And honestly, it’d be easier for me if she did.
It takes every ounce of my self-control to bring my mind back to my lecture, my students, my classroom, but I do it. I finally grasp the cheap plastic mouse, stand up, and smooth down the front of my skirt. I do so because the alternative of letting my life descend into a chaos of bad memories isn’t an option. Not for me.
Because that would mean letting her win.
Justin stays at the top of the classroom, his back against the wall, while I handle the line of students waiting to talk to me after I dismiss class. He doesn’t walk down the aisle until the room is empty.
I must give him a look, because the first thing he says is, “Is it okay that I came?”
He’s worrying his hands by rubbing them together, a nervous habit I haven’t seen before. “I hope I didn’t intrude, or make you feel. . .” he pauses, apparently searching for the right word, and then rejects the sentence altogether. “I hope I don’t seem like a stalker or anything.”
He tries to laugh at his joke, and then gives up.
I work to rearrange my face, then give a little laugh back. I thought I’d recovered from earlier, but seeing Justin up close has me feeling upended. I give a silent “fuck you” to my mother for trying to ruin another good thing in my life, even though I haven’t seen her for almost twenty years.
I’m too slow to react, and Justin goes on, growing more uncomfortable by the second.
“I’m just not doing well today, am I?” he says, chin tilted down as he talks. His bangs fall over his right eye and he absentmindedly brushes them away.
“It’s no big deal,” I finally manage to say. I give him a smile and reach to take his hand, hoisting my bag over my shoulder.
“I saw your text about your lecture today. I felt bad that I couldn’t talk when you needed me.”
That catches my attention.
All auditory hallucinations aside, showing up at my class like I’m too fragile to handle my job isn’t the coolest thing he could have done. And that text earlier. . .
“Really, I appreciate the gesture.” I give his hand a squeeze. “Next time, though. . .” I begin, but students for the following class start to pour into the room, all of them managing to walk and stare at their phones at the same time.
“What is it?” His eyes meet mine, those blue eyes like two pools I could happily drown in. He looks so earnest, like he’d do anything to make me happy—all I have to do is ask.
I decide to let it drop. I’m in no shape to pick a fight, anyway.
“It’s nothing,” I say, and we walk up the carpeted aisle, through the door, and out into the biting cold of December. Snowflakes are falling, and he offers to walk down to the student center and buy a hot chocolate for me at Starbucks. It’s a little ritual of mine after rough lecture days. A warm sweet drink after the bitter lecture topic for today is exactly what I want.
When I’m back at my office, hot chocolate in hand, and Justin headed across campus to his office, I check my phone to see the text Justin sent earlier that day during my lecture.
I’m coming, he’d written.
After the police have confiscated my phone, I’ll go back to the messages between Justin and me, replaying them over and over in my mind, and realize how they might read as something other than love.
3
Justin lives in an apartment on the second floor of an old Victorian building, just a few blocks away from campus. I live within walking distance of the campus, too, but in the opposite direction in a young professional complex, housing other junior faculty at the university. My building looks like an IKEA catalogue manifesting itself in rust-belt Ohio—all straight lines and white edges—but Justin’s apartment is different. It has, for lack of a better word, balls. There are spires and turrets, and one of the apartments on the first floor actually has a stained glass window. There are bats, literally, in the belfry. Well, technically it’s an attic, but still.
Justin showed them to me one night as they headed out for dinner from under the eaves of the roof. You can tell they’re bats, and not birds, he’d said, because they look like chaos in the sky.
The neighborhoods around Youngstown State’s buildings were once all derelict and vacant, with pigweed and thistle growing taller than me, and walking to Justin’s apartment I look for the winter carcasses of gargantuan rogue plants growing out of cracks in sidewalks and the broken asphalt of abandoned driveways. When I would run by them on the five-mile loop I followed religiously as an undergraduate at YSU, I’d have to dodge the swarms of bees that gathered around the weeds on warm days. Now, in the years since I’d left for grad school and had returned to teach here, most of the surrounding blocks have been razed and rebuilt with “luxury” student housing, new or renovated parks, and a few coffeehouses amidst other older, but renovated, apartment buildings. Likewise, my runs around the neighborhood have been replaced with a treadmill and a gym membership.
Walking the few blocks from campus to Justin’s apartment, I see recently planted saplings and the skeletons of larger trees unburdened from their leaves. The harsh lake-effect snow that swoops in from Lake Erie hits just a few times in December, only to ratchet up further come the bleak midwinter of February.
When I look down the Fifth Avenue hill that descends into the vacant spaces of downtown Youngstown, the crumbling roof of the city’s rescue mission shelter is visible, and next to it the red square tenements that makeup Youngstown’s public housing. I count from the right end of the array of crumbling structures until my eyes rest on the fifth building. I haven’t been back to my childhood home in years—not since Annie and I went searching for it during one of her visits after I started my undergraduate program at YSU, only to be met with a shifty, blissed-out twenty-something with track marks in his arm. He was sitting on the stoop claiming he didn’t live there, but was keeping an eye on the house for a friend. We didn’t stay long. Just being near it, seeing the windows where I’d peer in after school, hoping to see my mother making a sandwich, wiping the table, sitting on the couch waiting for me. Hoping to see her doing anything that told me she wanted to be my mother, but the windows were always empty when I arrived home. My mother was eternally in the back room, doing what she did best: taking care of herself.
The prick at the back of my skull comes hot and quick.
I turn around towards the way I came and decide to take the longer route to Justin’s apartment, across the bridge.
When I reach the highway overpass that crosses from campus proper into the surrounding neighborhoods, I stop and look out over the buzzing traffic below. Deep breath. My eyes focus on a crow flying against the slicing December wind and the world reassembles itself. There’s a buzzing against my leg and, when I pull my phone out of my pocket, it’s hot in my hand, Annie insistently pulsing up from the screen. Below her name is her pixie face glowing with a smile I’d snapped before she realized I was taking the picture.
I hesitate a moment before answering, even though I want to hear Annie’s voice.
“Hi there,” I say breathlessly as the icy wind that’s always whipping over the overpass for Route 680 slings itself down my throat.