Every Wrong Reason(28)

“Sure,” Jay agreed. “True love. It’s not just the booty that would have made him stray from his vows. He needed something stronger than that.”

“And did she love him?”

Jay nodded as if it was obvious. “I mean, her husband was a psycho, but she loved that Dimmesdale guy. She wanted to run away with him all those years later.”

I let his words settle over the class and wondered if these kids knew anything about love. How could they? I didn’t know anything about it and I was almost twice their age.

“So? What do you think about that?” I stared at them, but nobody was brave enough to answer. “Is true love enough? Was it enough for Hester and the way she was forced to live? Does it make their crimes forgivable? Does it redeem them?”

“No,” Andre announced loudly. “It just made them stupid.”

The bell rang and the kids jumped out of their seats before I could say anything more. Besides, there wasn’t really anything else to say.

I was inclined to agree with him.

“Don’t forget about your Scarlet Letter project! Now that we’ve finished the book, you need to be thinking about how you’re going to represent it to the class.” I hollered after them. “I want to hear your proposals on Monday!” They grumbled as they filed out of my room, but it didn’t bother me.

I felt like we’d made a breakthrough today. Somehow, despite my hung-over brain and my students’ usual lack of enthusiasm, we’d come together on social issues they could all relate to.

How many of them had single moms?

How many of them had been abandoned by people they loved?

Kara stepped into my classroom and I lunged for the trashcan. “Don’t puke!”

After a series of mumbled curse words, she collapsed in my desk chair. “Don’t say that word. God, don’t ever say that word again.”

I breathed a sigh of relief that she wasn’t going to toss her cookies all over my desk and smiled. “Did you have fun last night, Kara? Are you super happy we went out for hump day?”

“I want to die,” she mumbled. “Why the hell did I let you talk me into tequila shots?”

I tried not to laugh. Er, I tried not to laugh loud enough that she heard me.

“Am I interrupting?” Eli asked from the doorway.

I turned around and gave him a smile. “Nope, not at all. Kara is just dying.”

“I can see that,” he chuckled.

“Tequila,” she winced.

Eli turned to me with his eyebrows raised and a playful smile on his lips. “Death by tequila, not a pleasant way to go.”

“Eli, I hate you,” she grumbled.

“At least you don’t have to share your lunch with her,” he said to me.

The heavenly scent of fried foods had made its way over to me and my stomach rumbled loudly. “What did you bring me?”

“Ruby’s.”

“Oh, my god. You’re truly my hero!”

He set three Styrofoam containers on my desk and opened them slowly. My mouth started watering as soon as I saw the fried, crispy lumpias and spiced tocilog.

“This is my ultimate hangover cure,” he explained. “Ruby’s fixes everything.”

Kara winced, “Not everything…” she slipped out of my chair and practically collapsed on the ground. She curled up into a ball and tucked her arm under her head. “Wake me up in ten minutes.”

Eli and I shared a look. Then we dug into our lunch.

“So this is okay?”

“I love Ruby’s,” I said around a mouthful of lumpia. They were the perfect combination of crispy outside and spicy inside, like a spring roll only Filipino style. “Nick and I used to go on the weekends when we were first married because we could get so much food for so little.”

Eli waited a beat before he responded. I realized I put him in an awkward conversation spot, but with his usual directness, he rolled with it. “Why did you guys stop?”

I glanced at Kara on the floor, but she seemed completely out of it. I didn’t know why I didn’t want her knowing I opened up to Eli about my divorce. It still felt weird to me and I didn’t think I wanted Kara to look at it like a good thing.

I wasn’t sure it was a good thing.

“Probably for the same reason we stopped doing most other things.” I reached down to fiddle with one of the sauce containers, making my fingertips sticky. That wasn’t exactly fair. “I don’t know, actually. We always had fun at Ruby’s. We just stopped going. Maybe we got too busy.”

“Or maybe you stopped wanting to spend time with each other?”

I swallowed a large bite of rice and spiced meat and tried not to choke. Was he right? Instead of feeling the pain that I should or the insecurity in the truth of his words, I felt irritated.

My first thought was, “What did he know about me?”

What gave him the right to make judgments on my marriage?

But I swallowed again and tried to push those thoughts away. He was just being my friend. And he probably was right.

“Maybe,” I said noncommittally. “Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out the majority of reasons our marriage didn’t work out.”

He leaned in and I felt the warmth of his body as his arm grazed mine. “You know, you don’t have to torture yourself with all the whys and why nots. This is hard enough on you.”