Chapter 37
An email from Janine arrived the second week of January:
You can come to class…
—J. Ford
I showered before sprinting to the Metro.
Each time I glimpsed myself in the train window, I was startled by the waterfall of blond beneath my baseball cap.
I smiled, recalling Milan’s gloved hands slathering dye over my hair.
Since then I’d felt a desperate, rattled joy, like a toddler separated from her mother in the grocery store spotting the back of her head in the checkout line, but every parcel of joy was stained with Jay’s silence.
In class, the seats were arranged in a circle.
I sat near the chalkboard while students trickled in.
A little past ten, Nia turned up wearing a beret and leather trench and sat beside me.
Stupidly, I hadn’t thought about what I’d do when I saw her.
Tristan licking the cross out of my mouth tormented me while Nia removed her laptop from her bag and placed it beside a giant coffee tumbler.
I stared at the carpet, pretending I was working through a dire problem like how to time travel.
“Hey,” angling her face under mine, laughing. “Oh my God, your hair!”
“Oh, yeah. It’s different.”
“It’s cute. I tried blond once but my hair started falling out.” She took a quick sip of her coffee. “How was your break? Were you here the whole time?”
I swallowed the metallic vomit taste in my mouth. “I went to LA.” I almost asked her about New York, then remembered I wasn’t supposed to know about that. “You?”
“Oh, I was all over.” She didn’t go into detail. “I’ve been thinking about your portrait. Oh!” Gripping my arm with painful delight, “Thanks for that book. It was SO good. Stop by my studio after class and I’ll give it back to you? I can’t believe you’re a blonde now. It looks so hot on you.”
I was sweating like a glass of Blue Moon now, but not because of Tristan.
Her compliment played in my mind. She didn’t mean it like that.
Friends called each other hot. But the way she’d said it, “so HOT on YOU.” Or was it: “sooo hot on you”?
I was wrecked suddenly by the fact that I’d failed to register her tone, failed to be fully present for it.
I searched the annals of my brain, hoping to retrieve the sound of those words delivered in her silky voice.
Janine strolled in with a fat tabby trailing behind her. Nia apparently knew the cat because she gathered it in her arms, touching its nose with her own. It appraised her, hissing.
“Leave her, Nia. She’s in a bad mood,” Janine said.
Nia dropped the cat on the floor. It immediately started scratching the shit out of the carpet. The guy sitting across from me sneezed twice in quick succession.
Janine looked up. “You’re allergic?”
“Yeah, a little.”
She rummaged through her elegant tote and tossed him a pack of Benadryl.
He hesitated, then popped two in his mouth.
Janine proceeded to write the title of the course on the board in loopy cursive.
Who could read that? A hacking sound filled the room.
The guy was choking, grasping at his throat.
Nia calmly went over and slapped him hard on the back until he stopped.
I realized then that even though she was smaller than me, she could beat my ass.
Janine turned, dusting chalk off her hands, smiling like one of her students didn’t almost die. “When I say ‘autobiographical fiction or biographical fiction,’ what does that mean to you?”
A girl sporting a pink pixie cut said, “Fiction based on real life?”
“Stories or events that are factual but turned into a novel?” said the guy who almost died.
Janine looked at me. I stammered out, “Questions or concerns that are real to the writer and that… the writer acts out with fake characters?”
Janine nodded. “All of these answers are right. We’re talking about a spectrum here.
See, what we’re trying to do is free up the story so it can encompass all the endless possibilities of fiction and all the inherent truth of nonfiction.
It’s not that fiction isn’t true, it’s just that it has a different relationship to reality.
” Janine’s face broke into a mischievous smile.
“Playing in the big, big world of genre possibility. That’s what this class is about. ”
Unlike Milken’s workshop, we wouldn’t submit pages to the class. Janine would give us writing exercises. Office hours would be used to talk through issues with our writing one-on-one.
I approached Janine after class to thank her for letting me in. She shushed me. “I can’t let anyone know I’m playing favorites. I’m already in trouble.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I drifted out of class feeling high, generous.
Someone fell into step with me as I exited the building. Nia. I’d almost forgotten about fucking her boyfriend, but now the memory returned with full force.
“Your book—did you forget?”
I really did want it back, but I blurted, “You can keep it!”
“No, no. It’s yours. If—” Waving to a girl in platform boots, “Hi, Celine, cute coat,” then turning back to me, “If I keep it I’ll feel guilty every time I see it.”
She got a phone call on our way to the arts center. I tried to gauge if it was Tristan, but it didn’t seem to be. Maybe they were still in a “weird place.” Her demeanor changed when we entered her studio. She started kicking boxes aside, frazzled, but not in her typical upbeat way.
“Are you okay?”
She gave me a startled look. “Oh, do you remember the West Bank writer who’s supposed to be coming in March?”
“Yeah.”
“The university’s being difficult. ‘Oh, sorry, you can’t have the auditorium, it’ll have to be in a classroom.
Oh, wait, you need to get a sign-off from the lit department head.
Oh, now actually the dean needs to sign off on it and campus police will need to be there, but you’ll have to pay their overtime fee.
’ Now the university president has to sign something before we can go ahead.
I’m trying to coordinate the writer’s travel stuff—I mean, it’s not the easiest thing, getting her to DC right now.
Here it is.” She grabbed Art Monsters from a stack of books on her desk and handed it to me.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.
“Come to the reading.”
Smiling, I said, “Of course,” standing there awkwardly, knowing I should leave.
“I have to handle this, but I’ll call you?”
I said okay, though I knew I couldn’t go through with the portrait. My night with Tristan had foreclosed that option.
A news alert lit up my screen as I left the arts center.
Deadly wildfires were burning through the Los Angeles area, out of control.
A video: orange flames whipping the air, twisting into black plumes of smoke.
My fingers fumbled over the dialing pad in a rush to reach Jay.
He didn’t answer. I texted, Pls answer, r u ok?
My whole body was wound tight as I boarded the bus.
When he called back a few minutes later, I didn’t wait for his “hello.” “Are you all right?”
“Yes, sorry, I’m housing some friends right now who can’t get back to their places, um—” He turned away from the phone to say something inaudible to someone else. “Yeah, this seafood place I used to go to burned down, I can’t believe it.”
I swayed with the bus’s turns, but it felt like we were going nowhere. “What are they saying? Is it close to you? The fires?” I was trying to be calm, but my heartbeat drummed unevenly. Measuring my breaths didn’t help it, like my organs were rebelling against me.
“Not really, there’s just a lot of smoke. They’re saying right now that the fires are zero percent contained. We might have to evacuate but I’ll text you if we do. I think we should be okay.”
“How’s your dad? Your mom?”
“They were fine when I talked to them this morning. Please don’t worry. We’re going to be fine.”
I let my head fall against the window when he hung up.
My temple bone bumped painfully against the glass as we turned down Wisconsin Avenue.
My mind picked through every dark thought.
I clamped my eyes to extinguish them, but one remained: If something happened to Jay, was this the way I wanted to leave things between us?