The Girl He Used to Know Read online

  “I don’t mind it.”

  We’d arrived at my apartment building by then, so I left Jonathan standing on the sidewalk and walked toward the door. Before I reached it he called out, “You should think about joining the competition team.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  But I wouldn’t.

  11

  Jonathan

  CHICAGO

  AUGUST 2001

  I’m waiting outside the theater at noon when Annika walks out the door surrounded by children. She’s holding the hand of a little boy, and she crouches down to give him a hug before he runs into the waiting arms of his mother. The children scatter toward their respective parents, waving and calling out good-bye to Annika before they go. She waves in return, a smile lighting up her face. The smile grows bigger when she sees me, and I tell myself that accepting her invitation was the right thing to do. Like I told her on the phone, it’s just lunch. What I won’t tell her is that I’d been having an awful day when she’d left the last voice mail, and hearing her voice had taken the edge off of it. Annika’s the perfect antidote to any bad day.

  She walks up to me. “Looks like you’ve got quite a fan club,” I say.

  “I find children more enjoyable than most adults.”

  Her statement does not surprise me. Children are born without hate, but unfortunately, some of them learn by an early age to wield it like a weapon, and no one knows that more than Annika. She has always had a childlike air about her, which probably makes her highly relatable to the kids. It’s also the reason adults are often unkind to her, because they mistakenly believe it points to a lack of intelligence or ability, neither of which is true.

  “I picked up lunch,” I say, holding up the bag from Dominick’s. The grocery store has a great take-out counter, and since that’s where I ran into her, I figured it was as good a choice as any.

  “But I invited you. I’m the one who’s supposed to pay.”

  “You paid last time. It’s my turn.”

  The humidity has dropped considerably in the last week and the air feels halfway bearable as we head toward Grant Park. Annika remains silent on the walk over.

  “Is anything wrong? You’re kind of quiet,” I ask.

  “I talked too much last time. I was nervous.”

  “Don’t be. It’s just me.”

  It seems all of Chicago has decided to come to the park today. We pick our way through the crowd and find an empty patch of grass to sit down and have our lunch. From the bag, I pull out sandwiches and chips. I hand Annika a bottle of lemonade and crack open a Coke for myself.

  “You brought your board,” she says, pointing to the carrying case that had been slung over my arm and that now rests on the grass beside us.

  “I thought maybe you’d be up for a match.” Mostly I thought it would put her at ease. Chess has always been one of the ways we communicate best.

  “I’d like that. I’m rusty, though. You’ll probably win.”

  “I’ll probably win because I’m better than you.” It takes her a second to comprehend that I’m teasing and she smiles.

  She’s beautiful when she smiles.

  Around us, people play Frisbee on the grass, many of them barefoot. A bee buzzes around Annika’s lemonade, and I swat it away. When we’re done eating I open the board and we set up.

  Almost everything about Annika seems delicate. Her hands are so much smaller than mine, and when I first met her I spent enough time studying them as she contemplated her next chess move that I couldn’t help but wonder what they might feel like if I held one. But when she plays chess there is an absolute ruthlessness about her. She could barely look at me the first time I walked her home, but she has always stared at the pieces on a chessboard with laser focus, and today is no different. It’s a good game. She is rusty, but she plays hard, and I concentrate, because I’ve never forgotten the first time we played, when she wiped the floor with me.

  Today I manage to come out ahead, and I move my knight into position. “Checkmate.”

  There’s nowhere for her to move her king and she can’t block me or capture my piece. I can tell by her creased forehead and the way she’s staring at the board that she’s already beating herself up for the loss. “I let you win,” she says.

  I laugh. “No, you didn’t. You played well, but I played better.”

  “I hate that you beat me.”

  “I know.”

  As we’re picking up the pieces and putting them away, Annika says, “After we went to coffee, you didn’t act like you wanted to see me again.” My teasing smile fades, but I’m not sure if Annika will pick up on the hesitant expression that replaces it.

  “I did want to. I just wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.”

  “But we’re in the same city now. I’m ready and I’m making things happen this time. I’m not leaving it all up to you.”

  “There are things we haven’t talked about yet. Because I don’t think you want to talk about them.”

  “I thought we could skip over everything that happened and start fresh.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “It would be so much easier if it did.” She stares down at the blanket and neither of us says anything for a minute.

  “I go to therapy once a week. I started as soon as I moved to the city. Her name’s Tina. She’s really helped me understand why I … why I see things the way I do. I told her you probably didn’t want anything to do with me because of what happened between us, but she said maybe it was because of the divorce.”

  “It’s a little of both, I suppose.” It’s a hard pill to swallow when you have to admit, even to yourself, that you were wrong about the person you were certain was perfect for you. It was even harder to admit that part of Liz’s allure was that she was the polar opposite of Annika. At the time, I’d convinced myself that it meant everything until the day it backfired on me, and I realized it hadn’t meant as much as I thought it did. “You get cautious after a divorce. Second-guess yourself a little,” I say. But Annika was right to accept some of the responsibility for my hesitation, because it was definitely a factor. “What about you? Any breakups in your past?”

  “I dated one of my coworkers at the library. He’s a nice guy and we got along so well. We tried to make a go of it romantically for about six months, but he was too much like me.” She looks into my eyes and then looks away just as suddenly. “It was a disaster. People like us need people who are … not like us to balance things out. We’re just really good friends now. I dated the next man for over a year. He said he loved me, but he could never quite accept me for who I am and treated me as if I wasn’t worthy of his attention and affection because of it. Sometimes I worried that if we’d stayed together, I might have started to believe it.”

  “Maybe he did love you, but you wouldn’t let him.”

  She shakes her head no. “It’s because of you that I know what it feels like to be loved and accepted.” Her eyes fill with tears and she blinks them away.

  “Maybe I’m the one who needs to take it slow this time.”

  “I can do slow, Jonathan. I’ll wait for you, the way you always waited for me.”

  Annika is wearing slip-on shoes without socks. I reach over and gently take them off. She looks at me and smiles as the memory hits, and she wiggles her toes in the grass like it’s the best feeling in the world.

  I smile, too.

  12

  Annika

  THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

  AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

  1991

  Jonathan campaigned relentlessly in his effort to convince me to join the competition team. It didn’t help that Eric was now in on it, and I was receiving pressure from both of them.

  “What if I came to your apartment and picked you up for the meeting on Wednesday?” he asked. “Then would you go?” I’d only just begun to feel comfortable talking to Jonathan. I wasn’t ready to add another activity, especially a higher-stress activity lik
e competitive chess.

  “Maybe.” I wished I could protest that I didn’t need a babysitter, but the truth was that I avoided trying new things at any cost, and that’s exactly the role Jonathan would have to play.

  We packed up our things and left the student union together because Jonathan now walked me home every Sunday night after chess club ended. The others would head out for dinner and we would fall in step side by side until we reached my apartment.

  It was the highlight of my week.

  The sky had threatened rain on my way to the union, and now upon leaving the building, I discovered it had arrived as a heavy downpour. I pulled my umbrella out of my backpack and debated calling Janice to ask her to come get me in her car. I didn’t know how to drive and despite my mother’s urging, refused to obtain a license. The thought of piloting thousands of pounds of metal terrified me, and the closest thing I had to transportation was my old blue ten-speed Schwinn.

  “I drove tonight. I can give you a ride home.”

  Nervousness about being alone with Jonathan in his vehicle almost prevented me from taking him up on the ride, but before I could think too much about it, he pushed open the door, opened his umbrella, and held it over both of our heads as he headed in the direction of the parking lot. The wind was blowing and we walked quickly as he led me toward a white pickup truck. He unlocked my door and ran around to the driver’s side and unlocked his.

  It was early October and the days had grown cooler. The dampness in the air from the rain made it seem even chillier. I’d forgotten to bring a jacket and I rubbed my hands along my arms in an attempt to generate some friction.

  “Are you cold?”

  “I forgot my jacket at home.”

  Jonathan fiddled with a dial on the dash, and air blew from the vents. “It might take a few minutes to get warm.”

  Traffic slowed at the intersection. It was fully dark and at first I couldn’t understand why most of the cars had stopped at the green light, and why a few of them were honking their horns loudly, making me want to cover my ears from the awful sound. But then I spotted the goose and a long row of goslings trailing behind her as they tried to cross the road. Most of the cars were waiting, but of few of them sped through the intersection with no regard for the animals.

  I jumped from the truck without a second thought, leaving the door wide open in my haste to assist the geese. Jonathan must have leapt from the car right after me, because I could hear him yelling, “Annika! Jesus! Be careful.”

  The mother goose hissed as I worked on shepherding her and her offspring to safety. The rain pelted me, and Jonathan, too, because he’d begun directing traffic, holding out his hands like a policeman to stop the motorists from coming any closer. I walked alongside the geese and shielded them with my body as they slowly made their way single file through the intersection and down into the safety of the ditch on the side of the road. I flapped my hands in excitement because we had saved them, but then I put them over my ears to block out the cacophony of angry car horns. Jonathan and I got back in the truck and he pulled into the line of traffic when the light turned green. I turned around, craning to see the geese in the dark and feeling relieved when I located the bobbing head of the mother. They were heading away from the road, and I hoped they would continue on their way toward wherever they would settle for the night.

  “That was wild,” Jonathan said. “I had no idea you were going to jump out of the truck like that. You scared the crap out of me.”

  “Did you see those cars? Some of them seemed like they were going to run right over those poor animals. I don’t know why those geese were so off course.”

  “Some people need to chill out.”

  “Do you want to meet my roommate?”

  “You mean now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have to get to work, and I need to go home first to change into dry clothes.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”

  “I mean, I can spare a few minutes if you really want me to meet her.”

  Jonathan parked his truck and followed me up the stairs to my apartment. Joe and Janice were sitting on the couch watching TV. “That smell is incense,” I said.

  “Okay,” Jonathan said.

  I could read Janice’s expressions fairly well because I’d been studying them since the day I’d met her, and she was looking at us with her “I’m delighted” smile. “Annika! Who’s this?” she asked.

  “This is Jonathan. He drove me home because of the rain.”

  “Hi,” Jonathan said.

  “That’s my roommate, Janice, and her boyfriend, Joe. He smells like pot which is why we burn the incense.”

  Joe grunted a hello, but Janice and Jonathan shook hands. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “You, too.”

  “Why are you guys soaking wet?”

  “We had to help the geese. A mother goose and her goslings were trying to cross the road by the union and people weren’t even stopping!”

  “So you jumped out of the car to help them,” she said.

  “Of course. No one else was going to help them.” I turned to Jonathan. “Okay. You can go now.”

  No one said anything for a few moments. Jonathan walked to the door, but before he opened it, he turned around and said, “Don’t forget to take a jacket with you tomorrow. It’s supposed to be even colder than today.”

  “I won’t.” But there was a good chance I would. Organization was not my strong suit. Shortly after Janice took me under her wing during those disastrous early days of our freshman year, she tried to help me get organized and soon discovered I was a lost cause. My side of our dorm room looked a lot like my bedroom at home: Clean clothes in one pile, dirty in another. Papers everywhere. To some, it looked like chaos, but to me it was organized chaos, and Janice learned not to disrupt it after she tried to help me while I was at class by folding all my clothes. I’d become so visibly upset that she never attempted it again.

  Matching clothes and proper grooming were things I rarely thought about, but Janice was able to convince me that being color-coordinated was a good thing, and she gently reminded me to comb my hair whenever I started to resemble a mad scientist. There were still times I’d retreat under my covers with my penlight and a book, and Janice would ask if I was upset or depressed. Eventually I was able to assure her that sometimes, I just needed to be left alone. There were things I was confused about, mostly the proper responses in social situations, and as I grew more comfortable with Janice, I asked her about them.

  Living with her had been like a crash course in how to be normal.

  After Jonathan left, I shut the door and sat down on the couch next to Janice. “What do you think?”

  “Well, for starters, he’s very polite.”

  “He’s a giant nerd,” Joe said.

  “No he’s not,” I said.

  “Annika wasn’t asking you, Joe.”

  “I bet he just loves to play chess,” Joe said.

  “I love playing chess.”

  Joe snorted and shot Janice some sort of look. She shot one back at him. It was a fairly recent addition to her expression catalogue, but I knew it meant “Shut up right now, Joe.”

  “Why are you still dating him?” I asked Janice.

  Janice shushed me and pulled me into the kitchen. “I don’t know. He’s very, very pretty.”

  “And so dumb.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not like I’m going to marry him.”

  Was Jonathan a nerd? Just because he had short hair and didn’t play every sport didn’t mean that he was a nerd. He was really smart, and intelligence had always made guys seem more interesting to me than they might be to others. Plus, he was really good-looking and sometimes while we were playing chess I stared at him, mesmerized by how perfect his face looked. He had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen, which made me think his kisses would taste like Pep O Mint Life Savers. Joe’s kisses probably tasted like pot and Funyuns.

  And failure
.

  “Do you like Jonathan?” Janice asked. “Like, like him like him?”

  “No.”

  “It’s okay if you do,” Janice said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Just don’t jump in with both feet this time. Until we know for sure.”

  I turned to her, exasperated. “But how will we know?”

  “Sometimes we won’t. But if a guy reminds you to carry a jacket because he doesn’t want you to get cold, it’s a pretty good indicator he won’t try to hurt you. That doesn’t guarantee that he won’t, and you still have to be careful, but it’s a good start.”

  “I don’t want to be wrong again,” I said, because I had been, once, midway through our sophomore year. A guy named Jake, who I’d met in one of my lectures, had taken a liking to me, and to say I reciprocated with vigor would have been an embarrassing understatement. What started as silly doodling on each other’s notebooks while the professor droned on soon morphed into walking to our next class together, me wearing the biggest smile that had ever shown itself on my face, and Jake with his arm casually thrown over my shoulder or resting on my ass. Having a boyfriend was as great as I’d always thought it would be, and it was easy! For over a week, I rarely left Jake’s side. I sought him out in the student union and the dining hall, and took my rightful place at his table the way any girlfriend would. I did his laundry and helped him with his homework because that’s what you do when you’re in love with someone and they’re in love with you. And he was very busy, so I was grateful he could spend time with me at all. Whenever we ran into his friends, which seemed to be all the time because he was apparently very popular on campus, he would point at me and say, “Have you met Annika? She sure is something.” Then they would all laugh and my smile would grow even wider because it felt so good to fit in.