Frost - Marianna Baer
Baumschlager.
Not exactly how I wanted to spend a day without classes, but
it needed to be done. Celeste had had insomnia all week, and
continued to be paranoid that someone could be watching her
through the windows. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t share her
caution—it was true that a person in the backyard could have
seen everything we were doing. To me, though, the garden felt
like an extension of my space.
As for the bio lecture, after struggling in a couple of subjects
at Barcroft, I’d figured out that the more a subject daunted me,
the more trouble I had paying attention in class. Apparently, my
brain left the room when it was confused. Ritalin hadn’t worked,
so—at the suggestion of a tutor—I’d started recording and re-
listening to classes last year, and had made honor roll for the first
time.
“The genomes of eubacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes—”
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A knock came at the door behind me. I turned. David stood
in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his low-riding jeans,
wearing an orange tee that said I LIKE PI on it.
“I expected you to be more muscular,” he said, smiling. “And
male.”
“Herr Baumschlager.” I stepped down from the chair and
moved over to my laptop to pause it. “Yesterday’s bio lecture. I
enjoyed it so much the first time I had to listen again.” I figured I
didn’t need to be embarrassed about my nerdiness in front of a
guy with math humor on his shirt.
“My sister around?” he said. “She called me to help you guys
do something. Hang these blinds, I guess?” He picked one up off
the floor, still rolled and wrapped in plastic.
“Really?” This was my project. I hadn’t asked her to call him.
“She’s not even here. Her wireless connection wasn’t working so
she went to the library.”
“God, she’s such a twerp sometimes.” David shook his head,
like he was sort of annoyed, sort of amused. “Well, since I’m here,
at least let me help. She asked me to hang that photo of hers,
too.”
Usually, I preferred to do projects alone. But I did have a ton
of homework this weekend and was supposed to take Anya to the
park tomorrow. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
We headed down the hall to get parietals.
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Over the past week, I’d run into David around campus and
here in the dorm a few times. Always happily. Aside from the
gorgeous thing, he was friendly and easygoing, and knowing he
was around made me feel like if I ever had a major problem with
Celeste, there was someone sane who could mediate. It was
pretty obvious he was an equal-opportunity flirter, so I wasn’t
convinced that, like Celeste had said, he’d noticed me in
particular. But since it didn’t matter either way, I just enjoyed the
buzz I got from his attention.
Back in the room after getting parietals from Ms. Martin, I
assigned David the duty of measuring for the new brackets, while
I finished up removing the old ones.
When the drill stopped screeching, he asked, “Where’d you
learn how to use power tools?”
“My dad,” I said. “He’s a carpenter, old-house restorer guy.
Big into DIY.”
“My dad’s smart as hell,” David said. “But the only thing he
can hit with a hammer is his thumb.”
“It takes practice.” I wondered if his dad was a
mathematician, like David. Like the man in the movie A Beautiful
Mind. “I’ve been using tools since I was a kid,” I said. “I made that
bookshelf this summer.”
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I turned to point and noticed not only the muscles in David’s
back when he raised his hands, but also what he was doing. “Are
you measuring the front of the molding?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“With this type of molding and these brackets, it has to go
inside the frame. See?” I held one up and demonstrated.
“Oh. Right.” He smiled. “Maybe I’ll hang the photo first.”
I took down the last of the old brackets as he got the frame
from her closet. “So, you inherited your dad’s,” I coughed, “talent
with this stuff. Is he where you got your brain for spoon math,
too?”
“My what?” David said.
“Well, I know that you’re a math whiz. And you made that
comment about spoons. So I figure you were talking about some
type of equation or theory, or something.” I was kind of kidding,
but also a little serious. I didn’t know anything about
superadvanced math, and I hadn’t come up with any more
plausible idea.
“Like, physicists have string theory, and mathematicians have
spoon theory?” he said, standing there holding the photo.
“Yeah, exactly.”
David laughed. Hard. “Spoon theory. That’s great.”
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“So if that’s not it,” I said, enjoying the goofy heh-hehs of his
laughter, “are you going to tell me what you really meant?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, still smiling really wide. “It’s going
to sound lame in comparison.”
“The more you delay, the more you’re building it up,” I
teased.
“Okay, okay.” He rested the photo on the floor and hooked
his thumbs in his pockets. “I took a metalwork class last year and
developed a bit of an obsession with spoons.”
Metalwork. “Wait,” I said. “So you actually make spoons?”
He shrugged, as if to say, “See? Lame.”
“Spoons have always annoyed me,” he said. “I could never
find the right one for the right job.” He went on to describe how
he made them for specific uses. One had a built-in rest, so that it
didn’t touch the table after you used it to stir your coffee. One
had a small hole in the basin, so you didn’t get a whole lot of milk
with your bite of cereal.
“You realize this is kind of weird, right?” I said. I couldn’t
decide if it was cool-quirky weird, or just plain strange.
“I guess,” he said. “It was something . . . concrete to do. You
know?”
That I understood. Making something useful, something you
could touch, that solved a problem. Like the bookshelves I make
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to fit in weird-shaped spaces. I’d made the one for this room low
and wide, to fit under a section of the windows. Seeing it in its
place was incredibly satisfying.
“Is this still an obsession?” I asked. “Are you going to write
your college essays about how you want to bring better spoonage
to the masses?”
“No,” he said, turning his attention back to hanging the
photo.
He didn’t say anything else, so I got my pencil and tape
measure and had just begun correcting his measurements on one
window when he asked, “Is this a good spot?” He was holding the
frame up in the only free wall space, at the end of Celeste’s bed.
“And do you mind if I hang it? I wouldn’t want it on my wall if I
were you.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “That’s perfect.” Perfect because it
wouldn’t be very visible from my side of the room. I didn’t feel so
strongly that I’d tell David not to hang it, but I definitely didn’t
need “Dead Celeste the Bug Charmer” to be the last thing I saw
before falling asleep at night.
“Can you mark the spot for the nail?” he said.
I stepped off the chair and crossed to where he stood, then
had to lean next to him—just touching—to make a dot at the
center of the top of the frame. His smell of coffee and warm boy
skin filled my lungs and melted through my limbs.
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David suddenly shifted to look behind us.
“What?” I said, stepping back, looking, too.
“Thought I heard someone,” he said. “I think I know why
Celeste feels like she’s being watched in here.” He gestured over
at my bed, where Cubby sat with her wide owl eyes directed right
at us.
“Oh,” I said, smiling. “Yeah. You’ve got to watch what you do
in front of her. She’s all-knowing.”
We went back to our respective tasks. I drilled holes in the
first window frame, then got my screwdriver and one of the new
brackets.
“Is all this—making bookshelves, carpentry stuff,” David said
after finishing hammering, “something you’d do? Like your dad?”
“Not professionally.” I twisted a screw around, around,
around. . . . “I love buildings because of him, though. I was always
convinced I wanted to be an architect.”
“But?”
“Now I’m thinking I might want to do something that’s more
people-oriented. Social work, maybe. Or teaching. Or . . . I got
really into my psych class last year, so maybe psychiatry.”
“You’d be a great teacher.”
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I looked over at him. The photo was hanging and he’d started
measuring windows again. “How would you know?”
“Both my parents are teachers,” he said. “My mom’s a
professor. My dad taught middle school. I can spot a good one a
mile away. And I saw you give that presentation, remember?”
“Oh, right.” I brushed a loose section of hair behind my ear,
almost stabbing myself in the eye with the screwdriver. “Well, the
good thing about teaching is that I feel like I can major in lots of
things and go into it. But if I want to be an architect or a
psychiatrist, it’s more . . . complicated. I feel like I’d have to
decide soon.”
“You’d want to go to med school?” he said.
“So I could write prescriptions. I know therapy helps, too.
Obviously, it’s hugely important. But so much of everything is
chemical.”
I began turning the next the screw into the window frame.
“Like schizoaffective disorder. Therapy can only do so much,
right? It’s all about neuroscience and”—I almost said genetics—
“and biology.” The wood splintered, the bracket broke off and
clattered to the floor. “Damn.”
“It’s not like science has done anything great for my dad,” he
said as I stepped off the chair and scanned the floor for hardware.
“Jesus. I don’t know if he’s better when he’s on or off his meds.
Well, no. That’s not true. But he’s bad in different ways.”
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“But new drugs are coming out all the time.” I bent over to
grab the bracket and screw, then stood and faced David.
“Eventually, you know, in the future, mental illness won’t even
exist. Not in our lifetime, I guess. But eventually.”
“I think we’ll just make new problems as we fix the ones we
have.”
“You and Celeste aren’t big on medication, are you?” I still
couldn’t understand why she’d choose insomnia over Tylenol PM.
“I guess we’re kind of cynical.” David said. “We’ve gotten our
hopes up too many times. But, I mean, of course if something
happened to her, or to me, I’d be happy there were options.”
“Do you . . . is that . . . is it something you guys talk about?
You know, the possibility . . . ?”
He nodded. “We have a pact.”
“A pact?”
“Sometimes, when people first get sick, they know
something’s wrong but are scared to talk about it. Celeste and I
have a pact so if one of us ever starts . . . I don’t know, worrying
about thoughts we’re having, we’ll tell the other one.”
He sounded sweet, but kind of naïve, until he added, “Of
course, there’s not much I could do to help her, at that point. But
at least I could keep her from doing something, you know,
desperate.” He paused. “My dad has. A couple times.”
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“I don’t blame him.” After I said it, I realized how awful it
must have sounded. “I mean, stuff must be so difficult for him.”
“Not everything,” David said in a flat voice.
“I tried, in eighth grade,” I said. “And I’m sure my life wasn’t
nearly as hard.”
The words hit the air before I could stop them.
“I didn’t really try,” I added quickly. Had I just compared my
immature stupidity with his father’s serious mental illness? “I
took a bunch of pills,” I said, “but I threw them up. I didn’t almost
die, or anything. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made that connection.
It wasn’t that big a deal.”
“Sounds like a big deal,” he said. “What happened?”
“Well,” I started, my heart suddenly pounding. Why had I
mentioned this? “Like I said, I think stuff can be really . . .
physically based. My body was going through hormonal changes,
my chemistry was all screwed up, and my parents were getting a
divorce and I just kind of lost it.”
“The divorce was messy?”
“No,” I said. “They didn’t even use lawyers.”
“So—”
“They were making me decide if I wanted to stay in
Cambridge with my dad or move to LA with my mom.”
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“As a thirteen-year-old?” he said. “Of course you were upset.
Nothing to do with hormones.”
“People’s parents get divorced every day,” I said, “and it
doesn’t make them want to kill themselves. I mean, my parents
both wanted me. I got much better after I was on antidepressants
for a bit.”
“Who did you pick?”
I wiped my forehead and rested my hands on my hips.
“Neither. I was close to both of them and didn’t want to . . . you
know, choose one over the other. So in ninth grade, I came here.
Some vacations I go to LA, some I go to Cambridge. Sometimes I
go to Abby’s family.”
“That’s kind of sad,” David said.
“It’s not,” I said. “It was the perfect solution. During the
school year, my friends are my family.”
“There’s a big difference between friends and family.”
“Thank God,” I said. “Friends you can choose.”
I smiled, but instead of smiling back, David’s expression
hardened like cement. So did his voice. “I’d choose my dad and
Celeste,” he said. “Over anyone. And I always will.”
“Oh. Of course.” Blood rushed up my neck and flooded my
cheeks. “I didn’t mean that. I was talking about myself, about my
own family. Not about yours.”
