How To Disappear Completely Page 9

  Further breaking my promise not to snoop, I shuffled through the rest of the shoebox full of camp photos finding so many pictures of them together that I wanted to vomit. The cuteness of seeing Nicole when she was younger was completely drowned in the lake at Camp Happenstance where my life was taking place. I also came across a few letters that Allison had written about how she got into BU and was so excited to be moving to Boston. I kept digging through and found one about me. Allison wrote about how she had met a guy named Josh and how she wasn’t sure how she felt about him, but there was just something about him and that she’d give him a chance. It took a minute, but I was able to find the memory of how we met in my mental library.

  Allison and I were both in school at Boston University in completely separate circles of friends. I hung out with the musicians who wished they were at Berklee and the writers who wished they were at Harvard. She hung out with the other physical therapists and pre-med students. We both lived in Warren Towers on the 17th floor high above Commonwealth Avenue. I had a few friends who were having a small party one night and everyone was hanging out with a few guitars, singing some random tunes. Allison lived on the opposite side of the hall, but one of her friends lived a few doors down from the party. They had stayed up late trying to study like good students and were having a hard time concentrating with our poorly played covers of classic songs bouncing around the hallway.

  She got fed up with all the noise and came to tell us all to quiet down. Everyone at the party was way too cool to have some nerd tell them to shut up and so they didn’t listen. In fact, everyone actually started to play and sing louder after she left. When the party started to die down, I knocked quietly on the girls’ open door to see if they were still awake. “What?” came the answer from Megan, who lived in that room.

  “I’m sorry to bother you guys, but I wanted to apologize for everyone else. It was pretty shitty of them to not quiet down a little.”

  Allison turned around in her chair to face the doorway. “Are you guys done now?”

  “Yeah, everyone is wrapping things up.”

  “Good, maybe now we’ll actually get some studying done.”

  She looked at me with so much hatred that I felt as if I had just been tossed against the lockers by a bully in grade school.

  “Hey, so I was going to go downstairs to grab something to eat. Can I bring you guys some coffee or something as a peace offering?”

  Megan happily accepted and Allison threw a “Fine” my way, which I caught over my shoulder like a wide receiver, before the door was shut. When I came back up, they were furiously memorizing various bones and muscles of the human body. I didn’t say a word. Megan had left the door cracked and I just walked in put two coffees on their desks and left. I decided that I’d just go back the next day and ask Megan more about Allison. She couldn’t always be that mean, I thought, and like a good waiter I was gone before they realized their coffees had arrived.

  Nicole’s shower was alien and didn’t feel at all like mine. No two showers are ever the same and like a new lover, it would take some time to get used to the way they touched you. I let it get used to the feeling of washing over my body, hoping that eventually it would be as good at it as my shower was. I couldn’t say how long I was in there, but it must have been a while because I heard Nicole shut the door behind her as she came in.

  I finished my shower and dried off. I could hear Nicole clanging around in the apartment as she settled in. After quickly getting dressed, I walked out of the bathroom with a cleanliness that my mother would approve of. I was still a little damp as I walked out, but how could anyone get dry in a room full of steam? Nicole was sitting at her desk typing on her computer when she noticed me. “Hey, how was your shower?” I answered with a few casual words as I wondered if she was chatting with Allison online. Scenarios where I could sneak a peek at her computer without her noticing tiptoed through my brain as I tiptoed closer to her.

  “How was class?”

  “The usual. This class is always pretty dull. The teacher is just wretched.”

  As she was telling me about her class, I was bending toward her pretending to dry off my hair, while looking inquisitively at the screen. I could barely make it out. There was one chat window open in the same place it was before. It was impossible to tell who the sender was from so far away. My eyes were good but not that good. Nicole responded to another message on her screen as she continued talking about her class. When she finished her story, she realized that I was behind standing her and swiveled her chair around immediately, blocking any view of the screen. I had accidentally positioned myself right next to the box of camp photos that my fingers were sniffing through earlier and she looked at me nervously before asking, “So, do you want to do something today?”

  “Sure,” I shrugged. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I heard they’re playing Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey as the midnight show at Fenway.”

  “Is that the first one or the second one?”

  “I think it’s the second one. Where they go to hell.”

  “Yeah alright, let’s do that. I like that one.”

  For the first time in our short relationship, we both felt an awkward silence. She broke it with “Did you ever send that band your review of their show?”

  “No, not yet. Let’s do that now.” I leapt over to her desk to catch a quick glimpse of her screen before she could change anything. For a split second before she closed the window I saw that it was Allison that she was talking to. Nicole pulled up the band’s Myspace page. I shook my head unsure of what to do or say about the whole Allison thing. Clearly she doesn’t want to tell me that she knows Allison. At this point, though, she was visibly nervous that I might know about it as well. I decided to let her be the one to bring it up.

  “Here, you sign in and send them a message to go see your site.” She directed me with a clack of her keyboard, like a film slate, to start the scene. I positioned myself in her seat and typed my email and password to log in. She leaned nervously over my shoulder watching my every keystroke, her eyes glued to the screen sloppily like a first-grader’s art project. It was kind of cute how nervous she was, hiding her little secret. I debated how long to toy with her before revealing what was behind door numbered ‘I already know.’ I sent the band a message with a link to my blog saying that I really enjoyed the show and that I had written a blog about it. When I was done I leaned back in her chair and felt her relax for a moment.

  “You mind if I check my email real quick?” I asked.

  “Uh. Sure, go ahead.”

  I accidentally hit a keystroke combination that brought back up her iChat window and blinked my eyes in preparation for a quick glimpse of whatever they could take in. Eyes, don’t fail me now, I thought, I don’t often make you guys work hard. Do this for me. “Oops,” I lied as she realized what was going on and grabbed my attention by spinning me around in the chair. “You know what we should do?” She tried to cover. “That band is playing again tonight just outside the city. You want to have an adventure?” The real question was whether or not she wanted the adventure. A surge of confidence lit a bright path from my brain to my lips as I apparently decided to call our little poker game. “When were you going to tell me that you know Allison?”

  Her face went so white that if it weren’t for the various imagery tacked up to her walls, she would have blended in. Her jaw dropped as if all her baggage had fallen from her overhead bin and was now dangling from her chin. I almost took joy in the fact that I had called her out so blatantly because I was normally on the other end of this game trying to clean up the debris from some wreck. “I didn’t think you’d want to know about that,” she said quite honestly.

  “You didn’t think that eventually it would come out somehow?”

  “I guess I was just waiting for a time that seemed appropriate.”

  “When could that ever be appropriate?” I didn’t want to sound like I was too angry about it, but appa
rently I was. The truest feelings come out when you don’t think about them, when you just blurt them out while your inner censor is on a smoke break. She looked horrified and I realized that things weren’t going as I wanted them to. “What have you told her about us?”

  “I just told her that I met a great guy named Josh at a bar and we’ve been hanging out for a while. I really didn’t go into much detail.”

  I looked at her as a teacher may look at a student he’s disappointed with. He knows that the kid can do better and still has all the hope in the world for her to succeed, even though statistically she won’t get any better because she didn’t care enough. But she did care, I thought, and so I corrected myself. I shook my head for dramatic effect, waited a few seconds and then added, “When did you first realize that our Allisons were the same?”

  “When you told me about how you proposed to her. Who else would have done the same? It had to be you that she always talked about.” After a few seconds she finally asked, “How did you find out?”

  I navigated back to the iChat window of her chat with Allison and scrolled up to the top. “This popped up as I walked by your desk on my way to the shower. I wasn’t looking for it, but it grabbed my attention and I focused in passing on the name enough to recognize it.” Then I pointed to the photos near the shoebox. “I swear I wasn’t snooping around, but after that I saw this photo laying there.”

  “I thought that I had moved that box and cleared all those up after I figured out the connection, but I guess I just forgot.” She smiled wryly for a moment before finally asking, “Are you mad?”

  “How can I be mad? I can’t be mad that you know someone that I know. It’s just bizarre to me that you didn’t tell me that you knew her. I’m not sure what that would have changed or anything, but it just seems like the right thing to do.”

  “I know. I just didn’t know what to do.”

  “You can’t tell her that it’s me, though. You do know that, right? I haven’t even told her that I’ve met someone else yet. If she found out, of course she’d be upset, but if it was with someone that she knew, that would be much worse.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. She’s going to hate me forever.”

  I hadn’t thought about that part yet. She was absolutely right, though. Why would she even want to tell Allison? If they were at all close, that would have completely ruined their entire friendship. “Do you ever hang out with her?” I asked.

  “Sometimes. When I first got here and started school, we hung out for a bit but lately we haven’t seen each other much.” After a moment’s hesitation she continued, “Ever since you and I met, though, she’s been wanting to hang out again.”

  “Now that she has more time on her hands and fewer companions… ”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “So what now?” I asked, with a hint of hope lacing the rough packaging.

  “I guess one of us will eventually have to tell her, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should probably tell her.”

  “Honestly, before I found out about this, I wasn’t going to tell her until I was confident that this was actually going to go somewhere.”

  “Oh.” She was deeply hurt. Her body language signed the rest of the sentence for her: you’re not sure that it is?

  “Look, Nicole, it’s been, what, 3 days? How can either of us be sure of anything? I mean I really like you a lot, but I was with her for 6 years and only a few days ago asked her to marry me. Do you know what I mean?”

  Of course she did. She had just gotten out of a slightly abusive long-term relationship of her own and probably wasn’t ready to make any of those decisions either. I saw the realization come to her gradually like an incoming tide–unless you pay close attention to it, you wouldn’t see the transition from low tide to high tide, just the sudden rush of water against your feet out of nowhere.

  “So what now?” she echoed my own question.

  “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”

  “So how long were you going to wait before talking to her about it?”

  “I didn’t have a deadline for it, but it was certainly going to be a while.”

  “Don’t you think she’s curious what’s going on?”

  “Of course I do, but I’m bitter about her saying no to me and frankly I don’t care. She can just stew in the pot she put herself into by saying no. It’s her own fault as far as I’m concerned. She probably just thinks that I need some time and so I’m taking it.”

  “Actually, she’s beginning to wonder about things.”

  “Oh?”

  “She was asking my advice.”

  I waited for her to continue.

  “She asked whether she should consider you lost or try to keep chasing you.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Well, I told her that she needs to think about everything. She understands why you’re so upset, but she still doesn’t know if she’s ready for all of that–marriage and kids and family life. I told her that if she’s not ready, then maybe she should start letting go because that’s what she’d have to accept if she stayed with you.”

  “How very wise you sound, but somehow very biased.”

  “What do you expect? I really want us to work out, Josh. I’m afraid of how fast everything inside me has been elevated with you. But here I am, with the doors opening up at the penthouse and my toes are just over the edge. I’m just hesitantly waiting in the elevator, far enough out to keep the doors open.”

  She seemed surprised by her own words and I complimented her analogy to myself, and I thought so did she.

  “I know exactly how you feel,” is all I could muster, unable to keep up with her wordplay.

  “You should probably tell her something. Even if you just tell her that you need some space for a while. Not that you want to break up, but just that you need some time to think about things and that maybe she should think about things as well. That could give you at least a little bit of license to entertain the idea of meeting someone.”

  I nodded pensively, running scenarios in my head.

  “Josh. My worry is that after some time apart she’ll come running back to you wanting to get married. What would you do then?”

  “I hadn’t even entertained that idea yet. I honestly don’t know.” I realized that it was my turn to repeat the words of the day, “So what now?” We both relaxed a little bit despite all of the absurdity and smiled with each other. “What do you say we try and forget about questions for a while and just have some fun? I’ll talk with her soon. Ok?”

  “Ok.” She answered with a shy smile as she sat on my lap draping her arms around me as if I were a hero come to slay her inner dragon. “I’m sorry you found out like this,” she whispered into my ear, “but I’m glad that you know now.”

  “I still can’t quite share your enthusiasm, but I’m glad that it leaves us without secrets so early on.”

  Chapter 11

  It was a beautiful afternoon and we decided to go for a walk around the city. I never spent much time on the Cambridge side of town and so we walked towards Harvard Square. Things seemed pretty much back to normal between us as we strolled our way through the streets. The unusual thing about new relationships is that they innately want to become grown-up relationships as fast as they can. They do this by pulling you to learn everything you can about each other, even though the most exciting part about a new relationship is the mystery of who the other person is. Part of me wanted to put a limit on how much we learned about each other day by day. That way maybe we could keep our new car smell for a little longer. Few people have that much self-control and neither of us could help it so we spent most of the day finding out as much as we could about each other.

  I had always wanted to go to the Museum of Useful Things, right near Harvard Square, but Allison could have cared less, so we never did. Though it turns out it’s less of a museum and more of a store. Either way, it was great to check it out. Of c
ourse we trespassed onto Harvard’s precious lawns and read excerpts of novels out loud to each other as if we were students critiquing the great works of our generation with self-proclaimed authority. We walked around the grounds of the great school, toying with the idea of sneaking into a class to see what it was all about. At BU it would have been easy in most of the large classes. Anyone could have just waltzed right in, sat in the back and gotten the same education (sans degree, of course) for free. Neither of us had the guts to actually try it, so we had to pretend like we belonged as we roamed the grounds with our chins slightly higher in the air than we’d normally hold them.

  At the aptly named store Joie de Vivre, we checked out and played with all sorts of trinkets. Everyone there seemed to love everything in the store, but no one seemed to buy anything. They had novelty items that had no real use in daily life. Toys from older generations lined the shelves like unwanted older dogs surrounded by puppies in a pet store. They were fun to look at and play with for a minute, but no one really wanted to take them home. Even the children we saw played with something for a minute and then let it go like Zen masters dumping their artwork in the river after spending a year crafting it. I wondered how such a place stayed open.

  As our feet got tired from all the walking, our bellies tapped us from the inside reminding us what time it was, so we decided to grab a table at Grendel’s Den before planning our next move. The conversation of a young couple at the table next to us was wafting over to us mixed with the clang of their bracelets and their hipster jargon–the Bayside Ramblers were having a secret show at the House of Blues.

  “Josh, did you hear that? I love them. Can we go?”

  “Who are they?” I was not in the know.

  “Are you kidding? They’re like the next big thing around here. Where have you been?”

  Apparently not in college going out all the time, I thought, but only said “I don’t know.”