The Last September: A Novel

I laughed. If I were him, having already impressed me with the reference, I would have lied. In fact, because I wanted a point of commonality, I lied in the opposite direction. “I haven’t read it either,” I said, and he smiled.

It should have bothered me that Charlie hadn’t actually read the book. My mother was an English professor. My father had been, too. The little house I grew up in had book-lined walls in every single room. What’s more, I’d just finished a course on the Victorian novel that had electrified me. Fresh from a high school career that had gravely disappointed my mother, I wasn’t used to getting excited about anything academic. As a freshman, I imagined my primary focus in college would be exactly this: standing on a sticky floor in a crowded kitchen. Drinking beer and talking to a cute boy. But last semester, I had actually foregone parties to stay in my room and read through the thick paid-by-the-word novels. I had slogged dutifully through subplots and unfamiliar language. I had forgiven the coincidence in Dickens and aspired to the moral imperatives of Eliot. In other words, I had lost myself in the stories, falling asleep every night anticipating the next evolution a book would bring.

Charlie’s intelligence, I would discover years later, lay more in the realm of the physical. He had an intuitive and sometimes uncanny understanding of what would feel good, taste good, look good. My mother used to say he dressed like a European, with small flourishes that should have looked feminine but never did. He could glean obscure details about people just by looking at them.

That first night, after telling me he was Eli’s brother, Charlie asked me my last name.

“Mercier,” I told him.

And he said, “Ah, French.”

“Mais oui,” I said, very nearly the only two words I spoke of the language.

Charlie touched my jaw with the underside of his knuckle. “I should have known,” he said. “I studied cooking in Paris. This curve here: very, very French.” We stood on the back porch now, still wedged between everyone else’s shoulders. Our breath spiraled upward like the wood-smoke trails.

“You know, it’s too bad,” Charlie said, “to waste this night crammed in such a mob scene.”

I laughed, recognizing a come-on when I heard one. Still, that heart stayed lurched—affixing my feet exactly next to him. “Where else would we go?” I asked. “In case you didn’t notice, there’s three feet of snow out here.”

“Which makes it perfect for a moonlight ski,” he said. “Eli’s got plenty of equipment in the garage.”

We worked our way around the side of the house and opened the garage door. A pile of equipment tangled itself together in one corner. I had to jam the inserts of my Sorels into the smallest pair of boots to make them fit. Charlie wore Eli’s gear.

“Where’s your coat?” he asked. Pathetically, this small moment of concern made the inside of my chest swell open. He cared about me! I thought of my thick down coat, tossed over Eli’s banister. “It’s too warm,” I said, though all I had on was a skimpy lamb’s-wool cardigan. “We’ll just keep moving.”

Charlie dug into an old barrel and found a musty oatmeal-colored scarf and mittens for me, a moth-eaten wool cap and mismatched leather gloves for himself. As I wound the scarf around my neck, the door from the house struggled open, casting a slant of light and a burst of noise into the garage. Eli stood on the landing.

“Hey,” he said. “What are you two doing?”

“Going skiing,” Charlie said. For a second, I worried he’d ask Eli to come along, and I realized how much I wanted to glide away from the crowd, just the two of us, Charlie and me.

“Skiing,” Eli repeated. As if we were both crazy. He closed the door behind him to block out the noise. “When did you two even meet?”

“In the kitchen,” I said. “Charlie made hot chocolate.”