I Now Pronounce You Someone Else (17 page)

My freshman year roommate turned out to be a perfectly normal girl from Ann Arbor named Jillie. She didn’t smoke, didn’t borrow my clothes, didn’t have a contagious skin disorder, didn’t date, didn’t leave the room much but kept it darn tidy. She and I were friendly but not friends.

I lived in Gilmore Hall. Kirsten lived behind me in Dykstra (no relation to Chad, who went to Penn State). She and I stayed friends—are friends—but grew apart some over our freshman and sophomore years, and my two closest friends in the world now are two I met my first day on campus, moving into the dorm.

Lisa Mazzaferro, the single funniest and quickest person I’ve ever met, lived next door. Lori Morrow, a brunette Homecoming Queen in high school—Mother nearly choked—from across the state in Redford, lived around the corner. If I were switched at birth, then so were they, and we were all switched away from one another. They are the closest things to sisters I have, and I was so
pleased and almost moved to tears to introduce them to my parents the day we all came back from Christmas break.

“This is my mother.”

Shake hands.

Chat.

“And this,” I beamed, “is my dad.”

Lisa and Lori knew the details, and they both greeted him with hugs.

They knew the details of Jared and me too, and knew that I clung to the fantasy that one day would bring a knock on my door and Jared behind it, and we’d pick up where we left off, only better, like true old friends do.

But it never happened.

I never opened my door to find him waiting there for me.

We would never pick up where we left off.

How could we?

During my very first week of school, heading off to class across the Pine Grove there in the center of campus, I passed Nikki Hopkins and Brianna Borssom, seniors then, whose entirely too polite hellos told me they knew about my breakup from an unimpeachable source. And they did not want to stop to chat.

That stung.

I would think about the sting sporadically over the whole of first semester. A little difficult not to on the days
I passed Nikki and Brianna in the Pine Grove, but the thought gripped me at other times and in other places too. I came to no profound conclusions other than that I deserved it. I had hurt a friend of theirs, and that I had not meant to had no bearing on the pain.

I thought I should apologize to them, but my dad suggested letting it go and said it was enough for everyone that I was aware of it and would try not to repeat the mistake.

He and I spoke once a day, and we ended every conversation the same way:

Miss you.

Miss you too.

I wrote for the
Anchor
during freshman and sophomore years. I used it and my very heavy class schedule as the reasons why I rarely dated.

I dated some. Nothing serious. Nothing more than a couple seconds of good night kissing before thanking them for a lovely time and dashing into my dorm. And I ended up with a reputation for being shy and inexperienced around guys. (And let me just add that my least favorite dates were the ones that degenerated into offers to help me “get over” my shyness, and it was for me, all for me, these altruistic guys all said. Got to be that I could spot them at fifty paces and said to more than one at hello, “Keep walking.”)

Anyway, I wasn’t shy.

I just wasn’t over Jared.

And I wasn’t really trying to be.

How do you get over loving someone when it really is love?

At home, I kept myself busy in the summers with internships for local magazines—there were a couple little ones in town—and I did my first May Term at the end of sophomore year. In Ireland—Celtic Wisdom and Irish Culture. It had nothing to do with my English major, my heritage, or my life, but it was a ball and sparked an interest in Irish folklore I never knew I had. I had my first beer there, didn’t like it but refused to admit it, and wrote about fifty postcards home to friends and family.

It had been only two days since I arrived home, and I was still groggy and jet-lagged when I ran into the Java Bean for coffee late one cold June afternoon. It happened to be pouring too, like it never did—not once—in Ireland, so I was preoccupied brushing water off my jacket when I first walked in and did not immediately notice him, staring at me, smiling, clearly wanting to talk.

It was Chad Dykstra.

I had not seen him since we graduated two years earlier, and we rushed into a friendly hug, and
it’s good to see you; do you have time?; to talk?; yeah.

Chad must have been three inches taller and twenty pounds heavier. I was neither of those things, but my hair was shorter, a little, and he said I’d changed in other ways too.

“You just look so different,” he said more than once. “You look really good, Bronwen. Really good.”

We talked about high school. We talked about college. He talked about girlfriends. I talked about Ireland. The rain continued the whole time and even grew a little heavier as late afternoon turned to early evening, and the windows of the Java Bean fogged up.

We had been there at least an hour and a half before he said, “I owe you such an apology.”

“Really? What have you done?”

“About junior prom.”

“Prom? Chad.”

“No. No, listen. Let me just say it,” he said through a smile that could only be produced by someone who had been there, done that, and regretted his youthful stupidity.

“It was all about getting laid, and I didn’t treat you very well through that. It was all about me. I was all about me,” he said. “And you were right to say what you said.”

“I should have said something sooner. I should have been clearer. I shouldn’t have waited to the last moment.”

“I just would have broken up with you sooner.”

“Kirsten would have trashed you.”

“Kirsten did trash me.” He grinned again. “But I deserved it.”

“So whatever happened to you and—” I was about to ask about the girl he was going out with at graduation when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I looked up, and stood—almost as a reflex.

“I just came in for coffee,” Jared said, already on his way out.

“Okay.”

“So,” he said without much emotion or any I could read, and he quickly kissed my cheek. “Good to see you, Bronwen.”

He left before I could think of anything to say.

I watched him go—standing but unable to see much beyond movement out the coffee shop’s cloudy windows.

“Was that Jared?” Chad asked.

“Yes.” I sat.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “Would you excuse me?”

And I was up and running out the door, into the rain, into the miserable gray, and down the street where I saw Jared just climbing into his car.

“Jared!” I called.

“Bronwen, what—what are you doing?” He got out.

“I just—” I stood in front of him and just searched his eyes for a moment.

“You’re soaked. Get in,” he said.

“No. No, thanks. I just…want you to know…that I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I hurt you. I just needed to say it,” I said. “And…it’s good to see you too,” and I turned and hurried back to the coffee shop. I didn’t expect him to follow me, and he didn’t.

But that night I got a text message from a phone number I did not recognize. Area code 773.

R U dry yet?

I wrote back.

Maybe. Jared?

He wrote back.

Yep more later g-nite

At breakfast, I told my dad I had seen him, and we guessed he was home for a visit. Dad and Jay Sondervan had maintained their agreement made two years earlier, to keep Jared’s and my relationship out of their work, to refrain from being our messengers or emissaries. It strained their friendship a little but didn’t break it.

“Let him call you,” Dad said. “If he wants to. I know it’s hard, Bronwen, but I suspect you’re not the only one who needed a little time and space.”

A week passed before I heard from Jared again, this time via e-mail with the subject heading
Flushing Wastes Money.

He told me he had read an article in the paper a week or so earlier about cost-saving ways to go green.

You were ahead of the crowd. The article mentioned not flushing every single time.

And he signed it with a dash before his name. I wrote back:

As long as I wasn’t plagiarized. Are you back in Columbus?

Jared, two days later:

Nope. Left Columbus about eight months ago. Made some nice friends, but it turns out I’m a Beach Person and just couldn’t live in a landlocked city. So I’m in Chicago now with a company called US Apps. It’s small but growing, and there are beaches nearby, and I can get home in about two hours.—JJS

I waited a day to respond:

Maybe next time you’re home we could grab coffee. I miss you.

Then I deleted
I miss you
before I sent it.

He wrote back the next day.

No subject heading.

No closing.

Just:

I miss you.

I don’t remember happier tears.

And so began a daily e-mail correspondence in which we seemed to reintroduce ourselves to each other and catch each other up at the same time. I wrote at night. Jared wrote early in the morning. He said waking up to my e-mail was “a really good start to the day.”

He also wrote this:

So on the advice of this girl I once knew, along with suggestions in the book her uncle gave
me a couple years ago for Christmas, I have entirely given up red meat, but I still find chickens and their legs rather tasty.

I wrote back:

I, myself, have given up the idea that I will ever own a cat. Too many of my friends are allergic, and I’d hate for them to be uncomfortable in my house someday or be forced to take pills they don’t like.

He asked:

Where do you envision this house you mention being?

I answered:

As long as it’s close to miles of beach and water all the way to the horizon, I don’t care.

He wrote:

You would have been unhappy in Columbus. The people are super nice, and you would have made friends, but you would have been unhappy there, and, Bronwen, I probably knew it all along. But, at the time, I just figured we’d make it work. Somehow. I didn’t know how. Didn’t really think it through. Truth is, I just
kind of hoped it would all shake out. I did want that job. More than anything, and it was good for me. It gave me a great start, great experience, and I got terrific references from it. So—for whatever it’s worth—you would have been unhappy there. And that would have made the two of us unhappy. I think you might like Chicago, though.

I wrote back:

Chicago’s not so far away. Civil War soldiers could walk it in a day.

He called that night, and we both cried into the phone, and right before he hung up, I said, “Dream of me.”

Ten days later, I was back at Hope for junior year, living in Dosker Cottage with Lisa and Lori and four other friends and posters of Ireland all over my room.

It had been months since I’d seen Kirsten, who spent the summer studying in Vienna and then traveling through Europe with Charlie. We tried to get together in the few days she was home before school, but there just wasn’t time.

So on Friday afternoon, at the end of our first week of classes, I called her and asked, “Can you meet me at the Kletz in ten minutes?”

“I’m on my way,” she said.

The Kletz was the campus coffee shop, a mix of glossy hardwood floors and carpet, tables and booths, guys and girls, and most of us upperclassmen.

The Kletz was always populated but never busy, so Kirsten and I had our pick of tables and chose one near the center of the place. We had just sat down with our coffee, I had just begun to tell her the whole story of my life from one rainy afternoon at the Java Bean to the present, when a guy who had just entered the Kletz approached our table and said, “Pardon me. Aren’t you Phoebe Lilywhite?”

All I saw was his smile, Jared’s smile—the one that existed only for me and anticipated the next good thing coming from me, or that whatever came from me next was bound to be good.

“I used to be,” I said, standing, and when Jared held his arms out to me, I stepped into them, and he held me for what I hoped would be forever. “But I gave her up some time ago.”

“Back to Bronwen Oliver, I see.”

“Oh, no. I’m Someone Else now.”

“Really?” He kept his arms around my waist. “Who are you now? Because I would like to know you.”

“I would like to know you too,” I said. “And I’m exactly who I want to be at this particular moment. I’m Bronwen. Bronwen Oliver VanHorn.”