How Not To Fall by Emily Foster (3)

A month passes.

I’d tell you all about it, but here’s what it would sound like:

I wake up, go to class, go to the lab, teach my dance class at the community center, go back to the lab, go home, and go to bed. Then I wake up, go to class, go to the lab, teach . . .

Except the weekends. Here’s how the weekends go:

I wake up, go to the lab, go to the library, and then I go home and go to bed.

Occasionally I don’t even make it home but just fall asleep in the lab, and Charles or whoever will find me there in the morning, passed out on the couch in the ducklings’ office, my face pillowed on an open book. A few times Margaret and I manage to hang out—as my roommate and fellow duckling, she would usually hang out with me every day, but she’s not writing a thesis. She has a job lined up at a pharmaceutical company in Indianapolis starting in May, and until then she’s basically coasting. She’s enjoying her last couple of months in school, socializing, doing all the things we love doing, one last time before we go.

Not me. I’m the thesis-writing, doesn’t-understand-her-data zombie who wanders in at night, stares at the TV for ten minutes, and drops into bed without even taking off her clothes. And then I’m out of the apartment in the morning before Margaret wakes up.

So a month passes.

On one of the last go-back-to-the-lab nights, I’m sitting on the ducklings’ couch, reading a psychophysiology paper. I’ve been here for about ten hours, and everyone has come and gone for the day. There’s no one else in the lab—probably no one else in the building, since it’s Friday night. So when the door opens, I startle and gasp.

It’s only Charles.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he says. “What are you working on?”

“Noncoherence in anger,” I answer, taking off my glasses. I put the paper down and wipe my hands over my eyes. “Anger as an approach motivation, sure, but at which levels of analysis? Basically just anger. From a theoretical point of view, anger is a complete mystery to me.” I put my glasses back on. “Still.”

And he says,

I look at him. “Huh?”

“Nicholas Rowe,” he says. And then in a soft, high voice, he adds,

And before I can react, he pulls a white paper bag from his satchel and says, “I brought food. Take a break?”

“Oh! You didn’t have to do that—that’s so nice!” He hands me a bottle of water and a warm, foil-wrapped sandwich that smells like a cheeseburger. I take it with a smile but don’t unwrap it.

He sits at the far end of the couch, puts another foil-wrapped sandwich on the empty cushion next to him, and then starts rummaging through his bag as he says, “Annie,” and then clears his throat. After a pause he continues, “I wanted to say how impressed I’ve been with you these last few weeks. At first I was impressed at how well you took my criticism. You didn’t argue; you just looked at the data and saw the truth.” He pulls a bag of miniature Snickers out of his satchel. “But I’ve been even more impressed since then because your original analysis wasn’t wrong, it was only incomplete. You could have kept it as it was, and only you and I would have known the difference. But you weren’t satisfied with that; you’re committed to understanding your results more thoroughly.”

“Thank you,” I say. I roll and unroll the corner of the foil between my fingers.

“And I want to tell you that I think the world is going to be a much better place because you are in it and doing good work,” he says. He rips open the bag of candy and drops it on my side of the empty cushion. Then and only then does he address his own burger. “But I’d like to present you with another criticism, and I hope you’ll take it as well as you took the last one, even though I don’t have any data to back it up.”

“Okay . . .” I say.

“The world can only be a better place because you are in it, if you are in fact actually in it. If you keel over from lack of food, sleep, sunlight, and basic human contact, all of us miss out.” And he looks directly at me for the first time. “Will you please eat that burger?” he says.

I raise my eyebrows apologetically and say, “I don’t eat red meat.”

He presses his lips together, takes the burger back, and says, “Neither do I,” and he hands me his own sandwich. “Veggie burger.”

“I can’t take your dinner.”

“So help me, god, I will brace your mouth open like it’s A Clockwork Orange and jam the bloody thing in if I have to. Eat.”

I take it, and he pulls fries out of the bag and starts eating those, so I feel less guilty about taking his food. I unwrap the veggie burger and take a bite—and suddenly I am ravenous. When is the last time I ate? Did I have lunch today? Breakfast? I remember now: I had coffee, and I decided that putting cream in it counted as a meal. Dinner last night? Not that I recall. Lunch yesterday? Nope.

My mother would have my head if she knew.

“Have you read Carver?” Charles says in his I’m-giving-you-a-hint voice.

“Boy, have I read Carver,” I answer through a face full of food.

Charles chews thoughtfully on some fries. I take another huge bite.

“What time is it?” I say, realizing all at once that it’s fully dark outside.

“After nine,” he says.

“Fuck. I should go home.”

“Yes, you should,” he says, nodding and chewing. “But you should finish that before you go.”

Obediently, I take yet another huge bite.

“Thanks,” I say again, mouth full.

“Least I could do,” he says. “I’ve felt rather guilty about it, in fact.”

I shake my head and swallow slightly too much veggie burger. “I’m glad you caught it. Imagine how I would have felt if I had caught it later and didn’t have time to fix it.”

Through another mouthful of fries, he says, “There aren’t many like you, Annie.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I just say, “Can I have some fries?”

He hands me the container and says, “Have the rest. I had dinner out. I was only eating to be polite.”

To make conversation I ask, “Where’d you go?”

“Nick’s,” he says. “The ‘English Hut.’”

He says the last words with irony. Nick’s is neither English nor a hut. So I ask the obvious question. “Why?”

“There was a graduate student get-together there. I thought I’d spend some time with my own sort.”

I nod and eat.

He clears his throat and shifts in his seat. “But the whole time, I kept thinking, ‘These aren’t my sort. My sort is still at the lab.’ And so I stopped at Kilroy’s for the food and came to the lab on the off chance you were here.” He turns his face to me. “And you are.”

He holds my gaze for a second, and the corners of my mouth lift.

“There you go,” he says. “Haven’t seen that in a while.”

I look down. I have a little veggie burger left, but I don’t feel as hungry now. As I wrap up the last of it in its foil, I say, “Thanks for this.”

“My pleasure,” he says. I meet his eyes again, and he says quietly, “No one has what you have. The drive. The curiosity. The powerful intelligence. Diana is lucky to have you in her lab. I’m lucky. We don’t tell you often enough.”

I’m exhausted. I’m full. And, oh yes, I’m exhausted. I feel the burning behind my eyes and say, “Don’t make me cry again. You’d have to live with that forever, you know, the guy who made Annie Coffey cry twice.” I open the bottle of water and take a long drink.

“Do you think we could be friends, Annie?” he says. “I’ve known you for a year and a half, and I hardly know anything about you, except that you’re very bright—and, apparently, wanted to go to bed with me, which, I’ll be honest, seem like mutually exclusive facts. Though I expect that second thing isn’t even true anymore, now that I’ve ruined your semester, eh? Ah well. These things do happen.”

I choke a little on the water. “I’d like to be friends.”

“Let’s go climbing,” he says. “Why don’t you take tomorrow off, get some sleep, and then we’ll go rock climbing Sunday.”

I shake my head. “I already took yesterday afternoon off for the prairie vole talk, I can’t spare two whole days—”

“You can; you should. You’ll come back to it thinking more clearly. You’re stuck because you’re sleep deprived. Look, trust me on this one. I spent two weeks banging my head against a wall over a design flaw in the blood pump.” (He invented a medical thing. I don’t quite understand what it does, but I love what he calls it: the blood pump.) “Then I spent one weekend in the woods, and I woke up with the solution.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right. Okay.” Rock climbing. Absolutely. Fear of heights notwithstanding. Whatevs. It’s fine.

I put the remainder of the veggie burger into my bag, and Charles says, “Take the candy, too.”

“Thanks,” I say, and drop the bag of Snickers on top of everything else.

“How are you getting home?”

“Walking—or there’s probably a bus.”

“I’ve got my car. Let me give you a lift.” He takes my bag from me—and drops it to the floor. “Jesus Christ, what have you got in here?”

“Seven medical textbooks,” I say apologetically. “I’ll carry it.” But he keeps it, and we go out to his car. It’s only a couple of miles, but it feels luxurious just to sit there and let a combustion engine do all the work. In a few quiet minutes of inattentiveness, my brain is growing bleary.

As he drops me off, he says, “Get sleep. I’ll pick you up at two on Sunday.”

“Okay, see you then. Bye—and thanks again.”

I notice through the deepening haze that he doesn’t drive away until I’ve opened the front door and stepped inside.

As I close the front door behind me, I hear music playing upstairs. Margaret is getting ready to go out. I haul myself up the stairs and poke my head into the bathroom, where she’s putting on eyeliner.

“Annie!” she says brightly, and then, “Oh my god, Annabelle, you look like hell.” She turns off the music.

“I feel like hell. I’m going to bed. Have fun tonight.”

“Wait, have you eaten today? There’s pizza.”

“Yeah, Charles brought me Kilroy’s, actually.”

She blinks. “That was nice of him.”

“It was. He was very nice to me.” I blink slowly, my exhaustion growing. “He seemed to blame himself for me having to, like, redo six months’ work in one month.”

“Aw!” Margaret says, but I’m already on my way to my room.

I barely get my shoes off before I fall into bed.

 

Over the next thirty-six hours, I sleep for twenty-four of them.

I go for a run, too, I take a shower, and I spend a little time with Margaret—she tells me about her girlfriend, about her apartment hunting in Indy, about her fun and exciting life.

I used to have a life. Now I have a thesis.

By Sunday, though, I feel a lot better. Better enough to recognize I’m having Some Feelings about rock climbing with my, um, new friend.

When Margaret makes her way out of bed and into the kitchen around eleven Sunday morning, I am making pancakes.

“Coffee,” she grumbles, her hair in her face. It’s nice to be the alert one for once.

“French press,” I say, mimicking her tone and pointing to the pot on the table.

“Rock star,” she answers in the same voice.

“Yes, I am,” I grumble back.

She sits at the table and pours coffee into a waiting mug, then sits sipping it while I flip pancakes. It’s a little like watching a person-size balloon inflate, seeing Margaret caffeinate herself in the morning. By the time she gets to the bottom of her first cup, she’s almost human.

“Are there pancakes for me, too?” she asks.

“Pancakes for everyone!” I announce, like it’s my campaign promise.

She pours a second cup and says, “You seem lots better.”

“I am! My brain feels so much less foggy.”

“Tell me you’re not working today. Can you hang out?”

“Actually,” I say, “I’m going rock climbing with Charles at two.”

Her eyebrows go up.

“I know!” I say. “I want to talk to you about this development.” As I feed her pancakes, I report everything I remember from Friday night—the veggie burger, the nice things he said, the way he asked to be friends and said all he knew about me is that I’m smart and wanted to have sex with him. “Actually, he said he figured the second part wasn’t true anymore because he ruined my semester.”

“I think this must mean he’s over The Bread Fiasco,” Margaret says as she cuts a stack of pancakes into squares. This is what we’re calling it: The Bread Fiasco. Putting myself on the table, like bread. For sharing. Seriously, how can I be so good at organic chemistry and so bad at hooking up?

Margaret’s good at both.

She goes on, “That was pretty smooth, actually. He gave you a way out of The Awkward. You don’t have to be like, ‘I take it back,’ or ‘Hey, about that—no hard feelings, right?’ He made it easy.”

“I don’t take it back, though! I really thought we had A Thing. When he said the thing about being impressed with me and the world being a better place, I was like, ‘Dude, just kiss me.’ Shit like that is why I’ll never win a Nobel Prize. Nobel Prize winners don’t glaze over watching a guy’s Adam’s apple move while he talks and think, All I want to do is lick his throat.”

“You don’t know that!” Margaret says. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter that you don’t take it back. He built a wall, and he did it while sparing you both The Awkward. He’s a really good guy. Don’t try to make anything happen. Be his friend. His friendship you can take with you when you leave IU. His sexy, sinewy throat you cannot.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” I say. “I will be his friend and leave his throat alone.”

“Good,” she says. “Now: what are you going to wear?”