Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

And then I banished his voice from my head like I’d done a thousand times since that night and redoubled my attention to work.

ON VALENTINE’S Day in elementary school, we were instructed to give cards to everyone in the class. We’d made construction paper mailboxes with our names on them and placed them at the front of the room, colorful and open, ready to receive well wishes from anyone who might drop them in.

In fourth grade, I’d followed this instruction as I had every year before, carefully tearing apart the perforated Batman cards I’d gotten at Target and writing a classmate’s name on the back of each one. I’d saved the best one—Batman standing next to the Bat signal looking out over a moon-drenched Gotham City—for Noah Waldmann, who I thought was the coolest kid in my class. I’d been crushed when I looked through my mailbox to see that I hadn’t gotten a card from him. Then embarrassed when I realized that though the girls had given cards to everyone, unlike last year, all the other boys in my class had only given cards to the girls. Something had shifted. An unspoken line had been drawn through our social relations that had been clear to everyone except me.

Aside from that mild humiliation, Valentine’s Day was just something that happened, with the bonus that there was usually candy lying around. Sure, maybe I got the slightest bit jealous when I thought about people out with their dates, having attention lavished on them. But I knew it was just a stupid Hallmark holiday, really.

This year, though, it was like every force in the universe seemed hell-bent on shoving Valentine’s Day down my throat, up my nose, and into my eyeballs. Every storefront was plastered in a nauseous combination of pinks and purples. Posters for everything from kissing booths to film series appeared on campus bulletin boards, all of them printed on garish pink, purple, and red paper. The dining hall acquired table toppers that left an unsanitary dusting of glitter on the tabletops, which I’d find on my clothes and in my hair throughout the day. Even the radio was in cahoots, rendering songs I usually liked noxious through syrupy dedications of love.

So, though I had never paid the day much mind before, now, at exactly the moment I wanted to avoid thinking about romance, it was everywhere and there was no escape.

When I walked into Mug Shots the week of V-Day, Layne was in the middle of showing George, our newest employee, how best to place red hots just so on the whipped cream that topped our Hearts Afire Hot Chocolate, and where the vat of precrushed candy canes to sprinkle on the Mint Mocha Love Latte was. There was a dish of candy hearts, two of which were to go on every saucer holding a for-here drink. There was white-chocolate syrup dyed red for the Brownie Blitz Cappuccino, pink marshmallows for the Gimme S’Mores, and cinnamon sticks to stir the (Very) Dirty Chai Lattes. It was as if Valentine’s Day had exploded. And it was caffeinated.

That whole week I got home from work with red chocolate blood spatter dotting my clothes, shards of candy cane under my nails, and dust and dirt clinging to the marshmallow residue that coated my hands. By the time Gretchen came in to meet me near the end of my shift on Valentine’s Day evening, all I wanted was to be stricken with a particular strain of colorblindness that would disable me from seeing any color that contained red pigment. Also if I never heard the phrase, “I guess I’ll treat myself since no one else is going to treat me,” presaging the order of a drink again it would be too soon.

Somehow, though, all it took was watching calm, practical, totally together Gretchen lean over the counter to kiss Layne, who mumbled and flushed and pushed her glasses up her nose in delight, to make me as melty inside as one of the molten chocolate lava cakes that we served with cinnamon-cardamon marshmallows to dip in their liquid center.

After I’d made us both the most decadent drinks I could concoct (a combination of the Brownie Blitz Cappuccino and the Gimme S’Mores) and poured them into enormous to-go cups, Gretchen and I walked back toward the dorms, cutting through Washington Square Park because we always cut through Washington Square Park.

We sat on the edge of the fountain half sipping our drinks and half scooping them into our mouths with straws because I’d added so many brownie chunks and marshmallows that they were practically solid.

“So, you and Layne are really a thing, huh?”

“Yeah.” Gretchen stabbed at brownie chunks with her straw, eating them like shish kebab. “She’s pretty great.”

“She, um, came around, then? On the you-being-too-young issue?”