The Girl He Used to Know (Page 8)

“Everyone always goes out to dinner.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I don’t want to.” I put the book in my backpack and we crossed the street. Usually I abhorred small talk, but my curiosity got the better of me. “Why don’t you go out to dinner?”

“I have to work. I bartend at the Illini Inn on Saturday and Sunday nights. Do you ever go there?”

“No.”

“You should come in some time. Like when I’m working.”

“I don’t go to bars.”

“Oh.” He hoisted his backpack higher on his shoulder, and we walked in silence for a minute.

“Have you ever thought about joining the competition team? Eric asked me to consider it, and I think I’m going to.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“There must be a reason.”

“It would just be too much for me.”

“Because of your course load?”

“I can handle the academic load, but I volunteer twice a week in the Wildlife Medical Clinic and then there’s chess on Sunday night. That’s enough for me.” I required more downtime than most people. I needed to be able to read and sleep and be alone. “If you’re so into chess, why did you wait until your senior year to join the club?” I asked.

“This is my first year here. I transferred from Northwestern.”

“Oh.”

He stopped walking suddenly. “Thank you for being literally the only person I’ve told that to who didn’t immediately ask why.”

I stopped, too. “You’re welcome.”

He stared at me with a blank expression for a few seconds and then we started walking again.

“Why do you always smell like chlorine?”

“That’s the question you want me to answer?”

“Yes.”

“I swim almost every day. It’s what I do for exercise. I had my growth spurt later than everyone else, so I didn’t go out for football or basketball. If you don’t start early, you can never really catch up. I’m good at swimming though. I’m sorry if the smell bothers you. Seems like it never quite goes away, even after I shower.”

“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.”