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A puddle the size of a small house halfway across the empty lot ripples under a faint wind, the last gasps of the storm that blew through last night. I glance at the clock on the dash. Fifteen minutes until I can go home.
I click the light, snap the book shut, stamp my feet on the floor mats to keep the blood in my legs moving. The company that contracts out our security detail to different construction sites around the county said security guards can leave the car on for the A/C to keep cool in the summer but leaving the engine running for eight hours a shift seems like something Cruella de Vil would do. In a way, this is just like firefighting. Hours and hours of nothing, thenboom. Except I’m positive there will be no boom this time. Unless the sudden urge to pick up this book again counts.
Headlights from another security vehicle move across my windshield. My colleague, early for his shift replacing me, flashes his high beams twice. I flash them back and start the car, pulling out of the lot, the tires squealing unnecessarily on the asphalt. I drive toward the four-story glass building in the middle of an industrial park, five minutes away, where our offices are. As I step inside, the fluorescent lights blind me. Everything looks sleepy at two in the morning. The couch in the breakroom sags. The floors and furniture are washed out in the artificial light. Amir, my boss, isn’t at his desk in the expansive and empty office off to the side of the breakroom, but his keys lie on the desk, and a half-eaten tuna sandwich sits on a square of waxed paper.
The A/C kicks on as I clock out on the computer, a process that takes too long since the machine is about fifteen years past its prime. Flyers on the corkboard above the computer flap in the breeze created by the artificial air. The computer fan whirs, the high-pitched whine like the dinky, secondhand dirt bike I got when I was fourteen and promptly wrecked. I input my hours, hitting Enter and waiting again for the processor to catch up, the cursor spinning in a blue circle of death. Finally, the screen shows the landing page, confirming that my hours have been inputted, and I stand to gather my things from my locker. Another gust of air blows from the vent above me and flyers flutter again, this time one falling off the corkboard and landing on the keyboard.
It’s a notice for a rec touch rugby league and the grainy, unfocused photocopy of a rugby player in motion is a punch to the gut. That used to be me. Touch leagues, tackle, whatever. I’ve played since I knew how to toss a ball; instead of playing catch or teaching me how to throw a perfect spiral like all the other parents, Pop had taught me rugby rules in the backyard, while Grandma gardened. He drove me an hour each way to rugby practice two towns over when I was thirteen and showed up to my local league games after graduation. I was never good enough to play in anything more than an amateur league, but I loved it. Loved the sweat and the sometimes blood and the way we could lay all of our aggression out on the field and then crack open a can of soda together after. I loved pushing myself, feeling my lungs burn and my muscles scream. I loved winning.
And maybe George is right, because I don’t know who that man is anymore. Even if my doctors hadn’t told me I probably shouldn’t play again, I don’t think I’d play anymore. I want to, though. I miss the guy I was before the accident. I miss me. But the flyer is at least enough to remind me that George shoved a stack of flyers into my hands before I left tonight, asking me to share them at work. I wrench open my locker, flatten one out on the desk, and find a spot for it on the corkboard.
How to Make Friends as Millennial Adults: Psychological and Sociological Challenges in Forming and Retaining Adult Friendships, A Multidisciplinary Study, it says. Other than Amir and me, I don’t think there are many millennials here. Mostly Gen Xers and a kid who barely seems legal to work past eight in the evening.
Are you a millennial adult (between the ages of 27 and 37) who:
•Has difficulty creating new, lasting friendships?
•Experiences feelings of depression, anxiety, and/or loneliness?
•Feels that factors such as shyness, busyness interfere with forming or retaining platonic relationships?
•Believes friendships require too much work?
Consider applying for the Millennial Effect: Challenges in Making Adult Friendships. This cross-disciplinary exploration of friendship and its effect on our physical, mental, and emotional well-being will take place over six weeks and could pay $1,000 upon completion (per the results of a participant lottery).
It’s the $1,000 that gets me. And yeah, OK, I’d answer yes to all of those questions, but with $1,000 I’d have enough for a new water heater. Between Pop’s savings and pension, I’ll be able to keep him comfortably in the nursing home until his death. Pop and Grandma had put money away for my education but then I never got one. It feels unfair to use that money for home repairs.
I pull the paper back down off the corkboard, stuff it back into my backpack. I won’t fill out the application form on this computer. Amir will be back before I can even get the internet browser open. I’ll do it at home. Where no one can see me. I’ll apply and might get chosen and hopefully I’ll make $1,000. And if, in the process, I learn how to get back to the man I was before my accident? Well, that’s just gravy, as Pop would say.
Chapter Four
Lulu
The doorbell camera stares at me, an all-seeing eye. I never know where to look. Do I greet it, treat it like the person standing behind it? Ignore it? I ring the bell again, wincing at the sound that echoes back at me through the front door, painted in a green that seems like it’s meant to be happy, but is a bit too bright for my eyeballs. Branches and leaves sprinkle the front lawn but the porch managed to remain relatively intact after the storm, laid out like a photo shoot for one of those thick-papered home decor magazines. There’s a wreath on the door, not a forgotten holdover from Christmas, the seasonal kind. Eucalyptus leaves and little yellow flowers.
“The door is open, Lulu,” the disembodied voice of Calliope Singh, my high school best friend, comes from the doorbell camera. “I’m just putting the baby down. Come on in.”
“O-OK,” I say, leaning in close to the doorbell camera. This visit seemed like a good idea a few weeks ago when I reached out to her, but after multiple reschedules from both of us and still feeling the aftereffects of The Date, I checked my phone multiple times this morning hoping that Cally would cancel again.
No dice.
So, now my hands are clammy while I obsessively list my predesigned conversation topics: her mother’s health; her sister’s wedding; her summer plans. I’ve waffled over what to ask her about new motherhood, afraid that she’s had to answer the same questions over and over but not wanting to seem uninterested in the baby. I fell down a rabbit hole this morning and now feel like I could pass the certification exam to become a lactation consultant while researching ways to best support a new mom, but I don’t think I should ask her about her nipple soreness. At least not yet. We haven’t spoken face-to-face in a while.
From the outside, the house looks big, with a three-car garage and two-story turret and an interlock driveway, but as I step inside I see it’s the interior that would get it bumped to Zillow’s front page. Cally’s house is like something I’ve seen in a movie, all crisp white furniture and silver appliances, the straightest vacuum lines in the carpet and an entire wall of windows along the back of house, opening up onto a pool. The sun sends reflections off the water to dance on her kitchen ceiling.
It smells nice in here, something crisp and clean, not too floral or overpowering. There’s a grand staircase to the left of the foyer but Cally comes out of a stairwell near the back of the house, a baby monitor in her hand. According to social media, Cally’s baby is a few months old, still an infant, but Cally doesn’t resemble anything close to what I imagine the mother of a new baby looks like; an exhausted mess. She glows. Her dark hair shines and her eyes are conspicuously bagless. She’s always been petite, the girl who was perfect for the top of a cheer pyramid, but as she wraps me up in a hug she squeezes me with lean, strong muscle.
“How are you, Lu?” she asks, cupping my face. The shadows of fading henna wind up her hands and arms. “It’s so wonderful to see you.”
Cally sits me out on her back patio, in the shade by the pool where she’s already prepared a colorful Mediterranean orzo salad, protected underneath a mesh dome food cover. She offers me a glass of white wine, but I’m still feeling a little ashamed at how quickly the alcohol affected me the other night with Jesse, so I drink sparkling water instead. She sets up the baby monitor with the screen facing us, the volume turned all the way up, then she turns to me. I wilt under the weight of her attention, suddenly too aware of the ponytail I threw my hair into this morning when I remembered that I forgot to wash it last night or my short, jagged nails that I spent all of last week tearing at. “So,” she says, then pauses so long I’m sure that she doesn’t have a clue what to say next. “What have you been up to...for the last twelve years?”
Cally went away to school in California; Stanford. She met her husband there; they eloped in Mexico and lived there while they launched their interior design business. By the time she’d moved back to Pennsylvania, I was already in Lancaster getting my PhD.
“Well.” I clear my throat. Cally and I used to smoothly chat for hours on the phone about nothing in particular and also the most important things in our lives, but this conversation already feels like sandpaper. “I decided to shift the focus of my research,” I say, neatly skirtingwhy—because I couldn’t stay in Lancaster another minute with Brian and Nora and their blissful joy. “I’m focusing on depictions of witchcraft and gender in colonial New England.”
She hums and nods around a bite of her salad. “Neat.”
The bubbles in the sparkling water tickle the inside of my nose and I cringe instead of answering.
