Chapter 4 — A Nice Place

Jessica woke to a kitchen that already believed in morning.

Light had gotten into Jennie’s room the honest way, through the cracked window, and laid itself across the clean sheet. The other half of the bed was empty and still warm. For a second Jessica did not know which life she was in. Then last night sat up inside her body, all at once: the arm, the hand through cotton, the sound Jennie had tried to swallow, the wetness Jessica had carried into a sleep that had finally arrived like a thief at dawn.

She sat up late. She could feel that it was late in the quality of the light and in the panic under her ribs. First day. Scholarship. The letter under the lamp in the other room, still trying to be the most important object she owned.

Her sleep shirt was twisted. She tugged it straight as if straight cloth could make a person innocent again. Between her thighs there was a faint, tacky reminder. She hated that her first thought was not wash but again.

Jennie was in the kitchen in the oversized shirt from the night before, which at least was on. Hair in a clip that was already losing. Something was going in a pan that smelled like eggs and chili and a decision.

“You’re late,” Jennie said, without turning. “Get ready. First day. I am not explaining to a lecturer that my roommate was busy having a moral crisis in my pillow.”

Jessica stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded over her chest, which was a stupid defense. Jennie had already had her hand there. Folding her arms was like locking a door after the guest had used the bathroom.

“I didn’t mean to sleep that long.”

“You needed it.” Jennie flicked a look over her shoulder. It was ordinary. Almost. A small, private tilt at the corner of her mouth, like a bookmark left in a page. “Eat after you dress. Five minutes. The campus does not care that you look like a poem.”

Jessica fled into her own room.

The sheet was on the bed now. She did not remember putting it there. Jennie, then. The ticking had been covered as if the night could be covered with it. Jessica pulled on the pale dress her mother had ironed and then, after one look in the wardrobe mirror, took it off and put on the skirt from last evening with a different shirt, because the dress looked like church and she was already carrying church in her mouth. She washed her face until it hurt. She brushed her hair and it still looked like she had been held.

They ate standing up. Jessica tasted almost nothing. Jennie talked about a building code and a boy who sold photocopies and the coffee on campus that was an insult to beans. She did not say last night. She did not say you made a sound. She let the ordinary sentences do the more dangerous work of pretending there was such a thing as ordinary.

On the stairs Jessica said, “Jennie.”

“Mm.”

Nothing else came. Jessica had not built the rest of the sentence. Jennie glanced at her, almost kind, and bumped her shoulder the way you bumped a person you were not going to unpack on a pavement.

“Go be brilliant,” Jennie said, when their paths split at the painted gate. Different buildings. Different lives for six hours. “Don’t let anyone sit too close unless you want them to. And eat something that is not shame. Shame has no protein.”

“Bye,” Jessica said.

It came out like a girl leaving a house, not like a girl leaving a bed.

The walk to her building was short and crowded. People looked. They had looked yesterday in the white skirt; they looked today as if looking were a campus society you did not need to apply for. A boy on the steps lost the end of his own sentence. A girl in a group said something behind a hand. Jessica kept her chin level and her bag against her hip and told herself this was what happened when you were new. New was a kind of nakedness. It would pass.

It did not pass when she entered the lecture hall.

The room was a slope of seats and a whiteboard that had not been cleaned of last term. The air smelled of dust and deodorant. Jessica took a place not at the front — too visible — and not at the back — too like hiding. Middle, aisle, bag on the extra seat as a small wall.

Last night sat down with her.

It was not a memory she could file. It was physical. The ghost of a palm. The press of a body along her spine. Jennie’s breath breaking. Jessica’s own swallowed sound. She crossed her ankles under the desk and the seam of her underwear dragged and she had to close her eyes for one second, because her body, unconsulted, had started to answer the memory the way it had answered the hand.

She was getting wet in a classroom.

The shame of that was so bright it felt like a noise. She opened her bag and found a pen she did not need and wrote the date at the top of a blank page as if dates could govern flesh. Getting played, her mind said, in Jennie’s cadence, and then, worse: the way she enjoyed it. Enjoyed was the word she had refused in the dark. In fluorescent light it would not stay refused. A slow, secret slick. She pressed her thighs together and that made it worse. She thought of her mother lining up pills. She thought of the scholarship. She thought of anything that was not the inside of her own skin.

A chair scraped.

The boy who sat down in the seat she had tried to save with her bag moved the bag first, politely, as if he had a right to politeness.

“Sorry,” he said. “Everywhere else is a group project already.”

Jessica looked at him because not looking would have been ruder than the wetness she was trying to hide.

He was — she reached for a word that was not village and not Jennie — handsome in the way posters were handsome. Clean jaw. Easy mouth. Hair that had been told what to do and had mostly listened. He looked like the city had made him on purpose. If the class had taken a vote, the vote would not have been close.

“I’m Tyler,” he said, and smiled as if smiling were a scholarship of its own.

“Jessica.”

Her voice held. She was proud of that for no useful reason.

“First year?” he said.

“Yes. You?”

“Second, technically. I failed a module on purpose so I could sit in this hall and meet people who still believe in syllabi.” He tipped his head. “That was a joke. I can see your face doing the moral math. I repeated because I was lazy. Honesty. Good morning.”

It was kind, the way he said it. Not the kindness of a girl in an oversized shirt offering a clean bed. A public kindness. Sunlight kindness. Jessica felt her shoulders drop a fraction, which her body took as permission to remember Jennie anyway.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said.

“You say that like you mean it. Dangerous.” He spun a pen. “Where are you from? You have the look of someone who arrived with a suitcase and a letter.”

“The countryside.” She almost named the village and then did not. “Scholarship.”

“Ah.” No mockery. A small nod, as if he respected paper. “Then you’re the reason they still print those brochures with trees on them.”

She almost smiled. It surprised her. After last night, smiling at a boy in a lecture hall felt like being two people in one skirt.

The teacher entered with a bag that had given up its shape and a voice that expected to be followed. He wrote his name, a module code, an office hour nobody would attend. He talked about assessment and attendance and the difference between reading and highlighting. Jessica wrote words. The words sat on the page like good girls. Under the desk her body kept its own notes. Tyler’s sleeve was close enough that if she shifted left she would touch it. She did not shift. She thought, uninvited, of Jennie’s mouth on her shoulder, and had to underline a sentence that did not need underlining.

When the hall broke, chairs went back like a tide.

Tyler stood and slung his bag as if the day were already his.

“Coffee,” he said. “Not the campus crime. Actual coffee. Ten minutes from here. You look like you need something that isn’t fluorescent.”

Jessica hesitated.

She had a map in her head: back to the flat, wash, call home on Sunday, find a job listing, do not go anywhere with anyone, do not add another night to the pile. She also had his face, which was doing the simple, ruinous work of being the most handsome face in the room and not using it like a weapon.

“I shouldn’t,” she said.

“You can shouldn’t after the coffee.” He waited. He was good at waiting without crowding. “I’m not proposing. I’m proposing caffeine.”

She heard Jennie in her head: don’t smile too much. She heard her mother: eat. She heard herself, smaller: he seems kind.

“Yes,” Jessica said.

The café was a narrow room with plants that were trying. Tyler ordered for himself and then looked at her until she named something she could pronounce. They took a table by the window. Outside, students went by in herds. Inside, a machine hissed like it had opinions.

Tyler made jokes the way some people held doors: on purpose, hoping to be useful. The lecturer’s handwriting. A society that recruited with free pizza and unpaid labor. His roommate, who believed protein powder was a personality. Jessica laughed once, a real sound, and then felt traitorous for having a throat that could do that after last night.

This was too new. A boy across a small table. Steam. His attention like a lamp. In the village, attention had been something you walked around. Here it sat down and paid for her cup.

She thought, before she could stop the thought: he might be the first.

First boyfriend. The phrase was schoolgirl and devastating. Her face went hot. She put her fingers on the cup to give them a job. Tyler noticed — of course he noticed; people like him collected changes in other people’s faces — and did not pounce on it. He only smiled into his coffee as if the redness were a compliment he would not embarrass.

“You’re new,” he said, after the cups had gone down an inch. “In the city. Not just the hall.”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen anything yet? Or did they drop you into a timetable and call it living?”

Sundown Park arrived behind her eyes, uninvited and fully dressed this time: the faded sign, the bench, the belt, Jennie saying you stayed long enough to see the ending. She could not put that on a café table. She could not say sex park to the possible first boyfriend. The words would change the color of his kindness. Or worse — they would not. They would fit.

“I haven’t visited anywhere,” Jessica said.

The lie was small and clean. She was getting better at those. The city handed out practice.

Tyler nodded, satisfied in a way she did not yet know how to read.

“If you want to see a place,” he said, “I know one. Not a club. Not a mall. Actual air. It’s near campus. People go at this hour and pretend they’re in a better city.”

“A nice place?”

“A particular place,” he said, and the smile this time had a little more tooth. Still handsome. Still kind, if you only used the top layer. “You’ll like the trees.”

Jessica thought of trees the way she had thought of parks yesterday morning: as a smaller, tamer version of home. She thought of not going back to the flat yet, where Jennie would be a kettle and a look. She thought of Tyler’s wrist on the table, good-boned, harmless.

“All right,” she said.

They walked.

He did not take her elbow the way Jennie had. He walked close enough that their bags sometimes touched. He named buildings. He named a shortcut. He asked what she was studying as if the answer mattered. Jessica gave answers that were true and short. The longer truth — I came to send money home; I slept in a clean bed and let a girl learn my breast through a shirt; I got wet in the lecture — stayed behind her teeth.

The side path announced itself before the sign did. Packed dirt. The college wall. The row of old trees. Jessica’s step shortened.

“Tyler.”

“Almost there.”

The faded board. SUNDOWN PARK. The painted sun half-sunk. Under it, the marker name someone had tried to scrub, still a bruise if you knew how to read bruises.

Jessica stopped so completely that a student behind them muttered and went around.

She had been here in a white skirt with Jennie humming like a tour guide. She had watched a couple finish on a bench and walk away wiping their mouths as if the park were a napkin. She had sworn, in the stairwell, that she would not come back.

Tyler turned, easy, the handsome face open.

“This is it,” he said. “Sundown. Best light in the afternoon. Come on. I want to show you the middle path. It’s quieter.”

Jessica looked at the gate and then at him.

He knew. Or he did not know. Both options sat in her stomach like different stones. If he did not know, she was walking into the joke a second time as the girl who believed in trees. If he did know, the coffee had been a road, and kindness had a destination, and the most handsome boy in the class had picked the one place in the city that had already put its hands on her without touching her.

A couple went in ahead of them, laughing, the girl’s shoe already in her hand.

Jessica’s mouth was dry.

“You said a nice place.”

“It is,” Tyler said. “Depends what you do with it.” He waited again, that same uncrowding wait, which was beginning to look like a skill. “We can go back. Coffee was coffee. This is extra. Your call, countryside.”

Last night Jennie had said you can tell me to stop and Jessica had not known how. The park was the same sentence in leaves.

She could turn around. She could be late for nothing. She could go home and wash and write the date on another blank page.

She stepped through the gate.

The light inside was thicker, the city noise dulled, the path the same packed lie. Somewhere to the left, already, a low sound that might have been laughter and might not. Tyler walked as if he had been here enough times to stop seeing the sign.

Jessica walked beside him with last night still a slick rumor in her underwear and first-boyfriend heat still stupid in her face, and Sundown Park closed around them for the second time in two days, patient as a mouth that already knew her name.

This time there was no Jennie to say breathe.

This time there was a boy who had paid for coffee and called the trees a particular place.

Jessica kept her bag tight against her hip, and did not look at the first bench yet, and understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that the city did not need to invent new lessons. It only needed to repeat the old ones with a prettier face.

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