It was good between Neil and me in the beginning. I was his first girlfriend and he was grateful just to have me and to be getting laid. But eventually, his arrogance seeped through—he thought he was destined for greater things than little old me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “He got some scholarship in England and that’s the last I heard of him.”
“What an idiot,” Luke comments.
“He wasn’t an idiot,” I say quietly. “He was brilliant.” I’m surprised the guy hasn’t won a Field’s medal by now.
“Well, he was definitely extremely ugly,” Luke says.
I stifle a laugh. With his sticklike frame and blazing red hair and freckles, Neil wasn’t anybody’s conception of handsome, especially compared with Luke. Maybe that’s the real reason I was willing to date him—because his looks didn’t intimidate me the way Luke’s did. “Okay, he wasn’t Chris Hemsworth or anything, but…”
“Oh, come on,” Luke says. “You probably never saw him again because they captured him and put him on display in the zoo.”
I’m laughing hard enough now that there are a few tears in my eyes. “Stop…”
“Seriously, I couldn’t believe you picked that guy over me.” Luke shakes his head. “Talk about blows to the old self-esteem…”
“And what about that blond cheerleader type from Wellesley you were sucking face with through all of senior year?” I remind him, wiping my eyes.
“Margo?” He shakes his head. “She decided to believe the doctors who said I wasn’t going to walk again, and she took off.”
I stare at him, the smile gone from my face. “Oh my God, Luke, I’m so sorry…”
“Don’t be.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t true love. If she got in some disfiguring accident, I would have dumped her just as fast.”
I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Luke is nowhere near as shallow as I thought he was. After all, he liked me.
I close my eyes, remembering that night all those years ago. When I turned down the hottest guy in our class. I don’t regret it. Definitely not.
But I have always wondered what would’ve happened if I had made a different choice.
Chapter 8
That night when I get up to my floor, Sadie is standing in the hallway talking to another of my elderly neighbors, a seventy-something woman named Ethel. They’re both wearing housecoats and fuzzy slippers. I swear, nobody in my building is under retirement age.
There are times when I long to be seventy-something and retired. That way, nobody will be obsessed with me finding the perfect guy. I won’t have to worry about finding love anymore. I just have to hang in there another thirty years or so. Then my love life will be officially done.
Except the thought of that makes me so depressed, I could cry.
“Hi, Ellie!” Sadie says cheerfully. “Are you going out with your suitor tonight?”
“Um,” I say. “I don’t have a suitor, Sadie.”
“Of course she doesn’t!” Ethel pipes up. “Don’t be dumb, Sadie.”
I stare at Ethel in surprise. I always thought Ethel was a nice-enough lady, so I didn’t expect her to insult me (or Sadie) that way.
“How could you say that?” Sadie cries in my defense. “Ellie is beautiful!” She bites her lip. “Well, except for her hips. But she’s working on that.”
Great.
“Oh, Sadie,” Ethel sighs. “Don’t you know anything?” She gives me a knowing look. “Ellie is a lesbian. She’s not interested in having any suitors.”
Seriously?
“No!” Sadie gasps. “Is that true, Ellie?”
I start to tell her that it absolutely is not true, but Ethel quickly cuts me off: “Ellie, you don’t have to stay in the closet. Just because we’re old, it doesn’t mean we’re not understanding about this stuff.” She smiles proudly. “My granddaughter is a lesbian, you know. I could set you up if you’d like. She’s really pretty.”
Okay, I have to put an end to this right now. “I’m not a lesbian,” I say. Ethel looks very skeptical, so I add, “Really.”
“I told you,” Sadie says smugly.
“Oh,” Ethel says. She seems really disappointed. “So why are you still single then?”
“It’s her hips,” Sadie says.
I don’t want to discuss why I’m single with these women, considering I haven’t entirely figured it out myself. I suspect this is going to get very insulting and possibly end up with my having to take home another tub of pot roast. So I excuse myself and slip into my apartment.
When I get inside, my cleaning woman, Angela, is finishing up with her bimonthly session. It feels decadent to hire a cleaning woman, but I work long hours, and I hate cleaning and can afford it, so why not? Also, Angela does a much better job than I could ever do. Also, when she comes, she brings me a delicious homemade casserole that she stores in the fridge.
“All set!” Angela announces as she pulls off the blue latex gloves that she uses when she cleans. “Everything is spic and span.”
I look around my apartment, which is indeed sparkling clean. “Thank you so much! It looks great.”
Angela gathers her cleaning supplies to leave and I inhale the smells of Pine-Sol. I love a clean apartment. I’ve been hiring people to clean for me ever since college, even when I actually couldn’t afford it. After I worked as a bathroom cleaner in college, I swore I would never do it again.
One big thing that separated the poor/smart kids from the rich/dumb kids at Harvard was how we paid for our education. I’m sure Luke Thayer’s dad (also named Luke, I guess) just withdrew his petty change from one of his Swiss bank accounts to pay Luke’s tuition, but my grade school teacher parents didn’t have enough money to afford their third child’s private college tuition. So I ended up with loans and work scholarships. The work scholarships meant I got to pay off some of my tuition by scrubbing the toilets of my classmates.
It was the ultimate humiliation. I had to go into the dorms and clean the toilets of the students I had just been sharing a lecture hall with hours earlier. I preferred it when I was assigned the upperclassmen dorms because it meant I at least wouldn’t recognize them. But because all the freshman dorms were in Harvard Yard and that was where I lived as well, my assignments were almost invariably to the freshman rooms.
Whenever I got assigned to clean bathrooms in Thayer House, I’d think about Luke. Every day, Dr. Cole let him dominate the class discussions, and no matter how valiantly I fought against him, I always left the class feeling like he’d gotten the better of me. Worst of all, he always argued on the side of the most despicable character in the story, as if they were a personal friend of his.
It was so blatantly obnoxious, there were times when I wanted to get up and punch him in the face. But then I’d go off to my Computation Theory class and he’d go off to his Macroeconomics class and we’d never be forced to talk again, thank God.
It was good to think about Luke as I scrubbed toilets. I’d think about our most recent class discussion, the things I said, and the things I wished I could have said if the professor wasn’t there. Then I’d take out my anger on the Thayer toilets.