I’d been informed that it was unprofessional to bang my head repeatedly against the lectern, so I waited until I was in my car to let loose with the expletives that had been building up all day.
Why was God continuing to test me like this?
Diabetes, I could handle — I just had to eat well and deal with technology, which superficially described the life of anyone in this day and age.
A pug with separation anxiety and a tendency to stare was more joy than burden — I just hid my left shoes and on workdays Frankie visited with Julian, who worked from home now.
Teaching these intro courses, that was the true trial.
I knew that all professors preferred to teach the higher-level courses filled with eager math majors, and the department usually forced the non-tenured professors to teach this crap. Unfortunately, I had the bad habit of inadvertently insulting my department head, usually due to my lack of patience for bureaucratic bullshit. So now, three days a week, I taught two sections of ’College Algebra’ classes (the equivalent of high school Algebra 2) and two sections of ‘Calculus for Non-Majors’ (watered-down calc for pre-med students).
The algebra students had already struggled with these topics the first time around, and they groaned and whimpered whenever I introduced something new. All I could do was help them find study groups and encourage them to see me during office hours for one-on-one help.
Meanwhile, the pre-med kids were perfectly competent; they just didn’t care what they were taught, as long as they received stellar marks and glowing praise. I cringed every single time a student raised their hand to ask, “Will this be on the final?” We’d just had midterms. They knew what to expect, and they knew my answer was always: “YES!!! THIS IS ALL ON THE FINAL! IF I BOTHER TO TEACH IT, THEN IT’S IMPORTANT!”
Since my blood sugar had been wonky, I’d promised my sister I wouldn’t tutor this semester, so I didn’t even have that outlet. At least the once-weekly senior seminar in topology was still mine to teach, but it was small consolation.
Ugh. This diatribe was just as mind-numbing in my head as it would be if spoken aloud to some poor friend who innocently asked, ‘How was your day?’ Heavy metal and angry emo music helped. And deep breathing. Lots of deep breathing.
But just before I turned on my car radio, a super-mario-mushroom sound emanated from my phone. Only one person had that tone.
TOMMY: Hanging out with Julian. Guess who I bumped into?
My phone mushroomed again and up popped a picture of Tommy and Frankie, grins on both their faces. Tommy had been spending more and more time with Julian lately, which I found heartwarming. Julian was more mature than any 25-year-old had a right to be and Tommy took such heavy weights onto his shoulders… it was nice that they both had someone with whom they could be silly.
Plus, my pug was so much perkier after seeing Tommy at Julian’s; he had tried to put on a good front for me, but I knew he’d missed Tommy dreadfully. Frankie might still spend most of his time staring at people, but now he did so with a smile on his face. Being ‘just friends’ was extremely difficult, but thoroughly worth it. My bad mood melted away with one little text.
“Great! You’re here early!” Julian shouted as I came in the door. “Kendall! He’s here! Gogogogogo! Before everyone gets home! Trip, I hurt my ankle in what was not at all a sex-related accident, so you’ll have to do the honors.”
Julian’s daughter ran into the hall and shoved her feet into a pair of boots. Then she stared at me with a teenage look of impatience and exasperation and gestured for me to move.
I stepped back outside and allowed her enough room to get past without accidentally brushing against me, and she ran to Julian’s giant SUV and unlocked it. Oh shit. She was sixteen. “I am not teaching you to drive in Julian’s truck.”
She rolled her eyes and treated me to a look of pure disdain that could only mean, ‘Why would I ask you?’ I shrugged, because she was right — she had two new, overprotective dads to freak out in the passenger seat while she tried to merge into traffic.
She opened the back hatch, steepled her fingers together, and cackled. Yes, she actually cackled. I had caught glimpses of her smiling or laughing in another room, but I’d never seen her having fun in my general direction.
I peered inside to see a toilet that must have been from the seventies, in a hideous burnt sienna hue. How had nobody destroyed this before now, and why would Xander allow this monstrosity in his house? Then again, he wasn’t here and at least they’d stopped treating me like an invalid. So I helped her remove it from the truck and the dogs watched from a safe distance as we carried it up the stairs and into the center of a sparkly multicolor room with a big canopy bed. Her brother’s room, most likely. This didn’t seem like her style. Once we set it down, she artfully placed a toilet-paper holder, magazine rack, and chartreuse U-shaped bath mat around it. When it was perfect, she snapped a picture and we went back downstairs — I into the kitchen, and she to the computer in the living room.
“Well?” Julian asked impatiently.
“It’s perfect,” I said. I knew better than to ask questions when aiding and abetting this family in their escalating prank war.
“I know we spoil them, but Marcus has been begging for his own bathroom,” he said, a smile curving his lips. He pushed a healthy after-school snack in front of me and I accepted it gratefully. This was a ritual of ours, ever since the first day he’d begun dog-nannying for Xander and me —or, rather, for Cassius and Frankie— when I mentioned not having eaten lunch. Every day since, he prepared a large healthy snack for us to share when I picked Frankie up. I knew what he was doing, but it was done in such a way that I never felt condescended to nor over-scrutinized. It was simply our snack-and-chat time and Julian Moore had quickly gone from being my friend’s baby brother to someone I considered a close friend.
We sat quietly for a bit, watching our dogs supervise Julian’s daughter as she wrote an essay about To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t know why, but Frankie really enjoyed classic American young adult literature. The pug refused to listen to me read anything that involved animals, possibly because he felt the dogs were being unfairly stereotyped and the cats were being portrayed far too kindly. Or maybe he just didn’t enjoy the plot. I could never tell with him.
“This is getting too meta,” Julian said, sliding a plate of celery and peanut butter in front of me. “I can’t keep watching you watching the dogs watching Kendall. Besides, you need to dish!”
“Dish?” I asked, trying to act confused by the idiom.
“Tell me what’s going on between you and Tommy! He won’t tell me anything interesting.” Julian released a dramatic sigh.
“That’s because nothing interesting is going on. We text a little now and then. Sometimes we bump into each other here. But he agrees with me that we can only be friends, so that’s what we are.” I was mostly certain that was the truth, but Tommy could be stubborn and we hadn’t really chatted alone since he drove me home from the hospital.
“Yeah, that makes perfect sense,” Julian snarked, then waved his arm through the air as if shooing away our frustrating conversation. “I promised myself I wouldn’t pry, but Xander isn’t prying, Chance isn’t prying, my brothers aren’t prying… so it’s up to me. How are you adjusting?”
“To the pump-monitor combo? To having to cross over the bridge every day into what is essentially New Jersey, now that you’ve moved here? To–”
“To everyone knowing. To the change in tech. To eating differently. To everything,” he said. “And before you ask — no, Xander hasn’t told me anything, the jerk.”
“It hasn’t been as weird as I expected it to be. Mostly because the eating and the sleeping and all that are things that I did for years. I just…” I trailed off. I’d lived with them for a week after my hospitalization, so Julian knew all about my hangups as well as the freakout in October over my vision loss that had prompted my breakup with Tommy. Well, all about the freakout, but not about the vision loss.
“Was it the trip to the hospital, or all our lectures, or Tommy that finally got through to you?” Julian asked.
“All of the above? But… mostly Tommy… and her,” I jerked my head toward’s Julian’s daughter. Despite spending a week in her home, I still had trouble remembering her name. Names were my kryptonite. Well, that and sugar. “I guess I just needed someone to threaten me with bodily harm.”
“Kendall?” Julian asked with visible astonishment. She didn’t talk much to people she wasn’t comfortable with, and we all knew she still wasn’t comfortable around me.
“Yes?” she called back.
“Nothing!” Julian said. “We were just talking about how much homework you have left to do!”
Frankie and Cassius woofed in encouragement.
“And today’s appointment? How’d that go?” Julian asked.
He had already heard my opinions on eye doctors, so I simply told him “It wasn’t too bad. No different from any other time, and there have been no changes.”
Opthalmologists were the worst. Their faces were within inches of mine, they put all kinds of wet things in my eyes, and then made grandiose judgements on how well I was taking care of myself. Today’s lecture had been deserved, I knew, but at least my condition hadn’t worsened. It hadn’t gotten better either, but I couldn’t exactly say I’d taken my drops as religiously as I should have. Drops weren’t supposed to be a trial in self-control, but it still squicked me out that I had to allow two different kinds of liquid to plunge into my eyes several times a day. At least today he hadn’t dilated my eyes, so I could drive myself home.
“Well, if you eat one more celery stick, I have a surprise for you!” Julian sang excitedly. Yes, a man seven years my junior was talking to me as if I were a small child, but I was more interested in the surprise. I finished off the celery stick as quickly as possible. As soon as I was done, he slid an entire bakery box in front of me. An. Entire. Box.
“Dream bars!” I squealed. Julian’s brother Logan made the most amazing baked goods known to man and managed to use ingredients that had a low glycemic index. They had chocolate and hazelnut and salted caramel and everything delicious you could imagine all in one little brownie-shaped bar. And there had to be over a dozen in there.
“How many can I take home?” I whispered with all the reverence the gift deserved.
“All of it,” Julian said. “Logan made enough that his family and Tommy and I got to have some too.”
I gasped and immediately texted a thank you to Logan. I felt like holding this up and thanking people like it was a Nobel Prize. But instead I snatched one out of the box as if Julian was about to whisk it away. I wasn’t sure how well they kept (I’d never had so many to myself before), but I supposed I could put some of them in my freezer.
“Can I have one now?” Kendall asked from her seat at the computer. “I only have the conclusion left to write.”
“Of course!” her new father said and she practically skipped over. The teenager alternated between joyful child and jaded woman, and I thought that might be one of the many reasons that she fascinated my dog Frankie. I nodded to her in greeting, but decided not to force her into conversation.
“Maybe,” I said after I worshiped my first bite. “Maybe I can give one to my nephew as a bribe.”
“Why do you need to bribe your nephew?” Julian asked.
“I’m babysitting them tomorrow night as punishment for being an idiot, or so my sister says. Joy and her husband are having a date night.” Julian looked at me as though I’d grown a second head. “I watched them for an hour a few months ago. It should be fine.”
“How old are they?” the girl asked.
“The boy is three I think? And the other is still in the larval stage…”
“The baby’s ten months old,” Julian said for me.
“You can’t give one of these to a toddler!” she said, facing me. “They have nuts and wheat gluten and… you need to at least ask your sister first. Logan can give you a list of ingredients.”
“It can’t be that big a deal,” I said and immediately wanted to kick myself. She clearly knew more about kids than I did. “Can it? I’m guessing you’ve babysat before?”
She took a moment to swallow and take a sip of the water Julian had put in front of her. “It matters, Trip. Ask her, just in case. Do you know how to take care of a baby? Is your apartment baby-proofed? I mean… Maybe you should babysit here.”
I risked a glance at Julian, and he seemed almost as surprised as I was. Not only was this the longest conversation she’d ever had in my presence (let alone with me) but Xander had lamented more than once over the fact that she talked very little about her past. All they knew was that they had to keep her safe from her birth family and their righteous church friends. Thus, the homeschooling.
“That’s really, really sweet of you. But Joy said I couldn’t have any Moores or their families help…” Joy was being oddly unfair with that stipulation.
“You can… Never mind. Don’t google it. I’ll make a list so you can baby-proof properly before they come over.” With that, she rushed back to her computer.
“Thank you!” I called after her.
“You’ll need all the help you can get!” she shouted back.
It was just two kids for a few hours. One could barely get around on her own. The other could have conversations and, therefore, be reasoned with. How hard could it be?