In Between Days Page 10

  The boy who was explaining this all to them was named Seung, a Korean American boy who was good friends with Fatima. The other two boys at the table were Indian.

  “Did they give an explanation?” Chloe remembered asking at one point.

  “An explanation?” Seung said.

  “For why he was being denied tenure?”

  Seung rolled his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “The typical. You know, he hadn’t published enough. He hadn’t met the department’s requirements. That type of thing.”

  “Well, isn’t that kind of valid?” Chloe heard herself saying.

  At this point, the table had grown quiet, and Chloe could feel Fatima’s eyes on her. She could also feel the beer settling in.

  “I mean, just for the sake of argument,” she continued timidly, “let’s say he didn’t meet the department’s requirements, okay. Let’s say he didn’t do what he was supposed to do.”

  “It’s irrelevant,” Seung said. “He’s a great teacher, and besides, there’s a bunch of other shit I can’t even tell you about. Weird shit. I mean, the whole thing is just completely fucked. Trust me.”

  Chloe nodded and looked down, and then a moment later she felt the world spinning, the bar falling out of focus, her stomach growing nauseous. A few seconds after that, she felt a hand on her shoulder, and when she looked up, she saw one of the two Indian boys staring at her, the quiet, handsome one.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Why don’t we get you some air,” he said, and then he reached over and helped her stand up and led her out of the bar.

  Outside on the curb, she vomited twice into a large metal trash can while the boy held her hair and massaged her shoulders. He told her that it was fine, that she’d probably just had too much to drink, that it happened to everyone. Then he’d helped her sit down on the curb and given her a glass of water, which he’d brought out from the bar.

  “Drink this,” he’d said and held the glass to her lips, and then he’d smiled at her in a way that made her feel calm.

  She didn’t remember much else from that night, only that she had sat there with the boy on the curb for a long time and that they had shared a couple of cigarettes and that she had felt at once both embarrassed and strangely calm. And she remembered also that, at one point, he had told her that he’d agreed with what she’d said at the bar, about Professor Kim, that she’d made a good point.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, it was something I was thinking about, too.”

  “So why didn’t you say something?”

  He laughed and rolled his eyes. “Seung,” he said. “When that dude’s on his soapbox, it’s best just to duck and take cover.”

  She smiled and then drew on her cigarette and then looked at him. She wanted to say something else, but before she could say a word, the bar door flung open and Fatima came out, shaking her finger.

  “You!” she said, waving her finger drunkenly at Chloe. “You owe me, like, some serious cash, honey!”

  She was laughing as she said this though, and teetering slightly, and Chloe quickly ran over and hugged her, apologized. By then, the other two boys had come out and joined the third on the curb. They were lighting up their cigarettes and laughing, and then at one point they all turned around and started to leave.

  “We’re going to be taking off now, ladies,” Seung yelled back as they started down the street. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  And just like that the boy was gone, and Chloe was left there, staring at the back of his head, watching it as it bobbed unevenly down the street.

  “Hey,” Chloe said, after they’d left. “Who was that?”

  “Who?” Fatima said, trying to use the side of a mailbox to keep her balance.

  “That boy I was talking to.”

  Fatima smiled at her. “Why? You interested?”

  “No,” Chloe said. “Just curious.”

  Fatima stood up then and continued to smile. “Well,” she said. “That boy’s name is Raja Kittappa, but I’m telling you, Chlo, you should stay away from him.”

  “Why?” Chloe said.

  “Because”—Fatima smiled—“he’s got a girlfriend.”

  2

  IT WOULD BE several months before Chloe would hear from Raja Kittappa again. By then, she would be several weeks into the fall semester of her junior year at Stratham, a newly reinvented version of herself, a girl who now had friends, a girl who now had a social life, a girl who now had things to do on Friday nights. That previous spring she had gone out almost every single weekend, had made a habit of scheduling her study time around parties, and though she didn’t have as many close friends as Fatima, she had begun to take some pride in the fact that people knew her now, that people waved to her when she walked across the quad or smiled at her when she entered the dining hall. It was true that she had met most of these people through Fatima, but still, it felt good to be embraced by them, to be taken into their circle, and to be considered their friend.

  She would be out with some of these friends, in fact, on the night that Raja called her, though, even now, it seemed amazing to her that he had. At the time, she’d been standing in a small, dim-lit bathroom at the back of Le Café Rouge, a dark off-campus coffeehouse where Fatima and some of the girls from her advanced poetry class were performing spoken-word poetry and what they referred to as “impromptu verse.” She had taken a break from the performance when she got the phone call from Raja on her cell, though she hadn’t recognized his voice until he introduced himself. Once she did, however, it all came back to her, the memory of that night, and for a moment she just stood there, paralyzed, staring at herself in the mirror, not knowing what to say. Raja had spoken calmly at first. He’d said that he hoped she remembered who he was, then apologized for the randomness of the phone call and asked her if she might be interested in joining him for dinner the following night at Tommy’s. He said that he’d been meaning to call her for a while but hadn’t had the courage.

  She stood there, motionless, still trying to process what was happening.

  “I’m confused,” she’d said finally. “I thought you had a girlfriend.”

  “I did,” he said.

  “But not anymore?”

  “Not anymore.”

  She looked at herself in the mirror. “I think I saw her once,” she said. “Your girlfriend.” She thought then of the beautiful Indian girl who Fatima had once pointed out to her at the campus deli. “She’s pretty.”

  “Yeah.” Raja had laughed. “Well, she’s a lot of other things, too.”

  There was a sudden bitterness in his tone that made her regret bringing it up.

  “Anyway,” he said. “So, tomorrow? Tommy’s?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Should I meet you there?”

  “No, no,” he said. “I’ll swing by your dorm first, say, around seven?”

  “Sounds good,” she’d said, and then they’d hung up and she’d run into the main room of the coffeehouse where, just then, Fatima was coming offstage.

  “What the hell?” Fatima had laughed as Chloe rushed up to her. “Why the hell are you smiling so big?”

  The next night Raja had picked her up at seven, just as promised, and they’d walked over to Tommy’s and then, afterward, back to his dorm room on the other side of campus. Chloe had expected Raja’s dorm room to be just as mysterious as he was, but it wasn’t. In fact, it was almost surprisingly plain. A tall row of bookcases lined the far wall, and above his bed, a small futon in the corner of the room, there were tattered posters of various rock bands: Belle & Sebastian, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Guided by Voices. Chloe had sat down at a desk in the corner of the room and studied the small silver-framed photographs of his family—his mother and father, his younger sister—all dressed up in traditional Indian garb.

  “Where are these from?” she’d asked at one point, picking up one of the photos.

  “A wedding, I
think,” he’d said. Then he’d walked over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. It was the first time he’d touched her that night.

  “Whose wedding?”

  He looked at her. “No idea,” he said. “Can’t remember.” Then he smiled at her. “Say, why are you so interested in my family?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “They seem interesting.”

  “They do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, they’re actually not,” he said and laughed. “They’re actually surprisingly uninteresting.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Really.”

  “Well,” she said. “I wish I could say the same.”

  Up until that point, she had successfully avoided the topic of her own family, but now she felt she had opened up a door. Still, to her surprise, Raja didn’t pry. Instead, he just stood there for a moment. Then he cupped her face in his hands and leaned down and kissed her, a soft, innocent kiss that sent a rushing through her.

  “That was nice,” she’d said afterward, and then feeling suddenly self-conscious added, “I mean, you know—”

  Raja smiled at her.

  She looked down and blushed.

  “No, no,” he said softly, touching her arm. “You’re right. It was nice.”

  For the next several weeks, she and Raja were inseparable. They went to meals together, met for coffee after class, studied together in the library after dinner. She often made herself an overnight bag, which she’d bring over to his place in the evenings after dinner. They hadn’t slept together yet, but every time she packed her overnight bag, she’d have this fleeting sensation that tonight might be the night. Still, Raja never pushed, never pressured her. He seemed to want to take things slow. He seemed to be waiting for the right moment. And this was fine with her. For now, she was content to simply lie there beside him on his futon, to spend her evenings in his arms, to fall asleep to the sound of his voice or to the sound of the music on his stereo. They spent a lot of their evenings like this, just lying in bed, talking or listening to music. Raja liked to tell her stories, stories about his life growing up in Pakistan and India or, later, about his teenage years as a high school student in New Jersey. Through these conversations, she’d learned that his mother had grown up poor, even poorer than his father, and that she still spoke little English. She’d learned that his mother had cried for almost a week when they first moved to the States, that she hated New Jersey, that she hated the U.S. in general, and that she often threatened to leave, especially during that first year they were living there. He’d told her how distrustful his parents had been of the American school system, how they often set up meetings with his teachers, how his father had once written a letter to the principal asking for the dismissal of one of his teachers. During that first year in the States, he’d said, everything was different. It was like his parents were still pretending they were living in Mumbai. He and his sister were only permitted to socialize with other Indian children, friends of his parents, and they never once went out to eat, never once ate American food. It was like living in a controlled environment, he’d said, though over time his parents had relaxed, loosened up. Over time they had started speaking English at the dinner table; over time they had started letting them rent American movies from the video store; and over time they had even started letting them stay over at their American friends’ houses on the weekends. Still, it had always been there, he said, this strange distrust of the States, this longing for Mumbai. It was a kind of homesickness, he guessed, a kind of homesickness that just never went away. And he knew that eventually they’d go back there, that eventually, when his father retired and his sister was out of the house, they’d move back there for good. But when she’d asked him how he felt about this, he’d said very little, only that his parents’ lives—his parents’ decisions—were theirs, not his.

  “But don’t you care?” she asked.

  “It’s not about caring,” he said, and then he’d looked away, and that had been the last time they talked about his parents for quite a while.

  Still, despite the difficulty of his teenage years, Raja seemed to have enjoyed his time at Stratham so far. He had a lot of friends here, more friends than Chloe had ever had, and these friends often came over to his dorm room in the evenings after class. They seemed to gravitate toward him in the same way that other students gravitated toward professors. They valued his opinion, respected his advice, and often turned to him for counsel on the various problems in their lives. Chloe liked to joke that these friends of his were not really friends so much as “patients” and that he should be billing them at a competitive rate. “Maybe we could get a couch in here,” she’d said one night. “You know, set up a receptionist’s desk in the hall. I could be your secretary.”

  “Right.” Raja had laughed. Then he’d looked at her strangely and frowned. “To be honest, you know, I have no idea why they even come here. I mean, honestly, I don’t know why they think I can help them. It really should be the other way around.”

  But the truth was there was a part of Chloe that secretly enjoyed the fact that so many other students at Stratham seemed to look up to Raja, that they seemed to see in him what she saw: a kind and gentle soul, a boy who would do anything for the people he loved. She had never dated a boy like this before, never believed she would, though, of course, it became evident to her after a while that she was not the only girl at Stratham who seemed to feel this way. In fact, for every boy that stopped by Raja’s dorm room in the evenings, there seemed to be at least twice as many girls, and it was mostly the girls that Chloe had a problem with. Usually, they’d come in unannounced, sit down on the edge of his bed, then begin to play with their hair or complain about their classes; or, other times, they’d just sit there at his computer and check their e-mail. Most of these girls were Indian, some of them very beautiful, and all of them clearly enamored of Raja. They seemed to regard Chloe with a vague disinterest, if they regarded her at all, and more often than not, they’d simply sit there and talk to Raja as if she herself were not in the room.

  For the most part, she didn’t mind, didn’t let it get to her in the way she could have. She didn’t want to be that type of girlfriend, the type who allowed her own insecurities and fears to come into the picture. But still, there were moments when these girls could be so incredibly cold to her, so cold that she would find herself wanting to cry, and one night in particular when she did.

  This was a night in early October, a few weeks after they’d started dating. She and Raja had been hanging out in his dorm room, eating Chinese takeout with a group of students from his floor. Chloe didn’t know most of these students very well, but she knew that at least one of them was a girl who had once dated Raja. For most of the night this girl had ignored her, but then at one point, after they’d had a couple of beers, she’d begun to probe into Chloe’s past, begun to ask her about her freshman year. Wasn’t she that freak girl? she wondered. That freak girl who always showed up at parties by herself? What did they used to call her? she wondered. What was her name? No one else in the room, including Raja, seemed to know what this girl was referring to, but Chloe did, and after a moment she stood up and ran out of the room.

  Later, when Raja caught up with her on the quad, on the small wooded pathway outside his dorm, she was crying uncontrollably. Without even hesitating, he ran up to her and embraced her.

  “I don’t get it,” he said, stroking her hair. “What did she say? What was she talking about?”

  But Chloe didn’t answer. It had been so long since she’d even thought about freshman year, so long since anyone had even alluded to it, that she’d allowed herself to believe that that part of her life was over, that it was behind her, that no one now even remembered it. But of course they had.

  Later that night, as they lay in his bed, she told him the story. She told him about her first few months at Stratham. She told him about the weeks and months that followed, about the
year and a half she spent in solitude. She told him everything with the sobering understanding that this might be the very last conversation she ever had with him. But, in the end, Raja didn’t waver. His eyes remained focused on hers, his expression one of concern rather than disappointment. And when she finally finished, he simply leaned over and put his hand on her head, pulled her toward him.

  “I’m glad you told me,” he said, and then he kissed her on the lips. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  “You don’t think I’m lame now?”

  “Of course not.” He’d laughed. “In fact, I don’t think that would be possible.”

  Then he slipped his arm around her body and pulled her over on top of him. He gripped her tightly, and she understood then what was happening, what he wanted.

  She’d only had sex once before, with her high school boyfriend, Dustin O’Keefe, a few weeks before they’d left for college. That time she’d told herself that she was simply doing it to get it over with, so she wouldn’t have to enter college a virgin, but this time it was different. It still hurt a little, but it didn’t hurt in the way it had with Dustin. It hurt in a good way, and Raja himself was so unbelievably sweet to her, so unbelievably gentle and calm, so confident in the way he touched her, that she almost forgot for a moment that she’d done this before.