Saint Anything(97)

This time, I said nothing. I was trying to figure out what angle he was working.

“Let’s say this,” he continued. “We keep this between us. But you owe me one.”

“You can tell her,” I said. “I don’t care.”

“Nope.” He held up his hands. “Don’t want to be that guy. It’s our secret. Agreed?”

I didn’t like the sound of that. But before I could say anything, my phone buzzed. It was a message from Mac.

Just a scare. Everything fine, he’d typed.

“I need to go in,” I said to Ames, grabbing the door handle and pulling it open. “They’re waiting for me.”

“Sure thing,” he replied cheerfully, stepping aside. “See you at dinner.”

I walked into the lobby and behind the desk, dropping my bag at my feet. Jenn, in the other chair, was watching Ames, now heading to his car. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing,” I told her. “Just him being his creepy self.”

She picked up a folder. “I’m going to check in on the morons. You sure you’re okay?”

I nodded, and then she was disappearing down the hallway. I picked up my phone to reply to Mac.

Glad to hear it. Was worried.

Don’t be. All okay.

I looked outside, where it was starting to get dark; winter was coming. On my phone screen, these words remained, awaiting a response. Or maybe not. “All okay” was a good stopping point, after all, a place to stay while I could. As long as you stretched out a moment, it couldn’t end; if I didn’t write back, there’d be no further conversation, good or bad. I sat there for an hour. I never wrote anything.

*

For a good five minutes, I kept thinking I was hearing crunching. Finally, I was sure.

“Are you eating something?”

Silence. Then, a beat later: “Potato chips.”

I was shocked. In the entire time I’d known him, I’d never seen Mac consume anything unhealthy. This was a guy whose typical lunch consisted of lean turkey rolled up with lowfat cheese, a handful of almonds, and two tangerines. It was hard to picture him eating anything with trans fats, much less from a vending machine. I couldn’t even speak.

“Whatever you’re thinking,” he said finally, “I’ve already thought it. With paralyzing guilt added.”

“Since when do you eat potato chips?”

“Birth, basically.” Another crunch. “Until the March before last. After that, I was off them like a junkie kicking dope.”

“Until . . .”

“Yesterday.” Crunch. “I guess things are kind of getting to me.”

Again, I wasn’t sure what to say. Mac was naturally guarded; it wasn’t like he walked around bursting with sunshiny optimism on his best day. Selfishly, though—now I was the one adding guilt—I worried it might have something to do with me. “What kind of things?”

“My mom,” he replied. A sigh, then I heard what I was pretty sure was the sound of an empty chip bag being balled up. Oh, dear. “The showcase. And, you know, us.”

Outside my room, someone walked down the hallway, slowing their steps as they approached. Instinctively, I looked at the door at the precise spot where a lock would be, if I’d had one. I lowered my voice. “Us?”

“Yeah,” he replied, his voice casual. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll take what I can get when it comes to seeing you. But this situation . . . it’s not exactly ideal.”

I felt myself smile. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. It’s Spence’s.” He shifted, the phone muffled for a second. “I mean, it would have been bad for your mom to walk in and find us there, I’m sure. But not bad like this.”

“Layla said you were still mad.”

“She’s right.”

We were quiet a moment. I couldn’t tell if whoever was in the hallway had moved on or was standing there, silent, on the other side of the door. A week into his stay, I’d known Ames to do both.

I’d thought it was bad before, his being around. But the weird long looks, the way his eyes followed me around the room—none of it compared to suddenly having him in the house. Though he’d arrived with only a suitcase, a duffel bag, a few boxes, and a computer, he’d already managed to fill much of our shared living space. What began as a pack of cigarettes by the garage door became a damp U basketball towel I had to step over on our shared bathroom floor. That, then, morphed into the sound of talk radio flowing constantly from Peyton’s speakers right on the other side of my wall. Voices, all day and into the night. I dreamed of roundtables and panels, when I wasn’t having nightmares.

Then there were the constant drop-ins: Did I have a spare tube of toothpaste? Where were the lightbulbs kept? Did I feel like it was too warm up here, too? And that was just in the first thirty-six hours. It seemed like he was always passing by my door, peering in at me, stopping to chat while leaning against the door frame. When I started shutting it regularly, he knocked: a soft three raps, one slow, two fast. If I opened it, he always came inside.

“Serious cram time, huh?” he’d said to me the previous evening as I was finishing up an essay for English on Wuthering Heights. I was at my desk, and he on my bed, flipping through a magazine I’d left open there. Normally by this point, I’d have put on my pajamas, but I’d taken to doing that at the last minute. “I should have been more like you in high school. Could have avoided a lot of trouble.”