The Last September: A Novel

“What would you do if I asked for his phone number?” I said. “What if I asked you for his address?”


“I would give it to you.” Eli’s voice sounded very quiet, concerned, and a little bit reproachful. I could picture him—fifteen years from now, a doctor, with a soothing but faintly admonishing bedside manner, telling his patients not to smoke or eat fatty food.

That subtle admonishment helped me face the fact that if Charlie wanted to reach me, if he wanted to keep me in his life, he would have already done so. If Eli gave me his phone number, all I would do was humiliate myself further. Still, I brought my knees up to my chest and leaned my head into them, not able to prevent my teenage heart from asking, Why? Why don’t you love me?

THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN that, but over the next days I couldn’t help waiting. Part of me waited to stop wanting Charlie to write. Another part waited for him to change his mind. Every day, I checked my campus mailbox, which only stood empty or held a magazine or a letter from my mother. In a particularly weak moment, I called Information, but there was no Charlie Moss listed in Hyde Park.

One evening Eli called. He’d won a BURST award to do research work for a biology professor and wanted to celebrate. I met him at the Sink—he’d already ordered a large veggie pizza and a pitcher of beer.

“Congratulations,” I said, sliding into my chair. Eli filled my beer mug as I grabbed a slice of pizza.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m very stoked. This will look great on my med school application. Even if I do fail Russian Lit.”

“Good to know,” I said. Eli was still resisting my attempts to help, holding out for my writing the entire paper. He picked up the plastic teddy bear on our table, tipped back in his chair, and squirted honey onto a shred of pizza crust. We drank the pitcher of beer and ordered another. A few people from school joined us, including a girl named Wendy whom I thought had a crush on Eli. She had applied for the same BURST award.

“I’m glad you got it if it wasn’t me,” she told him.

Eli ordered more beer and poured her a glass. I watched them through fuzzy eyes, wondering if he would take her home, if she would fall in love with him, if he would blow her off. “No,” I said out loud. “That’s Charlie.”

“Brett?” Eli asked. “Are you okay?”

Wendy looked over at me. I expected a glare for interfering, but she mostly just looked sympathetic. She would be a nice girlfriend. I thumped my head onto the table. Eli patted my arm.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” he asked.

“No.” I pushed back from the table and stood up, hoping Eli would pick up on Wendy’s cues and go home with her. Someone should fall in love, if I couldn’t.

Back in my dorm room, instead of passing out, I stayed up late with Yeats and Coleridge, determined to erase Charlie’s memory with poetry. But the next day in class, the pages of my text were soggy and tearstained and blurred before my eyes as I remembered the sorrows of Charlie’s changing face. I’d thought he loved the pilgrim soul in me. But it turned out only the reverse was true.

Until that moment I had resisted poetry, my mother’s specialty. But right then I gave in. Novels need a logical arc, a progression of events, whereas all poetry requires is a moment, a feeling, a complex and unreconciled reaction. In other words, all I ever had of Charlie. Without the ability to write poetry myself—my critical faculties already overdeveloped—the only thing left was for me was to study it.

“Why?” I used to ask Charlie, years later. “Why do you think that one night made such an impression on me?”

“I don’t know,” he always said, sometimes with a shrug. “Maybe it was the bear.”