Page 55 of Give In to Me
“I’m fine, David.”
“You’re not fine. And that’s okay. You don’t have to be fine.” He stops walking. I stop too. He faces me, and his expression is the most serious I’ve ever seen on him, which is saying something because David’s resting face is a golden retriever’s. “You don’t have to tell me what happened. But you’ve to eat. And you’ve to let someone be here for you, because whatever this is, you’re disappearing into it, and I’m watching it happen, and I’m not built to just watch.”
I look at David, who’s twenty-one and plays baseball and builds spreadsheets about girls and has never once asked me to be anything other than exactly who I’m, and something in my chest shifts. Not cracks—I’m past cracking. Shifts, like a foundation settling, finding a new place to bear weight.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, you can be here.”
He nods once. Pulls a granola bar from his jacket pocket. I realize he’s been carrying these for me, keeping them on his person the way someone carries an EpiPen for a person with allergies, and hands it to me. We walk the rest of the way to the humanities building in silence, and I eat the granola bar, and it tastes like dust, but I eat it.
THE COFFEE SHOP HASchanged.
Joe is gone. The Thursday counter is staffed by a girl I don’t recognize, someone new, someone whose shoes are campus-appropriate and whose latte art is mediocre and who doesn’t know my order before I give it. I stand at the counter and I saylatte, pleaseand she makes it wrong, but I take it to my table by the window anyway. I drink it and I don’t mind, because minding would require caring, and caring would require feeling, and feeling is a door I closed on a bathroom floor two weeks ago.
Joe’s absence is its own message. Luciano pulled his men. Not just the barista cover, but all of them. The newspaper reader outside the science building, the one near the library, the one at the dining hall. I haven’t spotted a single wrong pair of shoes in two weeks. The surveillance that used to wrap around my campus life like a second coat, the constant quiet proof that someone was watching, someone cared, someone couldn’t stop protecting me even while pretending I didn’t exist—gone.
During the first avoidance, he sent his men. He treated me like air, but the air was guarded.
This time the guards are gone too.
I drink my wrong latte, open my thesis, and work.
IN CLASS, I’M A MODELstudent.
Third row. Same seat. Notebook open, pen ready, posture that my mother would approve of. I arrive early and I leave when the lecture ends and I don’t linger and I don’t draw circles on the margin and I don’t look at the podium longer than any other student looks at the podium.
I take perfect notes.
I answer when called on, because he does call on students, always has, and he doesn’t skip me.
I’m furniture again. The thing I was for two years before the recognition, before his men in the back row, before a finger froze mid-circle and the floor tilted. I’m one face in a sea of faces, and I’m performing normalcy with a competence that should scare me but doesn’t, because this is what Lively women do. We show up. We endure. We fix the fence.
But I catch something.
Week three. A Thursday. He’s pacing the front of the hall, mid-lecture, talking about system resilience. His voice is the same. His pacing is the same. His suit is charcoal, sleeves down, every seam in place.
But his eyes keep drifting to the third row.
Not to my face but my hand, which are motionless, flanking my notebook like bookends. My hands that used to draw circles he tracked from the podium, that used to tell him everything I was feeling without my permission, that used to move in loops he watched with an attention that had nothing to do with academia.
My hands that have stopped.
He’s looking at the place where my circles used to be, and something crosses his face fast, there and gone. Not the almost-smile, but something worse. A man looking at an absence and recognizing what it means.
I drop my eyes to my notebook. My pen moves. My letters are perfect.
I don’t give him my circles. They were mine, and he returned them marked this is done, and I won’t draw them for a man who chose a wall over my hands.
DAVID TAKES ME TO BUCKY’Son a Friday.
Not asks, buttakes. Shows up at my apartment at six PM, knocks three times, and when I open the door in my pajamas with my thesis open on my bed and my hair in the kind of bun that communicatesI’ve abandoned all social contracts, he looks at me for two seconds and says, “Nope. Get dressed. We’re going.”
“David, I’m working.”
“You’ve been working for three weeks straight. You’ve lost more weight, your eyes have that thing going on where they look at me but they’re really looking at a spot about six feet behind my head, and I promised Martha I would feed you.”
