Chapter I
The house on Pye Street has gotten colder and my twin bed feels smaller and Carson’s snoring is a bit more piercing.
Different people live here now. Athletic Joe has been replaced by Irish Maxwell, and PhD Jenny had dumped her fiancé and begun a needy, gropey relationship with sports medicine Caroline.
They’ve sealed the windows with blue plastic to conserve heat so there’s an aquarium feel to the place during the day, but you still have to vie for a spot around Mavis in the frigid mornings.
Maxwell and Caroline are recovering from religious childhoods and reassure me that I’ve done the right thing by walking away and being through with that lubberwart, as Jenny, who is getting her doctorate in Medieval Studies, calls him.
On the phone my mother tells me he has a Madonna-whore complex.
‘All men have it,’ she says. ‘His is a little more pronounced.’
‘Maybe he’s just being honest?’
‘There’s nothing honest about the degradation of women. It’s a power move and it’s been working for a few millennia.’ She’s a better feminist than I am.
She sends me an orange sleeping bag with a little hood for my head and it’s cozy. I mention to her that Carson uses it when I’m in class and she sends one to her, too. She has lived on a tight budget since the divorce, but that has never impeded her generosity.
I don’t run into Sam on campus, but I pass Yash once in the crowded corridor of Tate Hall between classes.
I spend the rest of the day analyzing the nature of his surprise at the moment he saw me.
That night I lie in my sleeping bag and feel sad that he can’t be my friend now.
I’m aware that I had ideas about the future that I hadn’t discussed with myself.
I figured Sam and I would go on separate paths after graduation, but I hoped Yash and I would stay friends, that we’d be friends for life.
Now that seems a lot less likely. And this is the thing I’m most sad about.
Sam comes to Pye Street eleven days after he told me to leave.
He hands me a short letter and watches me read it.
It is dry and unspecific for an apology.
At the bottom he has signed it ‘Heart the Lover’ and that makes me smile.
He kisses me before I can speak and, after a talk in my freezing bedroom, we go back to the Breach, where Yash and Ivan actually woo hoo when I come into the living room.
The next morning is Sunday and Sam goes to church. He hasn’t gone since I’ve known him. He told me he didn’t like the new minister. But last night he said he was going to give him another try.
When he gets up in the morning I keep my eyes closed.
I’m not sure how I feel about being back in the green bedroom.
I was giddy playing Sir Hincomb last night.
I faked them all out and ended up getting two full families, which none of us had ever done before.
Yash made me a crown out of a pizza box and Ivan pulled me up and spun me around the room.
In bed Sam and I tried to talk and we tried to cuddle but those weren’t our strengths together.
The talk involved a lot of fancy footwork around the fact that he thought we had both sinned in that brief moment in the downstairs hallway and I did not.
We didn’t have actual sex after that, but it came closer than you’d think given our animosity and all our avowals not to.
I hear Yash go downstairs. Ten minutes later the house smells of sautéed onions and garlic and I know he’s making hashbrowns to go with his scrambled eggs. If I get down there quick enough he’ll make enough for me.
The potatoes are crackling in the cast-iron pan and he doesn’t hear me come down.
I stop in the doorway and watch him scrape and flip with a spatula.
He’s got on gray sweats and a fraying blue Allman Brothers T-shirt.
His hair is wet, the front part in a great loop high above his forehead.
This is why Sam and Ivan call him Rooster, this way he has of drying his hair. I’ve never seen it before.
I don’t know how to not startle him. ‘Mmmm,’ I hum softly. ‘Smells yummy.’
He jumps. A few potatoes fly off the spatula.
‘Jesus, Jordan. I thought you guys went off somewhere.’ He looks mad but also very funny with his hair looped up like that. He sees me see it and I see him stop his hand from trying to fix it. ‘It’s not funny. My heart is going a hundred miles per hour.’
‘I’m sorry. Here, you sit.’ I pull out a chair for him. ‘And I’ll stir.’ I take the spatula from him. He actually does as he’s told. When I turn around again he’s tousled his hair back to normal.
‘Sam go to church?’
I nod. ‘Should I scramble some eggs?’
‘Sure.’
‘You do the cheese,’ I say and fetch him the cheddar and a grater.
We are used to cooking together. Sam is happy with a PB&J and Ivan only likes takeout.
But Yash and I cook chicken legs and fresh vegetables.
I often make my mother’s picadillo and he makes his grandmother’s butter chicken.
But we’ve never been alone in the kitchen together for this long.
We’ve never cooked for two. I crack the eggs into a bowl and froth them with a fork.
I divide the potatoes on two plates then pour the eggs into the pan and scrape up the browned bits of potato and onion into the scramble.
The eggs don’t stick, and cook quickly in nice chunks, not pebbly like they get in the cheap frying pan on Pye Street.
I sprinkle on the cheese just before taking them off the flame.
‘God, those look perfect,’ he says when I bring them to the table. He’s set it with green cloth napkins I’ve never seen before.
‘This is so nice,’ I say, sitting at my place across from him.
We both look at the clock at the same time.
We take a few bites and compliment each other on our parts of the meal, then we eat quietly.
It isn’t the kind of silence Sam and I have, where each of us will say something if we can think of it.
With Yash I can say anything and it will turn into a conversation.
We could talk about the green napkins—where he’d found them, what they remind us of, who ironed them—for a half hour.
But I want to make it count. I missed him during those eleven days.
I thought we couldn’t be friends anymore.
I can’t say that but it’s all heavy in my mind.
We have less than a half hour before Sam comes back.
We need to talk about something big, something that will secure our friendship forever.
It’s a lot of pressure to put on twenty-five minutes on a Sunday morning.
I glance over at him when he’s putting both eggs and potato on his fork with a knife.
He eats in that British way his father must have taught him, the knife so active, not just for cutting.
He has a very small smile on his face, as if he doesn’t notice we’re not talking, or as if we are.
He catches me looking at him and the grin spreads. ‘Glad you’re back.’
‘Me too. I missed this place.’ I look around the room, as if that’s what I missed, then point to a copy of The Inferno on the counter and ask what class it’s for.
‘It’s not for a class,’ he says. ‘I’m just doing a little advanced reading for Gastrell’s Immortality seminar in the fall.’
‘The fall? You’re not graduating with us?’
‘I took a leave of absence sophomore year so I have another year.’
Sam told me that he’d taken time off. He said Yash’s dad had put his mom in a psychiatric hospital and Yash’d had to get her out.
I asked how Yash’s dad had had the power to do that when they’d been divorced since Yash was five, and Sam said he didn’t understand why I wanted to be a writer when I could never just trust a story.
I like that I’ll know where Yash is in the fall. ‘Have you read that story “The Last Fall” by Ray Hart, about a guy who stays at college for an extra semester?’
‘Do tell. The plot sounds positively riveting.’
‘It’s beautiful. All his friends are gone and he sees the back of the neck of an old girlfriend in class and marvels at the feelings he once had for her and he’s got this housemate who only plays an album called Country Greats and the leaves are falling and the cold is coming and he has this thing with another girl that’s not really serious but there’s this gorgeous moment next to a soccer field when she fastens and unfastens a button on his jacket.
’ I can’t read the expression on Yash’s face.
‘It’s just this long tender farewell to youth. ’
‘I’d like to read it,’ he says, and nothing else. No quip, no barb.
‘I haven’t done it justice.’
The back door rattles and we both jump. Sam is in the window. He gives the door a shove with his hip and it comes unstuck. I’ve never seen anyone go in or out that way before.
He comes in and plucks at the green napkin in my lap. ‘Fancy.’ He spins around to the stove and studies the skillet. ‘None for me?’
Yash and I both get up and start chopping onions and potatoes. Sam pours a cold cup of coffee from the percolator.
‘How was church?’ Yash says.
Sam sits in my seat at the table and stretches out his legs onto Yash’s chair. ‘The new guy hasn’t gotten any better. Everything is in the interrogative, like he is seeking and questioning with us. It’s such a pose.’
‘Maybe he is questioning,’ I say.
‘If he is, he shouldn’t be in that job. God is not a question. He’s the answer.’
Yash and I are shoulder to shoulder at the large cutting board with our knives. I want to give him a quick glance, but Sam in this twitchy mood might catch it. Instead I tap my knife two times without cutting anything. Yash taps twice back.