The Truth About You & Me (13 page)

You settled it over our legs so that our knees touched as we put out plates in our laps. Our forks clinked as we ate.

It should have been awkward, that first time I ate with you, you in that amazing sweater, the one that hugged your shoulders in the way I wanted to. But it wasn't. Even then, it felt good to just be with you. And yes, I wanted so much more, but it was so easy to settle for what I was allowed to have: a quiet meal together, our knees touching, the blanket warming us up to a comfortable temperature.

We didn't talk as we ate, and it didn't bother me. The only sound in the room was the quiet ticking of the wall clock, one that reminded me I couldn't stay with you forever. Not yet.

Somehow we'd reached five o'clock already, and dusk was rapidly approaching.

“Do you have to be home any time soon?” you asked.

“Nah, my parents won't care,” I said. Then I cursed myself for mentioning them at all, for thrusting them at you like that.

“You live with them, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Just until I'm done with GRCC.” I paused. The college only had one small dorm complex, used mainly by international students. Most of the other students still lived at home, or maybe had a small apartment with a few roommates. “I told them I'd be home late.”

“Great,” you said, like you meant it.

I set my plate down on the coffee table and then let my body settle into the couch, pulling that supposedly ugly blanket up higher, and a surreal feeling settled over me.

There I was, a sixteen-year-old girl, in the home of my twenty-five-year-old Biology professor, watching as he ate dinner. Such a simple, domestic act, something a student was never meant to see.

I glanced out at the windows, to where the fog was settling around the edges. “I can't believe winter is coming soon.”

“Winter … and December.” You grinned and leaned forward, and for a second I had the oddest idea that you might just curl up close to me. But instead you tucked the blanket over my shoulders, then sat back again so that we weren't quite touching.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I'm a Biology professor. If you die of hypothermia, I'm sure the irony would haunt and kill me too,” you said.

I smiled, wondering if there was a way to find that superpower and push
stop
, so that you and I could simply sit there on that worn-in old couch, be there for all of eternity, enjoying life without the world to judge us for it.

You must have felt it too? The rightness of it all, when we were together and all those stupid rules just … disappeared?

I really do believe, even as I write this, that sometimes two people are just meant for each other, and that we were two of those people. Two people who made sense, and if only those two years didn't matter, we'd still be those two people today. Bright and happy and comfortable in the warmth of that wood stove, in your simple, unassuming one-bedroom house.

Sometimes what I hate most about all of this is that we never hurt any one. Not a soul, not even me.

Don't they get that? That you never hurt me like they keep assuming? I was
better
because of you. I was someone who mattered, someone who was allowed to have an opinion.

It was my parents who made me feel like a kid. Not you.

Never you.

When I went
downstairs the next morning, I'm pretty sure I floated down the steps, lost in memories of you, in thoughts of how hard it had been to pull myself away from you and drive home. It was dark by then, but my mom and dad hadn't thought a thing of me arriving home so late.

Trust is a funny thing.

“Hey! You're just in time to help me cook,” my dad called out as my bare feet hit the tiled floor.

For a jarring second I'd forgotten it was Saturday, forgotten about the tradition of a giant weekend breakfast.

“Oh, uh, awesome,” I said, blinking away the memories of you and making my way into the kitchen where Dad was bent over, digging through the produce bin. Without looking up, he said, “You can chop up the peppers. We're doing a scramble.”

“Cool,” I said, over the din of washing my hands. After I dried them on a paper towel, I went over to the little peninsula, to where the granite shone brightly under the fancy canned lights.

The atmosphere was different than it had been with you just the night before. It wasn't awkward, but it lacked the warmth I'd felt when I'd stood in that small kitchen of yours, watching your able hands prepare dinner.

Here, everything looked so nice and shiny and perfect, the way I was supposed to look.

I grabbed one of my dad's fancy Ginsu knives and set to work slicing the peppers into thin strips, the way he liked it. Dad brushed my arm as he set an onion on the counter top, and then he whirled around again and disappeared into the big pantry at the far end of the kitchen. I glanced back but could only see a shadow beyond the frosted glass door.

He emerged with a whole bag of potatoes, plunking them down on the counter and then turning to grab another cutting board and a big bowl. This was my father at his finest—a constant blur of motion, as if to make up for his stagnant career.

“How's class going?” he asked as he went to the sink to wash the first few potatoes.

“Good. I think I have an A in everything so far,” I said, a familiar sensation drifting over me. Grades. A's. All the usual expectations.

Funny, how I felt so different inside and yet he couldn't see it.

“Atta girl,” he said, returning to the counter. “How are your professors? Do you like them?”

The knife slipped then, and I yanked my hand back just in time.

“Whoa, watch it,” he said, leaning in to peer at my finger. “These knives are no joke.”

He'd come too close to the truth.

“Yeah, sorry. Knife slipped.” I picked up the red pepper I'd been chopping. “Professors are good. The English one is kind of boring, but Bio is great,” I said, going with the truth. You
were
great. You were so much more than great.

“Oh yeah? What are you studying in Bio right now?”

Bennett,
I wanted to say. I spent all of my class time studying you. But I didn't think my dad would like that answer.

“We covered cell composition first, and then genetics, and now we're on to evolution. We just had our first test,” I said.

“Oh?” He looked up at me, his hands stilling. “How'd you do?”

This was that moment, that look, the one that said,
Don't disappoint me, Maddie.
Don't end up like me, wallowing away as a small town PE teacher.
I had big plans once. I was going to be somebody. And now look at me.

“I got an A-,” I said, feeling a little bit weird about it. I did get that A-. You
gave
it to me. But Dad didn't need to know that, did he?

“Great job. A little more and you can turn that into an A.”

And there it was, that same push-push-push.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. I wanted in that moment to say, “Well guess what! I actually flunked! What do you think about THAT?”

Instead, we let the silence fall, and he finished chopping the potatoes. Then he tossed them in a hot pan with a bit of oil and started stirring, the potatoes hissing from the heat.

“You know what we should do?” he asked abruptly.

“What?” I tossed the chopped onion into the pan, blinking away the tears from the intense onion scent.

“Let's go do the corn maze,” he said.

“Uh, what?” Corn maze? What the heck was he talking about?

“The corn maze. You know, at Thomassons'?”

“I haven't gone to that since I was like twelve.”

“Yeah, but wasn't it fun?”

I look at my dad, realizing he's serious. His eyes are lit up like a kid who just got a puppy for Christmas. “I mean, yeah, but I was twelve.”

“Oh, is Maddie too old to be seen in a corn maze with her dad?”

He grinned at me in a way that made me grin right back without even meaning to. In a way that somehow made me say, “Okay, let's do it,” even before my brain recognized that I was excited by the prospect.

“Two for the
maze, please,” my dad said. Behind us, two kids squealed, tickling one another as they impatiently waited in line.

“Here you go,” the girl behind the little window said. “Do you want cow questions or sports trivia?”

“Cows!” I said at the same time my dad answered, “Sports.”

We looked at each other. “Okay, fine, cows,” he said, taking the narrow sheet of paper from her hand and giving it to me.

I don't even know why I chose the cow one, because it isn't like I know anything about cows, but I probably know less about sports, and we
were
on a farm, so it seemed like the thing to do.

My dad follow
ed me across the wide gravel drive and down the little slope leading to the entrance to the maze. Just inside the six-foot corn stalks, a placard greeted us: “
A cow gives how many gallons of milk a day?
” Dad read aloud
.

I looked at my paper. “A is four gallons, B is eight. Holy crap, there's no way it's eight,” I said, walking left for A.

He followed me and we rounded the corner, and then the maze closed up around me. I stopped abruptly, and Dad knocked into my back before stepping away and giving me some space. He laughed, an easy, carefree laugh I don't hear that often. “Eight gallons did seem like a lot,” he said.

“Seriously. Poor cows,” I lead him back the way we'd come, now following the arrow for B. We stepped farther down the path, the air growing cooler in the shadows of the cornstalks.

“Okay, next question,” I announced. “
Name one of the stomachs of the cow
. It's either ‘reticulum' or ‘burnum.'”

“Isn't a reticulum like a ladies' purse or something?” my dad asked.

“Uh, no. I think that's a reticule? ‘Burnum' doesn't sound like a real word. Let's go with ‘reticulum,'” I walked to the left once again, this time slower, in hopes I wouldn't walk straight into a dead-end again. Instead, the path curved around to the left, then snaked to the right, and when I saw the next sign post, I grinned, triumphant.

“Woohoo,” I said, feeling silly but not caring. It was strange to get out of the house with Dad. To get out of the pressure cooker and try to guess what the names of a cow's stomach were. But I had to admit … it felt good.

It reminded me of when I was younger, before I hit junior high, before everything was just another item for the college application, before the word “college” even entered my head. Before my parents started asking me where I wanted to go, who I wanted to be.

Back when we used to go to the mall or the park or sledding, a day of outdoors. And yes, maybe Mom was rarely there, but Dad was. He let us just be kids back then, before the expectations kicked in.

Before he started talking about how, in an instant, all of his plans fell through, how we'd have to be more meticulous, plan things better than he did.

We were supposed to be a success story, like Mom. Never a failure, like Dad.

I'd never thought he was a failure.

“See, told you this would be fun. We totally gotta do things like this more often,” he said.

“Yeah. I agree. Next time I'm studying cow trivia beforehand.” I was laughing.

“You're good at that,” he said.

“Good at what?”

“Studying. I wish I'd had your skills when I was your age. You're going to go so far … ”

That familiar vise tightened around my heart. “Yeah, I guess.”

“One bad tackle and BAM, it was all over for me. Don't make that mistake. What do you think you'll go for? Engineering like Mom, or something else? Hell, you could be a doctor if you want, the way you absorb things like a sponge.”

“I don't know,” I found myself saying.