Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

All I could do was console myself with promises of all the fun and relaxation I’d get to have during spring break. I had already planned out the things I’d do in the city that I’d been too busy—or too content spending time at Will’s—to do since moving here. I wanted to go to the Cloisters and the Tenement Museum. I wanted to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Hell, I even wanted to go see the Statue of Liberty. Maybe one day I’d get one of those hop-on-hop-off bus passes and pretend I was a tourist all day. After all, I still kind of was. For all that I’d been in the city for months, I’d hardly seen any of it.

I also had a full Netflix queue that I’d been adding to all semester. So, it was a plan: I would get my fill of the city during the day, then smuggle dining hall food back to my room and curl up in bed with my computer for as long as I wanted, not speaking to anyone if I didn’t want to.

I’d been doubly busy the last few weeks, having volunteered to help a grad student in the lab with some research for her dissertation. Part of her data had gotten mysteriously erased from the university server before she could back it up, and she had to try to re-create six months of work in a week in order to meet a deadline for her dissertation committee and submit her paperwork to the university in time.

It was horrible, and she was, understandably, a wreck, but she also treated me like I was her personal assistant. When I told Gretchen and Milton about it after running into the dining hall, totally frazzled, to explain why I couldn’t make it to movie night and why I was currently shoving food into my face faster than I could chew so that I could get back to the lab, they’d advised me to blow her off, saying that it was nice of me to help but it was her problem. I couldn’t do it, though. Her panic was too real, and I could all too easily see something like that happening to me.

As I ran back to the lab, cramming the piece of pizza I’d carried out with me into my mouth and trying not to indulge in elaborate stories where I tripped at exactly the wrong moment and a ball of chewed bread and cheese lodged in my throat, marking me down in the annals of history as having the most humiliating death on campus, my terrible manners reminded me of Will and I imagined what he would say if he could see me now.

He’d told me more than once that if I always ran to the rescue when someone asked I’d end up living my life in the margins of other people’s. That I was a pushover and it wasn’t my responsibility to kill myself in order to solve other people’s problems. This last had seemed like rather a dramatic pronouncement when he’d initially made it, but now, trying to walk-run and not choke on my pizza, I thought maybe he had a point.

One night I was working late in the lab when a guy I hadn’t seen before ambled in looking harassed and confused. There weren’t many people around so he came to me right away.

“Hey, have you seen a rock polisher around here anywhere?”

“Um, I don’t think so? But to be honest I have no clue what a rock polisher is, so I probably wouldn’t’ve known if I’d seen it.”

His name was Russell and he had a halo of frizzy blondish-reddish hair, a brownish-reddish beard, a full mouth, bright white teeth, and the sparkliest blue eyes I’d ever seen. He looked like a handsome, geeky lion and dressed like he was about to go on a hike. He was a geology and physics double major, and he usually worked in the geology lab next door, which was why I hadn’t seen him before.

We started talking sometimes when there weren’t many people in the lab. He was sweet and smart and funny, and I could tell he liked me. One night, he took me to the commissary for coffee and pie in the middle of the night and used his coffee cup and the pencil that was perpetually stuck behind his ear to explain how, at the molecular level, the pencil could pass through the pottery of the diner mug.

He asked me about my family and told me about his. His older sister was getting married the next month, and he hated the guy she was marrying. I told him about how Janie had a vlog on YouTube where she did makeup and hair tutorials and how funny she was in them. About how my mom had once read a series of mystery novels that featured a duo of New York City detectives, so every time I talked to her on the phone she asked me if I’d been to places that were featured in that series, only it was always things like “the Dunkin’ Donuts near the train station” or “the bus stop close to the Brooklyn Bridge” so I was never really sure what she meant.