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  “The book said you might resist going to the doctor, but I’m supposed to be firm and say that I’m the adult here, I’m going to do this for your own good and—”

  “Stop talking to me about what you read in some stupid book! You’re always saying you want me to act like an adult but it’s so obvious that it doesn’t even matter to you what I want—”

  “It does matter, it does matter to me what you want, it’s just that sometimes what a person wants isn’t what’s best for them, can you understand that?”

  “You’re such a liar!” Aimee screams, losing it now. “You’re a hypocritical liar!”

  From downstairs comes the sound, distant but distinct, of Aimee’s mother’s cell phone ringing: a high-pitched synth version of some upbeat classical piece. This cell phone almost never rings, because the only people who ever call it are her mom’s work people, and Aimee’s mom is almost always at work when the work people need her.

  “Oh crap!” Her mother’s manicured hand flies up to cover her mouth too late to keep the mild curse from escaping. She looks down at her watch, wild-eyed, then back at her daughter. “Midmonth meeting,” she says, panicked.

  Aimee nods as if she knows what this means. The phone starts over at the beginning of its plinkety tune—only half a plinkety tune left before it kicks over to voice mail.

  “Get it,” Aimee orders authoritatively, and her mother takes the command as if Aimee were her boss, flying out of the room and down the carpeted stairs to where the phone is buried in her purse by the front door.

  “Hello?” Aimee hears her answer breathlessly, having caught the call just in the nick of time. “Paul? Yes I am, I am out the door, I’m just dealing with a little situation here at home.”

  Aimee slumps back onto the bed, her floor-bruised hips and shoulders murmuring achy complaints as she moves. After just a moment her mother reappears, bracing herself with both hands against the doorframe like a drunken cowboy in a saloon. The morning perfection of eight minutes ago has already been violated—her hair has redistributed itself unevenly around her head and one side of her blouse is boiling over the waistband of her skirt.

  “I can’t believe I have to do this,” her mother says hoarsely, “because you just said some quite rude things to me that I’d like to respond to, and as you know I don’t like to interrupt a Conversation in the middle. But I forgot that it’s midmonth meeting morning and I absolutely have to go in to the office right now. But we are going to pick this Conversation up right where we left it when I get home.”

  Aimee shrugs and looks away.

  “In the meantime you know the drill. Medicines in the medicine cabinet, tea above the stove, minimal TV, please, and I’ll try to make it home early.”

  “Okay.” Aimee still doesn’t look at her mother.

  “I love you,” her mother apologizes.

  Aimee flushes with embarrassment, staring at the wall. When she turns back to look at the doorway, her mother is gone.

  After lying perfectly still for ten minutes, waiting to make sure that the Toyota doesn’t change its mind and pull back into the driveway, Aimee springs to life.

  She puts her favorite all-velvet outfit together, shoves her notebook and a couple of recently printed-out poems into her army satchel, and heads for the municipal bus stop at the entrance to Riverglade Estates.

  The English Department at the university is located in a building called Chancellor’s Hall—that much Aimee remembers. Other than the odd mention of its name, however, Bill never talked much about his office. Whenever Aimee used to picture where Bill worked she imagined a stately granite building, kind of a cross between a library and a bank, with columns and cornices and a couple of stone lions and maybe a bronze statue of some literary hero out front: Shakespeare with his little mustache and puffy shorts, considering his quill. Aimee used to imagine Bill jogging up a grand flight of stone steps every morning, briefcase in hand and arms full of books, pulling open the rich mahogany door with its iron handle and entering the hushed marble vault of the vestibule, alive with the echoes of scholars old and young whispering lines of verse to one another in the corridors overhead.

  In reality, Chancellor’s Hall turns out to be a long cement Kleenex box of a building, covered with stucco the color of stained teeth, with warping aqua blue vinyl panels set in beneath each of its narrow gray windows. The main doors, half blocked by a bike rack buried in a heap of bikes, flutter with a fringe of multicolored fliers that have been taped one on top of the other to cover every available square inch of plate glass.

  It has taken Aimee almost half an hour to find Chancellor’s Hall since she located it on the scratchiti-covered map posted near the bus shelter where she got off. The university’s campus seems to her so far like a maze of almost identical buildings, some of them squat and some of them tall but all of them ugly and none of them granite. In the half an hour she has spent wandering the place, she hasn’t seen a single literary statue or stone lion, just a lot of dazed-looking college students meandering around in twos and threes, uniformed in nearly identical hoodies and jeans, wearing nearly identical backpacks and baseball caps. Most of them could pass for Valley Regional kids, except for the fact that about half of them are casually smoking cigarettes.

  Aimee stands for a second in front of the flapping neon-bright fliers. Apparently a movie from 1963 about a blonde chick running away from the police is being shown this evening in French. A class called “The Economics of Post-Colonial Africa” is being offered for three credits, taught by a guy named R. F. P. Naroyan. Someone has lost her cat, Derek Whiskerton III, and will pay a “huge reward” to whoever returns him safely to her; the cat glowers out of its photocopied portrait like a cat of the dead, pupils white with flash. Two guys are looking for a roommate to share an off-campus apartment with, preferably female, “must love to party!!!”

  “Excuse us?”

  Aimee turns. A pair of ponytailed girls, virtually indistinguishable from one another in matching university pullovers and sweatpants, waistbands rolled down to reveal matching strips of orange-tanned stomach, have come giggling up behind her as she zoned out in front of the fliers.

  “Can we, like, get through here?”

  Aimee steps aside, moving her mouth in the shape of “sorry,” though no voice comes out.

  When the Ponytails yank open the door, murmuring to each other, Aimee follows them through it, into a lobby that is in every way the opposite of a hushed marble vestibule. Low ceilings, no windows, black vinyl flooring, banks of greenish fluorescent lights that hum a sickly harmony with the drone of a huge glowing Coke machine that dominates the space. The Ponytails flounce off down a corridor and Aimee stands alone for a second, taking in the massive disappointment of Chancellor’s Hall. It’s quiet, but in a dull, stressed-out way, the quiet of a doctor’s office or cheap hotel, not the rich quiet of a hall of learning.

  Aimee finds a directory on the wall by the Coke machine—the kind of black signboard with plastic letters stuck in it that they use to post the specials on in rest-stop diners—and runs down the list of names until she finds Bill’s. His office number is 104. She sets out down the same hallway the Ponytails disappeared into.

  The door to room 104 is smooth, featureless wood with a 3 x 5 index card taped to the middle that reads, in block capital ballpoint-pen letters:

  DR. WILLIAM PRUFER

  GREAT WORKS /POETRY I/FRESHMAN COMP

  OFFICE HOURS BY APPOINTMENT

  Aimee knocks at the center of the index card twice: rap rap.

  “Take a number!” Bill yells from inside.

  The sound of girls’ laughter filters through the door. Aimee knocks again: rap rap rap.

  “I said take a number!”

  The door swings open and Aimee looks down into Bill’s upturned, upside-down face. He’s reclined way back in his chair so he can reach the doorknob without getting up, and he’s practically horizontal. But when he sees Aimee he sits bolt upright and turns around to fa
ce her.

  “What are you doing here?” Bill doesn’t even pretend to be glad to see her.

  “I . . .” Aimee wants to explain, but she’s overwhelmed by the powerful wave of Bill-ness that’s pouring through the open door. The cramped, windowless office she catches a glimpse of behind Bill is saturated with the smell of him—part spicy aftershave, part used bookstore, part stale memory of cigarettes—and the painfully familiar scent knocks out Aimee’s coherence like a baseball smashing out a porch light.

  “I’ve got students here,” Bill says when Aimee doesn’t finish her sentence. He opens the door wider to reveal the Ponytails huddled up together on a small couch against the far wall.

  “We were here first?” one of them says, extending a challenge.

  “No, yeah, I’ll wait.”

  “Well . . . I don’t know if you want to do that. I have a lot of people coming in today, boom boom boom, one right after the other. I don’t know if it makes sense for you to wait.”

  Aimee just stands there.

  “It’s almost midterms, see, Ame. I didn’t know you were gonna show up, I would have told you not to come.”

  Aimee’s heart starts a slow, familiar descent.

  “Can I just . . . five minutes, Bill?”

  Bill sighs.

  “Five minutes, as soon as I’m done with these two. Even though they don’t know the first thing about T. S. Eliot”—Bill turns to the Ponytails and winks at them—they giggle—“I’ll do my best to make it quick.”

  “I’ll wait. I won’t go anywhere.”

  Bill nods and closes his door with a clunk.

  Aimee stands there for a second, nose to nose with the index card on Bill’s door. Mechanically she turns around, leans back against the wall beside 104, and lowers herself inch by inch to the floor. Her heart continues its slow, oozing slide down her center on its way to the pit of her stomach.

  As the minutes tick by, kids start ambling up to Bill’s door, bashful and aloof, not talking to each other. It’s a weirder sample of kids, in general, than the ones Aimee was seeing out around campus—there’s a giantly tall blond guy with big glasses and an enormous Adam’s apple, a short kid with an Afro, carrying a guitar case, a girl with dyed black hair and Doc Martens who eyes Aimee and her black-velvet-and-combat-boots ensemble with a mixture of recognition and suspicion.

  After a little while, Aimee realizes that the giantly tall guy keeps looking at her. Little furtive looks, always looking away before she can meet his eye. He focuses his eyes on the ceiling and, as if he’s following a map to Aimee’s side printed on the acoustic tiles up there, he moves awkwardly to stand beside her. His Twinkie-yellow hair hangs in a limp flop across his forehead and his cheeks are ravaged with angry red acne. Suddenly, as if he’s received a silent cue, he drops to the floor next to Aimee and starts folding himself up like a huge collapsible lawn chair. His arms and legs seem to bend in three or four different places as he packs himself down into a compact position. After maybe thirty seconds of complicated sitting down, he looks straight at Aimee. He’s on the verge of saying hello to her when the door to 104 opens at last and the Ponytails come out, giggling to each other like they just heard a great piece of gossip.

  Bill’s curly head emerges next; it swivels around until he finds Aimee.

  “Zorn,” he says, pointing at her. “Next.”

  Inside the closet-sized office Bill points to the little couch and Aimee sits.

  “So,” he says, lapsing into his chair, “make it snappy.”

  Make it snappy?

  What Aimee wants to say to Bill would take hours. It would take days. It would take so many hours and so many days that really the simplest thing would be for Bill to just move back into the house so she could have all the access to him she needs, to tell him everything she needs to tell him.

  “Bill,” says Aimee.

  There he is, real live Bill, looking at her expectantly, brown curls and brown dog eyes and raspy unshaven face. Aimee realizes that in the weeks since he left she’s already forgotten so many physical details about Bill, so many tiny wrinkles and sags and hairs on his face and body that she used to be aware of—they’ve been slowly getting wiped off her mental image of him. Her memory of Bill has become an Impressionist portrait, broad brushstrokes that only form an image from a distance. The reality of him is blazing with exquisite detail—she almost can’t bear to take him all in.

  Looking at Bill, she misses him unbearably, even though he’s right in front of her.

  “What’s up, Ame? What brings you down here in person? You jonesing to talk about great works of modern literature?”

  “Um, I was hoping you would give me some advice. It is partly about poetry, though.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Bill.” Aimee takes a deep breath. “What would you do if a girl that you were sort of friends with but not really took this poem that you wrote and kind of stole it but not exactly and won this prize with it and everybody thought she was a genius but really it was you that was kind of the genius, and also there was this other girl who could maybe help you get the poem back but she was hugely weird and scary in a bunch of different ways and you didn’t know if you should ask her for help because she might turn out to be even weirder up close than from far away. But still it seemed like she might be the only one who could help you get your poem back, what would you do?”

  Bill shakes his head out like a dizzy cartoon character. “Wait, who? Who could help you get the poem back?”

  “The weird girl.”

  “Honestly, Ame, I can’t tell how many girls you’ve got in this story, and which of them are weird and which aren’t and . . .” Bill trails off, looks around his office as if searching for a clue as to how to carry on. “Something tells me I’d have to get like an hour’s worth of backstory to really grasp what you’re talking about and frankly, I don’t have an hour to spare for backstory. So let’s cut to the chase here. Clearly there’s some major thing going on in your life right now, some kind of major emotional event going down in some kind of major emotional way. And it sounds like you need someone to take care of you a little.”

  “I don’t need anyone to take care of me.” Aimee straightens her spine.

  “There’s no shame in it, man. Everybody needs someone to take care of them, especially kids. I mean, what are you, twelve?”

  “I’m fourteen, Bill.”

  “Right, you’re just a little tiny kid who needs someone to look out for you sometimes.”

  First Aimee feels embarrassed by this, then violently annoyed. But in the middle of those dark, swirling feelings she also feels a tiny spark of hope ignite—is Bill about to offer to take care of her? Maybe Bill’s about to tell her that she can move in with him in his new bachelor pad in Maple Park, the subdivision out behind the university.

  And in a split-second Aimee imagines the whole thing: abandoning her dumb, boring, pointless room and her dumb, boring, nervous mom, shoving her six poetry notebooks and her three velvet hats and her sandalwood candle into her satchel and walking away from Riverglade Estates without even turning to wave back at her mom as she strides off down the cul-de-sac. Showing up at Bill’s place, ringing the doorbell and bouncing on her toes as she waits for him to open the door and beckon her in. She can just picture how Bill must have “decorated” his crummy new apartment, with a crummy futon and a crummy Ikea coffee table and cheap crummy Christmas lights taped to the wall up by the ceiling, and books, books—books in stacks on either side of the front door and books spilling out from under the futon, a stack of books holding up the TV, a stack of books pressing down the TV, so many books that they’ve taken over the kitchen and there’s not even any room left for food, so that when you reach into a kitchen cabinet looking for, say, oatmeal you pull out The Complete Works of William Blake instead. Aimee imagines Bill staying up late with her every night arguing about who’s a more significant writer, Frank O’Hara or William Burroughs. She imagines Bill letting her sleep o
n the crummy futon, and meeting her every day after school at the kitchen table like he used to, and eating Jell-O with her like he used to, and making jokes with her like he used to. She imagines her whole life turning out basically perfect from now on.

  “I don’t know, maybe,” Aimee says, angling. “I guess maybe I do need someone to take care of me. . . .”

  “Well it’s very mature of you to recognize that,” Bill says, nodding gravely. “And it just so happens that you are extremely tight with someone who’s aces at taking care of people. You know who I’m referring to?”

  Aimee looks up at him questioningly, shaking her head. You? she thinks. You, you, you?

  “Kathy Zorn!” Bill spreads his big hands out—tada!—like he’s just revealed the punch line to a supersmart joke.

  For a second Aimee doesn’t even recognize the name.

  “Who?” she asks.

  Bill leans forward and biffs Aimee lightly on the knee.

  “Your mom, goofbat,” he says, grinning.

  “What?”

  “Have you even told her that there’s something going on with you? Dollars to doughnuts you haven’t told her a thing.”

  “No way, no way, there’s no way I’d ever talk to her about any of this. She doesn’t understand a word I say.”

  “I know you think that, but I think you’re wrong.”

  “Come on, Bill, she’s an idiot. You know that.”

  “Excuse me?” Bill’s expression darkens and he pulls away, sits back hard in his chair. “You think I think your mother’s an idiot?”

  “Well you left her, didn’t you?”

  Bill’s mouth drops open.

  “Well, I mean—yeah, but . . .”

  Bill looks away from Aimee, grips his jaw with his hand, and sort of kneads the lower half of his face. His mouth opens, closes. Even during his worst fights with her mom, Aimee never saw him at a loss for words.

  “Look, Ame,” he begins at last, his voice low and searching. “I can’t explain why two people with practically nothing in common would ever fall in love in the first place, and I can’t explain why they’d stay together, or why they’d break up. Love is a mystery, man, I’m sure they covered that in school already. But you can’t be walking around thinking that your mom and I broke up because somehow I don’t respect her as a human being.”