segmented and starving, like a ringbarked tree.
Why would I want to share that with the class? Some things just aren’t meant for show-and-tell.
Feeling steadier now, I finish descending the stairs and stride toward my office, the sound of whooping and chanting growing louder and louder as I do. Sounding more and more adult rather than young adult and sounding more and more like it’s coming from my office.
And then I reach my office door and, with a deep sense of foreboding, open it to find Joey Fucking Kemp squatting on my floor with a pile of diapers, a creepy fake baby, and a stuffed ermine that has been passed around from building to building since I was in undergrad.
* Leo and Alessandro hover above him with their phones out, recording the scene like they’re camerapeople and this is Sunday Night Football.
The three of them turn to look at me like guilty children.
When I swing the door all the way open, I see Sloane standing on the love seat with a stopwatch in her hand.
“Et tu?” I ask, wounded.
She has the grace to look a little abashed, at least.
“Why,” I ask as I drop my satchel onto the floor, “are we all in my office today?”
The men turn and look to Sloane, who somehow still exudes tasteful dignity while standing barefoot on my love seat. “Joey needs to practice changing diapers,” she says reasonably. “So he can convince Riley that he’ll help when the baby comes.”
“Okay,” I say, also reasonably, “and why are we doing that in my office again?”
“Well, we couldn’t possibly do it in Sloane’s office,” Leo points out.
“It’s at the bottom of the hill,” adds Alessandro.
“The vibes are wrong,” says Leo.
“She did let us borrow one of the babies from her student health building, though,” says Alessandro. “It’s even got a rubber fontanel and everything. But she only had the one, which is why we had to grab the ermine from the staff room.”
I rub my hand over my face. My house is never quiet. My classrooms are filled to the brim with hormones, anxiety, and unsubtle texting while I’m talking. Is it so much to ask that my office is a place of peace? On occasion? On the very rare occasion?
Alessandro and Leo pout at me.
“Sloane’s office is closer to the big parking lot,” I say, not because I think they’ll listen to reason, but because I need to at least log the argument. “Again, at the bottom of the hill. You don’t have to walk up a hill to get there.”
Alessandro’s eyes go wide. “But the big parking lot has students parking in it.”
“The faculty parking lot is much better—and on the gentle side of the hill,” Leo agrees.
“You’re not faculty!”
Leo’s mouth pulls into something deeper than a pout. Genuine hurt. “Don’t use labels to box me out, Bram, I can’t handle it today.”
I turn to Sloane, who lifts a blazer-clad shoulder.
“Joey’s players have a football clinic on campus this afternoon, and since it’s a block day and he only had a couple history classes to teach, he could leave school a little early and come do some diaper drills.
So I grabbed the baby and some of the diapers we keep on hand to help the nontrad students and thought we’d give it a shot.
It was Leo who suggested your office. And then Alessandro was already at Nagel for some speech he’d given the little premed zygotes, so—”
“Wait.” I look around at the so-called friends assembled here. “So there is a group chat without me?”
The guilty faces grow guiltier.
“I’ve gotten my double-diaper turnaround time down to twenty-three seconds,” Joey volunteers in an unsubtle attempt to divert the conversation. “That’s with wiping, Bram.”*
I’m about to go back to the perfidious group chat when Leo’s phone rings. He glances down at the screen and then says to me, “You’re going to want me to take this,” as he steps out of the office.
“Don’t be sullen about the texts, Bram,” Alessandro says cajolingly as he leans back against my desk and crosses his arms. (Another three-piece suit today.
This one definitely Italian, and definitely tailored by someone who knew Alessandro’s capacity for casually breaking hearts left and right, especially while on Italian suit–buying trips.) “We actually started it in undergrad when we thought you and Sara might need a bail network or whatever. And then we only brought Sara in last year when she thought it would be in poor taste to send her and Asher’s boudoir photos to the main group chat. ”
“They were great pictures, though,” says Joey.
“It’s my fear that this secret chat is rife with speculation and hearsay, and—” I stop and really look at Sloane. There is white dust all over her blazer and trousers. Sloane is never covered in dust. Sloane has never even seen dust, to my knowledge.
Sloane follows my gaze, looking down at herself, and then her ivory cheeks go a deep pink.
“Darling,” Alessandro starts, “have you misread the instructions on the cocaine again?”
“It’s not . . . cocaine.” She slaps viciously at her chest and then at her thighs.
“Not that we’d blame you, with the divorce and all,” Alessandro says in a gracious voice.
“It’s not cocaine!”
That’s the moment Maddie steps into my office. She looks up at Sloane on the love seat, still slapping at herself, then down to the floor, where Joey is stacking diapers next to the stuffed ermine and the fake baby. And then to Alessandro and me.
“I didn’t realize you had . . . this . . . going on, Dr. Loe,” she says. “I’ll come back another time.”
“Stay,” I say, an unstoppable instinct, really, to beg her to stay, but the naked honesty in my voice is hidden underneath Sloane’s breathless, agitated “Don’t go, I promise this is normal.”
“Normal for us,” mutters Alessandro.
Leo steps back into the office behind Maddie, and now, despite being a decent-sized office for Gerhart, the space is nearly shoulder to shoulder with unwelcome visitors, a weasel, and Maddie.
I squeeze my way to my chair and sit, Maddie and Leo shuffle farther into the room, and Sloane is still on the love seat, slapping herself more gently now.
“Why do you have cocaine all over you?” Leo inquires, in tones of the delicately offended rich. “You don’t have a lint roller for that?”
Sloane’s face is red enough now to be medically concerning. “It’s not cocaine,” she growls. “It’s chalk.”