The worst is to back down. Or fall down, God forbidding. All through class-since I first saw him behind me-I've been tense and unsettled. I just can't shake him. Or That awful Night. It haunts me.
I steel myself again and wait til the room is empty before approaching Marjorie. Calling a teacher by her first name--how American is that?
"Marjorie, I hate to ask, but is there any way to get out of this class? Anything else I can do instead?"
Marjorie buttons her coat as she regards me steadily. "Is it just because of Matt?"
I blush a little, embarrassingly, and search for the right words. Sometimes I reach for words and they come in several different languages. Then I have to pause and sort them out before I respond.
"Partly. We have a history. Obviously. But I didn't do what I was accused of doing."
Marjorie shakes her head. "I have no say in how these situations are handled. This is a pilot program and we're still trying it out. My job is to help you figure out what you're doing that got you here, not to address any specific incident."
I sigh. "So that's it? I'm stuck?" She seems nice. It's not her fault that my life here sucks. That's his fault.
She nods. "I'm afraid so. But think about what Matt wrote: I don't know if he really meant it but it wouldn't hurt for you two to acknowledge you have a problem and think back to what happened and why."
I'm already shaking my head. "I really don't want to talk about that."
"Maybe that's the problem, Annika." She pats me on the shoulder and we leave the room together.
I spend the rest of the day in classes, go for a run before dinner, then finish my summer internship application before turning to my reading for the night. I have nothing much else to do anyway and the time zones between New York and Tallinn mean that if I read til midnight I can call home and catch my family before they all leave for their day. Tonight I really want to hear their voices.
"Papa! Any fresh snow?" I slip happily back into Estonian when my father picks up his phone.
He chuckles. "Zaychik, it's as you see-" He turns on FaceTime and pans his phone around the view out our kitchen window. I hear muffled conversations around him and see that the trees in the park behind our house are all white, their branches sagging under the weight of the heavy powder.
"Are you skiing this weekend?" I like to picture them in all their daily routines. It makes them seem closer.
"Me and Maire, yes. Your mom and Lena, no. Lena has a date so they're staying home."
"A date? With a boy?" I squawk. My sister is only sixteen. I wasn't allowed to date until I was eighteen, and that was all of two months before I left for college last year.
"Yes, well...." He clears his throat.
"Well what? Why does she get different rules than I did? What's the principle here?" I press him.
"Let me pass you to your mother-"
"That's not a principle. Here they call that 'passing the buck,' but I don't know why." It's no use because my mom is already on the phone.
"Annika! How are you?" She is moving around as she shouts into the phone to be heard over the morning chaos.
"Good! But why is Lena dating already? It's not fair!"
"Situational ethics, dear-"
"Our situations weren't different!" I cut her off. My mom happens to be a professor of philosophy and I don't want to get her started.
"Different rules for different people...." She tries again.
"That's a slippery slope! I could demolish that argument in three seconds flat, Mom! Try again."
She sighs. "I have to get to work now, but the short answer? She wore us down, bunny. She wore us down. I'm not sure you cared about dating half as much as she does."
Maybe not. I don't know Lena so well after a year away from home, but she was always a social butterfly. Which no one would ever say about me. I can hear Lena in the background asking if I'm mad.
"Gotta go, Anni-bear-Kisses!"
"Kisses," I repeat. "And you can tell Lena I'm not mad." And I'm not. Who needs a boyfriend anyway? Who needs friends when you've got family?
* * *
Over the course of the week we're supposed to write up our thoughts about the problem that got us into Marjorie's class. But I don't know where to start so I write a lot about being an international student and having no clue what's going on here sometimes. That Night was a prime example of my complete misunderstanding of a situation. Of a person. But I don't want to think about that.
Except everything spiraled downhill after that. The whispers, the gossip, the rumors, the backlash. It made my head swim and I guess I lashed out. So maybe I made some enemies. Maybe a lot of them. And maybe I did yell at those Delta Nu girls but it was in Estonian so what do they care? At least this is all temporary. And it can't get any worse, right?
It does.
I'm late to the next Extra Credit class and hurriedly pull out my notebook and pens as I sit down, glancing around. Everyone is looking at me. Except Matt, but I'm not looking at him either so I don't notice the tension in his shoulders, or his long legs stretched out in front of him.
"I'm so sorry! What did I miss?"
"We've paired up with partners to swap notebooks. You're working with Matt." Marjorie says neutrally.
I still. "Oh, fuck me!" Matt and I say this at the same time and everyone laughs while the two of us glare at each other.
Marjorie explains that each pair is supposed to work together to solve each other's "problems" so they don't happen again. I consider begging Marjorie for an out but I've already tried that once. I glare at Matt as I drag my metal chair noisily over to his. He winces at the sound and I'm absurdly pleased that I've succeeded in annoying him. His dark hair falls over his forehead but otherwise he's perfectly composed and it drives me crazy. His polo shirt could have been tailored to him and his jeans fit him to a letter. No droopy-butt pants for him. Mr. Smooth. Mr. Popular Perfect. Everyone sided with him.
"You're so full of shit," I say because his very existence is intolerable.
"Gee, hello to you too, Annika!" He smirks at me and I hate it when he smirks. It makes me feel like a bug and it draws attention to his mouth.
"That's exactly what I mean. You just want to bullshit your way through everything. Okay, then, let's get the courtesies over with: hello, how are you, sure is cold out! Now what?" I'm almost out of breath and he looks surprised by my outburst. I'm a little surprised too.
"Huh. I was going to say that maybe we should try to keep things polite, since we have to work together," he says slowly, watching me. He has the darkest eyes. They're brown but a very dark, dark brown and very intent. It's unnerving because his mouth says one thing--always joking, bull-shitting, smirking-and his eyes say a different thing, like he's thinking about something else altogether.
I look away, embarrassed by my rudeness, and take a deep breath. I consider apologizing. We seemed to get along so well that first night! Maybe I....
"But if that's the way you want it. Let's go for it. I know firsthand that you're a pain in the ass and even in the worst Hollywood-style post-apocalyptic dystopian future where we were left alone on the planet I wouldn't work with you. Fuck this!"
I open my mouth to blister him and he starts to stand up, but in a moment Marjorie hovers over us.
"Stop it! You're acting like children," she snaps, surprising us both. "Now, get over yourselves and do the assignment. Exchange what you wrote this week and then talk about how to move forward. By next week you need a plan in place to address what you figured out." She leaves before we can respond.
Matt and I look at each other and something passes between us. It's the same thing I felt That Night, when we first started talking at The Party, before The Incident. It's like a crackle, a spark, a flash. It scares the heck out of me. Without a word I pass my journal over to him and he passes his to me. We're careful not to touch even a finger.
I'm done reading first and I watch him absorb what I wrote, while I squirm a little. I'm embarrassed. I wrote about sitting alone in the cafeteria, wondering what was happening at other tables. I described conversations and analyzed what I should have said. I tracked the books I read (I read a lot), the phone calls with my family, the little flare-ups with my roommate.
"What does that say," he asks, pointing to some scrawled comment in the margin. I lean over, careful to keep my long hair from sweeping forward.
"Oh. That's 'screw you' in Russian."
"Was that directed at me?" He might be teasing, but again I can't tell.
"No, not that time," I answer slowly. "That was directed at the guy in my Contemporary Crises class who asked if I was interested in a pity fuck.... I think that's the phrase. Or is it a pity lay? I get lay and fuck confused."
He looks taken aback, then mutters, "douchebag." I'm taken aback. "You may be mean, but he shouldn't insult you."
I can't entirely suppress my smile. "Only you get to do that, huh, Matt?"
"Yeah. Exactly,"
He smiles tentatively too and we eye each other, wondering who will break this uneasy truce first.
Turns out it's me.
"Well, your writing is bullshit. As usual." I fold my arms across my chest defiantly, as if daring him to contradict me. He just raises an eyebrow. "You fill the pages with excuses for why your cheating was okay."
He just shrugs. "I don't think it was particularly wrong. As I say...here." He leans over and flips a few pages to the right part, then points. I push back into my chair to avoid him but he's still too close.
"It's clearly wrong! And you signed the college's ethics code so even if you don't personally see anything wrong with it you're obliged to follow its code of conduct." I let this sink in. "I'm amazed you didn't get in much more trouble for this. You could have been suspended, Matt."
"Doubtful."
"Why? Because mommy and daddy wouldn't let anything happen to their golden boy? Because mommy's a senator and daddy's a judge?"
I found this out afterwards. We talked about all kinds of things that night, including politics, but he never mentioned it.
"Yep." He shrugs again.
I stare at him in disbelief. He's playing me again.
"I don't believe you. You're bullshitting again. I wonder if you buy your own act."
"What are you talking about?" His eyes slide away.
I study him some more. "We're supposed to 'diagnose' each other's problem, right? Well, here's my best guess. You're lazy. You're not used to making an effort. But you care-- about some stuff at least. I remember...." I stop abruptly. Why am I going there?
He leans forward again, his eyes piercing me. "What do you remember?"
"Nothing. Never mind!" I want to back right out of the room. Matt opens his mouth but seems to think the better of it too, slumping back with a sigh.
"At least I tried to apologize...." His voice is low and I'm not sure I heard right. "Which is more than you did." He raises his head and his expression is hard to read.
"What?" I squawk. "What do I have to apologize for?"
His jaw drops. "Are you kidding me? You told everyone I..." His voice lowers and he clears his throat awkwardly. "Took your virginity and dropped you."
Now it's my jaw that drops. "You told them that!" I hiss.
He rears back. "What? Why would I do that?"
"Why would I do that?"
We stare at each other, frozen. I'm vaguely aware of other people in the room but all my attention is on Matt.
"And you told everyone I gave you an STD!"
I flush. Yeah, I did do that. But he deserved it.
"On Facebook." He's glowering.
I shake my head. "I am not doing this here. Now. At all."
Our gazes hold in another uncomfortable stalemate. He cracks first.
"So what about you? You never did write what you're in here for."
I grasp eagerly at the new subject. "Some sorority girls claimed I threatened them, threw rocks through their windows, wrote nasty things on their door. But I didn't! Why would anyone lie like that?"
He rolls his eyes. "Annika," he says impatiently. "They're jealous of you."
"Of me?" I squeak. They're the ones who belong, who fit in!
"Come on! You're gorgeous! Tall and blond and hot as hell with that sexy accent! You're a glamorous foreigner who speaks, like, three languages...." He stops himself as if embarrassed by what he's admitted. "You make them feel plain and boring. Of course they hate you!"
I flush and whisper, "four." He raises his eyebrows. "I speak four languages well, and a little French and Spanish too."
He takes a deep breath. "Who was it?"
"What?" I still feel unsettled. My shields are slipping.
"Who were the girls who made those accusations against you?"
"Oh. Valerie Abrams and some of her friends."
His expression changes.
"What?" I frown. Then I start connecting the dots.
"I know Valerie. I'll ask her about this," he says easily. Because that's how he is. Smooth. My eyes narrow. And I can't even help it, I feel that twinge of hurt again.
"Do you mean know in the Biblical sense?"
"I know her from high school," he answers quickly. Too quickly. His eyes are all innocent but I'm not taken in. This time.
"That's not an answer. So help me God, Matt, if you brought this down on me through one of your...." I switch to Russian for the term I need. "You will be very, very sorry!"
"I have no further comment at this time."
Really?? He makes a pile of his books and shoves them into his bag. I glance around and see everyone is packing up. And all the other partner pairs appear to be functional. One pair, Kyle and Lani, I think, are still deep in conversation. Across the room a redheaded girl packs her bag and puts on her coat, gesturing wildly and talking nonstop to her partner, a guy with glasses who seems dumbstruck. Then I realize we never even got to Marjorie's assignment. Shit.
"We're out of time and we're still supposed to identify our problems and come up with solutions...." I shove my arms into my parka. I'm tingling with frustration, resentment, nerves. Dealing with Matt is challenging, infuriating, stimulating.
He makes an exasperated sound and stands. I'm tall but he's taller still and we're almost eye to eye. "Okay! You write something about my problem and plan something and I'll do the same for you. We'll email them. We won't have to meet. Or talk."
"Fine!"
We exchange numbers and email addresses reluctantly, then walk out of the room together. In the hallway there are a few stragglers and we linger, trading snide remarks.
"Okay then! But don't you dare call me!" I sniff.
"Why would I? When I've got a whole week off from your charming repartee?"
My chin goes up. "I'll have plenty of time to come up with more insults by our next class. I've hardly gotten started."
He almost smiles and I'm almost charmed, though we do sound like children. He wheels around, walking backward away from me, and raises an eyebrow. I watch helplessly.
I point a threatening finger. "This isn't funny!"
I can't read his expression from this distance, but I can sense his amusement. With a cheeky salute he disappears into the stairwell. Damn him!