Hard Love (23 page)

A novel? Just like that the idea lodged in my brain and wouldn’t go away. Suddenly the idea of starting college and taking freshman composition, literature in translation, and existential philosophy seemed like the most stultifying way I could imagine to spend the next year. It’s not as if Katherine had made me any promises or anything. I wasn’t doing it because I thought I’d get published. It just became the thing I most wanted to do. Just to be able to say, “I’m writing a novel.”
I’m writing a novel!
Oh my God. I wanted to be able to say that! I wanted to
do
it!

So I deferred my entrance to Stanford and moved from my parents’ house into an apartment with Birdie. My father said that if I wanted to stand on my own two feet, I should see what that really meant, so I got a job pouring coffee and hustling cheeseburgers at the Mug in Harvard Square. As it turned out, waitressing at the Mug only allowed me to stand on one of my two feet, since rents in the whole
Boston-Cambridge metropolitan area are higher than the Hubble Telescope. My mother, always a pushover, helped me to remain upright by stealthily contributing an extra couple hundred bucks a month to my survival fund.

And then it was September, and all the schools and colleges started up again. The Square was full of students buying books and meeting new friends. Actually, the whole city was full of students buying books and meeting new friends. Even Birdie wasn’t immune to the excitement of it. I, however, was living with my best friend since sixth grade, twenty minutes away from the home I grew up in; I wasn’t feeling the thrill.

Not that I didn’t want to meet new people. In fact, what I wanted more than anything—though I wouldn’t have admitted it to anybody—was to meet a woman I could fall in love with. I’d been out and proud for almost two years, and the only love interest I’d had (if you don’t count Gio, and I don’t) was a girl who kissed me for a couple of weeks and then took off with the first guy who gave her a second look. That did a job on me—I got scared about trusting people, letting anybody know I liked them.

But I knew I had to get over that if I was ever going to have a girlfriend. My mother had this line about how “you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.” Or princess, in my case. I was eighteen years old, for God’s sake. I had to put myself out there and start kissing frogs unless I wanted to be alone for the rest of my life.

So, I had two goals for the year: fall in love and write a novel. How hard could that be?

Chapter Two

“H
EY, YOU’RE LATE, MISS MARY-SOUL
,” Doug, the manager, said when I hurried in the door of the Mug. “I’m bussing tables here instead of counting up my morning receipts.”

Or jawing with the customers. “Sorry,” I said, grabbing a clean black apron from under the counter.

“I guess it took longer than you thought to put on all that makeup, huh?” I don’t wear makeup. He chuckled at his own stupid joke.

“Roommate troubles,” I said.

He held out his hand like a crossing guard. “Don’t tell me about it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Everybody tells me their sob stories.”

“Not me, Doug. I couldn’t bear to see you sob.”

“My roommate this, my landlord that, my husband, my wife—everybody’s got a story.” Doug shook his head.

“Yeah,” I said, sticking change in my apron pocket. “People with lives are so inconsiderate.”

Doug guffawed. “You kill me, kid; you kill me.” Which
was why I’d gotten the job. He appreciated somebody who could take his guff and give it right back.

The Mug was a Harvard Square institution, and Doug had been managing it since sometime soon after the Revolutionary War. It was apparently owned by a guy named Gus who was too old to even come in and drink coffee in a back booth anymore like he used to. It was a tiny place, only eight booths and half a dozen counter seats in all, but during peak hours there were often people standing in line in the doorway. Different kinds of people, but you knew they all had two things in common—you knew because they
told
you, over and over. They all missed the old Harvard Square, the way it used to be before the big record stores and clothing chains took it over, when there were lots of funky little places like the Mug. And they all loved Sophie Schifferdecker’s pies.

Sophie had also worked at the Mug for a few centuries now, turning out hamburgers and tuna melts by the bucketload. In fact, as Doug liked to tell me, I was the first employee to be hired in the new millennium, even though we were now well into it.

“I don’t hire young people anymore,” Doug had said during my interview. “Too flighty. They work a few weeks, it’s not as much fun as it looks like, and they take off on me.”

Not as much fun as it looks like?
That was really bad news.

“I promise to work for you for one year,” I told him. “But then I’m going to college. And not around here.”

“What’s wrong with around here?” Doug had eyed me suspiciously.

“My parents live around here,” I said. That was the first time I’d killed him.

Since the colleges had just started up again, the Square was even busier than usual. Students weren’t behind in their classes yet, so they had plenty of time to sit around and drink coffee while they got to know their new pals. One of the Harvard guidebooks mentioned the Mug as “the place T. S. Eliot probably spent his afternoons writing poetry and warming his hands on a hot cup of Earl Grey tea.” Which you would think anyone would know was a load of crap, but every once in a while a few freshmen would come in, all wide-eyed, and order Earl Grey and grilled cheese sandwiches, and I knew from the way they looked reverently at the peeling wallpaper that they were impressed to have their hindquarters plopped in a booth where Great Literature may just possibly have been born.

Anyway, I ran back and forth between the kitchen and the booths for about two hours until the lunch rush was over. There was a short lull after I topped off everybody’s coffee, rang up a few bills, and stuffed the tips in my pocket. I poured myself a cup of coffee and tried to decide whether to ask Sophie for a turkey sandwich or just go for a piece of pie. I was cutting myself a nice wedge of apple-blueberry when the bell over the door tinkled again.

I was not surprised, when I looked up, to see that it was her. A Harvard student—that was my guess—who’d come in alone every afternoon that week and burrowed into the corner booth, ordering tea and barely looking up from her book. Day after day she wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt, as if that were her uniform. She looked like she’d been raised in a convent, and not just because of her porcelain-pale skin,
either. There was also something so innocent about her, so born-yesterday, it made me feel like I shouldn’t look at her too closely. As if she wasn’t fully formed yet, a chick just out of the egg, still damp and wobbly.

Except for ordering the tea, she didn’t speak, which offended me slightly. The Mug was the kind of place where people yakked at you constantly, and even though that got on my nerves, this girl’s I-am-so-smart-I-can’t-be-bothered attitude was annoying me too. Where did she think she was? Au Bon Pain? I picked up my order pad and stalked over to her booth. If I had to put down my coffee, I was going to make it worth my while.

“So,” I said, “you want some T. S. tea, and what else?”

She looked startled, her pale blue eyes open wide. “TST?” she asked. I guess she thought I was offering her drugs.

“Tea. You want tea, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. I guess so.”

“I mean, that’s what you usually order, so I just assumed. How about a piece of pie with that?” I gave her my pushy-waitress smile.

She turned her book facedown on the tabletop with a shaky hand. Grace Paley.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
. A book I’d always meant to read.

“Pie?” she whispered.

“Yeah, pie. It’s a round pastry thing with fruit in the middle.” I kept my pencil poised over the pad, waiting to write.

She blushed. “Okay, well, what kind do you have?”

“Today we have apple, blueberry, apple-blueberry, and pecan.”

“I guess I’ll have …” She seemed to be stumped. Obviously she needed that Harvard education badly.

“Or I could have Sophie make you a sandwich. Turkey, tuna, salami, grilled cheese—”

“I don’t think—”

“Or maybe both, huh? Turkey sandwich? Blueberry pie?” I put the pad down on the table. She was going to order
something
.

“Do I—do I have to order food?” the girl asked. And when I looked at her again, her blue eyes were starting to swim.

God, I was such a bully. “No, you don’t have to. You can just have your tea,” I said, giving up.

She sat up straighter in the booth and managed to look me in the eye. “No, I would actually like a piece of pie. How much is the pecan?”

“It’s a bargain at two fifty. The others are two bucks.”

She thought it over. “Okay, I’ll have a piece of apple pie.”

I winked my smart-ass waitress wink. “Good choice. Everybody loves Sophie Schifferdecker’s apple pie.”

The girl nodded and picked up her book again. Just shy, I decided. Pitifully shy. Amazing she has the nerve to go out and sit in a restaurant by herself. I felt kind of bad about pushing her to order the pie. It occurred to me that she could be on scholarship—even at Harvard, not everybody was rich. I set the pie in front of her and decided not to get mad if she left me a crappy tip.

I sipped my coffee behind the counter and glanced at a copy of the
Boston Globe
that someone had left in a booth. I
kept having the feeling that Pale Girl was looking at me, but I didn’t turn around to check. Then a bunch of customers came in and I forgot about her. Around four thirty I realized she was still there.

“You want anything else?” I said, walking over to her booth. “More tea?”

She blushed. “Oh, no thanks. I guess I should leave.”

I shrugged. “The dinner rush won’t start for another hour—you can hang out, if you want to.”

“Thanks.” She ran her fingers through a headful of messy rusty curls.

“So,” I said, “you a freshman?” Waitresses at the Mug are supposed to be nosy.

“A freshman? You think I’m a
freshman
?” She looked at me as if I’d slapped her.

“Hey, I’m just guessing. You’re not?”

“No! I’m a senior.”

I would never have thought that. “So, your last year at Harvard, huh?”

She blinked a few times. “I don’t go to Harvard.” “Oh, sorry. It’s just that a lot of the students who come in here do.”

A light went on behind her eyes. “Oh, you thought I was a
Harvard
freshman! I get it. No, I’m in high school. I go to Cambridge Rindge and Latin.”

“Really?” I sank down in the booth across from her without really realizing it. “We almost never get any high school kids in here. They all hang out in the pit by the T station in nice weather, or at Bertucci’s if they’re hungry.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. I’m new here. I don’t know many kids.”

“You had to change schools your senior year? That’s rough. Did your parents move here for jobs or something?”

She smiled but didn’t say anything for a minute. Obviously I was prying, which I normally don’t do, but there was something kind of interesting about this girl, and I felt like I’d almost figured out the puzzle.

“My parents are still back in Indiana, where I grew up. I’m living with my older sister now. She went to Harvard, but she graduated last year. She works for an architect.”

Pale Girl picked up her teacup and pretended to sip from it, though I knew the contents had disappeared a long time ago. What was she not saying? I looked at her clipped, unvarnished fingernails, the bashful smile that vanished as quickly as it appeared, her uniform of invisibility—were these clues?

And then I knew. Of course. That’s why she’d been studying me all week. Why hadn’t I seen it sooner? Was my gaydar on the fritz?

“Did your parents make you move out?” I asked.

She blushed again, knowing I’d figured it out. “Not exactly, but they were pretty upset about the whole thing, so my sister suggested I come out here and stay with her. It seemed like a good idea.”

I nodded, hoping to keep her talking.

“I like it here pretty much—I mean the kids aren’t mean to me or anything. I just don’t know anybody very well. And Lindsay, my sister, doesn’t get home from work until after six o’clock, and I hate sitting around her apartment by myself,
you know? I mean, it’s small, and it just doesn’t feel like it belongs to me yet.”

“So you decided to hang out here in the afternoon.”

“I came in on Monday, and I saw you, and it seemed like … well, you know, I thought maybe—”

“That I was a lesbian too,” I said.

She nodded.

“Well, I don’t hide it. My name is Marisol,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Marisol Guzman.”

“Lee O’Brien,” she said, hesitantly shaking my hand with only slightly more gusto than Damon the gorilla had a few hours before. We’d have to work on that.

“Welcome home, Lee O’Brien,” I said.

It had taken me only moments to decide to befriend Lee. Maybe it was some latent social-worker instinct I’d picked up from my mother, I wasn’t sure, but I was practically smacking my lips over the opportunity to help this baby dyke learn how to live in her new world. She needed somebody like me who was older (okay, only by a year), who’d been out longer (going on two), and was pretty much fearless about taking on the world (a trait I’d had forever, thank you very much).

It was only later, after Lee had hung around the Mug (eating a smuggled cheeseburger) until I finished work, and then followed me back to my apartment, where we’d walked in on Birdie and Damon howling over
Sex and the City
reruns and tossing popcorn kernels to the dog, that I wondered if picking up a stray of my own was such a good idea after all.

About the Author

Ellen Wittlinger
is the critically acclaimed author of the teen novels
Blind Faith, Heart on My Sleeve, Zigzag, The Long Night of Leo and Bree, Razzle, What’s in a Name
, and
Hard Love
(an ALA Michael L. Printz Honor Book and a Lambda Literary Award winner), and the middle-grade novel
Gracie’s Girl
. She has a bachelor’s degree from Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. A former children’s librarian, she lives with her husband in Haydenville, Massachusetts.