Mrs. Fletcher(13)

“Don’t worry about Brendan. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

“I hope so.” She wanted to tell him about the awful thing he’d said to Becca the other day, but she heard a child screaming on Ted’s end, and a woman’s soothing voice, and it didn’t seem like the right time to get into it. “I really miss him.”

“He misses you, too. You know that, right?”

“It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

“Eve,” he said. “Brendan really loves you. He just doesn’t always know how to communicate.”

She wanted to believe this, and she was grateful to Ted for saying it out loud. His guilty conscience had made him a lot nicer than he used to be.

“What about you?” she asked. The crying had subsided for the moment. “Everything okay?”

“Up and down. Jon-Jon likes his new school. And the gluten-free diet seems to be helping a little.”

Jon-Jon was Ted’s four-year-old autistic son, an adorable child with severe behavioral problems. When Eve first heard about the diagnosis, she’d reacted uncharitably, considering it a form of karmic justice for Ted and his bad-girl wife, Bethany. How ironic and gratifying it had seemed at the time to see their Casual Encounter disrupted by reality. But they hadn’t cracked under pressure the way she’d expected. Instead the ordeal had brought out the best in them. They were devoted to their son, totally immersed in the minutiae of his care. Ted had become an amateur expert on cutting-edge autism therapies. Bethany had quit her job and gone back to school for a master’s in Special Ed. All this rising to the occasion had made it hard for Eve to sustain the hatred and contempt she’d felt for them in the immediate aftermath of her divorce.

“That’s good,” she said, glancing down at her bare chest. The room was chillier than she’d realized, and her nipples were hard, which made her remember how much Ted had appreciated her breasts. They’re perfect, he used to tell her, not that it mattered much in the end. Absolutely perfect. “Maybe we should all stop eating gluten. Everybody who gives it up goes around telling everybody else how great they feel.”

“That’s because eating it made them sick.”

“I guess.”

The screaming started up again, louder than before, and Eve found herself wincing in sympathetic distress. Brendan had told her that Jon-Jon’s tantrums could be pretty terrifying.

“All right,” he sighed. “I better go deal with this. Have a good night, okay?”

“You too.” She almost said honey, a reflex from a different era of her past. “Thanks for calling.”

*

Eve was exhausted, but she stayed up well past midnight, playing Words with Friends against a random opponent, though that was just an excuse to keep her eyes open. What she was really doing was waiting for a message from Brendan. Over the summer he’d promised to keep in touch by sending her at least one text every single day. He was free to send more if he felt like it, or to call her, or even to arrange a Skype session if he was especially homesick. But one text per day was the agreed-upon minimum.

He’d kept his word for the past three days, texting her exactly once every twenty-four hours, even if his messages all said pretty much the same thing: College is awesome!!! (Tuesday); Another AWESOME day!! (Wednesday); and Still totally awesome! (yesterday). She was happy for him—though slightly concerned by the steady decline in the number of exclamation points he used—and grateful not to have been completely forgotten in the midst of all that awesomeness.

But no text had arrived today. It was Friday, of course, and he was drunk, as Ted had just informed her, so there was her explanation. But still—was he really going to break his promise on Day Four? Was he that irresponsible? She could have contacted him, of course, just typed out a quick miss you xxoo, and waited for him to respond, but that wasn’t the deal. The deal was that he would reach out to her, and she wanted him to do it of his own free will, without any badgering, because he loved her and wanted to include her in his life. But she already knew, long before her match with Heather0007 was over (a decisive victory for Eve), that she was kidding herself. He wasn’t going to text her tonight, and probably not tomorrow night, either. He just wasn’t that kind of kid, the kind who’d think about his mother while he was out having a good time with his friends, or flirting with a pretty girl from down the hall. From now on, she’d hear from him if and when he felt like it—probably when he needed something—and she’d be lucky if it was once a week.

*

She must have dozed off with the phone still in her hand, because the vibration of the arriving message shocked her awake. Thank God, she thought, lurching upright, squinting groggily at the blurred and blinding screen, blinking hard to get the words into focus.

U r my MILF! Send me a naked pic!! I want to cum on those big floppy tits!!!

For a second or two, she was deeply disturbed, unable to understand why Brendan would text her something so disgusting, no matter how drunk he was. It just didn’t seem possible. Big floppy tits? But then she double-checked, and saw, to her immense relief, that the text had come from a cellphone number she didn’t recognize. It was just some anonymous jerk, a stupid prank she wouldn’t even remember in the morning.





Orientation


Those first few days of school, before the grind of classes started up, were pretty awesome. They had tons of activities for the freshmen, including this Welcome-to-BSU Field Day on the main quad with tug-o’-war and ring toss, water balloons and a Slip ’N Slide, all kinds of summer camp shit like that. And the weather was beautiful, which meant that lots of hot girls were wearing cutoffs and bikini tops, and more of them than I’d expected had tattoos that were good conversation starters. Some of the less hot girls stripped down too, and everybody tried to be cool about it, because body image and all that. Zack and I took our shirts off, because we’d both been working out over the summer and why wouldn’t you, if you were ripped?