Forks, Knives, and Spoons Page 6

  Reluctantly, the kiss slowed and returned to softly parted lips before they separated. “Hi,” Andrew said, kissing her again tenderly. “Wow!”

  Amy beamed at him, the fluttering in her chest blocking any words.

  “Wow, Aim,” Andrew repeated, and leaned back in his chair catching his breath. He exhaled deeply and Amy watched his cheeks crease in contentment at their first kiss.

  “So, I’m not sure what this all means—” Amy started.

  “It means I like you. I really like you.” He grinned and leaned forward again. “Let’s be a thing.”

  “A thing?”

  He laughed. “We don’t have to call it anything, but yeah, let’s be a thing.”

  Amy reeled. She’d been fantasizing about Andrew asking her out since they first met, but did this mean he was asking her out? Since he’d saved her from Paul at the party, she felt a certain bond with him, an undeniable link. He placed a single, lingering kiss on her mouth.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Oh, wait.”

  “Wait?”

  She shook her head with a small laugh. “No, not that. It’s that Matt called me earlier; he invited me to the Phi Psi golf tournament this weekend, as friends, of course. I told him I’d go with him, just thought I should let you know.”

  “Sure. He’s harmless.” He kissed her ear affectionately. “Besides, we’re a thing now.”

  Amy nodded, wishing for a little more definition.

  KATE WAS WAITING ON the maroon couches for Amy, books spread on her lap.

  “Can we talk?” Kate scooped up her papers and they walked to room 808, greeted Veronica, and plopped onto Amy’s bed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know, I’m just feeling sort of bummed. I feel like everyone has a boyfriend, or dates, or is at least mashing with someone, and I don’t have anyone.”

  “I don’t either,” Veronica chimed in, using her dramatic breakup to cheer Kate. She joined them on Amy’s side of their room.

  “Most of the time I’m fine, but today it’s really bothering me.”

  “What about that guy who you’re always hanging out with? The guy who sat with you in the dining hall last night?” Amy asked.

  “Richie? No, he’s just a friend.” The phrase rang familiar to Amy.

  “Are you sure he thinks so?” Veronica asked, and Amy heard her father’s words in the question.

  “Well, I kind of like him . . .”

  “Is he a knife?” Amy nudged. The Utensil Classification System had continued to spread and grow among their floor mates and friends.

  “Oh, brother, here we go,” Veronica muttered.

  “Well, he is really sweet and good to me, but I feel like he hides behind humor. I see the way other people act around him, calling him Dick even though he doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t stick up for himself. It’s like because he’s heavy, he plays the funny guy, and I worry that he’s not happy even though he makes everyone around him laugh. So what’s that in the UCS?” Kate asked.

  Veronica rolled her eyes to the ceiling. Amy covered her face with her hands, tapping her fingers against her forehead.

  “I’ve got it! He’s chopsticks!”

  “He’s not Asian, Amy,” Kate protested.

  “No, no, he doesn’t have to be. He’s tricky like chopsticks can be tricky to use. He doesn’t fit neatly into a category and he can make other people laugh like when things drop from chopsticks right before getting into someone’s mouth.” Amy began to piece together her reasoning. “Chopsticks can be awkward, clumsy, and a little messy if you don’t know how to use them right. Richie still needs to figure out how to put his true self out there. It sounds like he’s fun but still a bit unsure of himself.”

  “Well, that seems like Richie,” Kate agreed.

  “Hey! I have an idea.” Amy stood abruptly and grabbed her toothbrush. “Let’s go out tonight. Come on, maybe we’ll even see Richie. It’s Pub Mug Night at 44’s, people will be out.”

  “No. It’s Tuesday. I have tons of work. I can’t go out on a Tuesday,” Veronica protested.

  Kate and Amy both laughed.

  “There are no rules that you can’t go out on a Tuesday, V,” Amy joked. “Come on, just for a little while.”

  “But I—”

  Kate perked up and joined in on the convincing. “For me? Please?” They watched Veronica’s brain calculating and deciding as Kate continued: “You know that my parents are teachers, they would die if they knew I went out on a weeknight. ‘School is your job’ was all I heard growing up.”

  Agreeing with Kate’s parents, Veronica enumerated the reasons she couldn’t possibly go out then she started to talk herself into it. “Well, I don’t have too much, actually, I did a lot already today. All right. Okay, let’s go out!”

  “Cool beans,” Kate said, clapping her hands, then focusing on Amy. “Are you seriously brushing your teeth again?” She laughed and left to get ready.

  Primped and perfumed, the girls gathered at the elevators with a few others joining in, and the group headed out to M Street. At 44’s, with coy smiles, flashes of fake IDs, and a flip of the hair, the bouncer let them past his guard. They paid a cover and were handed plastic pub mugs, their ticket to free beer until 10:30. Waiting to get them filled, and swaying in beat with Def Leppard, Kate nudged Amy’s arm. She was grinning and holding out a tattered shoelace. Amy looked down: Kate’s Keds were bare, the tongues bobbing between the empty holes. She laughed, tying one end of the string around her wrist, the other around her mug handle. All around them, thin ropes and colored lengths of yarn tethered the precious mugs to arms, forcing bartenders to use pitchers to refill outstretched cups.

  Arcade games blazed with colored lights at the end of the long, sticky bar. Bodies pressed against bodies as more people were granted their mugs. The odor of sweat mixed with the smell of yeasty beer. The group of girls hovered and swayed with the crowd like sea grass with the tides. The bar swallowed their voices, so they occupied their mouths with their mugs. They emptied them and emptied them and emptied them. Before disappearing, Kate yelled into Amy’s ear, “Richie’s here! Oh my gosh, I’m so freaked out!”

  Amy felt a hand grasp her waistband. She whirled around, knocked the hand off her, and clenched her fists, ready to fight off the offender. She couldn’t see among the mash of backs and chests, and then she saw Andrew.

  “It’s you. Sorry I hit you, I guess I’m a little jumpy.”

  “Oh, man, sorry, Aim. I wasn’t thinking. I saw you and was just trying to surprise you.”

  “You did.” She rested her forehead on his chest, trying to slow the beating of her heart. His hands were around her waist again, pulling her hips to his. The beer made her light-headed, and she felt a surge being up against him.

  “I never asked, did you get in trouble for knocking Paul to the ground?”

  “Nah, I brought him to fraternity council. He got a slap on the wrist if you ask me, but there was no way I would take any heat because of that asshole. Sorry I scared you.”

  Over Andrew’s shoulder, Amy saw Richie embrace Kate, patting her back in a friendly but awkward way. Kate, open to his hug, clumsy or not, was laughing as she threw her arms around his neck. Richie had a wide waist and wore too-large shirts. His face was perpetually cheerful and his eyes smiled even when his mouth didn’t. With only a moment’s pause, he clasped Kate’s face between his hands and careened over the friend line. Andrew turned to see what Amy was watching.

  “Come on, let’s do that, too,” he teased, and Amy felt his lips tender against hers, even as his intensity was fierce. Their mouths moved in sync, and he maneuvered them as one toward the wall. The crowded bar veiled them in privacy, and she felt the beat of the music equally in her ears and heart. Deep into their making out, Amy thought only of him until they slowed to a sweet kiss. Their faces rested an inch apart and their eyes held them together.

  Kate found Amy. “Oh, sorry,” she interrupted.

  �
��When you’re done, let’s book.” Andrew nodded toward the rear alley door, opened to let in air, then left Amy alone with Kate. Amy leaned against the wall, feeling its coolness seep into her back.

  “Richie kissed me! He kissed me, Amy, I’m so glad we came out. Go without me, he’ll take me home,” she gushed, and hugged her friend before giddily returning to Richie.

  Amy scanned the back of the bar for Andrew. Her visibility was only one sweaty shirt deep, but she craned to see above shoulders and through armpits. At last, she caught sight of him resting against the doorframe and Amy shuffled slowly closer. Then she saw it.

  Jenny lingered by his side; she held her hair seductively off her neck and tilted her face up to his. She leaned into him, and her chest touched his shoulder as she whispered into his ear. Amy’s face dropped as Andrew raised his hand and cupped Jenny’s shoulder. She pushed against bodies to move toward them faster. She lost her view and jockeyed around people who were rooted in place. Close to the door, she burst between two athletes, tall and solid, in time to see Andrew peeling Jenny off him, holding one of her hands away from his crotch and the other from his waist.

  “Knock it off, Jenny. Come on, time to go,” she heard him reprimand. Relief mixed with guilt as Amy wondered why she had doubted him, and her feelings shifted to anger at Jenny. Amy reached Andrew’s side and Jenny stepped back with a startle. Without a word, Jenny turned and fused into the crowd, her empty mug dangling from her wrist.

  IT WAS TWO IN the afternoon and Amy felt like she had the floor to herself. She had finished writing her weekly column for the Daily Orange and had moved on to typing an essay on her word processor for Owen Chen, a fraternity brother of Matt’s and a friend of Andrew’s. Some of the guys had started paying her to type up their papers. It was mindless, easy work for Amy, though she couldn’t help but clean up some of their grammar as she went.

  Her fingers clicked across the keyboard but stopped abruptly when she heard a shrill “No!” from down the hall. A sickness bubbled in her stomach thinking of Paul, and she knocked over her chair pushing it back and darted toward the cry.

  The hall was deserted and still except for a rhythmic sobbing coming from the floor lobby. Amy ran, her bare feet padding silently on the carpet until she saw Jenny, curled into herself on the stool, her back to Amy. She clenched the phone receiver with both hands. Her hair hung loose, covering her face like a curtain, and her shoulders visibly hiccuped in sync with her sobs.

  “I can’t believe you did that without even talking to me, Mom,” Jenny spat. “How could you just throw it away? Don’t you know what it means to me?”

  Unseen, Amy’s first instinct was to go back to her room; her fury with Jenny was raw and palpable. She felt disgust thinking of Jenny hitting on Andrew only a few nights before, and she needed no reminder of what she’d pulled with Eric their first month at school. Amy started to backtrack to her room, to leave Jenny suffering in the lobby, when a wrenching, guttural sob gripped her. She stopped midstep, dropped her shoulders, and, looking up at the ceiling, turned back toward the pay phone. Her decency led her forward and she laid a hand on Jenny’s back. Jenny spun, startled; her eyes were framed pink and her pale lashes clumped with tears. Amy stepped back to leave once more, but Jenny clasped her wrist, mooring herself to Amy.

  “Don’t say that! It’s all I had of—” Amy could hear the voice talking in Jenny’s ear but not the words. Over her shoulder, Amy noticed messages for Veronica pinned to the board. Each was scribbled with the words Eric called, and she looked back at the distraught girl who had hurt her friend.

  “Yeah, I know, I know he’s not. But you still could’ve saved it, I could have fixed it, I could have kept the pieces. Why did you even have to be in my room?” Jenny sounded like a whiny teenager. Still secured to Amy, her mauve fingernails sculpted half-moons into Amy’s skin. The voice garbled from Jenny’s ear.

  “I get that it was in a million pieces, but still . . . it’s all I had.” Jenny spoke with a resigned finality. “I’m gonna go now, Mom. Bye.” She held the phone in her hand for a moment longer, still hiding behind her blond screen of hair, before she placed it onto the hook.

  She released her grip on Amy and looked numbly past her, not meeting her eyes. “Thanks,” she said, and walked without perkiness to her room, leaving Amy alone again with the silence.

  AFTER DINNER AND NO SIGN of Jenny, Amy went to brush her teeth before checking on her. In place of her toothbrush in her bathroom basket, she found a rolled-up piece of paper. The note was made of letters clipped one by one from magazines and glued into sentences.

  We have your precious toothbrush. If you ever want to see it again alive, deliver one unopened chocolate to the third sink in the bathroom. Come alone. Do not call the police. Or else. Pay up or the toothbrush gets it.

  Amy played along and grabbed a handful from her stash of chocolate minis. Then she pulled out a spare toothbrush and scrubbed her teeth while delivering the candy to the bathroom sink. On the way back to her room, she tied a small bag of chocolates to the dangling pen on Kate’s door then knocked without waiting for her to answer.

  Amy shored herself and walked to the end of the hall. She struggled, reluctance weighing against sympathy. In her heart, she knew Jenny was hurting, and that truth allowed her, in the moment, to put her own betrayals aside and knock firmly on Jenny’s door. She waited; the door wasn’t propped open like it so often was. It didn’t take long to cross a dorm room, so Amy tapped again after a pause, with less conviction. She was uncapping the purple dry erase marker beside Jenny’s message board when the door cracked. Jenny peeped out and darkness poured from behind her. She sniffled and dabbed at the redness of her nose with a bunched-up tissue.

  “I wanted to check on you,” Amy said. “How are you doing?”

  Jenny opened the door a fraction wider, accepting Amy’s kindness. She stepped in, and Jenny tugged the chain on her bedside lamp, casting a golden luster. The dimness made Amy woozy, and she eased herself into the beanbag chair with its fuzzy purple cover. Jenny’s room matched her personality and had a phosphorescence about it, but there was not a single photograph of family or friends, Amy noticed. Tones of violet filled the space. Round paper lanterns hung at different heights from the ceiling above her desk, which was full of pencils topped with feathers and pens coated in glitter. A huge painting hung by a wide ribbon and was surrounded by smaller paintings, all in shades of purple and all signed in the corner Jenny-Doe, Jenny’s childhood nickname, she had once explained. Amy admired the images again, thinking she had a true artistic talent.

  Jenny plopped onto her bed, stomach down, and hugged a lavender velour pillow under her chin. “Sorry about before. I mean, thanks for being there, but sorry you had to hear it.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, Jenny, but I’m here to listen if you want.”

  “My mom, well, it’s just my mom and me, you know,” she began.

  Amy nodded. “I just have my dad.”

  “And she threw something away that really mattered to me . . .”

  Amy thought of how her relationship with Jenny had been arm’s length, polite, skeptical, and had only skimmed the surface like a dragonfly lilting over a pond. She had the distinct sense that they were hovering at a shifting point.

  Amy recalled one of their first nights on campus and how much Jenny had revealed to complete strangers. She had scoped out a few couplets of roommates and gathered them in her room. Then, sitting cross-legged on the corner of her bed, she had opened court.

  “So, how are we going to meet some guys?” she began.

  Leaning in conspiratorially, she told the group about how she snagged a gorgeous guy on the beach that summer. As he walked by, no doubt looking her way, she pretended her bathing suit top had broken. Jenny coyly asked him to get her tank top draped over her bag, and then she rolled to her side, giving him a good peek.

  Amy was surprised at the stories from a girl they had met only days before. Oblivious to
her audience, Jenny continued with tales of her California flirtations. Her litany of exploits and experience gushed forth tinged with a wisp of fiction. “The Jenny Callista Legends,” Veronica had said to Amy when they were back in their room.

  Situated again in Jenny’s single months later, Amy realized that even the coarse details she had shared that night might not compare with what she was holding back now. She watched as Jenny teetered between divulging and concealing.

  Jenny tiptoed in to the subject: “My mom was dusting my bookshelves. I don’t even know why, it’s not like she was always cleaning my room when I was home or anything. But she knocked over a stack of books and a tea set that really mattered to me went crashing and every piece broke . . .”

  Amy sat still, intent on Jenny’s face and words, allowing her space and time.

  “I loved that set. All the pieces fit on a china tray. It was purple with white flowers and I loved to pour water from the teapot into the tiny cups. I would take sips and serve my stuffed animals and my dad.” Jenny hesitated and took a breath. “It was from my dad. He gave it to me when I was little. It’s all I had when he—” Jenny crumbled, crying again.

  Amy leaned out of the beanbag chair and kneeled beside Jenny. “It’s okay, go ahead and cry,” Amy whispered as she stroked Jenny’s back. The lamplight cast long shadows up the walls like ghosts overlooking the scene.

  “I should have hidden it. I always kept it in my room,” Jenny choked out between sobs, “but I should have protected it and put it in my closet or wrapped it into a box before coming here. I can’t believe she threw it away. She threw it all away.”

  “Could she get it out of the garbage?” Amy suggested, knowing it was a stupidly obvious idea, but she wanted to be helpful and didn’t know what else to say.

  “Gone. The garbage is already gone.”

  Of course she had already asked that of her mother.