Nothing Real Volume 1 by Claire Needell Read Free Book Online Page A

some sort of animal need, a pattern of recognition. He takes a step closer to her, then seems to think again, and asks her if she wants a drink—a Diet Coke, which is all he has in the fridge, though he could run down to the bodega and get some beer. He says this as an afterthought, as if thinking some people might do that, drink during the day. As if that had never been him.
    She says no and they sit down on the couch, and, to her surprise, start making out. It feels like nonsense, like not having anything else to do. He feels like Val, but clean, his hands soft. “I’m glad to see you,”he says, and she realizes for him it is real, a moment. “I hope my email didn’t freak you out. It was a low point. Mostly I’m okay, though.”
    â€œIt didn’t,” she lies.
    He stands up and starts walking around the room. He seems agitated. “Let’s go for a walk.” He can feel something isn’t right. He can see right through her, and she wonders why that quality, that knowingness, can’t be love.
    They go down the street, to a coffee shop. She orders an espresso and a little orange cake covered in poppy seeds. She hasn’t eaten anything since dinner the day before. Her usual one meal. The cake is so sweet it makes her head spin.
    â€œOne time I almost got in my car and drove to Boulder, but then I decided that would not be a good idea.” He says this with a shake of his head, as though he can’t believe this distant memory.
    Nancy shakes her head too. “Probably not.”
    â€œI felt like you hated me, were disgusted by me.”
    â€œNo,” she says.
    â€œLook, just say it.” He drums his fingers on the table. “I know I was a total asshole.”
    â€œWhy? What’s the point?”
    â€œHow about for the record?”
    â€œThere isn’t a record. There’s a past. And now. A whatever.” She feels clever for once. Like maybe she’s outgrown him, or herself.
    He takes a bite of his croissant and Nancy fingers the cake, breaks off a crumb. She can smell the synthetic quality of the orangeflavoring. She’s already taken a nauseating bite.
    â€œAnyway, how is school? How are you doing?” he asks, leaning back in his chair. He looks self-assured, a young academic at the coffee shop. She wonders if he knows anyone, recognizes any of the girls, their hair in messy buns, cool and pale, so unlike the Boulder hippies in their beads and white-girl dreads.
    She’s embarrassed by the thought of Colorado and its relentless sunshine. She shrugs. “Taking this feminist-theory class with this professor who doesn’t believe in grades. Everyone starts with an eighty-five and then moves up, ‘as a community,’ from there. She says the grading system is patriarchal. Like the way everyone asks, ‘What’d you get?’ Sounds like a jock after a drunken party.”
    He chuckles, but like he’s heard this already, which he probably has. After all, he’s at Columbia. The messy-haired girls in the coffee shop would be beyond joking about such things. They would be visiting Professor Gail Windham during office hours.
    â€œYou have to be dead to get a B anyway,” Val says. He lights a cigarette. It must be the price of sobriety. A Marlboro Red. She looks around to see who will tell him to stop, but it seems like a chill scene, everyone looking the other way.
    â€œSo now you smoke,” Nancy says.
    â€œIt’s all I have left.” He smiles and looks genuine, but she can no longer stop seeing the artifice in him, in everyone—in the stage set of the pastry shop, in the steam on the windows, and the little bits of poppy-seed cake on her plate. Everything seems too yellow, distant, like looking through a slightly dirty lens. Maybe all that glarefrom the Colorado sun is making the rest of the world appear forlorn. But then why didn’t Colorado feel real to her? It was as if her