In the end I post up at the big Starbucks near the T stop, the windows fogged with the damp chill outside. I pull my laptop out of my backpack and watch the tourists and college kids waiting in line for their coffees, the hipsters with their tattoos and undercuts. Sometimes I think it would be cool to look a little more like them, to try bright pink hair or an eyebrow ring or whatever. Then I imagine the curious looks and snarky comments I know I’d get if I ever did anything like that at Bridgewater, and it seems safer to just blend in.
“Marin?”
I look up and gasp, almost knocking over my cup at the sight of Bex standing next to my table in jeans and a worn-in hoodie. With his glasses and his coffee cup he looks like a college kid home for the holiday weekend, messenger bag slung over his shoulder and laptop tucked under one arm.
“I thought that was you,” he says.
“Oh!” I steady my cup on the table, offering him a smile. “Hi.”
“Sorry,” he says, “am I traumatizing you right now?” He grins. “I saw my first-grade principal at the pool once, and I don’t think I ever really recovered. A nun in a bathing suit, just to burn that image into your mind like it’s burned into mine.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Nuns are allowed to wear bathing suits?”
“Apparently.” Bex shudders, then nods his chin at my computer. “What are you working on?”
I glance down at the screen with gritty eyes, then back at him. “My admission essay for Brown,” I admit.
“Really?” He frowns. “Deadline is coming up, right? It’s not like you to have put it off this long.”
“It’s done, honestly,” I confess, dumbly pleased that he’s been paying close enough attention lately to know what is and isn’t like me. “Or, I mean, it’s done in that it’s a five-paragraph essay with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I just keep noodling on it though. I want it to be absolutely one hundred percent.”
“Curse of the perfectionist,” Bex says with a knowing smile. “Want me to take a look?”
I shake my head. “You don’t have to do that.”
“No, seriously,” he says. “I want to.” He sets his own battered MacBook down on the table. “Come on, hand it over.”
“What, right now?”
He shrugs. “Do you have a better time?” He sits down in the empty chair across from me, holding his arms out for my laptop. I click my browser shut—probably there’s no reason for him to know that I’ve been procrastinating by trawling Riverdale fan fiction—before passing it across the table, wrapping my hands awkwardly around my empty cup.
“Well, I definitely can’t sit here while you’re reading it,” I announce barely five seconds later. I get up and stand in line for another latte—unable to help glancing over my shoulder, searching Bex’s face while he reads. His eyes are serious behind his tortoiseshell glasses. The weak afternoon sunlight catches the gold in his hair.
A few minutes later, I walk back to the table, chewing my lip.
“This is fantastic,” he says before I even sit down.
I manage to stop my hands before they fly to my mouth, but barely. “Really?”
Bex nods. “Honestly, Marin, I’ve read a lot of admission essays, and I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. Your writing is, like, super mature.”
“Well, thanks.” I glance down at my cup, trying not to smile too widely. He’s not the first teacher to tell me that; still, coming from Bex it’s like it somehow means more. “I mean, realistically I’m still going to be messing with it until the deadline, but I really appreciate it.”
Bex laughs. “I’m the same way. Like I said: curse of the perfectionist,” he says, tilting his chair back onto its hind legs as if he’s sitting in a classroom himself. “Listen, I don’t know if you know this, but I went to Brown. And so did my dad . . . and so did his dad, actually.” He smiles a little sheepishly. “When you go for your interview, look out for Beckett Auditorium.”
“Oh, wow,” I say, eyes widening as I cop on. I had heard his family had money, but I never realized there was that much of it. “Yeah, I will.”
“Anyway, I just wanted to say that if you ever wanted me to put a call in, try and throw my weight around a little bit, I’d be happy to do it. I don’t know if anyone there will give a shit, but it couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Thank you,” I say, nodding my head and mustering a smile. “That would be amazing.”
Bex nods, satisfied. “Honestly, my pleasure. You earned it.”
“So, um, what about you?” I ask, motioning with my cup at his laptop. “What are you working on?”
“Oh, Jesus,” he says with a rueful shake of his head. “You don’t want to know.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Well, now you have to tell me.”
“My novel.” Bex visibly cringes, dropping his face into his hands. “I can’t believe I’m even saying that out loud to you right now. Go ahead, have a laugh.”
My eyes widen. “You’re writing a novel? Seriously? What’s it about?”
Bex sighs theatrically, lifting his head to look at me again. “I’m trusting you with this, you realize. You could ruin me.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“No, I know you wouldn’t.” He shifts his weight again, the front legs of the chair hitting the tile floor with a clatter. “It’s about a guy who wants to be a theater actor, but he’s not a very good theater actor, so he’s working for a children’s theater doing puppet shows about the Revolutionary War and stuff. And then his dad dies.” He makes a face. “See, it sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid,” I promise immediately. “Honestly, it sounds good. Is it, like, autobiographical, or . . .”
Bex makes a face, enigmatic. “My dad is alive,” is all he says. “Anyway, I’ve been writing it since undergrad, and I’ve got a mostly done draft. But I just keep on . . .”
“Noodling?” I supply with a laugh. “Curse of the perfectionist, right?”
“Exactly,” he says, tapping his paper cup against mine.
I’m expecting him to move to one of the other empty tables, but instead he stays where he is while I drink my second latte, caffeine buzzing wildly through my veins. We chat about all kinds of things: our Starbucks orders—Americanos, he tells me—and his parents’ aging collie, an exhibit on protest art he saw at the contemporary art museum. I’m struck again by that same feeling I had the day he drove me home after school a couple of weeks ago, that he’s weirdly easy to talk to for a teacher.
Not just for a teacher. For a guy.
I feel a blush creeping up my chest underneath my sweater, glancing over at the baristas behind the counter and wondering idly if they think Bex and I are on a date. And like, obviously I don’t think we’re on a date—he’s my teacher, and he’s like thirty years old—but as we sit here I can imagine dating someone like him. Someone who cares about what new plays are workshopping in Boston. Someone who knows the name of the Speaker of the House.