Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

“Nothing.”

“Did I give you permission to use that program?”

“I’m in public,” she said. “What’s your problem?”

Andy sighed, got a glass out of the cabinet. He needed to steal his laptop back momentarily, see if Melissa had written to him, try to figure out what to say back to her. He poured himself some water, wished there was some junk food in the house, something his daughter hadn’t assiduously prepared. Something with nitrates.

“So who were you writing to, anyway?”

“Lily Dreisinger,” Rachel said.

“Why don’t I know this Lily Dreisinger?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “You’ve met her. She was at the father-daughter dance.”

All those glittery preteens, impossible to tell apart. Andy leaned back against the counter. “You were writing to her quite enthusiastically.”

“We’re in a fight.”

“You are? About what?”

“God,” Rachel said.

“Seriously?”

“I told her about Belle’s baptism, about how we believe in God now, and she said that we didn’t believe in the real God because we don’t belong to a church, and how we were probably still going to hell, and I was like, whatever, you’re an idiot, and she was like I shouldn’t pretend to be something I’m not just to fit in. We’ve been kind of fighting about this for a while. She’s sort of really mean when it comes to this stuff.”

“I see,” Andy said. He sipped his water. His ripple effect.

“Is that what you think we were doing?” he asked. “Just trying to fit in by going to church?”

“No,” she said. “That’s what I told Lily, that it’s not like everyone needs to do exactly what she does to be cool, or whatever. But she can be such a bitch.”

“Rachel—”

“Sorry,” she said, looking abashed. “I shouldn’t say that.”

“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t.”

In the back of a cabinet, he found a small package of Oreos, which had probably been there for months. Did Oreos expire? He shook out several cookies, put them on a plate, sat down at the table across from his daughter. She looked at them for a second, weighing the various chemicals and sugars, and then gave in to being eleven and popped one in her mouth.

Andy ate one the way he did as a child, twisting off the top, licking off the cream.

“We need some milk,” Rachel said.

“True,” Andy said, but neither one got up to get any.

“So I have a question for you,” Andy said, when they had reduced the number of Oreos on their plate by half. “Why do you think we really went to church? If it wasn’t just because everybody else does?”

Rachel shook her head, wiped some chocolate crumbs off her mouth. “I think we were trying to be happy,” she said.

“That’s all?”

“What do you mean that’s all?” Rachel said. “It’s a big thing.”

She twisted off the lid of an Oreo, mimicking Andy. “We were trying to be happy,” she said again. “And I think we were.”

When he finally saw Melissa again three days later, she was the apologetic one. “Studying for finals,” she said, throwing an arm around his neck, even though they were practically in public, in his office. “What a drag.” Then she kissed him, and he almost gave himself whiplash twisting away. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re in my office,” he said.

“So?” She moved some papers off his chair, sat down on it, slung a leg over the arm like she was posing for a men’s magazine. Had he ever seen her sit like this, her legs splayed apart?

“Melissa,” he said, gesturing with a hand to get her to sit up straight, but she didn’t seem to understand. How would he feel if Rachel came into her professor’s office (Rachel, only seven and a half years from college, ten years younger than Melissa) and sat right down and spread her legs like this? He would kill her, that’s what he would do. He would ground her until the end of time.

“What, are you sick of me?” She batted her eyes at him the way she sometimes did, as though he should find her irresistible.

Andy grinned through his embarrassment, shook his head.

“So what’s the problem?”

He sat down on his desk near her, and after a moment’s thought took her warm pudgy hand. He had to do this. Did he have to do it here? Probably, unfortunately.

But before he could speak: “So I have the rest of my paper,” she said.

“Your paper?”

“Jeez, fuzzy-head,” she said, taking her hand away so she could smack him, playfully. “My independent study. You know, the reason I met you in the first place.”

They were still doing her independent study? Suddenly the whole of the past nine months seemed to tunnel away from him. There had been moments he could remember—his trip to Florida, the baptism—but the day-to-day stuff, the research, the grades, the showering, the commuting, the soccer practices: had any of this even happened? He ran a hand through his hair to make sure it was still there.

“Are you okay?”

“I just—I’ve been sort of out of it lately,” he said. Maybe he was wrong about Melissa. Maybe she really could understand him. This was how he felt after Lou died: unsure about everything, about who he was supposed to be and what he knew. Melissa was looking at him, concerned. “I’ve been having a hard time with my focus,” he said.

“Are you sick?”

“I’m not sick.”

“Because my uncle, for a long time, he had all these problems focusing and concentrating and then it turned out he had Lou Gehrig’s disease.” She smiled, abashed. “Not that I think you have Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

“Melissa, look, I’m not sure we should keep doing whatever we’ve been doing,” he said, but she wasn’t listening, or if she was she was going to pretend she wasn’t. She was riffling through her backpack, retrieving a large white binder. Written on the cover, in marker: The Proof of God’s Hand, an Independent Study, Written in Conjunction with Andrew Waite, PhD, by Melissa Anne Potter, April 15, 2012.

“Your independent study,” he said, weakly.

“Do you like the title?”

He took it in his hands. It was heavy: the expensive brand of binder. He flipped it open, thirty pages, with a table of contents listing things like “The Human Eye” and “The Paradox of Nothing.”

“But did we ever really work on intelligent design together?” he said. “I mean, did we really write this in conjunction?”

“Well, I guess we didn’t really write it together,” she said. She looked guilty. “I could change that title if you want. Maybe just ‘written under the auspices’ or something like that.”

“No,” Andy said. He put the binder down. “What I mean is that I can’t remember us ever really talking about intelligent design together. I don’t remember ever going through the facts of intelligent design, trying to pin them down and prove them.”

“Are you serious?” Melissa said. “We talked about God forever. We went to church together!”

“Yes, but I don’t think I—did you ever explain it to me?”

She looked at him, blank and worried.

“I just don’t think I did a very good job of challenging you,” he said.

“That’s because you didn’t want to challenge me. I convinced you of God’s design,” she said. “Or my books did. Or Pastor Cling. I shouldn’t really take the credit,” she said. “But we came to an understanding of what God’s design is. We both did. You read the books!”

She was a wide girl with a wide-open face, open gray eyes framed in thin lashes. Her bushy hair in a ponytail, her cross resting comfortably beneath her clavicle. She had brought her legs back together and was now sitting primly, her hands nervously clenched on her lap. She was a good person, a sweet person, and he had failed her in more ways than he could count.