Leave Me

Sunita’s bedroom was, as Todd had warned, a mess: a jumble of throw pillows and brightly colored wall mosaics, a pile of clothes spilling out of the closet.

Todd’s bedroom by comparison was spartan: a bed that would pass a military inspection, a framed poster of the periodic table of the elements done up to look like a Warhol, and an enormous bulletin board full of movie ticket stubs that had been artfully arranged to look like a flower. Maribeth went to inspect.

“We see a lot of movies,” Todd said. “I figured if I was going to spend all that money, I might as well have something to show for it.”

“Do you like movies?” Sunita asked.

“I do, but I don’t go often enough.” When she’d taken the job at Frap she thought she would use at least a couple of the Fridays to sneak away to an early matinee. But she hadn’t. Not once. She glanced at the stubs, which were mostly from recent films, none of which she’d seen: Skyfall. Pitch Perfect. American Hustle. Identity Thief. The Hunger Games. Ted. Harold and Maude.

“Harold and Maude?” she said in surprise.

“I know,” Sunita said. “He dragged me to that at the Row House. It’s really weird. Have you seen it?”

Not since college. Not since the first night with Jason.

After Maribeth had taken Courtney up on that dare to profile Jason for the college newspaper, she’d gone to the radio station office, prepared to spend exactly one hour with some ugly music snob.

But after talking to him, she found a reason to continue the interview the following day. And then he insisted that she sit in on one of his shows, to get the full experience, he said.

It turned out that everything Maribeth had expected about Jinx had been wrong. Sure, when she first admitted she didn’t like Nirvana, he’d ribbed her a little—“Who raised you?”—but it was all good natured. She could tell straightaway that he didn’t judge what people liked so long as they liked something. His whole thing was that he loved music. Deejaying wasn’t a way to be cool, or discerning, but his way of expressing the love.

And he wasn’t ugly. Not in the least. When she’d first seen him at the radio station office, she’d thought he was cute: that mop of hair, the hazel eyes, those plummy lips. When he got excited about some track he was playing her—because when she didn’t recognize a band he was referencing, he would drag her into an empty studio to educate her—he’d close his eyes and bite his lips, and Maribeth would lick hers as if in response. By the third day of the interview, after she’d watched him spin records for his show, she had upgraded her assessment from cute to beautiful, and she had chapped her own lips from licking them so frequently.

Normally writing was agonizing for Maribeth—it was why she preferred editing—but she wrote the article about Jason in a frenzy of inspiration and filed it immediately. When she saw it in print the next day, she understood what she’d written. Not a profile, but a mash note, circulation 11,500.

“On an average day, Jason Brinkley flits around campus anonymously, a sort of Clark Kent in jeans and a T-shirt. But when he gets in the booth, in this case the radio broadcast booth at WLXR, he transforms into Jinx, a musical Superman,” she read out loud to Courtney from their dorm room. She skimmed further down, unable to stomach the thing. Then she got to the kicker. “In an era of practiced cynicism, when everyone pretends to be too cool to care, Brinkley is that rare exception, someone who truly cares and is all the cooler for it.” She threw down the paper. “Why’d you make me do this? I hate you. No, I hate me.” She put her head in her hands. “Kill me now. Please.”

“It’s kind of sweet,” Courtney said. “Sensible Maribeth, crushing so publicly.”

Maribeth crumpled the newspaper and threw it into the bin. “I’m staying home today. I can’t risk running into him.”

She was still hiding out in the dorm that night when Courtney persuaded her to come to the movies. “A late showing of Harold and Maude. Who will be there?”

Almost no one, it turned out. Except for Jason Brinkley, sitting by himself, holding a bag of popcorn and a box of Jujubes. It wasn’t a setup—Courtney had never met Jason—but Maribeth felt a tickle in her stomach, heralding some kind of fate at work, though she was too tongue-tied to say a word to him during the movie or on the walk back to campus. Instead, she just listened to him and Courtney rave about the film’s soundtrack.

They lingered outside her dorm. Courtney gave them a look and went on ahead. “I have a kind of writing question for you,” Jason said to Maribeth.

“Okay,” she said cautiously.

“I like to title my mixed tapes. It’s an important part of the process. I’m working on one I was thinking of calling ‘Too Cool to Care,’ but I didn’t know if the inherent contradiction was clear enough, or if it was overkill.” He shot her a mischievous grin that in the coming years would become more familiar to her than her own smile. Maribeth understood then who the tape was for, and that if a gushing article was a reporter’s declaration of love, then a mixed tape was the deejay’s equivalent.

“It’s nicely ambiguous,” Maribeth told him.

“One more question,” he said, still grinning. “If I’m Superman, does that make you Lois Lane?”

Her whole body flushed with pleasure. It was so rare in life for things to play out exactly how you fantasized. “Only if you shut up and kiss me,” she said.

“I’VE SEEN HAROLD and Maude,” she told Sunita and Todd. “But it was a million years ago.”