Chapter 36 Unconfirmed
Chapter 36 Unconfirmed
Daisy
He's at a party, I thought. With his team. With people he's known for years. With Tiffany, who walks next to him like someone who knows where she's allowed to stand.
And you are here making tea at ten thirty on a Friday night because you agreed to a deal that was supposed to be simple and has become the least simple thing that has ever happened to you.
I poured the water over the tea bag and watched it steep and had a very honest internal conversation with myself.
The conversation went like this:
You are not jealous.
Pause.
You are experiencing a logical concern about the integrity of the arrangement.
Longer pause.
You are wearing his hoodie.
I looked down.
I was, in fact, wearing his hoodie. I had put it on when I got back to the room because it was cold and it was there and it was warm and those were the only reasons.
Practical reasons. The same reasons he had given it to me in the first place.
I pulled the sleeves down over my hands and drank my tea.
It's fake, I reminded myself. All of it. The car rides and the lunch table and the restaurant and the hoodie. It's a deal. Protection for tutoring. Three months, clean, and then it's done.
You knew this going in.
You planned this going in.
The kitchen was quiet around me. The stove light hummed.
I thought about Tiffany's voice.
He makes you feel like you're the only person in the room. He's very good at it.
I had filed that in the category of cruelty designed to destabilize. I had filed it there because that was the correct category and because the alternative category was one I was not prepared to open.
I rinsed my mug. Put it on the drying rack. Turned off the kettle.
Then I went back upstairs and sat at my desk and opened my phone and saw a text from Maya.
Hey, are you up?
I responded immediately, "Yeah, studying." What’s up?
Maya responded in forty seconds: I saw the tunnel thing. Are you okay?
"I'm studying," I typed.
That's not what I asked.
I looked at the message. Then I typed, "I keep thinking about whether they're actually over."
Three dots appeared immediately. Then: And?
"And I shouldn't care," I typed. It's fake. I know it's fake. I agreed to it being fake.
Maya's response took longer this time. When it came, it was three sentences:
Daisy. Let me guess, you’re wearing his hoodie right now.
I looked at the hoodie and at the phone. How the hell did she know?
I responded after thirty seconds: Really? How did you know?
She responded immediately. “You do that when you are trying to get a hold of the situation, Daisy. You are my friend.
I nodded. She knew me so well.
She typed, "You know what that means, right?"
I locked the phone and put it face down on the desk.
I did not know what it meant. Or rather, I knew exactly what it meant and was choosing not to confirm it in writing because written things were real in a way that unwritten things could still be argued with.
I opened my integration notebook.
I wrote the date at the top of the page.
I wrote the first problem number.
I wrote the first step of the solution.
Then I stopped writing and sat very still in the quiet of the Martinez mansion at ten forty-five on a Friday night and did the thing I had been avoiding since the third quarter of the game.
I let myself think about it honestly. Just for sixty seconds. No plan, no analysis, no notebook categories.
Did I care where he was?
Yes.
Did I care who he was with?
Yes.
Was that going to be a problem?
I picked up the pen.
I wrote x squared plus C at the end of the first integration problem and moved to the second one and did not answer that last question.
Some things were more useful unconfirmed.
I studied until midnight. The driveway stayed empty. I did not check it again after eleven, which was a decision I made deliberately and held to with the focused discipline I applied to everything that required effort to maintain.
At midnight I closed the notebooks and turned off the desk lamp.
In the dark, the hoodie was still warm.
I did not take it off before I went to sleep.