let this not be a real break-up!
The tweet has been retweeted and replied to with jokes along the lines of Nothing to worry about—that rock only disappears virgins and Who’s holding who back? I recognize most of the responders as Haywood students. But there’s one that I don’t recognize—IceVirgin33—who has written, The daughters of the sun kissed the boy, trying to thaw him and wipe out the kiss given him by the queen—
“You’re up early.”
Harmon, dressed in sweatpants and T-shirt, is standing right over me. I guiltily close the laptop. Bad enough that I’m on Facebook; I really don’t want him to see me stalking my son’s girlfriend’s page.
“Did you sleep on the couch down here when you came in?” He kisses me on the forehead and then gives me a closer look. “Or did you not get back to sleep at all?”
I shrug, a motion I’ve cribbed from Rudy’s playbook. “I figured I might as well get some work done.” I hold up the folder of essays that I’ve only gotten half through. “Bet I’m ahead of you.”
“Did you have to go out and get him?”
“There was a loud party at Duke. That cast party. He said it was keeping him up. I picked him up in the parking lot.” The lie slips easily from my lips.
Harmon looks like he wants to say something else but then thinks better of it—a look that’s become familiar over the years. I know that Rudy’s behavior has driven a wedge between us. But what can I do? I love Harmon, but he doesn’t have kids of his own. He’ll never understand that Rudy always has to come first.
I try to make it up by filling his water bottle and getting his sweatshirt for him . . . and realize I never washed the one Rudy was wearing last night, which I’d left on the radiator. I go to fetch it and find a stain on the right cuff, but it’s hard to make out against the purple. At least the sweatshirt is dry. I hand it to Harmon and he puts it on. The sweatshirt’s too big on him; he’s lost weight these last few months from all the running he’s been doing.
“Don’t work out too hard,” I tell Harmon. “I like to have something to hold on to.”
He laughs and nuzzles his hips into my ass. When was the last time we had sex? I try to remember. Letting Rudy live in the dorms was supposed to give us more time alone, but having two teenagers hanging around the house hasn’t been conducive to our sex life. Maybe, I think, it will be better if Lila and Rudy aren’t here all the time.
The thought makes me feel so disloyal to Lila that I decide to text her. Although it’s only 6:34, I know that Lila goes jogging early in the morning. I find the last message Lila sent to me, three weeks ago (Do you have any cumin at the house? I’m making curry for dinner!), and type: Hey, just wanted to see if everything’s okay . . . Then I realize this might seem like prying so I erase it and type instead: I hear the play was a great success! Congratulations! I add a smiley face and a lilac because it’s Lila’s favorite flower and hope that if she responds she might volunteer some information about what happened between her and Rudy.
While I’m waiting for a reply, I continue grading papers. I’ve just come to Lila’s paper—“Slut Shaming in Puritan New England and the Age of Social Media”—when my phone rings. It will be her, I think, picking up the phone without checking the screen, and I’ll tell her how funny it is that I had just started her paper—
It’s not Lila, it’s Jean. “Oh, thank God!” she says. “I was hoping you were up.”
My heart thuds against my rib cage at the thought that she’s calling to tell me something has happened to Rudy before I remember that Rudy is asleep upstairs. “What is it, Jean?” I ask, resentful that she’s given me such a scare. I love Jean—I owe her my job here and my life—but sometimes she takes her job as headmistress too seriously. She is probably calling because some parent has complained about the senior class’s unorthodox production of The Crucible (I’ve heard it includes references to rape culture) or that Haywood Hull has made some new demand in return for financing this year’s historical