The Girl He Used to Know(17)

“Well, for starters, he’s very polite.”

“He’s a giant nerd,” Joe said.

“No he’s not,” I said.

“Annika wasn’t asking you, Joe.”

“I bet he just loves to play chess,” Joe said.

“I love playing chess.”

Joe snorted and shot Janice some sort of look. She shot one back at him. It was a fairly recent addition to her expression catalogue, but I knew it meant “Shut up right now, Joe.”

“Why are you still dating him?” I asked Janice.

Janice shushed me and pulled me into the kitchen. “I don’t know. He’s very, very pretty.”

“And so dumb.”

“It’s okay. It’s not like I’m going to marry him.”

Was Jonathan a nerd? Just because he had short hair and didn’t play every sport didn’t mean that he was a nerd. He was really smart, and intelligence had always made guys seem more interesting to me than they might be to others. Plus, he was really good-looking and sometimes while we were playing chess I stared at him, mesmerized by how perfect his face looked. He had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen, which made me think his kisses would taste like Pep O Mint Life Savers. Joe’s kisses probably tasted like pot and Funyuns.

And failure.

“Do you like Jonathan?” Janice asked. “Like, like him like him?”

“No.”

“It’s okay if you do,” Janice said.

“I don’t.”

“Just don’t jump in with both feet this time. Until we know for sure.”

I turned to her, exasperated. “But how will we know?”

“Sometimes we won’t. But if a guy reminds you to carry a jacket because he doesn’t want you to get cold, it’s a pretty good indicator he won’t try to hurt you. That doesn’t guarantee that he won’t, and you still have to be careful, but it’s a good start.”

“I don’t want to be wrong again,” I said, because I had been, once, midway through our sophomore year. A guy named Jake, who I’d met in one of my lectures, had taken a liking to me, and to say I reciprocated with vigor would have been an embarrassing understatement. What started as silly doodling on each other’s notebooks while the professor droned on soon morphed into walking to our next class together, me wearing the biggest smile that had ever shown itself on my face, and Jake with his arm casually thrown over my shoulder or resting on my ass. Having a boyfriend was as great as I’d always thought it would be, and it was easy! For over a week, I rarely left Jake’s side. I sought him out in the student union and the dining hall, and took my rightful place at his table the way any girlfriend would. I did his laundry and helped him with his homework because that’s what you do when you’re in love with someone and they’re in love with you. And he was very busy, so I was grateful he could spend time with me at all. Whenever we ran into his friends, which seemed to be all the time because he was apparently very popular on campus, he would point at me and say, “Have you met Annika? She sure is something.” Then they would all laugh and my smile would grow even wider because it felt so good to fit in.

And then, a short while later when things turned bad, my roommate was there once again to pick up my pieces and put me back together.

Janice laid a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t think you’re wrong this time. I think Jonathan genuinely likes you. He seems like a good guy. Let yourself have this. Don’t let one bad experience take the happiness in meeting a great guy away forever. If you’re not quite ready to admit it to me, at least admit it to yourself.”

“Do you really think he likes me?”

“It sure seems like he does. Does he flirt with you?”

Jonathan hadn’t done any of the things Jake had done, like drawing on my notebook or putting his arm around me. “I’m not sure. He does smile at me a lot.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“I’ll have to pay closer attention.”

I thought about Jonathan later that night when I was lying in bed, and I tried not to mentally catalogue all the things that could go wrong. Instead, I thought of how he almost always chose to play with me at chess club. I liked that he always walked me home. I liked that he cared whether or not I was cold.

I liked all of those things.

I liked them a lot.





13


Annika


THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

1991



The sun had barely risen when Jonathan and I left campus for the drive to St. Louis. My empty stomach churned. I was so nervous, I hadn’t been able to fathom the thought of breakfast and I worried I might dry-heave in the passenger seat of Jonathan’s truck.

“I’m sorry there’s no music,” Jonathan said. “The radio has never worked.”

“I like the quiet,” I said. Being trapped in a car where loud music was playing was one of the things that could send me into a tailspin. I couldn’t handle the overstimulation and would need hours of silence to counteract the noise. Jonathan’s truck looked old and it rattled softly as we drove down the highway, but to me it was perfect.

Jonathan had not only convinced me to join the competition team, he’d talked me into participating in the practice match. Eric had been thrilled. So had Janice. I was the only one who still had reservations. At the last chess team meeting—and only the second one I’d attended—I’d overheard some of the others questioning Eric about whether I was cut out for tournament play. That was another thing I’d discovered over the years. If you’re quiet and don’t make a lot of sound, for some reason people think it means there’s something wrong with your hearing. But there was nothing wrong with mine.