180 Seconds, Page 2

  A sudden pounding on my door startles me, and it takes me a second to squelch my panic before I tentatively open the door.

  “Allison! How was your summer? You coming to the dorm party upstairs?” A petite girl with a plastic cup stands before me. Her bleached hair spikes in dramatic chunks from her head and then lands just on her shoulders. I recognize her from a few of my classes last year. Becky? Bella? Brooke? Some kind of B name. She catches herself when she notices my tank top and pajama bottoms. “Oh. I guess not,” she says.

  I form a big smile. “Hey! It’s so good to see you. Oh my God! You look gorgeous! Check out that tan!” I manage to sound so overzealous that even I’m surprised at the squeal in my voice. “I’m seriously beat from all the end-of-summer parties.” I give a knowing look, trying to convey the idea that I’ve been engaged in such wild and scandalous activities over the past few weeks that I cannot possibly haul myself to one more social event. I pretend to yawn.

  B-name girl raises her cup in understanding and nods her head so vigorously that a strand of her hair bounces into the liquid. “I hear you. Well, rest up. Next time, ’kay?”

  The idea that I am going to have to spend another two years here, deflecting social interaction, is daunting. If I could throw an invisibility cloak over myself and attend college that way, I would.

  “For sure . . .” I make the horrible mistake of pausing, letting her know that I cannot for the life of me remember her name.

  “Carmen,” she says with a splash of annoyance. “Carmen. I lived next to you last year, and we had lit and British history together.”

  “I know your name, silly!” I scramble to think of something else to say. While I don’t want to go to any parties, I also really don’t want to hurt her feelings. It’s moments like this that I so wish I could be less awkward and weird. In a scramble to be friendly, I blurt out, “I just . . . I was just noticing your cool earrings. They’re so unique.”

  She touches a hand to her ear. “They’re plain silver hoops.”

  “Er, I didn’t mean unique, really. I meant . . . that . . . they’re the perfect size. Not too big, not too small, you know?”

  Carmen looks at me skeptically. “I guess so.”

  “They’re really nice. I’ve been wanting a pair like that.”

  “My mom got them for me. I can ask her where she bought them if you want.”

  I smile. “That’s so cool of you. Thanks!” I’m too chipper, I realize, so I bring it down a notch and fake another yawn. “Anyway, I’m sorry I’m so lame tonight. But drink a beer for me, will you?”

  “You got it! I’ll start now!” She takes a big drink from her cup and goes down the hall, turning back after a few paces. “Nice to see you, Allison.”

  “You too, Carmen!”

  I lock the door and turn off the light. The door to the empty second bedroom is open, and I stare at it. Leave it open, or shut the door? I can’t decide what to do. Closed will make it seem as though someone is in there. sleeping, studying, hooking up, wanting privacy . . . As though maybe I have a friend in there with whom I have an actual connection. Something. Open will remind me that there is no one in there.

  Truly, I have no idea what to do. Minutes tick by.

  Suddenly, I lurch forward, grab the handle, and slam it shut. That room does not exist.

  I rush away and quickly close my own door. I cannot get back into bed fast enough.

  I scramble to pull the bedding up to my chin in some kind of crazy fit. Why would Carmen come by my room? It’s inexplicable. My toes are wiggling wildly, and I clap my feet together to calm them down.

  I fan my body with the sheets before again smoothing the fabric, making sure the top fold is exact. Simon insisted on getting me new sheets, even though I already had one set, and he washed and even ironed these for me before we left home. He looked terribly disappointed when I tried to turn down these new sheets. “You can’t have just one set of sheets! Please? For me? Just this one year, have a second set,” he’d pleaded. “The thread count is off the charts.” So, I’d thanked him and accepted the gift of high thread count.

  The feel of the heavyweight cotton is less familiar than the inexpensive, scratchy sheets that I’d often slept on when growing up, and so I am moderately uncomfortable and tempted to pull the old ones from my closet and remake the bed, but in an effort to make Simon happy, I stick with these. He’s been trying for years to give me a new normal.

  I wish I could let him, but my history is too tainted for him to fix.

  I stopped hoping for stability when I was ten. It was a good, long run of optimism, if you ask me, but when I turned ten, it became obvious that I was unadoptable. No one would want a shy, uninteresting, skittish child who was well past the cute baby stage.

  I close my eyes and stroke the sheets over and over, trying to manage the anxiety that always comes with revisiting the past.

  I remember a very kind social worker who picked me up from a home placement when I was around eight. It was New Year’s Day, with sleeting rain stabbing at the mounds of snow, and she must have adjusted her pink wool scarf a dozen times a minute in her nervousness. What a depressing job she had. I can still see the smiling faces of the parents and their two biological children as they all hugged me good-bye and waved, wishing me well and thanking me for staying with them. Thanking me, as though I’d been an exchange student who’d just stopped in temporarily to experience the culture of an upper-class Massachusetts family. As though they’d been hosting me for fun. But at least I ate well, went to a good school, and got to take ballet for those six months. Ballet classes, however, were not worth the heartbreak that came with being told it was time to go.

  My childhood was a constant exchange of new schools, new rooms, new houses, new neighborhoods, new families. I think about how many teachers and classmates I had to meet, how many times I had to start over.

  Then there were birthdays. Either overly celebrated or entirely forgotten.

  My breathing picks up, and I squeeze my fingers over the fabric, trying to remind myself that I have more now than I ever expected. I should be reassured. There is Simon. He promised he wasn’t going anywhere. He adopted me. He signed papers, for God’s sake. Legally, he can’t go anywhere.

  So, he is stuck with me.

  My phone jars me from my impending escalation.

  Steffi. She’s the only person in the world I’d talk to now.

  I wipe my face and cough to clear my throat. “Hey, you!”

  “Hey, back!” Steffi shouts happily. Immediately, I am comforted.

  Steffi has been the one exception to the endless proof that the world is unstable and unreliable. From the moment we met when we were fourteen, we have been partners in survival. For only three months, we lived in the same foster family with four other kids, but three months were all we needed to cement our friendship.

  “How is California?” I ask.

  “Stupidly sunny and gorgeous. Just like me.” Steffi lets out her gravelly laugh, and I can practically see her flip her long blond hair. “I was made for Los Angeles, you know that. And you are, too. You’ll see that once you graduate and get your ass out here.”

  I smile. “That’s the plan.” I hear music fade in and out and the sound of hangers being pushed along a closet rod. “You going out?”

  “You betcha. I’m putting you on speaker while I get dressed, ’kay? So, what’s going on with you? How’d drop-off with Daddy go?”

  “Fine. You know . . . We had lunch.”

  “Simon still as hot as ever?”

  “Oh my God, Steffi! Don’t be gross!” But I can’t help laughing.

  “He’s not my daddy,” she says, making her voice all sexy and borderline creepy. “If I had my way, I could be Mrs. Simon Dennis. And be your mommy!”

  “Shut up! That’s weird. And he’s gay,” I remind her. “You’re not exactly his type. Thank God.”

  “There is that,” she says, sighing dramatically. “Dammit! Is he still wea
ring those adorable aviator glasses? Don’t answer that. Why is romance so unfair?”

  I roll my eyes. “I think you’ll survive not capturing Simon’s heart.”

  “It’s fine. I plan to drown my sorrows in a slew of vodka sodas and pick up the hottest piece of ass I can find. And you? Will you be getting some college-boy action yourself this fine evening?”

  I refrain from snorting. “Classes start tomorrow. Just taking . . . it . . . easy tonight.” For some reason, I stumble over my words, and it’s the only thing Steffi needs to know something is off.

  “What’s going on, Allison?” She’s gentle now.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You having a hard night?”

  It’s useless to lie to her. “Yes. A little. I don’t know why.”

  The music in the background stops. Like it or not, I have her full attention. “You want to run through it again?” she asks.

  I can’t speak, but she knows me well enough to know that I’m nodding.

  She begins to tell me what I already know—or what I should know, but what she must remind me of all too often. “We are not statistics. We beat the system. Nobody wanted us for all those years? Fine. So, we blew apart the system. We grew up alone, rejected, unwanted. But screw everybody. We graduated high school, and we’re both in college. We haven’t gone to jail. We don’t use drugs. We’ve never run away or been on the streets doing Lord knows what. We are not statistics,” she emphasizes again. “We lived with some rotten families. We lived with some cool ones. The details do not matter. Do you hear me? The details do not matter. I don’t want to live in the past. Neither do you. We’re not going back there. It’s over. We are not goddamn statistics. We will never be. We are the exception, and we are exceptional. Got it?”

  I nod to myself again. “Right.” I had become a shell of a kid until Steffi showed up and rocked me into life. At least to a degree.

  “So, what else?” she prompts. “What do we do? Each and every day?”

  I roll onto my side and reach to turn off the small desk light that shines over me. “We focus on the future, and we don’t look back.”

  “Big futures,” she corrects. “And why do we have big futures waiting for us?” she asks me.

  “Because you made us study. Because you knew that our education was the most important thing. That it would save us.”

  She’s not bragging when she makes me say this; she’s only pushing me to validate what we both did. She should take more credit, though, because Steffi threatened, cajoled, and bribed to get my contact information with each move. She was relentless in keeping us together even after we were apart. And Steffi is the only reason that I threw myself into school because she instilled in me how crucial this was to survival.

  “And you got into college. A damn good one.”

  “And you got a full scholarship to UCLA. Nobody does that. Nobody,” I stress, almost as if to remind myself of what she’s accomplished. Steffi’s hard work and ferocious determination have indeed paid off well. She, much more than me, is the exception to the foster-kid rule.

  “We got where we are,” she continues, “because we stayed focused.”

  I stare at the ceiling above me. “And because you took care of me.”

  “We took care of each other.” Steffi pauses. “Do you remember what you did for me?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  She’s silent for a bit. “Okay. But you took care of me, too.”

  “Why don’t you let me take care of you more now?”

  “Because I’m a tough shit.”

  I can’t help laughing. “You are. I just want you to know that I’m here for you. That I’d do anything for you.”

  “Of course you would! I know that. Allison?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You got a good ending, okay? You got Simon. Don’t forget that. Even when we thought it was too late, even when it felt like it didn’t matter anymore, you got a father. You have somewhere to call home, somewhere to go during breaks and summers. Just because he showed up late doesn’t mean that he doesn’t matter. You defied some crazy odds by getting adopted in high school.”

  “It’s not fair.” I cannot stand when Steffi says this, because my guilt is uncontrollable. I cup a hand over my mouth to stifle the sobs that threaten to come through, and it takes me a moment until I can speak without emotion. I wait until my voice is flat. Factual. “But you didn’t get adopted.”

  “I didn’t need to. I was a sick little kid, Allison. Nobody wanted a kid who’d had cancer. And then, years later, even when I was better, I didn’t need them.” The them she refers to are Joan and Cal Kantor. Steffi moved into their house around the same time I moved in with Simon. Simon adopted me, but Joan and Cal did not adopt Steffi, instead letting her turn eighteen and go off on her own. No support, no family, no sense of safe haven.

  As hardened and independent as Steffi was, even she was shaken when they politely let her know that their time as foster parents was done. It was not a happy graduation from high school.

  I will never forgive them.

  I’ll never know what to say about Joan and Cal. What to say about how they discarded the most tremendous girl. A could-be daughter.

  As always, Steffi steps in to fill the void I create. “Look, Allison, I was a dud, okay? A risk. And why would I want to settle down with a nice family and their three dogs when I have you, right?”

  “Right.” But I’m not sure.

  “Hey! Snap out of it!” she says sharply. “I got you! What do I always say?”

  My head is spinning. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Hold on to your one. Remember? I have you, and you have me. And when you’re lucky enough to find one—just one—person in this unforgiving life who makes everything worth it, who you love and trust and would kill for, then you hold on damn tight, because that’s probably all you get. We got this,” Steffi says with conviction.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s going to hurt until it doesn’t anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say it.”

  “It’s going to hurt until it doesn’t anymore.” I repeat her words, but I’m not sure I believe them. I’m not as strong as Steffi, and my past does still hurt. Even though the worst should be over, it all still hurts with a relentless, enduring power that I cannot match.

  It’s possible that I’m too broken.

  “Steffi? You’re not a dud. You never were. You are more perfect than any parents could handle. That’s all.”

  CHAPTER 3

  MOTIVATION

  I learn a troubling thing during the first week of school: it’s harder to find upperclassmen courses that are jam-packed with students. I’m a big fan of lecture halls and classes that facilitate anonymity. As much as I avoid people, certain types of crowds are ironically my friend.

  On Friday morning, I spend thirty-five minutes in the campus registration office, going over the course options with an eye for the best chance at being able to blend in. I refuse to drop my Hundred Words for Snow: Language and Nature class, because it’s all about how language influences the way we see the world, and I find that irresistibly intriguing. Plus, the course seems to involve a lot of listening, with minimal class participation, and I’m totally on board with that. I do, however, give up Cultures of Neoliberalism, because it meets in a conference room in the library, and there is no way I am going to discuss “the relative autonomy of the economic sphere” with only six other students and a professor. Instead, I swap that out for the very popular Social Psychology. Between those classes and the Eating for Change? Food, Media, and Environment in US Consumer Culture, as well as Probability and Mathematical Statistics, I should have a perfect balance between being safe from too much interaction and having really interesting classes that I’ll enjoy.

  With my schedule in place, the next few weeks go smoothly. I settle into a pleasing routine of studying, visiting the library, and reading during meals in the cafe
teria. I suppose I come off as a quiet, nerdy girl, but that’s nothing terrifically unusual at Andrews College.

  I’m in a surprisingly good mood one late-September Friday as I move fluidly through the crowded student union and outside to the quad. I only have psych class left today, and the upcoming weekend means less pressure to interact. The union’s café makes a good iced coffee, and I suck the straw hard as I walk to the sunny lawn area and find a spot to myself under a large oak tree. I have a half hour before class, so I lean against the knotty trunk and retrieve a library book from my backpack.

  I’m probably the only person alive who still prefers print books over e-books, and overall, I’m not much into technology. Obviously, I use e-mail and the Internet for research and news, and I have a cell phone, but that’s about it. Steffi has been hounding me to get on Facebook and Twitter and such for years, but the mere thought makes me want to hurl. As someone who stays on top of celebrity gossip, Steffi can’t understand my desire to avoid social platforms. While she doesn’t have any particularly close friends in Los Angeles, she’s well entrenched in UCLA’s superficial social scene, and she’s always busy going out with groups of party acquaintances.

  My iced coffee is the right amount of both strong and sweet, and I draw another big taste as I kill time before class. The air has begun to cool a bit, and it finally feels more like autumn. I look up and watch the oak leaves flutter in the slight breeze, letting sun and shadow flicker across my face. There’s a feeling of peace. It’s so quiet here.

  I scan my surroundings and, as always, admire the beautiful old stone that makes up the original buildings on campus. Andrews College could not look more classically collegiate, and even the newer buildings were designed to fit in with the old. Trees and shrubs, brick pathways, and ornate lampposts all add to the atmosphere. Inspired by this glorious day, I decide that I should spend more time out here before the brutal Maine winter arrives. Holing up in my room so much is probably not smart, and from my spot under this tree, I can at least watch the world go by, even if I don’t participate. I realize that when I pay attention, I actually hear a lot: Frisbee players calling back and forth to each other, the chatter of students traversing the nearby walkway, guitar notes floating my way from a musician under another nearby tree . . . I’m taken aback at how much sound I usually shut out. Great. Another thing that’s probably not indicative of sound mental health.