Jennifer Weiner: Then Came You

The worst part wasn’t the boys; it was the girls, the ones who had once been my friends. She thinks she’s sooo pretty, I’d heard Missy Henried sneer to Beth Brock one day at lunch after Matt Blum, staring at me across the cafeteria, had almost walked into a table. Like I’d asked for him to stare. I had a mirror, and I’d seen enough magazines and TV shows to know that I was what was considered good-looking, maybe even beautiful. But the beautiful girls on TV or in those glossy pages all seemed happy. They never looked lonely, like their faces, their hair, their bodies were traps keeping them apart from everyone else. I couldn’t figure out why I felt guilty when boys stared, like I was lying, or offering them something I didn’t really have. All I knew was that Missy and Beth and I had been Brownies together; we’d trick-or-treated every October, giggling in the costumes that had turned us into cheerleaders or witches or Pink Ladies from Grease, posing on Missy’s front porch while her father struggled with his video camera. Now I was their enemy. Now they were on one side of a wall, and I was on the other.

“So what am I supposed to do about it?” I asked my dad. Back then, I thought he knew all the answers. Our house was full of books he’d read, biographies of presidents and scientists, thick hardcover novels with approving quotes from The New Yorker on their backs, different from my mother’s mysteries, which were bright paperbacks with actual people on the covers and titles spelled out in foil.

He’d patted my shoulder. “Just be aware.” Almost ten years later, whenever I felt a man’s eyes passing over me — sometimes lightly, like water, sometimes like the high whining of a mosquito in my ear — I’d remember my father, mumbling into his tie, my father, when he was still all right. Love you, sweetheart, he’d said, and hugged me, the way he hardly ever did since my breasts had gotten bigger than bug bites on my chest.

In the food court, I speared a maraschino cherry on my chopstick. The man in the suit made up his mind, walking away from the salad stand, heading straight toward me. I thought he was in his late thirties, maybe his forties, with dark, curly hair and a handsome, coddled face.

I bent over my dinner, hoping he’d just keep walking, and began the time-consuming process of separating the chilies from the chunks of chicken and pineapple, wondering whether he’d work up the nerve to say something or if he was just cruising by for a closer look. When I looked up again he was standing right in front of my table for two, with nothing to eat.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you go to Princeton?”

I nodded, unimpressed. I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said Princeton right across the chest. No makeup, except a little lip gloss and the mascara and eyeliner I never left the dorm without, because my lashes are so sparse and fine that they’re basically invisible without a swipe or two of Lash Out, and my eyes are such a pale blue-gray noncolor that they tend to blend into my forehead without liner, giving my face the look of an underbaked pie.

“You like it there?” he asked. I nodded again.

He lifted his briefcase and moved as if he was going to sit down across from me. I edged my metal-legged chair backward, preparing to tell him, politely, that I needed to finish my dinner and get going because my friends were waiting, when he asked, “Do you play any sports?”

This was a surprise. I’d been betting an either What’s your major or Where are you from … either that or he’d ask me for help, the most common ploy. At the mall, guys would ask which movie I’d seen and if I’d liked it, or if I could help them pick out a necklace or a sweater for their sister or their mom. At the gym, guys would point at the controls for the StairMaster, feigning confusion. Hey, do you know how to work this? In the grocery store, they’d need my assistance picking out pasta or plums. At the gas station, they would require directions; in class, they’d want to know if I’d read the assignment, if I had plans for the weekend, if I’d read this book or heard that band. I know this makes me sound as if my life was a nonstop parade of men who were dying to talk to me, but it’s just the truth. When you look a certain way — blond and tall, with D-cup boobs, with wide-set eyes and a straight nose, and full lips that are dark pink even without lipstick — men want to talk to you. Usually they ask you out, and twice in my life, once in this very mall, I’d been asked if I was a model.

“Field hockey and lacrosse,” I said. I’d played both in high school, but not since.

The man sat down, uninvited. “Are you twenty-one?”

I narrowed my eyes, one hand on the strap of my backpack, wondering whether he was going to propose something illegal or seamy, like phone sex or stripping. Up close, he was older than I’d thought, older than he should have been if he was hitting on a girl my age, maybe forty-five, with a plain gold wedding band on his left hand, and I didn’t want to have dinner with him, or give him my number or my e-mail address or tell him where I lived or let him buy me a drink or a frozen yogurt; I just wanted to finish my food and go back to my dorm room, avoid my boyfriend, curl up with a book, and count the days until graduation. That was when he smiled.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m getting ahead of myself. Jared Baker,” he said, and stuck his hand across the table.

I shook it quickly. The skin of his palms felt as soft as I imagined the skin on his face would. I got to my feet, never mind that half my dinner was still sitting there. “Excuse me, but my friends are probably waiting for me.” I had my tray in one hand and my backpack in the other when Jared Baker said, “How would you like to make twenty thousand dollars?”

I paused. My skin was tingling. Illegal, I thought. It has to be. “Doing what? Smuggling drugs out of Mexico?”

His smile widened so that I could see his teeth. “Egg donation.”

I set my tray back on the table. “Sit,” said Jared Baker, coming around the table to pull my chair out for me. He looped my backpack’s straps over the chair and did everything but spread a paper napkin in my lap. It was a funny performance, like a parody of a man tending to a wife who was fragile as an egg. Or who was carrying fragile eggs. “Eat your dinner.” He frowned at the plate. “Skip the spring roll, though. Saturated fats.”

Looking him right in the eye, I dragged the roll through the slurry of Chinese mustard and duck sauce I’d made, and took a giant bite. His grin widened. “Moxie,” he said. “That’s nice. People like a girl with a sense of humor.”

“Are you serious?” I asked once I’d swallowed. “Twenty thousand dollars for an egg?” I’d seen ads, of course, in the school paper, online, and on fliers posted in the student union and the library. Families seeking egg donors. All expenses paid. Please help make our dreams come true . But I’d never noticed the fee for the egg itself, and I’d never guessed it would be so high.

Jared Baker was friendly, but not smarmy, serious and calm as he asked me more questions: Where had I grown up? What were my SAT scores? Had I ever had an IQ test? Had anyone in my family had cancer or diabetes or mental illness? I gave him the numbers and said no to the illnesses. He pulled a notebook out of his briefcase and asked if I had siblings, how old my mother had been when I was born, and how much I’d weighed as a baby. I was careful with my answers, thinking about what he’d want to hear, what story would go best with the girl he was seeing, a tall, blond, jockish girl in a Princeton sweatshirt who was eating by herself only because her friends had finished first and were waiting for her in the bookstore.