My Oxford Year(93)

From Connor.

As I read it, confusion quickly eclipses my surprise.

Congrats! Holy shit!

What is he talking about? For a crazy moment, I think that he must know about Jamie and me, about my decision to stay. Obviously, I’m a sleep-deprived idiot. I text back:

Hi! But . . . ?

He replies with a link to a CNN web page. I click on it.

I only read the headline before striding out the double sliding doors and into the parking lot, pressing call.

Gavin picks up on the first ring. “There you are!” he says. As if I’m a kid who wandered away from him at a department store instead of someone who didn’t answer her phone once—once—because she was deciding whether or not to kill her boyfriend.

“Hillerson’s out!”

“Yeah, I saw,” I say.

He’s barely listening to me. “It was the debate, his numbers tanked! We just won all five primaries!” I’d totally forgotten about the primaries. Is today Tuesday? I look up at the cloudy sky for a clue as to what time it is. “God, I wish I could see his smug bullshit face right now. Anyway, we’re officially in full-on general-election mode. Things are moving quickly, kid, and we’re gonna need you to come home. I know it’s early, but you had a good run. And I remember that I spent my Trinity Term just drinking.” He laughs. I don’t. “Look, I know it’s not exactly sticking to the plan, but plans are subject to change without notice.” I can tell my silence is unfamiliar to him and for the first time I sense discomfort in his voice. “Okay?”

I wasn’t going to do this now. I wanted to wait until I’d had some sleep, until I could be articulate and diplomatic, because, frankly, I’m a verbally incontinent mess at the moment.

But now, like Hillerson, my hand has been forced.

Here we go.

“No.”

Gavin’s silent. He’s never heard that word come out of my mouth before. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not coming home.”

“Let’s not make this a thing, Ella. You don’t want me to find an interim deputy political director, because, I gotta be honest, I don’t think that’s gonna be good for you—”

“No, I mean I’m not coming home. Period. Now or in June.”

More silence. Then he says, “What’s this about, Ella? It can’t be another job. There’s no better opportunity—”

“No, I wouldn’t do that to you. Or Janet. I’m so grateful to you both . . .” I can’t finish. I choke up. It turns out, the act of making a choice, of choosing a path, doesn’t mean the other path disappears. It just means that it will forever run parallel to the one you’re on. It means you have to live with knowing what you gave up. Which isn’t a bad thing; if anything, it only serves to strengthen my resolve.

But I would have killed this job. I would have been a superstar. I know it.

Gavin knows it, too, because, after a lengthy pause, he tries to save me from myself. “Ella, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna give you a day to think it over before I start looking for someone else.”

“I don’t need a day.”

“Yesterday, we promoted you. Today, you quit. Did you get spooked? Doesn’t this opportunity mean anything to you?”

Resenting the hell out of his guilt-tripping takes a backseat to my encroaching realization that actually, no, it doesn’t. It occurs to me that I never told anyone I’d been promoted. When Gavin and Janet gave me the news, I went back to the company of my friends, my boyfriend, and his parents, who gave me a ring, and I never had the urge, not once, at any point in the evening, to tell anyone. It was irrelevant before I decided it was irrelevant. “You would think,” I answer.

“You’re too smart for this!” Gavin says, impassioned. “You’re not one of those girls.”

I bristle. “What girls would those be?”

He pauses. His tone rhetorical, he asks, “Is this about a boy?”

My anger comes hot and quick. What an awful, reductive thing to say. I take a breath. “No. This is about a girl. This is about a girl choosing her life.”

“Oh, really? Choosing her life over making history? Over helping get a fellow woman elected president? Those are your priorities?”

He might as well have punched me in the stomach. “Gavin—”

Suddenly another voice takes over the line. “Ella?” Then she whispers, away from the receiver, “Take a walk.”

Still reeling from Gavin’s assault, hearing her voice makes my eyes swim. “I’m so sorry—” I begin.

“Don’t apologize,” she says fiercely. “You hear me?”

I don’t think I can stand any longer. I drop to my knees on the asphalt, frigid air sawing in and out of my lungs, clouding in front of my face. “It’s just . . . things changed. I changed,” I gasp.

“Ella, Ella, stop. It’s your choices at the end of the day that make you who you are. Be that. I admire that.” She’s silent for a moment, letting her words sink in. I struggle to breathe. “I have to go.”

“Thank you.”

“My door is always open. Okay? That’s a promise.”

“That’s a plan,” I say, and she’s gone.