Things I can’t Explain Read online

  Peering through the windows, I see fashionable New Yorkers with their toddlers crammed into CBGB T-shirts standing around a bar making fresh juices with toss-ins like berries, and a tray of mixers, acting as their own mixologists. I’m surprised it isn’t Bring Your Own Prosecco. When did the term DIY, which used to signify a punk rock spirit of independent creativity, become so gentrified?

  It dawns on me that this could be a pretty cool story. Not the prosecco place, but DIY. Not only does it exemplify all the basic principles of the free market economy that Fergface drilled into my head, but DIY is also Economy 101 that every young Nuzegeek reader might understand.

  I remember Charley’s Cook Your Own back in Springfield where we could cook our own steak for twenty-eight dollars. Dad loved that place. Now that was DIY before its time, and a great break from Mom’s tofu. But I’ve always wondered: If you have to cook your own food, shouldn’t it cost less? I mean, would you pay Camp Canine to let you wash your own labradoodle? Or fork over cash to Acme Car Wash and detail your own car?

  I can understand picking your own strawberries and pre-ripping your jeans. If you’re homeless, a cardboard box might be what passes for DIY housing. And first-time New Yorkers know that DIY furnishings are what you find on the street.

  But I’m also thinking: There’s Kickstarter and Indiegogo, right? I’ve seen tons of blogs written by industrious millennials who’ve taken financial matters into their own hands by tapping into their passions and using them to turn a profit.

  Clearly, the Do-It-Yourself trend is a viable business model and the people leading the charge are becoming entrepreneurs. Still, I don’t want to be pitching the financial benefits of weaving your own doormats out of dog hair to Dartmoor. And I’m pretty sure a piece about a spa where you can massage yourself probably isn’t going to fly. Then again, maybe if someone could find a way to distill Heineken Light backwash into automotive fuel that could power a Beemer convertible, Dartmoor would be interested.

  I’m going to have to zero in on something fabulous.

  Unfortunately, what I zero in on is the ultimate zero—Norm—and he’s walking directly toward me.

  I need to find someplace to hide, and quick.

  CHAPTER 15

  No joke. From where I’m standing I can see Norm, my very own ex-BF-cum-stalker, across the street reflected in the restaurant window. He’s hanging out with a bunch of overage skater dudes.

  With every fiber of my being, I do not want to see or be seen by Norm, so I do that stupid sitcom thing and duck into the next nearest doorway, which is some tiny Village cappuccino place.

  I sit down in the far back corner and keep one eye on Norm across the street, waiting for him to move on. Slowly, I realize this is no random java station. I take a deep breath and remember that one of the most momentous moments of my life occurred here. This is Joe’s Coffee. Why, you may be legitimately asking, does my entire love life revolve around coffee?

  I don’t know the answer to that question, but Joe’s Coffee is a place I’ve kind of been avoiding for a while. My eyes dart across the wrought-iron tables to the very corner where it all changed between Sam and me, one autumn day almost a decade ago. Two best friends, childhood pals. Platonic to the extreme.

  Across the room I see him entering now, just the way he looked that day, with his lush brown hair sticking up everywhere, his easy-to-read face with a stubble of beard and the way he smiled at me with his soft sleepy brown eyes.

  That one image and it feels as though a trap door has opened beneath my feet and dropped me through time.

  Sam was late and I had to get back to the paper. He was down from college, where he’d just started his sophomore year. My messenger bag was slumped beside me on the floor, filled with textbooks and notebooks for my night classes, and I’d had a draft of a small piece I was writing for the Daily Post—my first. It was short and I was hoping Sam would read it before I handed it in.

  My internship with Hugh was in full throttle, so I’d had to jump through several fiery hoops to finagle this meager forty-five-minute furlough to meet Sam downtown. I remember that day feeling how lonely I was in the city, even with the beehive of a newsroom and Hugh being about the most demanding person I knew. There just wasn’t anyone around who flat-out knew me. That’s how it feels for the first few years after moving to New York.

  You couldn’t miss Sam coming through the door of the café. I’m surprised every girl there didn’t stand up to claim him. At six foot two with broad surfer’s shoulders, Sam stood out—a bright and fresh presence among all gloomy gray New Yorkers.

  “Hey, Clarissa, how’s it going?” he asked, folding himself into the tiny café chair.

  “Awesome now that you’re here,” I offered and slid over the cappuccino I had waiting for him. Sam smiled graciously and shrugged off his jacket. Just seeing him sitting across from me, I could feel my breathing relax and deepen, like the missing piece of a puzzle had fallen into place.

  “So how’s it going?” I asked.

  “School’s crazy, but fun,” he said, taking a long sip of his cappuccino.

  “Like, a lot of work for all your classes?” I’m half envious that I didn’t go to a normal college like everyone else, imagining Sam up there having a good time without all the ambitions and responsibilities I had burdened myself with.

  “Yeah, that, too, but you’d think they just discovered the sexual revolution up there,” Sam said, and I perked up. Kind of an odd subject to lead with, I thought. I could see he was a little uncomfortable. I guess he needed to talk about something so I figured I should dig a little further.

  “Doesn’t sound so bad on the face of it. What do you mean?” I don’t know why, but I had to admit that Sam being up at that girls’ school always bothered me ever so slightly. I hoped they appreciated him for who he was, but I put it out of my mind as none of my business.

  “Well, it’s a bit extreme. You can’t believe how everybody is hooking up all over the place. Sometimes they barely know each other,” he said.

  That’s my Sam, still a regular guy, the kind of guy you never see or hear about, that they never show on television in Super Bowl ads or in the movies. A red-blooded American boy, with raging hormones and all the proper working parts, but still the kind of guy who is thoughtful, soft, genuine, and put off by inappropriate stuff.

  “Weird—I suppose having oodles of sex with random strangers is one of the rites of passage you forgo by choosing a job over full-time college,” I said with a dollop of regret, thinking how it was pretty hard for me to relate. All things considered, I figured I could live without having to buy home pregnancy tests and whatever antibiotics work best on STDs.

  “Yeah. They take the ‘liberal’ in liberal arts pretty seriously up there, I guess, mainly because the boy-girl ratio is so out of whack.”

  Sam’s freshman class included the first coed admissions to his college—a small, artsy school nestled into the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. It had been one of very few all-women’s colleges left in the country up until last fall, when the administration voted unanimously to admit men into the female student body (academically and literally, it would seem). Sam was one of only about thirty testosterone-bearing individuals on the entire campus.

  “I guess the administration is just new at this, probably trying to rein it in,” I said, assuming we all live in some kind of rational world.

  “Are you kidding? You’d be surprised how many teachers are sleeping with students. There’s one—this writing teacher I have—Betty Jo Carson. She’s always playing with the buttons on her blouse when we meet in her office, pulling down the shades and kicking off her high heels.” I could see how this might be more stressful for Sam than a lot of other guys. Yet I can also see why he’s so appealing and why a woman on the prowl would have him in her sights.

  “It’s kind of like every room is a bedroom up there, if you know what I mean,” he said.

  “That may be the definition of ‘dorm,
’” I added.

  “I don’t know if it’s that way at other schools.”

  “They should mention that in the college brochure for recruiting,” I offered, trying to lighten things up and find a way to change the subject.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of weird. There aren’t a lot of kids up there in the mountains. It’s us and the bears.”

  Sam laughed a little awkwardly and there was a moment of silence that made me wonder why he was telling me this. Not that we didn’t talk about anything and everything. But it seemed like something was on his mind. That’s when it occurred to me that I knew very few details of Sam’s sexual history, and I wondered why we had never talked about this kind of stuff before. Thankfully, Sam changed the subject.

  “Hey, did you hear about the reunion party?” he asked.

  “What reunion party?”

  “How soon the famous forget,” Sam chided. “Class reunion bash the day after Thanksgiving.”

  “A reunion at Tupper High?” I frowned. “Already? Isn’t it customary for those things to take place at the five-year mark, or better, after fifty? We all just graduated, like, five minutes ago.”

  “It’s been a year,” Sam corrected, annoyed, as if I was being some kind of snob. “It’s a chance to see everyone again, considering you weren’t even there at graduation. Besides, who cares what she’s calling it?”

  “‘She’?”

  “Yeah, that’s the only glitch.” Sam gave me a sheepish look. “The party is being thrown by one of your least favorite people. Genelle.”

  “One of?”

  Genelle Waterman did the best she could to make my last year of high school, well, let’s say difficult. She didn’t succeed, but I didn’t mind when my internship started early and I had to skip graduation. It didn’t sound exactly thrilling to reunite on her turf.

  “Come on, that stuff is all in the past,” Sam said. “Everyone wants to see you. Including me.”

  “I’ll be home for the holiday,” I reasoned aloud. “So I guess I could go.”

  “Yeah, what’s the worst that can happen?” he said, more as a statement than a question.

  Sam shoved his hair out of his eyes and when his hand came down to the table, it inadvertently landed on top of mine. It’s a sensation I’ve felt a zillion times—Sam brushing against me in some accidental way, just part of how we communicate. We’ve always been easy with each other—his hand on my arm, my hand on his hand, casual touches here and there. It always happened when we talked. But this time it felt different. Kind of annoying, actually. Maybe it had to do with being far from home. I dismissed it at the time.

  Our conversation slipped easily to my internship, and when he asked how I was doing at the paper, I reached into my bag and pulled out the article. He jumped right in and I watched him read, nodding, grinning, and knitting his brow at all the right places.

  “Wow,” he said. “This is amazing. You’re, like, a real journalist. I like how you manage to lay out the facts, but still embed your own personal spin on the subject. That’s so you.”

  I was about to thank him, but at that precise moment, his legs shifted under the table and brushed up against my knees. What were his knees doing here all the way on my side of the table? It was a stupid little bit of bodily contact, but something was unsettling about it in a way I hadn’t expected. When did Sam get so tall and lanky?

  “Sorry,” I said, reflexively touching his knee again with my hand and moving to the side. But that touch felt like an even bigger deal and I knew in that second that something more was going on. Sam was surprised, too. This was definitely more than just me and Sam bumping knees … as friends.

  “Hey, pal, put those knobby knees of yours back where they belong,” I joked, trying to restore my equilibrium.

  Sam’s cool and careful, so he didn’t say anything.

  He’s your best friend, I reminded myself. And then a thought exploded in my mind, like a piano being dropped on my head from a second-story window: Can men and women be friends? I mean, can they really be just friends? Okay, yeah, Sam and I are a shining example … and yet …

  “You must have gotten taller,” I observed, laughing.

  “Yeah, that never happened back in the lunchroom at Tupper,” he said, a little embarrassed.

  “No,” I awkwardly agreed.

  Sam went to the counter for another cappuccino, and returned moments later with a paper cup emblazoned with the Joe’s logo. I was a bit surprised that he ordered his beverage to go, but I guess he was playing it safe. I had to get back to Hugh anyway.

  On the sidewalk, we said our good-byes.

  I remember heading back to the paper thinking how Sam and I were the perfect team. Friends in the most complete sense. Still, I was trying to mentally decode the meaning of what had just happened. We’re such perfect friends and we’re perfect together—why aren’t we … together? How many times had someone asked me that question? I must have touched his knee dozens of times before—but this time that act wasn’t so much a matter of crossing the boundary between friendship and romance as erasing it. Two weekends later, at the Tupper High School reunion, everything changed.

  “Yo, Clarissa!”

  Who in this place knows my name? I wonder. Blinking out of my memory, I look up and blink again.

  Shit.

  Norm.

  He’s standing right in front of me, sucking up way too much of my personal space. I grimace.

  “I never heard from you. Did you get the flowers I sent?” he asks. “You’re not just letting ol’ Norm hang out there to dry again, are you?”

  I could scream. Not only am I not happy to see Norm, but I’m instantly reminded that one of Norm’s most pathetic habits is that Norm insists on referring to himself in the pitiable third person. You’d think a copywriter trained by Hugh Hamilton would have known better than to get involved with someone who talks about himself in the third. Hugh would have eviscerated him. Yet another reason why Norm was such a colossal mistake.

  “I did receive the flowers,” I snarl at him and stand. “And the balloon-o-gram, and the Legume of the Month Club membership, and the official certificate notifying me that an endangered baby Sri Lankan elephant has been sponsored in my name.”

  Norm gives me a lazy, self-satisfied grin. “Thought thirty-two cents a day was a small price to pay to make you happy. Not to mention how comforting it must be for the baby elephant.”

  “Yes, and I gave them to the Kute Kritters Day Care on my street,” I say, although I’ve never been sure if Kute Kritters is day care for kids or pets, but that doesn’t matter right now.

  “Norm, what is there about ‘over’ you can’t understand?” I demand. I’ve said this to him more times than I can count, but, as usual, it doesn’t seem to register. What did I ever see in this idiot? Oh, right … he’s got abs you can grate cheese on.

  He takes my hand and tugs me toward the door. “Come on, Clarissa. I want to show you something.”

  I pull my hand away, but follow him because it’s the only way out and that’s where I want to go. The old skater dudes are still hanging around outside. They’re crossing the street heading toward us.

  “See those guys? I just sold three of them five brand-new custom skate decks. Aging hipsters love ’em. You’ve got to see the new boards—they’re awesome. I’m officially a business now, and ol’ Norm is about to make some serious bank. I’ve got a major backer and my peeps doin’ the gluin’. No more Gorilla Glue for me. Honest. I’ve sworn off it.”

  “Congratulations,” I say dully, ignoring Norm’s plea for redemption from our early skateboard-making debacle. I look for the best direction to dash. “Let’s just be clear, we’re still broken up—you have to get that through your head, okay?”

  The aging hipsters join our little tête-à-tête and Norm makes his big play in front of them. “Aw, come on, Clarissa, give good ol’ Norm another chance,” he pleads. “You’re the snappiest, most rad dudette I’ve ever met. How about you and o
l’ Norm take my new newfound cash and celebrate with a chow down? You’re my queen, Clarissa, you know that.”

  I grind my teeth as they all turn to look at me. I postulate that if the rejection is spoken in Norm’s native tongue, in front of his peer dude group, it might sink in, probably the one thing I haven’t tried.

  “No, Clarissa does not want to go out to dinner with poor ol’ Norm. Clarissa and Norm are broken up, kaput, finished, and will never be getting back together, ever. Clarissa has a big job interview at the Seaport tomorrow, so Clarissa has a lot of work to do, which is why Clarissa is walking away from ol’ Norm right now. Again. Forever.”

  I turn and make a fast exit, before any more pronoun-free conversation ensues.

  “Whoa, dude, she just threw your heart on the ground and stomped all over it,” I overhear one of the bearded Big Lebowski–ish hipsters say.

  “Yeah, just shows she’s pretty hung up on me,” Norm responds.

  Wonders never cease. I keep walking.

  “See ya soon, babe,” he calls after me.

  Turning the corner, I hope it’s just a figure of speech.

  CHAPTER 16

  On Thursday morning I’m back at Nuzegeek. I’ve chosen an outfit that will likely render Mr. Millburn apoplectic: a ’70s-era cotton candy–pink jacket nipped in at the waist and a pair of jet-black, raw-silk, high-waisted, wide-legged trousers à la ’70s YSL. I’ve secured my hair back from my face and wear a pair of round, wire-rimmed sunglasses, John Lennon–style. I’m pretty sure MT will approve. She may dress like a super-chic professional, but I’m betting she’s a gal who appreciates fashion verve when she sees it. Dartmoor, that vulture, is waiting for me in front of MT’s double doors. We exchange sneers and allow Druscilla to escort us in without comment.

  Again, the white glare of MT’s office flares before me, but this time, I’m ready for it. I smoothly lower the sunglasses to the bridge of my nose while Dartmoor stands there blinking manically until Druscilla works her magic with the push-button electric blinds. You’d think, after working here all this time, he’d be better prepared. It’s a moment before his pupils return to normal size, and this gives me time to select the better chair closer to MT’s white desk.