I had to leave for a while, and that Marley would be coming down. My mother and Gretchen watched me move around, but neither of them said anything. I didn’t know where I would go, what I would do with the afternoon.
Before I actually left the dorm, I stopped by Gordon Goodman’s office. He frowned when I used the words “candle” and “paper bag” in the same sentence. But when I told him about Inez, and how homesick she seemed, he scratched his chin and looked thoughtful.
“Tonight?” he asked. “You want to put them out tonight?”
“Tonight would be best,” I said. If we had to fill out forms and wait a week, Inez would be right: where we lived would not feel like our home.
“I’ll make some calls,” he said. “Come on in and sit down.”
He had a tall stack of papers and a calculator on his desk, but he moved both to the side. I said I could make the calls myself if he told me who to call and gave me the numbers. He seemed pleased that I offered, but he waved me off. Housing would want to talk to him, he said. And he was already on a first name basis with almost everyone at the fire department, because of all the stupid false alarms.
“I think it’s great that you’re doing this,” he said, the phone tucked between his head and shoulder. His smile was so approving that I felt guilty. He thought the idea had been mine. I couldn’t tell him that my mother was the one who had organized everything, or that after two days, she was doing my job far better than I had in four months. All I could do was sit there and look grateful as he made four phone calls and spent a total of twenty-five minutes on hold.
I was grateful, and also, despite my misrepresentation, encouraged. Some people would always go out of their way to help, once they saw that you were really trying.
When we got approval, I texted Gretchen: they could put the luminarias out that night. I suppose I could have called, and maybe heard a group reaction to the news. But by the time I walked out of Gordon’s office and past the beeping video games in the lobby and out into the afternoon, I felt so awake and calm in my own head that I didn’t want to talk at all. The sky was still clear, the air cold, but I felt fine once I started walking.
The bookstore gave me two options: I could get cash back for my chemistry book, 30 percent of what I paid for it, or I could get 40 percent in trade. I picked out a used copy of Middlemarch, some gum, an organic peanut butter dog treat shaped like a candy cane, and a red knit scarf on clearance.
“You sure you don’t want to keep it?” the cashier asked. He touched the cover of the chemistry book. “You look a little sad to see it go.”
I wouldn’t have said I was sad. But I understood what I was doing. At that moment, I was no longer thinking about quitting or even deciding to quit; I was actually quitting. And it was hard to look at that brick of a book and not think of all the long days and nights I had spent with it, trying harder than I’d ever tried at anything in my life. And now all that work, all that trying and worrying, was for nothing. I had failed.
The Union was decked out for the holidays, too. There were blinking lights and large banners wishing all of us a happy Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah. I used the change from the bookstore to buy coffee and some pistachio nuts. I found an empty armchair that faced a window big enough for me to see much of the sky, the first clouds of the probable snow hovering on the western horizon. I looked at my watch. I’d told Marley I would be gone for several hours, and I hadn’t been gone for forty-five minutes. I crossed my legs. I uncrossed them. I crossed them again. I looked out at the sky. Whenever my father had taken his rare breaks from work, for holidays and family vacations, he often moved this way, jittery and anxious, unsure what to do with himself.
But I just needed to get used to it. For the rest of the afternoon, I read. Middlemarch was