Chapter 42a

 The blood was everywhere. 

Spattered over the tarp, the chairs. Darkening Rona’s skin like a spray-tan. Clumping in her hair.  Crusting on the faces of the artsy college students walking past them in the aisles, the ones who’d been sitting in front.

Gavin looked down at his shirt. It was like he’d been a bystander at a shooting.

Rona ran a finger along the fabric on his shoulder.  “Oil,” she said.  “Probably won’t come out.”

Of course it wouldn’t.  First they fucked up his play, and now his shirt.  Whatever.  He wasn’t uptight or anything. He could just let it go. Just a shirt. One less thing to take with him to Kansas.

Rona wanted to talk about the play, he could tell, but you couldn’t say anything in here, not in the middle of this blood-spattered audience, all filing out of the theater in silence, hushed and reverent.  She held it in until they were back in his car, door clicked closed and locked.  He was waiting to say something, too.  He hoped it was the same thing.

“Wasn’t that so amazing?  The way Mi was, he was so creepy in a way but—”

“They changed the ending.”

It had been bothering him since he saw it.  It was freaking him out worse than his shirt. Never mind how Liam Stump wrote it, how it was always done.  Just forget all that and make up your own ending. Evidently Rona hadn’t noticed it.

“What do you mean?”

Just what he said the first time. “They changed the ending.”  With more emphasis, like that would make his meaning more obvious.

“Really?”  She was detangling a bloody strand of hair, separating it half and then in half again. “But it was the same last line.  Yes, that’s right. Bloody kill me.”

Not the dialogue. It was that blue scene.  Gavin had seen more productions of The Divine Sharpness than anyone on the planet, and none of them, definitely not one, had ended like that.  They ended the way Liam Stump had written it. Bo and Mi continue tearing at the heart with teeth and fingers.  Beating heart slows, stops.  Fade to black.

“The blue scene,” he said. “At the end, when it went all blue and they floated into the sky.”

“Oh yeah, maybe that was a little different.” She gave up on that chunk of hair, moved on to another one. “I mean, of course it was. You’re the expert.”

It wasn’t a little different. It was totally different.  It was changing the whole meaning of the play.  He didn’t say anything more about it, though. If she couldn’t share his frustration, his indignation at this brazen display of directorial activism…well, there was nothing more to talk about. You can’t just change the ending of someone’s play.

Rona was off on something else already, something about the body and the mind.  He didn’t feel like following, just focused on driving.  The collar of his ruined shirt was itchy against his neck, and his hands were sticky on the steering wheel.  He tried to clear his head, stop thinking about the changed ending, but it was still there, lurking like a headache in the peripheral parts of his brain.

“Do you want to go to Café Firenze?” she asked, as soon as they turned off the state road and into New Buffalo.

“Like this?”

“Like what?”  She looked down, saw the spray of oil on her arms. It wasn’t  so bloody now that it had smeared in a bit, more like they were returning from a really rough week of camping. “That doesn’t matter.  Everyone’s cool there.”

Right, everyone was cool.  He imagined running into Randy Ledbetter there, surrounded by a six foot moat of doting students. Or what about Marjorie Mendelssohn, reviewing the dissertation of some graduate student she liked better than him. Saturday night, they won’t be there. Nothing to worry about. No, still. Showing up at the place where all his professors held office hours, on basically a date with his student, covered in rust-colored oil?  Horrible idea.

“Can we go to the other one?”

“You mean College Grounds?” He could hear her nose wrinkle.  “Why?”

“I just like it better.”

“Fine, I guess.” She pulled down the sun visor and smoothed out her hair in the mirror, like that was going to help anything. “We can go there.”

The place was packed with Kaylas and Bradens (that’s what they were called now) studying in their New Buffalo t-shirts and baseball caps and slutty shorts. Saturday night, they should be out drinking somewhere.  But no, they were here, filling every table with their crooked towers of books and file cards. 

Finals. They started in two weeks. Worst time to ever to try to have a conversation in a coffee shop.

Rona sighed, like why did you bring me to this awful place.  “I’ll find us a table,” she said. “Get me a coffee.”

“Just a regular coffee?” He had kind of expected her to get something weird like green tea or whatever a rooibos was.

“Yeah, black.”  She wandered towards the back where there were more seats.  A lot more seats, like the maximum number you could fit into the room.

Gavin wiped his face and hands with a couple napkins before he ordered.  There wasn’t a mirror anywhere, but he checked himself out in a spoon at the counter. Not horrible, but not good either.  Nothing like clean.  Plus his shirt still looked like he’d been rolling in a mud puddle. The barista squinted kind of funny at him, but he didn’t say anything, just handed him two medium paper cups so he could pump his own coffee out of a carafe.  

He found Rona way in back.  He had to shimmy his way to the table, turning his hips one way and the other to fit between the tables without spilling too much coffee.  The table lurched to one side when he set the cups down, but he was kind of expecting it.

“So, why not?” she asked, like the conversation about New York was just continuing, like The Divine Sharpness had never happened. 

She picked up her cup and studied it, skeptical.  Café Firenze used real porcelain for-here cups, which was a lot nicer for sure.

“You really want to be a professor?” she asked.

“I’m going to be a professor.”  That was just the fact of the matter.  He had accepted it now.  Want had nothing to do with it.  

“It just seems so, like, depressing,” she said.  “Like, you seem really depressed.”

Depressed?  No one had ever called him that before. He was way too normal to be depressed.

“Your energy.” She took a sip of her coffee, held it in her mouth. “You seem kind of weighed down, like you’re sighing all the time.”

Well, weighed-down, sure. Like the weight of the air around him was pressing down on him, squishing him towards the ground. That wasn’t depressed.  That was just the way things were. He tried to think of one professor, one graduate student who didn’t seem like that. Nope, nothing. Blank.

“That’s part of the job, I guess.”  

She turned the cup in her hands, smearing red-brown fingerprints over the white paper.

“You could do something else.”

“This is the only thing I know how to do.”  

“But you can learn something else.  You’re not that old.”

“I’ll be thirty in July.”

“Really.” Eyebrows raised, like she hadn’t realized.  “Well.  Age doesn’t matter.” Yes it does. It was obvious, right there in here eyes, the better-you-than-me tone of her voice. She was like, what? Nineteen.  “You can always start over. Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena.”

He’d never heard her speak Spanish before.  It was kind of cute how it sounded, a little sassy, maybe a Miami accent or something.

“That’s like, better late than never,” she said, her cheeks flushing under the muddy red. “My mom always says it.”

Gavin hadn’t touched his own coffee yet.  He took a sip from the top, where an oily skin was forming over it. He felt squished into his seat, trapped. He tried to scoot back a few inches, but his chair bumped against the one behind him.  He turned around and a Kayla was glaring at him, all boobs and pink gloss.  He mouthed the word sorry and turned back to Rona.

“Here’s the thing,” he said.  “I’m gonna go.  It’s basically inevitable.”

She drank some more coffee, worked it through her jaws like she was chewing.  Even all sticky and dirty, she managed to look amazing, maybe more than usual.  Like an amazing person, someone who’d been through things. He wondered if he’d ever looked that amazing to anyone in his whole life.

“I want you to make me something,” she said.

He shook his head.  “I don’t know how to make anything.”

“But if you could make something. If you could make anything you wanted, what would it be?”

“Well.”  He’d never really said this out loud to anyone, or even to himself.  It was too embarrassing. But the way Rona was looking at him, the bigness and darkness of her eyes, made him want to say something she would approve of. “I always thought it would be cool to make a movie.  But you can’t just do that.”

“Of course you can.” She smiled, put down her cup so she could clap her dirty hands together. “Listen.  I’m going to let you move to Kansas.  But you’re going to send me a movie.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t have to be long or anything.  It can be five minutes.”  She pointed towards his pocket.  “You can make it with your phone.  Just a little movie. Something you care about.”

She reached out, put her hand over his on the table.  “You have to promise me.”

All right.  That was easy enough.  A five-minute movie with his phone. Maybe that would be a good thing to do in Kansas, learn to do a little video-editing, make a dumb little movie. He was going to have a lot of free time on his hands.

“I promise.” 

“Blood promise.”  She dragged her finger across his arm, smearing it with brown oil.  Then she held out her own arm, just a little browner than his. “Your turn.” 

He traced his finger over her skin.  It caught a little as it moved.  Maybe there was something else in that oil, something sugary like syrup. He could feel little hairs under his finger sticking to her skin.

“Okay,” she said, holding out her finger.  “I, Gavin Cheng-Johnson.”

He looked around to see who was watching this weird, witchy behavior, totally unfit for the fraternityness around them.  No one.  It was loud, nineties hip-hop blasting, girls complaining about their boyfriends and their professors.

He lifted his finger to touch hers.  “I, Gavin Cheng-Johnson,” he repeated.  

“Do solemnly swear.”

“Do solemnly swear.”

“By this blood of Bo and Mi.”

“By this—”

“Don’t laugh.  It’s serious.”

“By this blood of Bo and Mi.”

“That I will make a movie.”

“That I will.”  This one was kind of hard.  He swallowed, licked bitter coffee flavor from his lips. “I’ll make a movie.”

“And send it to Rona Gomez.”

“And send it to Rona Gomez.”

“There.”  Rona dropped her finger, left his hanging in the air in front of him.  “Now you’re free to go.  I release you. As long as you keep your promise.”

He looked at his own finger, hovering over the table, cuticles stained.  Something inside of him did feel sort of free.  It was like how you’d feel if you stepped off a cliff and suddenly discovered you could float on air.

“I’ll keep it,” he said.

When he dropped her off at the dorm a half hour later, she made him park so he could get out and give her a hug.  A goodbye hug.  Ever since she had dropped out of his class, each time he saw her had seemed like the last, but this was really it.  Maybe he'd see her in New York someday—Sinder would be living there, so maybe Gavin would find a conference to attend out there, or just go for a regular visit.  But it was just as likely that this was the end, that when she was going to unwrap her arms from his neck and be gone from his life forever. 

“I’ll be waiting,” she said, when she let go.  Waiting?  “For your movie.  Remember.  You took an oath.” 

He nodded, but she had already turned to leave.  He stood next to his car, watched her tangled hair bounce against her back as she pulled open the heavy residence hall door and disappeared. 

<Chapter 41a

Chapter 43a>