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West opens his bedroom door. “I’ve got to study. ”
He closes it, and then there’s just the sound of the TV and Bridget shifting uncomfortably on her end of the couch.
“I didn’t do anything,” I say. “I don’t even know his last name. ”
But I’m not sure who I’m talking to.
No one replies.
“So when are you heading home?” West asks.
“Tomorrow. ”
It’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving—or Wednesday, I guess, since it’s three in the morning. Campus has been a ghost town since lunchtime, and West has been at the bakery all day. He had to come in early. He’ll stay late. He has an insane amount of baking to do to help Bob get the holiday orders filled.
It doesn’t matter, he told me. He’s got the whole rest of break to sleep.
“Early?” he asks.
“Yeah. ”
“Can you go vent the oven for me?”
I walk over to the oven—which is more like a metal closet with glass in the door—and push the button to vent the steam so the loaves will start to dry out during the last few minutes of baking.
“Thanks. ”
I hop up on the counter and study the room. Since October, it’s become almost as familiar to me as my dorm room, and I’ve stopped noticing how crowded it is. How the vented steam smells of moist dough, raw and wet. How West’s hands are always busy, the floor is always dirty, and I’m always safe, even if I’m not always comfortable.
Officially we’re on break, and I should be at home.
Home has become an increasingly difficult concept. I still talk to my dad once a week, but I’ve come to dread our conversations. I’ve been a daddy’s girl my whole life, and now I don’t know what to say to him. He asks me how Con Law is going, if the class is as tough as I feared. He reminds me that I should look into summer internships at the career center, because I ought to have some experience before I start applying to law schools in a few years.
He tells me he loves me and reminds me to be safe.
I hang up the phone with a piercing pain in my stomach. I feel like a liar, but I haven’t told him a single lie.
For the first time since I got to Putnam, I don’t want to go home for break. Dad gets into the whole turkey thing, and I’m in charge of stuffing. My sister Janelle and her fiancé do cranberry sauce and rolls. Alison, my other sister, is in Lesotho with the Peace Corps, but if she were home she would do pumpkin pie.
I guess I should take over pie duty.
I’m supposed to get fitted for a bridesmaid’s dress for Janelle’s wedding, which is coming up in the summer. She emails me details about the venues they’re looking at, the colors she likes, the save-the-date cards they’re having made on Etsy. I know I’m supposed to be excited, so I act that way, but I can’t drum up any enthusiasm.
“You ever call that guy?” West asks.
It’s been two days since he shut himself up in his room. This is the first time either of us has mentioned that conversation.
“Scott,” I say.
“I didn’t forget. ”
“No. I didn’t call him yet. ”
His phone buzzes. West checks it and taps out a message to someone. He’s been glued to it all night, distracted. He hasn’t told me who he’s talking to. It could be his sister, his mother, some girlfriend back home he’s never mentioned.
He doesn’t tell me anything.
Tonight he has nothing to teach me. All these weeks of glazing and proofing, I feel as though we’ve never talked about what it is I’m actually supposed to be learning.
