“Yeah,” he said, a little shyly.
College ended in a fractured, frantic way, just as it had begun. Greer and Zee began to pack up their dorm rooms, and neither of them was happy about what immediately waited for them. Zee would be moving back home to her parents’ house in Scarsdale, to live there while training to be a paralegal, which both her mother and father had urged her to do—“semi-forced me to do,” Zee said—because she had no other plans, and no skills. She would have liked looking for a paid job as an activist, perhaps as a community organizer, she’d tentatively suggested, but they had swept it away. “Be serious, and think long-term,” her mother had said. “Those jobs don’t have earning potential.”
On the very last night, the entire Ryland senior class took buses to a scruffy beach an hour away from campus, where a bonfire was built and Dog brought out the ukulele again, and many sad, emotional songs were sung. Greer and her cluster of friends sat together in a huddle. Zee walked on the sand in circles, saying, “Really? It’s all over now? This is so depressing. It’s like a final field trip for people at a hospice.”
Greer went back up to the house in Macopee while she figured out what to do next. Cory flew business class to Manila on Cathay Pacific, settling in under a downy blanket, drinking a glass of Shingleback McLaren Vale Shiraz as the lights in the cabin dimmed. “All you need to know about my new life,” he texted her when he landed, “is that they gave me pajamas to wear on the plane.”
In Macopee Greer found a full-time job at Skatefest, the same place where she had worked part-time in high school. She spent her days now handing out skates, and her evenings sending out her résumé and eating morose dinners, often by herself in front of a novel. She was finally not as angry at her parents as she used to be, she realized—they were too marginal for that, too weak—but her connection to them seemed vague, as if she had to remember who exactly these two people were. Being here is temporary, she thought. It’s just a lily pad. It’s what happens to you after college. I will be able to leap off one of these days.
Cory sometimes called from Manila while Greer was sitting at the skate-rental counter in the middle of the day. It was twelve hours later where he was; their lives were opposites in all ways. “I’m lonely and I’m bored, and I miss you something sick,” he said.
“I miss you too. Something sick,” she added. “I like that.”
“I want to be in your bed right this minute, Space Kadetsky,” he said. “Why can’t I make myself really small and crawl through the holes of the phone?”
“Maybe you can.” She paused and sighed; he sighed too. “I had a dream last night,” Greer told him, “in which we agreed to ‘meet in the middle.’ Which was a raft on the ocean.”
“Was it nice?” he asked.
“Very. But then somehow my mother was there, dressed as a clown. Kind of spoiled the mood.”
“I can imagine. You know,” he said after a second, “maybe we could do something sexy over the phone.”
They’d had occasional phone sex and Skype sex during college; Greer had always felt a little nervous, afraid that somehow it would be intercepted. “The NSA doesn’t care about your orgasms,” Cory had said. “Believe me.” But then again, she tended to be on the quiet side even when they had sex in person. “A nun and a mouse had a baby, and that is me,” she’d said to him once after they’d slept together in her childhood bed.
Now she said, “‘Do something sexy over the phone’? I can’t, Cory, I’m at work. There are people here.” She felt the back of her neck prickle at the thought. In the distance, teenagers and parents with little kids were moving around the Skatefest rink. The sound was like an ocean, coming at her in scratchy waves as the skaters moved closer and then receded. She thought of Cory on top of her, his hands all over her, proprietary, welcome. Her arousal lifted her away from the smells of people’s feet and the glass box of rotating, candied-looking hot dogs.
“You got something more important to do, Kadetsky?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Rent skates to skinheads.”
“Ah.”
“I wish I could do it, though,” she said sadly. “I really, really do.”
“I know.”
Sadness, excitement, then sadness again; it all rose and fell like the sounds of skaters scuffing the floor of the rink. Hold tight! she thought, conveying this to both herself and Cory, thinking of them in bed together, and the joint effort couples had to make to be a couple, and stay a couple. If one let go, then that was it, both of them fell. Hold tight! she thought, imagining his body, and her own much smaller body against it.
“You should go to sleep,” Greer finally said. “It’s late where you are.”
“I have to look over my deck pages.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”
“I’m afraid I don’t either, but I’m pretending I do. We’re flying to Bangkok in the morning for a meeting. I miss you,” he said again. “Imagine me in my douchey white shirt and tie.”
“I bet you look hot,” she said. “Imagine me in my orange Skatefest tunic and little cap.”
And so it went, conversations with Cory on a different continent while Greer leaned across a sticky, shellacked skate-rental counter. After work in the evening she drove her parents’ old Toyota home along the highway. Sometimes, on Woburn Road during that standstill summer, she would park the car and get out to talk to Cory’s brother, Alby, who was now eight years old and handsome, big-headed, and could often be found outside on his Razor scooter, powering down the slant of the driveway.
“Time me, Greer, while I go around the block,” he said one evening when she came home from work in her parents’ car. He’d been waiting for her, she realized, riding in circles until the car pulled onto the street. So she agreed to time him with the stopwatch that he held in his hand for just this purpose. “I want to beat my personal best,” Alby said. “You know what that means, right? It’s the best record a person has thus far.”
“I can’t believe you just said ‘thus far.’ Well, actually I can.”
“Miles Leggett told me his dad calls me an idiot savant.”
“Well, then his dad has no idea what he’s talking about.”
“Someday he’ll know. Like when I win the Nobel Prize.”
She laughed. “Aim high. What field are you going to win it for?”
“Oh,” said Alby. “I didn’t know you needed a field. Do I have to decide now?” Even as he said this, she knew she would recount the conversation to Cory tomorrow, on Skype.
“No,” Greer said. “You definitely don’t have to decide now. Okay, go ahead, I’ll time you.”
“Keep an eye on Slowy too,” said Alby, and then Greer saw that his turtle lay humped in the grass at the side of the driveway.
“Ready?” Greer asked, and Alby nodded. “Get set,” she said. She paused and watched him angle himself forward. “Go!”
Greer lifted the start button as Alby headed down the driveway; soon he was out of view. The front door of the Pintos’ house opened, and Greer turned to see Benedita on the front step, looking for her son. There was always a stiffness between her and Greer. “I’m timing him, Mrs. Pinto,” Greer explained. “He’s going around the block on his Razor.”