Chapter 10 #2
Third row. Same seat. Notebook open, pen ready, posture that my mother would approve of. I arrive early and I leave when the lecture ends and I don’t linger and I don’t draw circles on the margin and I don’t look at the podium longer than any other student looks at the podium.
I take perfect notes.
I answer when called on, because he does call on students, always has, and he doesn’t skip me.
I’m furniture again. The thing I was for two years before the recognition, before his men in the back row, before a finger froze mid-circle and the floor tilted.
I’m one face in a sea of faces, and I’m performing normalcy with a competence that should scare me but doesn’t, because this is what Lively women do.
We show up. We endure. We fix the fence.
But I catch something.
Week three. A Thursday. He’s pacing the front of the hall, mid-lecture, talking about system resilience. His voice is the same. His pacing is the same. His suit is charcoal, sleeves down, every seam in place.
But his eyes keep drifting to the third row.
Not to my face but my hand, which are motionless, flanking my notebook like bookends.
My hands that used to draw circles he tracked from the podium, that used to tell him everything I was feeling without my permission, that used to move in loops he watched with an attention that had nothing to do with academia.
My hands that have stopped.
He’s looking at the place where my circles used to be, and something crosses his face fast, there and gone. Not the almost-smile, but something worse. A man looking at an absence and recognizing what it means.
I drop my eyes to my notebook. My pen moves. My letters are perfect.
I don’t give him my circles. They were mine, and he returned them marked this is done, and I won’t draw them for a man who chose a wall over my hands.
DAVID TAKES ME TO BUCKY’S on a Friday.
Not asks, but takes. Shows up at my apartment at six PM, knocks three times, and when I open the door in my pajamas with my thesis open on my bed and my hair in the kind of bun that communicates I’ve abandoned all social contracts, he looks at me for two seconds and says, “Nope. Get dressed. We’re going. ”
“David, I’m working.”
“You’ve been working for three weeks straight. You’ve lost more weight, your eyes have that thing going on where they look at me but they’re really looking at a spot about six feet behind my head, and I promised Martha I would feed you.”
“You didn’t promise Martha anything.”
“I promised Martha in my heart, Lively. Get dressed.”
Bucky’s is a diner four blocks from campus that David loves with a devotion he reserves for few things outside of baseball.
Red vinyl booths, a counter with stools that swivel, a menu laminated so many times it’s practically bulletproof.
The kind of place where the waitress calls everyone hon and the coffee is burnt and strong and served in mugs that have seen every decade since the seventies.
We sit in a booth by the window. David orders for both of us, and I let him because arguing requires energy I don’t have and because the booth is warm and the vinyl creaks when I shift and there’s something profoundly, stupidly comforting about a place where the biggest decision is whether you want cheese on your burger.
“Yes,” David says to the waitress, before I can answer. “She wants cheese. And extra pickles. Don’t let her say no to the pickles.”
“I don’t want extra pickles.”
“See? She’s lying. Extra pickles.”
The waitress, who’s sixty and unimpressed by both of us, writes it down and walks away, and David grins at me across the table, and something in my chest does the shift again. The settling. The finding of a new place to bear weight.
The food arrives. I eat. Not because I want to, but because David is watching me with the focused determination of a man who has decided that my caloric intake is a team sport, and because the burger is good, actually good, the kind of diner food that doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is. Honest food. Nebraska would approve.
We talk. David tells me about the economics girl. Her name is Verniece, he finally learned, and she invited him to a study group, which in David’s spreadsheet metrics is a significant data point. I listen. I nod. Somewhere around the second milkshake, I laugh.
It surprises us both.
Small and startled, pulled out of me by something David says about accidentally calling Verniece by the wrong name and then overcorrecting by using her full name for the rest of the conversation, which made her think he was either a stalker or running for student government.
The laugh hurts and it feels like moving a joint that’s been locked for too long, rusty and resistant and raw.
David hears it. His face does something complicated—relief and worry at the same time, the expression of someone watching a patient take their first steps after something bad.
“There she is,” he says, quiet.
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“I’m not making it a thing. I’m making a burger a thing. Eat your pickles.”
I eat the pickles. They’re sour and cold and entirely too many, and David is beaming at me across the table like a man who just won a game he didn’t tell me he was playing.
Something lands on my cheek.
I don’t feel it at first, too absorbed in the pickle situation and the milkshake and the warm vinyl booth and the simple animal comfort of food and company. But David’s eyes catch it.
“Hold still.” He reaches across the table. His thumb brushes my cheek, quick and casual, wiping away whatever landed there—a crumb, a drop of milkshake, something small and meaningless. “Got it.”
I blink. Startled. His hand is already back on his side of the table, already reaching for a fry, and the touch was nothing, was purely David, was the same unselfconscious kindness that makes him carry my books and stock granola bars and bully me into diners on Friday nights.
A laugh follows. Small, surprised, the second one tonight, pulled from me by the matter-of-factness of David wiping food off my face like I’m five years old.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Don’t mention it. You had milkshake on your face. It was a rescue mission.”
I shake my head. Pick up a fry. The diner is warm around us, the window beside our booth fogged at the edges from the heat inside meeting the cold outside, and beyond the glass the street is dark and wet and the headlights of passing cars smear across the condensation like watercolors.
One of those cars slows.
I don’t see it. My back is to the window. I’m looking at David and eating my fry and my hands are flat on the table beside my plate, still, motionless, no circles.
I don’t see the black car that pulls to the curb across the street. I don’t see the man behind the wheel, alone, no driver, no soldiers, just a man in a dark coat sitting in a car that has stopped moving on a street where it has no reason to stop.
I don’t see his face.
I don’t see the way his eyes find me through the fogged glass—the girl in the booth, the girl with the still hands, the girl who’s laughing at something the boy across from her just said while the boy reaches across the table and touches her cheek.
I don’t see his hands on the steering wheel. I don’t see the way his fingers tighten, knuckles going white, gripping the leather so hard the tendons stand out under his skin.
I don’t see any of it.
But the car idles at the curb for a long time. And when it finally pulls away, the tires leave marks on the wet asphalt, sharp and black, the tracks of a man who pressed the accelerator the way you press a fist against a desk. Once, hard, and then silence.