Don't You Cry(27)

This girl is not a good match for Esther. Not at all. That’s what I decide.

I walk in and cross the room, traversing the patchy, polished concrete floors, staring down at them, in fact. I don’t look at the girl, not yet, not until I’m closer. It’s hard to look into the eyes of the person who plans to take over your life—knowingly or unknowingly. It isn’t her fault, I get that, and yet it doesn’t make me dislike her any less. I might just hate her.

I focus on my feet instead, on the rounded toes of a pair of leather boots, as I walk.

Her light eyes move from the window to mine, and it’s then that she smiles, a pleasant smile, yes, but also one with reserve. “You’re Esther?” she asks, extending her tiny hand, and I say that I am. I’m Esther, though of course I’m not. I’m Quinn, but right now, that’s neither here nor there. I’m Esther.

Her name, she tells me, is Megan, and then, as if she doesn’t even know her own name or hasn’t quite decided on who she is, she says, “Meg.” Her handshake is lethargic to say the least. Prissy. I’m not even sure that we touch.

I don’t bother to get a coffee, knowing this will be quick. I’m not even sure why it is that I agreed to meet, but for some reason I wanted to see her with my own two eyes. She strikes me as young and naive, the kind of girl who probably has no clue how to hail a cab. The kind of girl I used to be. I slide onto a bar stool beside her and say, “You’re interested in the apartment,” and she assures me she is. She’s a recent grad, or will be come December, and looking for a new place to live. Right now she lives with her single mom out in Portage Park, but is looking for something closer to the Loop, more trendy, a younger crowd. She has a job all lined up for after graduation in the west loop. She needs an apartment close to transportation. She tells me dramatically with a flip of the ginger hair, “The commute from Portage Park would take years.”

The thing that exasperates me the most is that she sounds a lot like me, or the me I was all those months ago when I saw Esther’s other ad in the Reader, her first roommate request. My lucky break, I’d thought at the time, but now I wasn’t so sure. Now I feel like some kind of mass-produced commodity rather than someone unique. My heart breaks a little with each of Meg’s words, when she tells me her gig is in graphic design, how—as an avid environmentalist—she plans to bike to work in the summer. How the hardest part of moving away from home will be leaving her cat behind. How she loves to cook, and is a self-professed neat freak. My heart breaks not because any of these things appeals to me but because I think Esther would like Meg. I think Esther would really, truly like Meg.

But the question is this: Would she like Meg more than me?

“You’re looking for a new roommate?” asks Meg, and I nod my head, staring out the window as a sea of people walk by, commuters just stepping off the 22 bus.

“My roommate,” I tell her sadly, “is about to move out.” And then I tell her how she sometimes has trouble paying her fair share of the rent. How sometimes she shorts me on her half of the utilities, or eats my food without asking first. And it’s true; I do each and every one of these things. But that doesn’t make me a bad roommate. Or does it?

What will I do, I wonder, if Esther makes me leave?

Where is Esther, I wonder, and why won’t she come home to me so we can figure this out?

Why won’t she talk to me?

Meg asks questions about the apartment, logical questions about first and last month’s rent payment, security deposits and whether or not there’s laundry in the building. Questions I never thought to ask. But when she asks if she can see it, the apartment, I say no. Not yet, is what I say. “I’m speaking to a few other applicants first,” I lie, though I wonder, over the course of the next few hours and days, how many calls Esther’s phone will receive. One call, ten calls, twenty calls? Twenty young people wanting to chase me from my home, to take my bed, my bedroom, my best friend?

“I’ll be in touch,” I tell her, but then mumble under my breath so that she can’t hear, as I walk quickly away, out of the coffee shop and onto the city street, But I just don’t think you’d be a right fit, Meg.

Though of course she could’ve been Jane Addams or Mother Teresa or Oprah Winfrey, and I still wouldn’t have thought she was good enough for Esther, whether or not Esther brought her here because she thought I wasn’t good enough for her.

Talk about ironic.





Alex

I wander the streets, searching for Pearl.

It’s a path that takes me through the neighborhoods of town, from the stately homes where the stinking-rich people live, to the smaller, more provincial houses like mine, something just slightly above a hovel. I walk from the shores of Lake Michigan inland, where the waterfront community becomes bucolic. I pass the schools, an elementary school, a middle school and a high school, all three lined in a row, three bland, light brick buildings that have to bus kids in from surrounding towns to fill the halls. The American flag flutters before each one, beating in the wayward wind like the webbed hands of a bat’s wings. The noise is loud; not a single bat, but a colony of bats. There are kids outside, on the playground, thronged together to keep warm, gym classes in uniform running laps around the archaic high school track. A fire engine soars by, lights and sirens blasting—the town’s volunteer fire department. I stand on the side of the road and watch it go, looking for signs of smoke in the distance, its four big tires kicking gravel up along the road. I hope Pops hasn’t managed to start our own house on fire. Thankfully they head the other way of our home.