Very in Pieces (7 page)

His dad made stuffed peppers. “It's quinoa! Quinoa is the perfect protein, you know.”

The stuffed peppers, though, are not perfect. More like mush with the sides of the peppers collapsing in on themselves.

“That's some bruise you have there,” his dad says as he passes me the tray.

“It doesn't hurt much anymore,” I tell them. I untuck my hair from behind my ear so it falls down to cover the contusion. As I do, the ends swing down and brush across Christian's arm.

“I hope the nurse kept a good record of the incident,” Christian's mom says. “If you need to take legal action, it's good to have a paper trail.”

“Mom,” Christian says. “It was an accident. Very is not going to take legal action.”

“I might,” I say. “Stanford's tuition is over fifty thousand dollars a year. Not to mention books. A big fat lawsuit could really help.” I don't know why I keep saying Stanford is my top choice college. Once Nonnie got sick, I knew I would need to stay closer to home.

“Very, don't encourage her.”

I push the pepper plate away from me. “Do you think I should go after just the one guy, or the whole team?”

“You start with the school,” Mrs. Yoo says. “They'll have the biggest insurance policy. If you can't get enough from them,
then go after the kid's family.”

“How much do you think I could make?”

Christian rolls his eyes.

“Well, it all depends on how you play it. If you can provide some evidence that your intelligence was somehow diminished—you are a smart girl, after all, that is your greatest asset—you could make a claim that the injury hurt your future livelihood. With your youth and potential, that could be quite the windfall.”

Indeterminate limit
.

It gets me thinking, though. What if Adam had hit me harder, had jostled my brain with such force that I really did lose my intelligence? Not that it would make me stupid, just average. Or what if it had changed me completely? There was a boy in our class, Logan Whelcher, who had been in a car accident. He'd been kind before, the type of kid who said thank you to teachers at the end of class. When he came back he was surly and mean and had a whole new group of friends. It wasn't just that the accident shocked him or anything. It flicked a switch in his brain and made him this alternate, inverse version of himself. What if that had happened to me? Who would that girl be?

“I can put you in touch with one of the personal injury lawyers in our firm if you'd like,” Mrs. Yoo tells me.

“I'll hold off on that for now. I think maybe the injuries weren't so bad after all.”

“I wish you'd come to the lake with us,” Mr. Yoo says. I can't tell if he's simply turning the conversation away from his
wife's litigiousness, but I do know that he's sincere. Christian asked me to go. His mom asked me. His dad asked me. His sister offered to play taps every evening on her clarinet. Christian once held his phone up to the dog, whose whine crackled across the ether to me. I said I wasn't able to go because I was taking a Latin class at the college over the summer, but that was only a half truth, one that Christian and his family would approve of. I could've gone up for a weekend, but I didn't want to leave Nonnie. And there was something terrifying about being alone with Christian in the silence of a still lake and heavy trees.

“Maybe next summer,” I say.

“Maybe,” Mrs. Yoo says. “That will be the summer everything changes, though.”

“Mom,” Christian says.

“Well, you'll both be going off to college. They don't call it the Turkey Dump for nothing.”

“Turkey Dump?” I ask.

“Mom,” Christian says again. His voice spikes like he's dropped back into his puberty days, when he was chubby-faced and his voice cracked so much he almost never talked in class.

“It's basic statistics. If you look at when most relationships end, it's around Thanksgiving, and the rates are especially high for college freshmen. Tell them, Jin.”

Mr. Yoo does a hefty fake chuckle and says, “That's not exactly my area of expertise. How's your pepper, Very?”

“Delicious,” I lie. I take another bite and the quinoa is mush in my mouth. I don't think he cooked it right. Christian stares
down at his own half-eaten pepper like his mom just grounded him or something, but I feel a bit of relief, like she has given us an expiration date. Not that we have to break up next Thanksgiving, but if we make it that long, that's good enough.

iv.

After dinner Christian and I go down into his finished basement and lie side by side on the carpeted floor, books open in front of us.

This was where we did it the first time. It. An imprecise pronoun, Nonnie would say, but everyone knows what “it” means.

When we first started dating we would kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss until our lips were sore—so sore they'd be raw the next day. It was good. It was fine. He really seemed to like it. Not surprisingly, given the way we got into it, we moved up the chain—around the bases, so to speak—fairly quickly. Shirt off, pants off, oral sex. It was like we were ticking things off of a syllabus, racing to get through the course work. Then we made it to the final: sex itself.

So I lost my virginity in his basement rec room while his parents were at a neighbor's playing bridge. We got to the point where I normally said, “Okay, stop”—me sitting astride him, his hands on the bare skin of my breasts. I didn't tell him to stop, though, and he kept going, helping me to slip off my underpants, struggling to put on a condom (Why did he have
it with him? Did he know that was the day I wouldn't say no? Did he always have one with him?) and then just pushing himself inside of me. He didn't say anything. I don't know what I expected him to say. It's not like he was going to yell, “Incoming!” I guess I just expected there to be some acknowledgment of what we were about to do, but instead it was like he snuck in, like he thought if he just went ahead and did it, I wouldn't notice. That makes him sound like he's a bad guy, and he's not. And I did want it, so I don't know why I'm making such a big deal out of it.

Moments after it started, it was over. He left to go throw out the condom in the bathroom—wrapped, I'm sure, in layers and layers of toilet paper to hide the evidence—and I lay there sticky and stung. It had hurt, but, of course, I'd known it was going to hurt, just not how—sharp at first and then dull burning. I figured that was the problem. The next time, though, was less painful and no more exciting. I wondered if maybe we were doing it wrong. But no, all the parts went into the places they were supposed to—just like Coach B. had explained in health class. Maybe sex was overrated. He left for a summer at his lake house soon after that. So we'd had sex two times. Two and a half if you counted a misguided attempt on my part at a second go-round that second time. Trying to do it better. Trying to do it right. It had been nine weeks, not that I was counting.

“I've been thinking about college,” Christian says.

“Have you? What an odd thing for a young man just starting his senior year to be thinking about.” I laugh and he doesn't.

“I'm going out to Minnesota for Columbus Day weekend, to look at Macalester College, and I thought—”

“Minnesota? Land of a Thousand Lakes?”

“Actually it's Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, but who's counting, right? Macalester has a great political science department and I could focus on foreign relations. They don't have a varsity hockey team, but they play in a club league that's really good.” I am nodding my head in agreement. So he's going to go to the arctic tundra of Minnesota. Good for him. But then he says, “I thought maybe you could come with us. We're going to go see Carleton, too, and maybe St. Olaf. They're all pretty close to each other—maybe a little more than an hour. It's like going down to Boston. No big deal.”

I'm having a hard time making the gears in my head fit together. Why, exactly, would he want me to visit a college he may or may not attend? Although, now that he's said it, it seems a perfect fit for him. Maybe Macalester has one of those lumberjack teams, and after we break up next Thanksgiving, he'd join it to try to find some solace. He'd learn how to walk on a log as it went down a river. He could fell a pine tree with a manual saw. He'd come back after freshman year with even broader shoulders, and I'd shake my head and say, “I can't believe I let you get away.” And then maybe he would kiss me and it would be just like in the romantic comedies that Britta watches, the ones where there's all sorts of missed connections, but everyone winds up paired off in the end.
Just like a Shakespearean comedy
is what she says.

“I was looking online and I think the math department at Carleton—well, I mean, I think it's worth your time to look at it.”

“Wait, what?”

“You should look at it. I know you have your heart set on Stanford.”

“I don't necessarily—”

“Or MIT, I know, but sometimes at small liberal arts colleges you can get more attention, and the faculty is just as strong. And I know it's stupid, I mean totally stupid for us to plan on going to the same school, but I also think my mom is wrong about that Turkey Dump thing. And it's just that all these schools around Minnesota are really good, and then we'd still be close to one another.”

“In Minnesota, ya? Do you really think I'm a Minnesota kind of a person?” I say the state's name again, the way I think people there do—
Minny-soh-tah—
although I imagine this would sound as false to them as someone attempting a New Hampshire accent does to me (
wicked smaht, ayuh!
).

“You could be a Minnesota person. With effort and support, you can be whomever you want to be, right?”

It's one of the corny sayings we had to learn at the training to be a peer counselor. My personal favorite was, “You're the best at being you.” Britta and I remind each other of this regularly.

“Even with effort and support, I don't think I want to be a Minnesota person. You'd be great there. I'll buy you a lumberjack hat.”

“It could be someplace else. Like if you really want to go to
California, there are the five colleges out in Claremont. I could go to Pomona, and you could go to Harvey Mudd.”

“There's a college called Harvey Mudd?”

Christian sighs and starts turning through the pages in his chemistry textbook.

“I'm not sure we're Southern California people, Christian. And anyway, I doubt they have a hockey team.”

“There's roller hockey.”

He's still looking down at the book, but he goes past the chapter we're studying. I don't stop him.

“There are lots of college towns. I mean, lots of places with lots of colleges. Chicago. Philadelphia. You could go to Penn and I could go to Haverford or Swarthmore.”

“It's just that everything's all up in the air right now,” I say. “With Nonnie, I mean. I don't want to leave her.”

“But that's why you should go look now. I mean she might not even—” He stops himself, but we both know what he's about to say. She might not even be alive.

Now it's my turn to look through the textbook, at all the diagrams of molecules and atoms and electrons flying by.

“Very, I'm sorry.”

“It's fine.”

Our pages make a fluttering sound as we turn through them.

“Here,” he says, and flattens his page. I turn mine to match his.

I pick up my pencil and start copying down the formula from the book.

Christian's dog comes padding down the stairs and into the room. She sniffs and then, seeing that we have no food, turns and leaves again.

I should be angry, but he's right. Nonnie might not be here. And then where will I be?

Well, Very, I suppose I was just like you.
What if Nonnie had taken the train northwest to Minnesota instead of up to New York City? Would she have still re-created herself in the same way?

“I really don't think I could be a Minnesota person,” I tell him.

“Fine, Very,” he says.

“No, seriously, do you really think I could become a Minnesota person?”

“I'm not even sure what that means.”

“Earnest, affable, kindhearted. Not a sarcastic bone in the body. Maybe I could do that. I just wonder how much people can really change, without some, like, Logan Whelcher–type accident.”

“Logan Whelcher?”

“Yeah. Like, do you think the person he was before was who he really was? Or the person he is now?”

“Is this about Adam and your head?”

“Not really. It just had me thinking. Like maybe it sucks for Logan, this new version of him. But what if for some people their other version is better. Like—” I pause. “I mean, do you think people just are who they are and there's no changing it?
Or do you think we get to determine who we are? Could I make myself into a Minnesota person for you?”

I wish I hadn't said the “for you” part, but it seems to relax his body. He stops picking at the corners of the pages in his book. I stare at him with wide eyes, like if he can answer this question, then maybe we won't have an expiration date. If he could just tell me yes, then maybe I will visit Minnesota with him and consider the arctic tundra. I want to shake him so he will tell me all his truths, all that he believes. I want him to give me my answers. “What do you think?”

“I dunno, Very. Seems like people have been struggling with that question for ages, though I think ‘Can I be a Minnesota person' is a new approach.” He grins at me. “Maybe there isn't an answer.” And then I swear to God he chucks me under the chin like he's my grandpa or something. “I know you don't like a world without concrete answers.”

I sit up and pull my textbook onto my lap. That's what people don't understand about math. They think it's all concrete and right or wrong. And yes, there are right and wrong answers, but it's how you get there, how you derive the answer, that matters. You can be plain and pedestrian, or you can meander around, or, in the case of the best mathematicians, you can be elegant. It's not poetry, I know that. But it can be far more satisfying in its beauty.