Then, two months into her time at Cornell, a different kind of boy had come along. His name was Daryl, and he didn’t wait for her to make the first move, and when things happened they were neither clumsy nor brief, and they were way the hell past enjoyable. Sometimes Aubrey had still lain awake all night next to him, but only to worry that she might do something wrong and lose him. That fear had been there from the moment she’d met him, the sense that she had never quite won him over, though she couldn’t define it more clearly than that.
She found her interest in the books and lab notes waning just a bit in the months after meeting Daryl, though her academic work didn’t suffer much for it. Instead, her time with Daryl came at the cost of time with her friends, a fact Daryl seemed just fine with. He didn’t like her friends all that much. He certainly didn’t like her spending time with them. In hindsight, that should’ve been a red flag, but it hadn’t been. She had not been looking for any flaws on his side of the equation; all her focus was on worrying about her own flaws.
Other flags should have been more obvious. Like when he would pick her phone up off the table and check whom she’d called that day, right in front of her, as casually as if he were reading the newspaper.
You talked to Laney? he would say. What was that about?
Some little spark inside of her wanted to reply, She’s my best friend, and it’s none of your fucking business what it was about.
Then another part of her would think, Don’t lose him, don’t lose him, don’t lose him, and when she opened her mouth all that came out was the answer to his question, in detail, and somehow in the tone of an apology.
They’d been together six months when he suggested she drop out of the program. She wouldn’t need an income, he said; his own would be mid-six by the time he was thirty. They had never talked about getting married, but the possibility of it had been there for months already, in the subtext of their conversations.
It was in the days after that talk—days she spent giving the idea real consideration—that younger Aubrey started piping up in her head. Younger Aubrey with that old Beetle packed full of clothes and books, rolling out of South Bend on a summer morning. She began to call that version of herself Proust Girl, because among those books in the Volkswagen had been a boxed set of all Proust’s published work. Proust Girl had not read a word of the man’s writing yet, back then, but fully intended to. She had meant to have it deeply absorbed by Christmas break of freshman year, not just so she could whip out quotes and look brilliant, but for the light it would shine on her understanding of human nature. Proust Girl couldn’t have known that she would get fifty pages into the first book and throw the whole goddamned set in the trash. She couldn’t have known the writing would feel like ham-fisted overacting on the page, any more than she could have known that nice boys would never be able to get her off—would never even be able to make her smile. Proust Girl was none too happy at the idea of dropping out of Cornell, but what the hell did she know? Proust Girl could’ve never seen Daryl coming.
When it finally happened, it did so in the most mundane of places: the kitchenware aisle of a Target, just off campus. She and Daryl had been out to dinner and had stopped for groceries afterward. Aubrey saw a vegetable steamer she’d looked at two or three times before; it was on sale now, a hundred dollars instead of one fifty. She set it in the cart, and Daryl took one look at it and told her to put it back on the shelf.
Don’t worry, she said. I’m paying for it.
No you’re not. You can’t afford it. Put it back.
No joke in his tone, and nothing in his eyes but sternness, and the expectation of obedience.
That look from him wasn’t quite unprecedented, but it caught her off guard this time.
Daryl, it’s my money, I’m buying it.
Never taking that locked gaze off of her, Daryl took the steamer from the cart and set it back onto the shelf. When Aubrey reached to pick it up again, his hand clamped around her forearm hard enough to dig into the muscles. Hurting her. On purpose. And still there was that gaze drilling into her. In that moment she realized she’d seen it before she ever met him. Long before.
And no, Proust Girl really would not have seen Daryl coming, she thought. Not if he’d been standing in a garage with an old Husqvarna, beating it with a wrench.
It ended right there in that aisle full of pots and pans, with Aubrey screaming at him to let go of her, screaming even after he complied, her hands coming up and covering her head, the brink of a nervous breakdown right there in front of a dozen shoppers.
That had been four years ago. She had finished up at Cornell and taken a postdoc appointment at Texas A&M. A year later she’d found herself here, at Arizona State, where she was now contemplating starting over and getting a law degree.
A paper cup in the wind.
She gathered the books she wanted from the passenger seat, stuffed them into her backpack, and got out of the car. On the front walk she nodded hello to the guy with the lawn mower, put her key in the lock, and stepped into her unit.