Page 3 of Considering Us

“And how much of your expenses will that cover?” she asked, picking up my checkbook from the coffee table and tossing it at me.

“Probably my car insurance,” I scowled, setting the checkbook aside. “Maybe my electric bill, too.” I was in so much trouble.

“So, hear me out,” she began. “My classmate Andrea Lark has very suddenly become the Head of School at Rockwood. It’s a boarding school in New Hampshire on George’s Island, just next to Portsmouth. You can walk into town; it’s that close.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“She needs a Dining Services Director. Like immediately. Housing is included.”

“Me? A boarding school? I’ve never done anything like that. Come on, Tam. I would have no idea what I was doing.”

“Think of your experiences,” she said. “Didn’t you say you shadowed staff at events during your semester in DC during college? The White House and State Department, right? Nothing shabby about that. And ten years in multiple high-end Boston restaurants, followed by private chef services for some of the wealthiest families in Boston?”

“And David Anders.”

“How could I forget your reclusive Celtic? What I’m saying, Dev, is you are flexible, innovative, and can work with anyone. Your name is mud here in Boston, at least for now. But people have short memories. You’ll be able to come back. You just need to do something else for a little while.”

I swirled the ice in my glass and decided to change the subject, not wanting to fully entertain this idea. “Who is this guy you’re seeing tonight?”

“He’s a professor at BU. That feels old and serious, doesn’t it? Is that the life stage I’m in? Dates with professors? I still feel like I’m twenty.” She stretched out her hands and examined her manicure. “Maybe I won’t go.”

I sat up suddenly, my mind cycling back to fifteen years earlier. “What if he’s the one you’re meant to be with? And youdon’t go, and someone else snags him? But he’s actually meant for you.”

Tam laughed. “Do you really believe in that? That these missed opportunities really mean we’re denying ourselves our destinies? Come on, Dev, I’ve never heard you talk like that. I’m the one who clings to rom-com movies, and even I don’t think it’s true.”

For whatever reason, I couldn’t shake the image of a twenty-year-old boy with dirty blond hair and a hand that felt so perfect in mine. When I had bad days, my brain often went back to 2007 for no apparent reason. It had been amazing until it was so disappointing, so why think about it? Maybe I just liked to wallow in more misery when things took a downward turn. “Did I ever tell you about Kyle?”

“Who’s Kyle?”

“I guess not then.” I curled up tighter into the elbow of my small sectional couch. “The night before I left for my DC semester—this was January 2007—all the Norwell College students who were leaving on school-affiliated programs had a dinner. We had come back from our semester breaks before everyone else, had brief orientations with our groups, and stayed in temporary dorm rooms for a night before departing. People were going all over the world. This, of course, was when I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and was going to DC to immerse myself in the rat race of government and politics.”

“Which you hated,” inserted Tam, who had known that much about me. She actually knew almost everything. I had just never told her about Kyle.

“Yes, which I hated. The rest of my group loved it, but it wasn’t for me. Anyway, I knew Kyle the way you knew people at small liberal arts colleges who you didn’t really know. We had been students in the same Intro to Sociology class our freshman year, but it had been a big lecture hall. He was the goalie ofthe soccer team, so I knew of him, but that was really it. We were sometimes at the same parties, but he lived in the soccer house for his sophomore year and the first semester of his junior year, and I had stuck with the same group of friends from my freshman dorm. Our lives hadn’t intersected in any sort of meaningful way until that moment. But there we were, grabbing for the same last slice of watermelon in the food line with our own pairs of plastic tongs.”

“How romantic,” mused Tam. “I mean it. Now, this sounds like a nineties rom-com movie that I can get on board with.” Tam loved rom-coms, and by extension, I had grown to enjoy them, too. But she was the expert and could relate most of life’s circumstances and scenarios to specific movies. It was impressive.

“I guess itwasromantic, at least at first,” I replied, knowing where the story was going, which was where the magic died a humiliating death. “He offered to split the watermelon slice with me, so naturally, we ended up sitting together. He suggested we sit in the smaller room that was adjacent to the main room, so I sat across from him, and we talked for the next two hours. It was one of those conversations without any spaces or awkward pauses. It just kept going and going. Like one of those really good ‘Dinner with Cupid’ matchmaking columns in theGlobe.”

“I love those,” Tam quipped. “I need more dates like that. It rarely happens.”

“Agreed,” I said, continuing with the story. “And it was unusually warm for January—like fifty degrees at eight at night, which you know is crazy for New Hampshire in winter. So, we took a walk around the Loch. You’ve never been to Norwell, but there’s this lake in the middle of campus. It’s small and technically called Lake MacGavin after some Scottish donor, so Norwell students call it the Loch.”

“I’m learning so much.” Tam laughed. “It’s eight-thirty. I need to make a decision. Do I stay or do I go?”

“Give me five more minutes, and then you can decide,” I said. “I’ll give you the express version of the rest of the story. We walked around the Loch like five times. After the second time, we were holding hands. After the fifth, we kissed for the first time.”

“Oh, was it good?”

“Like the best kiss of my life. I still go back to it in my head. Nothing has come close to matching it.” I felt my body temporarily relax and flush warm. Despite what eventually happened with Kyle, that was one of the greatest moments in my highlight reel.

“Aww, I love that. Okay, keep going. Three more minutes.”

“We went back to the dorm where we were temporarily staying, we listened to Oasis on his iPod, and we drank Coors Light that he bought from a guy staying in the next room over.”

“And I’m guessing….”

“Yes, eventually, but not until like three in the morning. There was a lot of talking. He talks a lot, but it didn’t annoy me. He was fun to talk to. I liked everything about him. And then we went to breakfast and ate a bunch of bacon. Other things, too, I’m sure, but I remember the bacon. For some reason, it tasted like the best bacon ever.”

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