Believe (True Believers #3)(22)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Which sounded so pathetic. And unfair. I hated myself for even thinking about it in those terms.

Maybe I didn’t deserve to see him. Yet that didn’t stop me from texting back.

I only have an hour free. 12:45 to 1:45.

I’ll be there. Where should I meet you?

On campus. University center. Text me when you get there.

I wanted to add something. Like an x or an o, or a heart or a smiley. All of which seemed too much.

K. See ya then.

K.

He didn’t respond, because uh, why would he? And then I felt like a jerk.

Damn it. I decided right then and there that I was going to continue to do and say whatever I wanted with Phoenix. That this was my chance to have a totally pure experience with a guy, in the sense that I wasn’t going to censor what I said or did. I was going to treat him exactly the way I would one of my girlfriends.

So I went for the smiley.

And he sent me back, get this, a rose. Swoon. Seriously, of all the guys I had ever dated, no one, not a single sucky one, had ever done that. It was simple. It was nothing much. Just a tiny graphic that required nothing more than him tapping it on the screen and hitting Send.

Yet it meant everything to me that the guy who was supposed to be such bad news was actually kind of charming. He reminded me of the Beast in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Rough around the edges, a little bit grumpy, but well meaning. Sweet.

When I went off to my parents’ house for dinner, I smiled as I sang along in the car to some Taylor Swift. The lyrics didn’t suit my mood, but the upbeat tempo did.

The smile lasted even through my grandmother starting in on me about eating more.

“Skin and bones, it’s disgusting. Men don’t like a woman who looks like a chicken,” she said to me, scooping more rice onto my plate.

“No thanks, I’m full,” I told her, knowing I was offending her and, in her mind, offending my mother as well by refusing her cooking. But I was going to burst if I ate anything else.

She clucked. Her hair had gone gray before I was born and she refused to dye it. She also refused to say how old she was, but by my father’s best geusstimation, she was eighty-nine, having had him at twenty-seven or thereabouts, because she had left Puerto Rico to come here for college and had married immediately. But whenever you asked her about any of it she gave vague responses and said things like, “Age is a state of mind. And muscle tone.”

“I’m going to die before any of you are married,” she said, looking tiny and forlorn in her chair at the foot of my parent’s enormous and very traditional dining room table.

“Probably,” my brother Eric said, which earned him a slap on the back of the head from my dad.

Dinner at my parents every Sunday was a thing. You went unless you were vomiting from the flu or were recovering from major surgery. My aunt and uncle and cousins were there every week too, and my brother Marco had brought his girlfriend, Rebecca, for the first time, which was basically a sign of commitment. You didn’t bring just anyone to Sunday dinner, but they both looked uncomfortable with the reference to marriage and who could blame them? They’d only been dating a few months, but my grandmother had been sighing and giving them meaningful looks all afternoon.

For some reason, I’d been seated to the right of her at the table since I was about six, and it was a dubious honor. She was always overfeeding me and always criticizing me. My eyebrows were too thick, then too thin once I waxed them. I was too fat, too thin. Too outspoken, too quiet. I was silly to focus on my art, then silly to want to work in an office. She hated my clothes, no matter what they were. Yet I knew she would murder a man with nothing but her attitude and her handbag if he ever tried to hurt me.

“Robin Bernadette,” she said, using my middle name like she always did, because it was a saint’s name, whereas Robin was too English and pagan in her opinion. “You look like a girl who has had her heart broken. Tell your abuela who this rotten boy is.”

Unfortunately, while Nathan might have proven himself rotten, it wasn’t his fault. Not really.

“Mama, I think that’s old news,” my dad said. “Haven’t you noticed she keeps sneaking looks at her cell phone under the table? And she’s smiling today. There’s a new boy.” He tapped his temple, looking smug. “Trust me.”

Well, since they had me all figured out, there wasn’t much for me to say.

I wondered then about how we are raised, how it shapes us. Tyler and Phoenix had grown up with addicts, Rory without a mother, Jessica with a father who ran a huge church, while Kylie and I grew up in the so-called ordinary nuclear family. How had that made me who I was? Was it so very ordinary that I was ordinary?

I do know that when I applied to college I stressed over that damn entrance essay because what did I have to say? I couldn’t outline how I invented an app for family members of cancer patients or did missionary work in Africa or was the daughter of a senator or had to navigate gang warfare to get to the community center where there was one teacher who believed in me. I lived in a middle income multicultural suburb of white, black, and Hispanic families where both parents worked as teachers, bank tellers, warehouse managers. Nothing other than ordinary people doing ordinary things.

My mother wanted me to milk my Latina heritage in my essay, but it felt like bullshit to me, so I didn’t. I wrote about expressing myself through art. My twelfth-grade English teacher gave me a C and suggested a rewrite. I didn’t. But I got in to the design school and that was all I ever really wanted, so I figured it didn’t matter.

Yet then I guess I fell off the rails, even though it didn’t feel like that at the time. It just felt like a party. But now, it didn’t feel like me.

Was it because I didn’t have a strong identity or a real sense of myself? Was that what my high school boyfriend had meant? That I had a quasi sense of self?

I didn’t know.

But I did know that today my father was right. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling just a little. Despite my grandmother’s comments about my disappearing br**sts and my chicken wrists. Despite knowing that it was going to be hard to have Kylie and Nathan around the apartment.

“Leave her alone,” my aunt Marguerite told my grandmother. “She looks beautiful, as usual.”

“Actually, she looks hungover,” Eric said.

That had me sitting up straighter. “I’m not hungover. I don’t drink.” That was one thing I did know. I wasn’t going to be accused of doing something I was determined to stay away from.