The Girl He Used to Know(27)
“We have to go,” I said. “They need me at the clinic.” But how could I help the hawk when I could barely walk?
“They don’t need you. I just had to get you out of there. Don’t you understand what was going on?”
I think it was safe to say I didn’t understand anything that was going on.
“What did you think was going on?” I asked her.
“I don’t know for sure. I only know what it looked like,” she said.
“What did it look like?” I cried.
She turned to me, and I knew what the expression on her face meant, because I’d seen it a couple of times before. Once, when she was waiting to hear how she’d done on an important test our freshman year, and the next when her grandmother had gone in for open-heart surgery and they’d given her a twenty-percent chance of living through it. “It looked like he might have told his friends they could watch.”
“Watch us kiss?”
“Annika, I think he was planning to do more than kiss you.”
The fear and shame that washed over me when I finally understood what she was getting at, and how horribly wrong I’d been about the situation, shattered me. I shook and cried and Janice leaned over the gearshift and put her arms around me until I stopped crying. When we got back to the dorm she put me to bed to sleep off the effects.
The next day, when I arrived at class, I took a seat on the other side of the lecture hall. Knowing how scared I was that Jake might seek me out, Janice attended the lecture with me.
That’s the day I discovered what it felt like to have not only a friend, but a best friend.
Now, at Kam’s, in a situation that had already pushed me clear out of my comfort zone, I had the added misery of coming face-to-face with someone I’d hoped never to see again. I must have been staring at Jake while I relived the painful memory, because he raised his glass and crooked his index finger at me, beckoning. He wasn’t smiling this time.
The terror I’d felt that day bubbled up from the place deep down inside where I’d hidden it away, never to be thought of again, and I bolted, fighting my way through the crowd as if I were swimming upstream against a strong current. It was like being in the diner without shoes, but worse because this time, there was nothing preventing me from being there but my own bad memories. On the outside, I looked like everyone else. But on the inside, I remembered that I didn’t belong.
I burst through the door onto the sidewalk, and I kept going.
“Annika! Wait!” Jonathan caught up to me and grabbed my wrist moments before I would have darted in front of an oncoming car. “Jesus,” he said. “You have to stop doing that. Please just stop for a second.” He waited until the street cleared and then interlocked our fingers and led me gently to his truck. “Are you okay? What happened in there?”
“It’s too loud. And I can’t handle the smoke and there was a guy—”
“What guy?”
“Nothing. He was just this guy I used to know. He was sitting at a table with some people.” Tears sprang to my eyes, and I was glad it was dark and that Jonathan couldn’t see them.
“Would you rather go to my place? It’s quiet there.”
I couldn’t help but compare it to what had happened the one time I’d accepted a similar invitation. But I felt safe with Jonathan and knew he wouldn’t hurt me, so I said, “Yes.”
* * *
He lived in a studio apartment on the middle floor of an old three-story house in an area that was technically considered off-campus. It must have been quite a trek on foot and he’d probably had at least a twenty-minute walk ahead of him whenever he’d brought me home after chess club. He parked on the street, and we walked up the path to the front of the house and climbed the stairs, which were on the outside like a rickety wooden fire escape. He jiggled his key in the lock of a small door that had peeling paint, the color of which I wasn’t sure. Tan, or maybe it was just dirty. “It always sticks,” he said.
He flipped on the lights, and I got my first look at the place he called home. It was small, that much I had expected considering the apartment was located in a house, but it was clean and orderly, much more so than it would be if I lived there.
I stood still as he closed the door and tossed his keys on a small table. There was a couch and a coffee table. A small TV sat on a piece of plywood spanning two milk crates that were full of books. Something about Jonathan’s place put me instantly at ease. It felt cozy, and it was every bit as quiet as he’d promised. I could see myself living in a place like this.
“I like your apartment,” I said.
He smiled. “Thanks. This was about all I could find on short notice. Do you want a beer? I’m going to have one.”
I sat down on the couch. “Okay.” I’d tasted beer before. I didn’t really care for it, but Janice said it was an acquired taste. She kept our fridge stocked with wine coolers, which we both preferred if given the choice, but I didn’t often drink them. Drinking alcohol made it harder for me to understand people; I had a hard enough time following along when I hadn’t drunk anything at all.
Jonathan opened the beer and handed it to me. Then he sat down beside me and popped the tab on his own. We each took a drink, his considerably bigger than mine. The beer tasted pretty much like I remembered from the last time, and I must have still had a long way to go before I reached the acquired-taste stage.