“That doesn’t look too bad,” Grace said, reaching into a pocket and coming out with a Band-Aid. “It could have been a lot worse.” She looked down at Hannibal and gave him a scowl. “Not nice!” she said to him.
“Can he hear you?” I asked, blowing on the non-wound.
She picked Hannibal back up, patting him on the head. “She just needs a lot of touching,” she said. “She has to learn that that’s safe.”
I looked up from putting the Band-Aid on my wrist. “He’s a she?”
Grace nodded, reaching into her pocket and taking out an oatmeal cookie.
I shook my head as she tried to hand it to me. “I think I’m okay for now,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Give it to Hannibal. If you feed it to her, she’ll trust you more.”
The thought of putting my hand near her mouth again wasn’t too appealing right then. But I put the cookie up to her lips anyway, like Grace showed me, letting her lick it off my hand, rubbing her head with my free one.
“We just have to be extra careful with the runt generally, and spend more time,” she said. “Not less. Less gets you into trouble.”
I pulled my hand away. “Sounds like most people I know,” I said.
We headed down toward the lake, Hannibal in Grace’s arms, Sam in tow behind me. Grace seemed happier—or more comfortable, at least—now that the dogs were around. When we got down to the lake, she sat herself down on the edge and took her shoes off, put her feet right in the water. I followed suit. It didn’t feel so nauseatingly hot when our feet were in the water. I felt, automatically, a lot cooler—and happier—a chill racing up my spine for the first time all day.
“You want to know a secret?” Grace said. “Well, maybe it’s not really a secret, but you want to know the real reason I don’t want to leave here?”
“There’s a boy,” I said for her. “He’s the reason?”
“How did you do that?”
“I’m not that old.”
“You’re pretty old,” she said.
“I am,” I said. I put my head in my hands, shaking my head. “How did that happen?”
Grace started laughing. I looked at her and smiled. I hadn’t been that much older than her when Matt and I started dating. And I remembered it so clearly—that feeling at the beginning—that incredible feeling that this was the first real thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to tell anyone who would listen: my mother, my friends, the mailman. Even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I think I believed that talking about Matt made us more real, somehow, more permanent. In some way, maybe it did.
“The thing is, he’s a year behind me in school,” she said. “He has a year left here, but the problem is he doesn’t want to go to college at all, even when he can. Except maybe the community college here, which is pretty terrible.”
It was called Baruch. Baraque. Something like that. I had seen it driving in. The entire campus was composed of three small buildings, a circular driveway. No ocean access that I could see.
“He wants to just stay here and keep everything like it is. His family has these two flower shops. One here, one the next town over. And he’ll be fine. He can do that forever, and be content. He wants to do that forever.”
“What do you want?” I said.
“I want to keep him happy,” she said.
I looked down at the water. Sam was standing right on the edge, getting closer to waddling in. Hannibal was busy digging, nestling into my side headfirst. I reached out, gingerly, to pet her. My junior year of college, Matt had been a finalist for a great internship at an architecture firm in Chicago, and he would have taken it, wouldn’t have let us being apart from each other stop him at all, if they had taken him. It was the first time I questioned my own decision to attend NYU instead of going out to California like I’d originally planned. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to go, but it had been such an easy decision for me to choose being near him, keeping him happy. I couldn’t understand why, all those years later, our being apart wasn’t a harder one for him to make. It took a long time for me to understand that the fact that I feared him going contributed to him not being scared himself. That was often the truth. Someone’s affection would give someone else freedom.
“I just think if I stay here for the year and commute, we’ll figure it out, you know? He’ll see college isn’t so weird. Maybe he’ll want to come with me the next year.” Grace shook her head, almost angrily. “I just think people forget what it feels like to really be in love, you know? Like when that’s the only thing in the world that matters. I just don’t want to decide it’s not that important. Do you know what I mean by that?”
I knew exactly what she meant, which made it harder to figure out how to tell her what I wanted to say, which was that it wasn’t always everything. Love. And still, what did I know? The reason Matt and I hadn’t worked out wasn’t because I loved him like that. It was because he stopped loving me like that. And really, why did that have to be the end of the story? I had made it the end because I was too scared about what might be coming next—some watered-down version of what we’d once been. What had come next instead? Me, motionless, unable to do much without him. The watered-down version of what I’d once been.
“So did you have a serious boyfriend when you were in high school?” Grace asked. She put her hands in the lake to wet them, petting Sam’s back, cooling him down.
“Kind of.”
She looked at me, confused. “Kind of serious?”
“Kind of high school,” I said. “He was already in college when we met. It’s a long story.”