Page 41 of The Make-Up Test
Sometimes, the right choice hurt far worse than the wrong one.
“Tell Cleo I said hi, okay?” With that, Allison hung up and dropped her phone on the table. As soon as it left her hand, she gave in to the sob shoving at her chest.
Colin’s lips were a tight line. His hands waved about, lost birds uncertain where to go.
Her mother and Ethan had drained all the fight from her. There was nothing left to stop Allison from dropping her forehead to Colin’s chest. Nothing to warn her against knotting her hands into his shirt hem. The rise and fall of his breaths lulled her like the rhythm of a rocking chair. One of his hands smoothed her dark hair while the other settled on her lower back. Her tears soaked the front of his T-shirt.
She gave herself two minutes. One-hundred-and-twenty seconds, each one counted down by the tick of Colin’s watch. Then she sat up and swiped her face.
Sniffing, she pointed at the dark blue spot on his chest. “I drowned Aquaman.”
He glanced down at his shirt. “Irony.”
They both laughed, and it felt to Allison like a deep breath after staying too long underwater.
“Sorry to make such a scene,” she mumbled.
He shook his head. “Do you want to talk about it?” His hands flexed as if he was fighting the urge to reach for her.
Colin knew about Jed. One night not long after they’d started dating, they’d been in his room, tangled in each other with a rerun ofFriends(another of her mother’s favorites that had haunted Allison’s childhood) streaming in the background, when Allison had caught sight of Monica Gellar’s fat suit. Straddling Colin with her bra straps by her elbows and her pants unzipped, she’d launched into a ten-minute tirade about representations of fatness in popular culturethat had eventually led to a confession about how awful Jed had been about her weight (and everything else), and how hard it was to have her mother pushing her to have a relationship with him, as if none of his hurtful words mattered.
Not to be outdone (of course), Colin had then shared how, because of him, his mother had never gotten to go to law school or become a law professor, which had been her dream, and how his grandfather had given up on retiring early to support them. Colin had promised them that he’d be the professor instead. It was the only thing he thought about most days. Making it up to them for choosing him.
Clearly, Colin understood family pressures, but there wasn’t anything to say. Allison had told her mother and Jed what she’d needed. And even if shehadwanted to talk, it couldn’t be to Colin. They couldn’t grow closer. Too much was at stake if they imploded a second time.
Pushing her chair a few inches to the left, she placed her Chaucer textbook on the table. Jabbing her finger at the book hard enough to hurt, she said, “I want to talk about this.”
She pretended not to see the disappointment in Colin’s eyes as they dipped to the open page.
Chapter 15
Allison let herself fall into the rhythm of the iambic pentameter as she stood before the class, hitting each of the hard vowels and consonants that gave Middle English its Germanic sound with as much gusto as she dared.
“O deere cosyn Palamon,” quod he,
“Thyn is the victorie of this aventure.
Ful blisfully in prison maistow dure—
In prison? Certes nay, but in paradys!”
By the time she reached that last hard vowel with para-dees, her jaw ached from nervous tension.
Raising her eyes to the room, she took a breath, the air crackling against the silence. Clothes rustled softly as some of the students shifted in their seats, and the keys on a few laptops clacked.
This was it. Her chance to prove to Wendy that somewhere inside of Allison was the teacher she pretended to be every time the wordrecitationwas mentioned.
Her gaze skirted to Colin, who gave her a thumbs-up. Before Wendy had called her to the lecture podium, he’d scrawled some affirmations on the top corner of Allison’s presentation notes. Goofy things likeYou’re going to slay thisandDon’t let this be a knightmare.Who knew bad puns could be a balm to one’s anxiety?
Colin, apparently.
Returning his smile with a small one of her own, Allison rolled back her shoulders and shifted her attention to the class.
“I chose this passage,” she said, “because of the language. In the face of Arcite’s love for Emily, words start to lose their meaning. Being free from his prison becomes a prison unto itself because he’ll be separated from the sight of her. Meanwhile, he views his cousin, still locked in the tower above Emily’s garden, as not only free, but in paradise. This is a subtle way in which Chaucer’s narrator depicts love, and the women who incite this love, as dangerous and unsettling.” She cast a glance over the faces before her. “Do you see anything else in this passage that might support my ideas? Any lines, or even words?”
Whole minutes ticked by without a response. Sweat gathered at her temples and soaked the backs of her knees. If she moved from behind the lectern, everyone would see it raining down her calves.
Clearly, Allison would never be good at this. She’d led herself down the wrong career path. How naïve to believe her dreams from elementary school were sound life goals.
