Page 13 of Leaving the Station
I shook my head and closed my notebook, giving him my full attention.
“They’resocool.” He pulled out his phone. “They’re fromSeattle—that’s where you’re from, right? I’m not misremembering?”
“No—I mean yes, yeah.” I had the sudden urge to suck on the tip of my ponytail, a bad habit I’d finally broken in middle school. “I’m from Seattle.”
“I made a playlist of their music for you, if you wanted to listen.” He tossed his phone back and forth between his hands. “I could send it to you.”
“Yeah,” I said, slightly breathless. “That sounds nice.”
We exchanged numbers, and I expected him to leave after that, but he pulled out a deck of cards.
“Wanna play a game?”
“Yes.”
There was nothing else I wanted to do. Being with Alden felt like floating in a warm bath—I didn’t have any sense of time or place.
He taught me a card game with too many rules and beat me handily each round.
“It’s getting late,” Alden said quietly, leaning closer to me. He’d moved from the armchair to the couch during the first game.
He was right—it was 1:59 a.m., and the student union was empty and echoey. I’d easily lost track of time with him.
“I guess we should go back to our dorms,” I said, not meaning it.
“I guess,” he said, but he didn’t move. “It’s a shame we have to sleep at all.”
“Yeah?” I could feel heat traveling to my face, but I didn’t hide it from him.
I knew he was saying that he wanted to stay up with me.
I wanted to stay up with him too.
“Yeah,” he confirmed.
When I got back to my dorm, I was wired.
I listened to the playlist, but all I heard were Alden’s words, over and over:It’s a shame wehave tosleep at all.
He made me feel like someone worth staying up for. Like I was special and important.
He made me feel like a different person entirely.
Monday, 2 p.m., near Schenectady, NY
When the waiter takes our order, Clint gets the short ribs, as promised, and Virginia, Oakley, and I all get the veggie noodles.
“Come on, none of you ladies want a little meat on your bones?” Clint asks.
Virginia rolls her eyes. “We’re not all brutes.”
Oakley puts her forearms on the table. “It’s all a gender display anyway,” she says, and I freeze. “I was reading this article the other day about how meat is associated with a more masculine identity. You know, the big strong man ripping into a lower animal’s flesh, proving he’s at the top of the food chain.”
“Sounds like Clint,” Virginia says, laughing.
As well-meaning as they seem, I hate the way Clint and Virginia talk to each other. The way they fall into precise stereotypes of a straight couple their age.
But Oakley’s unphased. “The fact that it’s adisplayis what’s really important in this situation. There’s a theory that genderisn’t a stable identity but that it’s constructed through social interactions. So Clint orders ribs; the three of us”—she gestures to me and Virginia—“order a vegetable dish, and we’ve proven something about ourselves to each other. But maybe if we were dining alone the roles would be reversed. Maybe Clint would want noodles and the rest of us would have ribs.”
