Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

She was wearing one of his old T-shirts — God, she could make an ancient, stained Rugrats T-shirt look good — and a stretchy little black skirt. The air conditioner in her bedroom window was so loud that they had to turn the music way up, which made it hard to hear Ruby’s answers to his flash cards, but Harry was reading her lips. They were listening to Otis Redding, and every now and then Ruby would jump off the bed and dance.

“‘Showing great joy’—come on, that’s an easy one. Jubilant!” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Give me something harder.”

“You can’t just do the hard ones. You need to make sure you know the easy ones, too. You can’t give the easy ones away! That’s how you rack up the points!”

“Harry, this is the SATs, not a video game.” Ruby clapped her hands. “Let’s go, next.”

He flipped through the cards. Temperate. Gloaming. Cloister. Ruby knew them all. She got up and turned the fan so it was pointing right at her face. She had a few tiny pimples on her right cheek, and one of her earrings had gotten infected — she’d pierced that ear herself, in the bathroom at school — and the hole was still a little bit red. Harry wished that he could videotape every second he spent with Ruby so that he could look at it in twenty years. So he could show it to her in twenty years. So they could look at it together and show their children. A boy and a girl. Twins, maybe. Was it weird that Harry was picturing twins? They’d be light-skinned, like Ruby, with chubby arms and legs, like him.

Harry had been thinking a lot about the future.

He’d be done with Whitman in less than a year — graduation was in June. That was only ten months away. He’d already told Ruby that he loved her, and he couldn’t imagine that changing anytime soon. He couldn’t imagine it changing, period. What were the rules for when the best person you knew was someone you’d known all your life? Were you supposed to pretend to look elsewhere, just for due diligence? Harry didn’t give a fuck about who else might be out there — it seemed literally impossible that there was anyone else on the planet who he would like more. It wasn’t anything as cheesy as having a soul mate — that was Lifetime-movie shit, soft focus and hokey. It was just math. Anyone else + Harry = stupid. He hoped that was one of the questions.

If he did well enough on the test, he could easily get into any of the city schools he wanted to go to, which wouldn’t even be expensive. If Ruby kept working at her parents’ restaurant, she’d make money. All they needed was a place to live. In eight months he’d be eighteen, and then his parents couldn’t tell him not to see her. It was really just his dad, anyway, and Harry thought that there was a fairly high likelihood that he’d get over it soon.

Harry hadn’t seen his friends in weeks, and he didn’t care. Maybe that’s what it felt like to be in love. Ruby hadn’t been hanging out with her friends either — there were girls who Harry had seen her with every day for the last four years, Chloe and Paloma and Anika and Sarah Dinnerstein, but other than Sarah, he hadn’t seen them all summer. That seemed weirder. He didn’t really want to bring it up, because it might pop a hole in that magical, mysterious dream that they were clearly living inside, a world in which Ruby loved him back. But he wanted to know.

“Hey, what are your friends doing this summer? Chloe and them?” He chewed on his nails.

“Chloe’s in Paris, Paloma’s already at Dartmouth. They’re on the quarter system — plus, there was some freshman camping trip beforehand. Ugh, I would rather die a slow, painful death than go on a freshman camping trip.” Ruby sighed. “Everyone is gone but me.”

“I’m not gone. I’m here.” Harry flipped through the flash cards, quizzing himself.

“I know,” Ruby said. “But you don’t count.”

Harry looked up.

“Oh, come on, I don’t mean it like that,” Ruby said. “I just mean that of course you’re here. You’re not done with school yet, and plus, you’re just, like, always here.”

“Uh-huh,” Harry said. “I guess that’s true. Would you rather I was somewhere else?”

“You’re my love slave,” Ruby said. “This is the only place I want you to be.” She jumped back onto the bed, stuck her legs in the air, and tugged off her skirt.

“Is that your way of apologizing?” Harry asked. He pulled his knees into his chest.

Ruby flipped over and crawled the rest of the way toward him. “Yes.”

“I guess I could let it go with a warning. Just this once.” Harry closed his eyes and let Ruby take the flash cards out of his hand. They made a splashing sound when they hit the wood floor, and when Ruby started kissing him, Harry imagined all the words floating up in the air and making sentences about them, a miniature tornado of love poems. Maybe it didn’t matter if Ruby loved him. Maybe his love was enough for both of them.

Andrew was home so infrequently, it was almost like he had a nine-to-five job. Elizabeth took to staring out the window like a sailor’s bride. A sailor’s widow? Is that what they were called? A couple of the houses in the neighborhood had widow’s walks, which didn’t even make any sense — there was no view to speak of, except the roofs of other houses, and it seemed like offering burglars a runway, but there was no accounting for sense in Brooklyn real estate. Even when Andrew was at home, he treated her with a polite chilliness that usually lasted only a few hours. Now it had been several weeks, and Elizabeth was worried he might never warm back up. She missed the cat. She missed Andrew, the way he used to be, or the way she used to think he was. Sometimes at night when Elizabeth was trying to go to sleep, she would close her eyes and see Iggy, his tiny little pussycat face peeking out from under a car or behind a trash can, and then he would start to look like Andrew, and she would open her eyes and stare at the ceiling, her heart beating so fast. Iggy was lost, Andrew was lost, and so was she. Everyone except for Harry. Poor Harry! To be saddled with such parents and a missing cat, all at once. Maybe she should make an appointment for him to see someone.

Her phone rang — the house phone, the landline. No one ever used it except the office at Whitman, or sometimes some clients who were especially anxious about something that couldn’t wait until morning. Elizabeth picked it up and said hello. There was a telltale pause.

“Hi there, oops, you caught me! It’s Naomi!”

Elizabeth looked at the telephone. “I didn’t even realize that you had this number. Then again, you seem to have all the numbers, so I’m not really surprised. I’m much easier to reach on my cell phone, though.”

Naomi laughed. “I’m calling for Andrew. He left me a message, and I got a little excited, you know, like, he’s Mr. Mistress!”

“Andrew called you?” Elizabeth pulled back the curtain again and peered out onto the street. “To say what?”

Naomi tsked. “You are so naughty! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” Her voice hardened. This was Hollywood — the swift, humorless shift toward the mercenary. “He said that he never agreed, and that as a co-writer of the song, his consent was required to use it, and that his lawyers would be delighted to talk to our lawyers about it. He also said, and I quote, ‘There is no amount of money that will make me change my mind.’ So that’s interesting, don’t you think?” The bubbles came back to her voice. “Tell me he was high, Elizabeth. Tell me that it was a prank phone call.”

Elizabeth swallowed. Andrew was the one who was acting crazy — why was she the only one who noticed? Why was everything her fault?