English as a Second Language

  He was still holding my wrists in his hands, and we were both looking down at my knees and my bare feet, poking out from the sweatpants I was wearing. I tilted my head back to look at him.

  “Hey,” I said in sudden wonder. “When I’m not wearing shoes you’re really not short at all.”

  “Alex,” he said, “your shoes are absurd.”

  Which is when he kissed me.

  And then I didn’t know if he kissed me or I kissed him, but everything got tangled and breathless and there was even more kissing. Toby put his hands on either side of my face and I slid my arms around his waist and the kissing went on and on. And then we were on the bed. Which is when everything got completely out of control.

  This time when I woke up the next morning, we were both naked.

  “Oh shit,” I said, my eyes flying open.

  I felt him move beside me.

  “If you’re going to dive across the room, tell me now,” he muttered, his face in the pillow. “Last time you nearly castrated me.”

  “That’s such a lie,” I said crankily. “You exaggerate about everything.”

  “I can’t really believe you have the gall to let that sentence exit your mouth,” Toby retorted, lifting his head.

  He stretched, like a cat. This left very little room in my tiny cot. I sat up and scowled at him. He turned over and looked up at me. We stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Don’t even pretend that you can’t remember,” he told me quietly. “I can see that you do.”

  “I remember.” I glared at him. “Why would I pretend to have a drunken blackout?”

  “Because.” He shrugged. “You’re a girl.”

  “That gives me a frightening insight into your love life,” I told him.

  He rolled over and then stood up. I watched him pull on his underwear and his jeans, and then he reached over and tossed me one of my T-shirts and my sweats.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I yanked on my clothes and tied my hair back. Toby filled two glasses of water from the tap and handed me one.

  “Do you have to smoke now?” he asked, irritably.

  “Yes,” I retorted rudely. I lit my cigarette.

  He sat down in my chair, shirtless, holding his water. We stared at each other again. I noticed that he really did have a nice body, which I also remembered from the previous night’s explorations, although I shied away from those images. I also noticed that he looked like shit in the morning, which meant we probably matched. And finally I noticed that he looked very serious.

  “What?” I asked, only slightly alarmed.

  “The night I got back,” he said, staring at his hands. “I went to the pub with Jason and Suzanne and we all got very pissed. Then Suzanne and I walked home together.”

  “You pig,” I breathed, getting it at once.

  His head came up. His eyes were dark, but clear. “I thought, why not? There’d been all that trouble, and what had I got out of it? Just a snog.”

  I stared at him. “I can’t believe you. You slept with her?”

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  I took a drag and then exhaled in a long stream. “You slept with her,” I repeated in a cold, flat tone. I felt as if I was shaking, although my hand looked steady.

  His eyes were that dark brown and were completely unreadable. Something flashed through his gaze and then was gone.

  “I was going to tell you last night,” he said finally. “It’s why I came round.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, very deliberately.

  “Brennan—” he began, a conciliatory note in his voice.

  I cut him off. “Just get out of here.”

  “It’s not as if I planned this,” Toby continued, his eyes narrow. “How was I supposed to predict that you would—”

  “Just shut up!” I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray the way I wanted to stub it out on his face. “Not only am I forced to consider the fact that I had Suzanne’s sloppy seconds, but the fact you care much more about getting laid than about our friendship, you fucking pig—” I sucked in a breath, realized I was shouting, thought, Good, and carried on. “I hope you enjoyed yourself, because she’s going to keep you on a very short leash and I’m about three seconds away from throwing you out my window. Get out.” He didn’t move, he just stared at me. “Get out!” I screamed.

  At that, he did, closing the door quietly behind him.

  And then, just like that, the third term started up and we were smack in the middle of another paper crunch. I barely had time to register that the new term had started before the madness descended, and this time my housemates were also in on the panic. Their summer exams were coming up and they were all forced to undertake massive studying—what the Brits called “revising.”

  I wasn’t a big fan of examinations. I had never really recovered from those Introduction to Western Art classes I’d taken in college, where I was forced to flip through stacks and stacks of university prints in order to tell the difference between flying buttresses. I stared at Cristina’s and Melanie’s exam schedule in horror. How did you even approach studying for eight separate exams over the course of ten days? I knew that I had once managed it, perhaps on a smaller scale and with papers instead of exams, but it was all unimaginable to me now.

  I avoided Toby. I avoided speaking to him, beyond certain class moments in which I employed an icy civility, and I avoided thinking about him, because no one could write a paper with an exploded head. On the occasions that I forgot to avoid thinking about what had happened, the rage nearly knocked me over. So I worked pretty hard to stop thinking about it. I avoided Suzanne entirely. I sat in my room and drove myself quietly insane—and sometimes not so quietly. Melanie shut herself away in her room and could only be seen at mealtimes. Cristina veered between intense periods of studying and desperate demands that we go out and drown our inability to concentrate. We ended up most nights in our kitchen, drunk, and vowing to arise the next morning filled with motivation and purpose.

  I wrote a thousand words on the literary significance of anorexia. Then another thousand about postcolonialism. Then another eight hundred or so on who-knows-what, before screaming in inchoate rage at my ceiling, which didn’t really help.

  “Oh my God,” Jason said over the phone, ignoring my surly greeting. “Have you checked your email?”

  “No.”

  “Check it right now.”

  “I’m actually writing a paper, Jason, in case you’ve been busy the last few weeks picking lint out of your—”

  “Just check it,” he ordered, and put the phone down.

  So I did, but even the vague expectation of something didn’t prepare me for the sight of the name Sean Douglas in my inbox. I shrieked. And then sternly reminded myself that if Jason had received the same email, it was unlikely to be a little e-letter of love. More’s the pity.

  Dear Fictions of Choice students:

  Please let me know, via email by Friday, the topic of your dissertation in a line or two. Please also prepare the 500 word proposal mentioned in the Graduate Handbook for your first supervisory meetings.

  Thanks,

  Sean

  I realized I was hyperventilating.

  I did what I always did in moments of academic panic—I snatched up my phone to call Toby and vent.

  And then put it down again, remembering.

  Stupid Toby and his alley-cat morals. Now what was I supposed to do?

  The library, as it turned out, was not the appropriate venue to soothe my panic. I thought that maybe getting out of my room was the right idea, and that the library would inspire me not only to work on my current paper, but to choose a dissertation topic. Maybe I would stumble across academic zeal and purpose—who knew? Confronted with masses of the studious, however, I felt distinctly ill and left almost at once.

  I wandered back across the campus in the bright afternoon and brooded, something I would have been content to do for some time. “Bright” in Engla
nd did not mean “sunny,” after all—it meant bright clouds. The country was a brooder’s paradise. But I happened to glance up and see Toby headed toward me. There was no one else on the concrete path. I didn’t know which was more disconcerting: that he was there before me and unavoidable or that he was jogging.

  He slowed to a walk and removed his earphones, never taking his eyes from me. Immediately, it annoyed me that he wasn’t as out of breath as I would be if I even contemplated jogging.

  “Alex.” He murmured my name in greeting, in a tone I’d heard before. The very English, completely default polite setting he’d once used on Suzanne. I felt my teeth clench.

  “Toby,” I retorted. Without the default setting.

  It was a long, awkward moment. I glared at him. He shifted his weight and sighed.

  “Is this it, then?” he asked impatiently.

  “You have an attitude?” I was flabbergasted. “Are you kidding?” I stepped around him and began walking away. Fuming.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to say!” he called after me.

  I turned back around. “I don’t know, Toby. I can’t think of anything. Except maybe an apology?” The sarcasm burned even my ears.

  “Fine,” he bit out. “I’m sorry you’re so wound up about what happened. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that we were dating and that I owed you full disclosure of my romantic history in the six seconds I thought about it before we got together.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s quite an apology. Are you aware of the actual definition of the word?”

  But I wasn’t walking away anymore. Toby just watched my face carefully for a long moment.

  “Did you get that email from Sean?” he asked.

  It was an olive branch. I stared at him, and, to his credit, he held my gaze. I was still angry with him, but it turned out I didn’t know how to be in England without him there to talk to. Normally I spoke to him any number of times a day, about a thousand insignificant and significant things. I hated losing that more than anything else. Well. Almost as much as the persistent image I had of him and Suzanne—

  I decided to get over it—not that he deserved it. Because he had a point. We weren’t dating. Would I even want to date him? I decided not to answer that question.

  Instead, I asked lightly, “You’ve already researched your dissertation topic, have you? That must be why you have time for leisurely jogs about campus while the rest of us are working hard on essays and proposals.”

  Toby sighed. “I think you’ll find that most MA degrees require a dissertation, Brennan. Surely it can’t come as a surprise to you. Of course, perhaps they do things differently in America.”

  “Go to hell,” I suggested merrily.

  He was grinning at me. I made a face at him. It was as if nothing had happened. Almost.

  Some feverish hours later, I was at 3,548 words. I had only to conclude something, and then write a conclusion, and then I would be done. Give or take some fine-tuning and my suspicion that the paper lacked an argument. I would have liked to think that my essay was spare and lithe because it contained the elixir of brilliance, but that would have been a terrible lie. This meant that my only remaining writing assignment for my master’s course was the dissertation. I felt light-headed and reached at once for the phone.

  Fifteen seconds later, Cristina was slumped in my chair, cigarette clenched in one fist.

  “I wrote three more words,” I said brightly.

  “I hate this place,” Cristina said, with only marginal bitterness.

  “That leaves me with roughly two thousand more to go. It’s due in three days, if I haven’t mentioned that yet.”

  “It’s the place almost more than the people. Who would not act crazy here?” Cristina sighed. “And I think I am the craziest of all.”

  “There are much crazier people around,” I argued loyally.

  “I don’t understand why everything is so hard,” Cristina said softly. “Or why nothing is funny any longer.” She exhaled a huge cloud of smoke, and then glared at it until it disappeared.

  “It’s the exam and paper tension,” I said. “Everyone suddenly has too much work. And besides, there aren’t any new people. We’ve all been sick of each other for months.”

  “Or just of ourselves.” Cristina sighed. She stood up. “I must go study. If I return, you must not let me in.”

  I returned my attention to my computer screen and scowled at it.

  Thirteen

  Jason slammed a round of drinks on the table. “Careful,” I said, as the wooden-topped table reverberated.

  He paid me no mind at all as he flopped down next to me. “This,” he intoned, “begins the final frontier. May the dissertations begin.”

  We clanked our drinks together, and I wasn’t the only one who looked a little bit anxious.

  “I don’t really want to write a dissertation,” I said. “My economics housemates only have to write about ten thousand words. Of course they also have to use graphs and mathematics. And they have to take those hideous exams. So I guess it’s really a toss-up.”

  “Illustrations!” Toby said, his eyes brightening. “We can use them, right?”

  “Only as a supplement,” Jason said in repressive tones.

  “Thank you, Jason,” Toby said witheringly. “I thought I’d write my entire master’s thesis using only illustrations.”

  “You could always test that theory,” I said encouragingly. “The picture being worth a thousand words theory.”

  “I don’t know which one of you is the least amusing,” Toby said. “Right now it’s a dead tie.”

  I treated him to a mocking grin, and received the British two-finger salute in return. I had been right about Suzanne’s short leash, but had underestimated Toby. He had all the makings of a first-class prick. He’d told Suzanne that things could continue between them, but he wanted no one else to know. She had interpreted that to mean that he didn’t wish to arouse my jealousy, which, naturally, had greatly pleased her. She now took great pains to hang out with us, so she could feel smug and superior and so she could eye Toby with triumph when she thought no one was paying attention. Toby, of course, did exactly as he had always done, only now with sex on tap and without having to declare himself in any kind of public way. I gave him the American single-finger salute.

  “I’m only going to say this once,” Jason interrupted sternly. We looked at him. He smiled. “My paper was absolute shite.”

  We clanked glasses again. It was just the three of us, whiling away a late spring afternoon. We’d all met up in the library, supposedly throwing ourselves into our dissertation research. We’d adjourned for lunch and had never gone back. It was sunny, and we were sitting outside in the pub garden—which was not in the least garden-like, but a concrete patio with picnic tables.

  “You two are a terrible influence on me.” I sighed. “I had very serious research plans for today.”

  Jason laughed. “What bollocks. I watched you take fifteen fag breaks in a single hour.”

  “I actually budget my time around those cigarette breaks,” I said with great dignity.

  We all soaked in the unexpected sunshine. That was the thing about England—it was truly gorgeous in the sun. The unfortunate side effect was that most English people felt the need to strip down at the first sight of it. Toby was actually stretched out on his side of the table, sunbathing. At least he had his clothes on. When we’d walked over from the library, we’d had to pick our way through crowds of British sunbathers, in various states of upsetting undress. Blue and purple flesh on shameless display, legs and torsos the color of thick cream, all of it slowly roasting to an angry pink in the spring sunshine. It was quite a sight to behold.

  “The only problem with this position,” Toby said after some minutes, “is that I have to exert so much effort to get to my pint.”

  Jason sighed. “That and the fact you look like an utter prat.”

  “Piss off,” Toby suggested. But he sat up.
He frowned at me. “Why do you have sunglasses, Brennan?”

  “I don’t really know how to answer that,” I said. “Because I bought them? Because it’s sunny?”

  “It’s not that bright,” he said.

  “And neither are you,” I replied. “Since you’re trying to get a tan.”

  He scowled at me. I smiled back at him.

  And so on, for hours.

  I woke up with a loud pounding noise careening around in my head and was completely disoriented. Then I remembered: very drunk at the pub in the afternoon, had toddled home for a nap. The pounding was at my door, not in my head. It took me whole long moments to determine that. I picked up my watch and saw that it was just a few minutes before 8 p.m. I launched myself up and flung open the door, squinting when the light from the hall hit me in the face.

  Jason and Toby stood there, doing the male version of giggling. Which was still giggling, but a great deal sillier.

  “You must be kidding,” I said.

  “Come on, Brennan,” Jason ordered. “The night is young. Onward!”

  “I’m not going out,” I snapped.

  “Not looking like that,” Toby agreed.

  I flipped him the finger, then flicked on my light and turned to get a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

  “You’re right,” I said, and snickered. “I look like shit.”

  Toby brushed past me and settled himself on my bed, slamming down a four-pack of lager with great flourish. He stared at me.

  “I brought drink,” he said defiantly.

  “Indeed,” Jason murmured. He raised his brow at me. “Apparently someone pointed out to our Toby that he ought to contribute to our nights of revelry.”

  “Is alcohol all you people think about?” I asked crossly. “I think I’m hungover from this afternoon. If not still drunk.”

  “You slept,” Toby said, cracking open a beer. “You’re fine.” He thrust the beer at me.

  “Sobriety is completely overrated,” Jason opined, seating himself. “Why be sober? Why trouble oneself with the actual dreary world?”