if it was Si or Jed, but the new rule was that if I used the f-word, I would be ‘punished’ by having to wear all White Sox clothing.”
Zeke laughs and it’s an easy, happy laugh, loose and filling. Real. “I love that story,” he says, and only then does he drop my hand.
And I want to weep with gratitude that we didn’t talk about Friday night. Even if it means no sweets for a year.
FIFTEEN
AND SLOWLY, VERY SLOWLY, LIFE returns to normal. It’s been three weeks since I arrived in Merritt, three weeks that feel like three months, and my old life feels like something that took place years ago. The life in Chicago, with the Cubs and my brothers, Lake Michigan instead of the pond. The life that I lived at home instead of eating in the cafeteria, hanging out at campus eateries, buying groceries with Alice to keep in our minifridge.
A life when I dreamed about learning French instead of practicing all day, every day, studying until I begin to dream in French. A life before Alice and Colin. A life before Zeke.
On Friday night, Colin sits with me and Alice at the poetry slam even though she isn’t ready to go onstage. It takes a full ten minutes of hanging out near the cafe before Alice is ready to go in, and that only occurs after Colin stakes it out and assures her it’s practically empty. We all make like it’s no big deal, like we were eager for the fresh air (blended with the scent of pot—thank you, New Hampshire).
Saturday we go back to last week’s brunch location and spend the day outside on the patio, reading and drinking so much coffee that by the end I’m so jumpy I don’t need to go for a run. I’m burning off energy just standing.
Colin’s back on Sunday, at my door with a pile of movies under his arm and a giant container of popcorn.
And while Colin is clearly talented as an artist, his ability to reenact a variety of classic movies is killer. And he does so apparently without any hint of embarrassment in public. Like walking down Main Street. Or in the middle of a park on campus. Or in the common room. He can single-handedly re-create entire swaths of dialogue from The Princess Bride to Harry Potter to some movie from the 1980s about misfits in high school.
He’s the perfect nonboyfriend: always there, always remembering what’s going on in my life, always ready to try something new.
And so even though there’s no kissing and no potential for kissing, there’s also no anxiety, which is a bonus.
Zeke and I don’t talk about what’s going on between us. He still disappears every afternoon, though I’ve mostly abandoned the drug dealer idea since he doesn’t seem to have lots of new expensive crap. I work on the extra assignments and stare at pictures of Paris when my brain turns to mush. I conjugate French verbs, memorize Marianne’s vocabulary lists, read articles, watch French television shows.
But when Zeke is around? It’s a whole different world. We dedicate entire evenings to talking about all the places we’ve visited, the spots we want to see someday. Zeke tells me more about his grandmother Emmaline in Paris, how she moved there after his parents got married, after her own divorce. He paints a picture so vivid, so clear, that I feel like she’s walking with us, telling us her own stories. He shows me photos on his phone of her house, her backyard garden, the tall and distinguished-looking Algerian man she’s lived with for the last twenty years, a man a full decade younger than her.
“You’d love her,” Zeke says, and there’s such a wistfulness to his voice that I almost want to stop, to put my arms around him. “She’s exactly your kind of person. She says what’s on her mind, all the time. She told me once that she spent so long trying to be the person she thought others wanted her to be that she didn’t want to waste another moment not being true to herself.”
Is that what he believes about me? That I’m true to myself? That I say what’s on my mind? Because I don’t. If I did, I’d beg him to tell me where he goes all those afternoons, plead with him to let me into his real life, not just the fairy tale we create in French. I’d tell him how much it hurts