The Girl He Used to Know Read online

  “I wondered that too,” she says.

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you for an urban dweller.”

  “It’s only a twenty-minute walk to work, and if the weather’s bad, I can take the L. I have a driver’s license, but I don’t own a car. It’s not like I really need one to get around.”

  “How do you like working at the library?”

  “I love it. It’s all I ever wanted to do.” She pauses and then says, “You must like your job, too. You’re still working there ten years later.”

  “It’s a solid company, and they’ve made good on all their promises.” I’m even a bit further along on the career path they laid out for me during the interview process, and most days I like my job just fine. Some days I hate it, but then I remind myself that, just like Annika said, it’s all I ever wanted.

  “Do you still swim?”

  “Every morning at the gym. What about you? What do you like to do in your free time?”

  “I volunteer at the animal shelter when I can, and I have a part-time position at the Chicago Children’s Theatre. I help teach an acting class on Saturday mornings. I wrote a play.”

  “You wrote a play? That’s amazing.”

  “It was just a fun thing to do. The kids did a great job with it. I’m working on another one right now, for them to perform at Christmastime.”

  “How old are they?”

  “I work with several different age groups. The youngest are four and five and the oldest are in the nine-to-eleven range. They’re a great bunch of kids.”

  “Do you have any of your own?”

  Her eyes widen. “Me? No.”

  “Are you married? Or in a relationship?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ve never been married. I was seeing someone, but we broke up. Are you married?”

  “I was. We divorced about a year and a half ago.”

  “Were you married to that girl? The one you told me about on my answering machine?”

  So, I guess she did get the message after all. “Yes.”

  “Do you have kids?” She looks apprehensive as she waits for my answer.

  “No.”

  Liz had very clear goals in mind when it came to her career, and she wasn’t going to stop climbing the corporate ladder until she shattered the glass ceiling. Her passion for business was like a homing beacon when I first arrived in New York, beckoning me toward her. I was all for Liz climbing the corporate ladder, but each rung had a timeline attached and when she informed me she wouldn’t be ready to start a family until she was forty-one, and what did I think about freezing her eggs—I thought she was kidding.

  She wasn’t.

  It’s funny how the very trait that attracts you to someone is the same trait you can’t stand when you’re untangling yourselves from each other. And not funny ha-ha. Funny like how in the world could you not have seen it?

  I’d agreed to meet with Annika today because I’d hoped for some answers, but by the time we finish our coffee we’ve progressed no further than idle small talk. She is in no way prepared to revisit what happened between us, at least not yet, and it would be unnecessarily harsh to push her.

  “Ready?” I ask when nothing but melting ice remains in our cups. She stands in response and as we walk, she mentions how much she loves her apartment’s proximity to the park and museums, and points out her favorite places to grab takeout or go shopping. Her neighborhood provides everything she could ever want, and Annika the urban dweller makes perfect sense now. She lives in a bubble where nothing takes her out of her comfort zone, and everything is within her reach.

  I should have realized it immediately: Annika is doing fine. There’s no one here to save.

  As we approach her apartment building, her bouncing stride and nervous chatter ramps up as her anxiety reaches a fever pitch. Has she been waiting for me to say something and now that we’re almost home, she’s afraid a confrontation is imminent?

  I grab her hand because I don’t know how else to still her, and the memory that slams into me stops me in my tracks. We’re not on S. Wabash anymore but rather the doorway of her college apartment building. Her palm is small and soft in mine, and it feels exactly the way it did when I held it for the first time.

  “We don’t have to talk about it.” She stops moving and the look of sheer relief on her face tells me I was right. There won’t be any explanations today, but I’m not sure I have the fortitude to keep peeling back Annika’s layers in order to obtain them. “I just wanted to know if you were okay.”

  She takes a deep breath. “I’m okay.”

  “Good.” I glance toward the entrance of her building. “Well, I should get going. It was great seeing you again. Thanks for the coffee. Take care, Annika.”

  Though she has trouble deciphering other people’s facial expressions, her face is an open book and no one would ever have trouble understanding hers. I’ve always wondered if she exaggerates them to help people understand what she’s thinking, the way she wishes they would for her. I find it endearing. When she comprehends that one coffee date is the extent of our reunion, she looks crushed. Though it isn’t intentional and it’s certainly not retaliatory, I have the fleeting thought that this is the first time I’ve ever done anything to hurt her.

  And it feels awful.

  But maybe my failed marriage isn’t far enough behind me. That’s the thing no one tells you about divorce. No matter how much you and your spouse agree that the relationship is broken, it hurts like hell when you go your separate ways, and the pain follows you around until one day, it doesn’t. It’s only recently that I’ve noticed its absence, and I have no desire to gamble on replacing it with more heartbreak.

  I don’t want to leave.

  I want to pull Annika close, twist my fingers in her hair and kiss her the way I used to.

  Instead I walk away from her feeling more than a little lonely and very, very tired.

  6

  Annika

  THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

  AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

  1991

  One week after I beat Jonathan at chess, Eric sat down across from me a few minutes before Sunday night’s club meeting began, thus restoring order to the chaos he’d inflicted upon my world.

  “Tell me this is the year you’re going to agree to compete,” Eric said.

  “You know it’s not.”

  “You could if you wanted to.”

  “I don’t want to. I don’t like being away from home.”

  “You’d only have to travel a couple times. Three if we make it to the Pan-Am. There’s going to be a practice meet in St. Louis in October. You could go to that one. Feel it out. Drive home afterward.”

  “I don’t drive.”

  “You could ride with someone.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Eric nodded. “Good. I bet you’d like it.”

  I would totally hate it, and I purged the thought from my mind immediately.

  I was studying the board, already formulating my strategy and pondering which opening move would be most effective, when a voice said, “Would you mind if I played with Annika again?”

  Jonathan was standing there looking down at us. Why would he want to play with me again? On the rare occasions when Eric missed a meeting, the other club members rarely sought me out to play, and I usually ended up slipping away and going back home.

  “Sure, man. No problem,” Eric said.

  Jonathan sat down across from me. “Is that okay with you?”

  I wiped my palms on my jeans and tried not to panic. “I always play with Eric.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “What? No. I just … I always play with him.” But Eric had already taken a seat two tables away across from a junior named Drew.

  “I’m sorry. Do you want me to ask him to switch back?”

  That was exactly what I wanted, but what I wanted even more was for the two of us to start playing so we could stop all this talking. So I did the
only thing I could to make that happen.

  I picked up my white pawn and made the first move.

  * * *

  This time, he won. I’d drawn on every bit of skill and experience I possessed, but it still wasn’t enough, and he deserved the victory. “Thanks,” he said. “That was a great game.” He whistled as he packed up his things.

  Our game had gone on for so long that once again, everyone had already left for dinner. When I picked up my backpack and turned to go, Jonathan grabbed his and fell in beside me. I fervently hoped it was because we were both headed in the same general direction of the exit and that it would be a largely silent endeavor, but I was wrong.

  “Do you want to catch up with everyone? Get some pizza?”

  “No.”

  “You’re really good at chess.”

  “I know.”

  “How long have you been playing?” he asked.

  “Since I was seven.”

  “How long have you been a member of the chess club?”

  “Since freshman year.”

  He was probably six-two to my five-four, and his legs were much longer than mine. I had to walk briskly to match his pace in order to answer the questions he kept firing, which hardly seemed fair since I didn’t really want to answer or keep up with him in the first place.

  “Did you always know you were going to join the club?”

  “No.”

  I’d discovered the chess club by accident three weeks after I moved into my dorm room, on the same day I’d called my parents, told them I was dropping out, and asked them to come get me the next morning. I’d spent the preceding twenty days swirling in a paralyzing vortex of loud sounds and bad smells, overwhelming stimuli, and confusing social norms, and I’d had just about all I could take. My parents had taken me out of school halfway through my seventh-grade year, and my mother had homeschooled me for the rest, so the transition had been especially jarring and confusing for me. Janice Albright, a chatty brunette from Altoona, Iowa, who the university had randomly assigned to be my roommate, seemed to float effortlessly through the rapid-fire onslaught of college life while I kept getting stuck in the maze, taking wrong turns and backtracking. I trailed behind her like a wisp of smoke she could never quite shake, a lone figure in a sea of bobbing twosomes and foursomes laughing and joking their way to class. I followed Janice to lectures, to the library, and the dining hall.

  On that particular Sunday, Janice and two of her friends returned to our dorm room shortly after I made the tear-filled call to my parents. One of them sat down with Janice on her bed, and the other settled herself at the end of mine. I was sitting cross-legged near the top and the girl’s presence drove me under the covers with my book and the penlight I’d been using since I was a child when I was supposed to be sleeping and not reading. It was September and our unair-conditioned dorm room felt like a sauna most of the time; under the covers it was nearly unendurable, the air stifling and hot.

  “Just because you look like that doesn’t mean you can be weird,” the girl said. I froze, hoping she wasn’t speaking to me but knowing instantly that she was. I’d heard some variation of this sentiment more than once when I would do something people thought was strange or out of the ordinary. But she’s so pretty, they’d marvel, as if the way I looked and the way I acted were mutually exclusive.

  I am pretty. I know this for two reasons: People have been telling me my whole life, and I own a mirror. Sometimes I wondered how much worse people would treat me if I were ugly. I never thought about it for long because I was almost certain I knew the answer.

  “Be nice,” Janice said.

  “What?” the girl said. “It’s weird.”

  Though Janice had rarely spoken to me in the three weeks we’d shared a living space, she had never been unkind. And once during our second week in the dorm, when I was running dangerously low on clean clothes, she showed me where the laundry facilities were and taught me how to use the machines. Silently, we stood side by side and folded our clean clothes, stacking them in the same basket that she carried back to our room.

  Suddenly I was in middle school again, and the kind of terror I hadn’t felt in years enveloped me. I just wanted them to leave me alone, and I trembled as my eyes filled with tears. Beads of sweat prickled my hairline, and the air under the covers became unbearable. But there was no way I could show my face now.

  “Why don’t you guys take off without me,” Janice said. “I’ve got some studying to do.”

  “Jesus. You really struck out in the roommate department,” one of the girls said.

  “Forget about her,” said the other. “She’s not your problem.”

  “I don’t mind looking out for her. Besides, it would be like kicking a puppy.” She said it quietly, but I heard it.

  The soft click of the door signaled their departure, and I came out from under the covers and took deep breaths of the cooler-only-by-comparison air. “Why would anyone ever kick a puppy?”

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “Then why would you say that?”

  “It’s just an expression.”

  I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. The more I tried to stem the flow of my tears, the faster they fell. Neither of us spoke for a while and my sniffling was the only sound as I tried to get myself under control. The ringing phone saved me from further humiliation when Janice rose to answer it.

  “Hi. Yes, it’s Janice,” I heard her say and then she stretched the cord to its limit so she could take the phone out into the hallway and talk to whoever it was in private, away from me. After a few minutes, she returned, hung up the phone, and sat down on the end of my bed.

  “Sometimes I miss my old room. I have six brothers, but I’m the baby, and they’re all out of the house now. But I remember what it was like when they all lived at home. They drove me crazy. It’s hard not to have a space where you can be alone.”

  I hadn’t uttered a word, and yet Janice somehow seemed to know exactly what I was thinking and how I was feeling. How in the world did she do that?

  “It’s so hot out. I was thinking of walking to the union for a lemonade. Why don’t you come with me?”

  I didn’t want to. My parents had promised they’d be there in the morning to take me away from this nightmare, and I wanted to dive back under the covers and count down the minutes. But there was a part of my brain that understood what she’d done for me, so I said, “Okay.”

  As we walked to the union, Janice pointed out the Wildlife Medical Clinic. “I’ve heard they need volunteers there. You should go talk to them. They probably want people who would be kind to animals.” I nodded but didn’t have the courage to tell her I’d be gone in the morning.

  While we were standing in line waiting to order our lemonade, I noticed the chessboards. There were at least fifteen of them sitting on the nearby tables, pieces set up, waiting for play. Students sat in front of them, talking and laughing.

  I must have been staring because Janice said, “Do you play?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go check it out.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Come on.”

  She handed me my lemonade, and I followed her over to an older student standing next to one of the chessboards. “What is this? My friend plays chess and she’d like to know.”

  “This is where the chess club meets,” he said, looking at me. “I’m Rob. We’re here every Sunday from six until eight. What’s your name?”

  Janice nudged me, and I said, “Annika.”

  He turned to the boy on his right. “This is Eric. He’s new, too. If you stay, we’ll have an even number and everyone can play.”

  “She’d like that,” Janice said.

  I had been looking off in the distance and Janice moved into my line of vision so she could look me in the eye, which made me very uncomfortable. “I’ll be back at eight to pick you up. I’ll come right here, to this table, and we’ll walk home together.”

  “Okay.�
�� I sat down across from Eric, and the only thing that kept me from bolting in terror was him moving his first piece. Instinct took over as I formulated my strategy, and as we played, I forgot how much I hated college, and how stupid I felt trying to do the things that came naturally to everyone else. I took out all my frustrations on that game, and I played hard. Eric proved to be a worthwhile opponent and by the time I ceded victory to him—but just barely—I felt almost human again. For the first time since I arrived on campus, I did not feel quite so out of place.

  “Great game,” Eric said.

  “It was,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

  Rob handed me a sheet with some information about the club. “So just come back here next Sunday.”

  I took the sheet and nodded, and at eight o’clock on the dot, Janice arrived to walk me back to the dorm. One of my worst days had turned out to be one of my best. For the first time in a long time, strangers had showed me kindness, and I dared to hope that one day, Janice and I might become actual friends. And thanks to the serendipitous discovery of the chess club, I had an outlet, and a reason to stay.

  Later that night, when Janice went down the hall to study, I called my parents back and told them not to come.

  * * *

  My thoughts drifted back to the present when Jonathan and I reached my apartment building. It had been a while since I’d reflected on the events that led me to chess club. If not for Janice and the members of the club, and the kindness they showed me that day, I would not be a senior in college. Though I still had far to go, I’d learned so much about people and life, and that there were very good and very bad things about both.

  “Is this where you live?” Jonathan asked as I made my way up the sidewalk toward the front door.

  My back was to him, and I didn’t turn around when I responded. “Yes.”

  “Okay. Have a good night. I’ll see you next week,” he said.

  7

  Annika

  CHICAGO

  AUGUST 2001