Chapter Text
Mark was horribly, disastrously, unforgivably late to his English lecture. He knew he shouldn’t have slacked off for the first two years of college and avoided the inevitable core curriculum. But it was all so exciting, being in north Jersey instead of being close to home, and no longer living in his teenage bedroom still plastered with band posters and postcards from the science museum that he never really understood, but thought looked cool anyway. Instead, he had his own space, to treat as he wanted most of the time. Of course, he hardly knew what to do with it, because it wasn’t truly his— it was temporary, it changed every year. But at least it had a bed, and a window, and (usually) a view over a tree and a patch of grass that would become golden and die in the autumn, and it was quiet, and the fridge in the kitchen down the hall only had milk and juice and the occasional forgotten hoagie in it, never the cases of beer that had taken up the one at home.
All this– the red brick university buildings, the smell of the dirty sea some miles off, the constant bustle of the city, would’ve been unthinkable this time three years ago. He hadn’t bothered applying to many colleges; what was the point, if nothing worked out for him, anyway? He had never been the brightest– anything outside of New Jersey, and some things within it, too, were just fleeting dreams that could never work, if not for academic reasons, then at least for financial ones.
He’d cried when he’d gotten into his university. Then, he’d wiped his tears and told his father, who’d humphed and told him that he’d better study something useful if he expected any support. Accounting, then, was the safest option– and he’d done well enough at it, the logic of the math a welcome distraction from the chaotic storm of words in his head that always seemed to follow him. But, of course, the words caught up to him, and here he was, taking the only English course that matched his schedule, and failing miserably at it. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t understand nineteenth-century literature, not when the words were packed so densely on the pages it was like trying to read one of those lists of medication side effects wrapped up with a blister pack of pills. And it didn’t help that the words weren’t making much sense, either; he could hardly keep track of which Miss Bennet was which, and why Mr. Darcy was so proud. Wasn’t he supposed to be hot?
Who was he kidding? It was his fault he didn’t understand. It was always his fault.
Mark made it to the lecture room, and opened the door. It creaked to reveal the three rows of seats – the class was more of a seminar than a lecture, after all – almost all of them occupied, save for a few in the very front row, next to the girl with blonde hair who he swore raised her hand to answer every question the professor posed. Blonde girl it was, then.
He hurried as quietly as he could down the single set of stairs down to the front row. He worked his way around the stray backpacks that blocked his way, until finally arriving just next to the blonde girl. She looked up at him in amusement (or contempt? He was never good at telling.)
“Is that take seaten?” A pause, then, under his breath: “Fuck.” He moved to sit down before he could even wait for her reply, and then suddenly, his feet were still behind him while the floor was in front of him, and he was falling, and he landed with an unimpressive oomph, half of his body laid over something – someone? – decidedly soft and warm, and the other half of him sprawled on the floor. He rolled off of his landing pad, strings of “sorry” and other similarly-colorful language tumbling from his lips as he scrambled to be seated in the threadbare seat beside the blonde girl.
Mark turned his face toward the professor, whispering another “sorry,” as if that could absolve him of the crime of disrupting class so horribly. He wished his hair was longer so it could hide the fact that he’d flushed all the way up to his ears.
Just as he tried to tune in to what the professor was saying, Mark felt an elbow nudge his. He looked over, still painfully embarrassed.
“We’re on page 145,” the girl beside him said helpfully, already turning back to her book before their eyes could meet.
“Oh– uh, thanks,” he mumbled in reply. He swore she held back a laugh as he trailed off.
The inside of his backpack, after his frantic unzipping and shuffling around of the numerous contents, was, of course, missing the one thing he needed, his father was right, he was a sorry excuse for–
“You can look on with me,” the girl beside him piped up again, helpfully, and he swore he’d start going to church again now, he’d stop being a sinner, he’d be baptized again if he had to, because who was she if not an angel sent to earth to help him?
“Thanks,” he responded dazedly, voice catching on the end of the word.
She balanced her book on the armrest between them. One of her manicured nails (simple, white with baby blue and yellow flowers) pointed at the paragraph they were currently analyzing. Mark’s eyes focused more on the perfectly rounded edge of her nail than on the word beneath it.
He wasn’t much better at listening, still too aware of the few inches between their elbows, the way her fingers were now drumming against the pages of the book as she spoke up – shit, she was speaking, and he couldn’t hear a word of it –
Mark tuned in right near the end, finally tearing his gaze from her soft-looking hand, catching the last few words of what was surely impassioned analysis. God, why had he always opted to sit in the back before?
The professor responded something about irony, and Mark felt the words fly over his head, as they always did. Ah.
The rest of lecture passed in a blur of hard-to-read slides on the burned-out projector, and the constant ping-pong of analysis between the professor and the girl beside him didn’t get any easier to understand, not when her book was still balanced precariously on the armrest, revealing her wonderfully messy annotations, loopy cursive mixing with rushed underlines to produce a picture of spur-of-the-moment inspiration that he couldn’t hope to recreate with his own amateur attempts at connecting the few pieces of the narrative he understood. He traced every curl and dip of the letters, over and over again, and by the time class was dismissed, he swore his eyes were tattooed with the shapes of her words.
She finally removed the book from the armrest and broke his meditations on the wonders of handwriting.
“See you next week,” she said to him with a slight giggle as she got up. “Remember your book next time!” Her long white skirt tumbled to hang around her ankles, just skimming the tops of her scuffed white sneakers, still wrinkled from where she’d been sitting on it, messing with it, bunching it up and letting it fall back onto her, over and over again. She tightened her backpack straps and turned around.
Quickly, without even thinking, Mark followed her, loosely grabbing her by the wrist to stop her. She froze and turned around to face him again.
Like he’d been burned, too familiar with the sensation of hot and wrong against his palm, Mark retracted his hand from where it circled so perfectly around her wrist, caging her in.
“Shit, sorry–” he began, and she took him in as if scanning through each layer of his tissues, searching for something beneath.
He tried again: “Sorry for, uh… everything, really, but the fall and grabbing you just now especially, I really hope you’re okay, and I’m sorry that I forgot my book and you had to crane your neck–”
“I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.” She cut him off with a kind smile, and God, seeing the way it split her face was like staring directly into the sun. It certainly felt like it, too, heat enveloping him as he kept looking, entranced.
“Um-” he began again quickly, and stuck out a hand toward her, shy instead of intimidating. “Mark. I usually, uh, sit in the back, so I don’t, um.”
“Well, Mark, it was nice to meet you.” Somehow, her smile grew even bigger, but remained just as gentle. She turned to start leaving again.
“Wait! Um–”
“Hm?”
“Do you want to get coffee with me tomorrow, maybe?” The words flowed from his mouth before he could even begin to understand what he was saying, and he was powerless to stop them. “So I can properly apologize. On me, of course. I think it’s supposed to be nice out tomorrow, so we could even get off-campus to that nice café across from the math building?” His hands were sweating, and his mouth wouldn’t stop: “Maybe we could meet at 11?”
Blessedly, she cut him off: “It’s a date! I’ll see you then, Mark.” She waved at him and finally succeeded in turning herself around to leave.
Mark remained rooted in place for a few moments after her departure, reliving the sound of his name in her voice. Mark. Not accusatory, not disappointed, just him. Mark, who’d fallen onto a pretty girl and somehow convinced her to get coffee with him the next day.
It was only when he was at the library, two coffees and a playlist’s worth of piano concertos into cramming for his upcoming accounting exam, yet failing miserably because the image of her smile just wouldn’t leave him that he realized two things in rapid succession: one, she’d called their meeting a ‘date,’ and two, he didn’t even know her name. How was he supposed to go on a date if he didn’t even know the girl’s name?
The rest of his study session was less-than-productive, the graphs and tables of his textbook and the slant of his hurried notes all imprinted with the outlines of her smile, her painted fingernails, the bright yellow clip holding her hair against her head.
Questions— the frantic kind, the flushed-face kind, the stupid-smile kind — plagued him as he walked back to his dorm, notebooks digging into his back from where he’d hastily shoved them into his backpack. How was he supposed to date a girl he had just met? Was he supposed to bring flowers? Pull out her chair for her? Had she even meant ‘date’ the romantic way? It had rolled off her tongue so easily, perhaps not. Perhaps he was reading too much into it, perhaps she’d only said yes out of pity, God, he wouldn’t blame her for saying yes to him, for being scared of him, he’d grabbed her after all, maybe she worried what would happen if she said no–
His shoe caught on a loose stone on the sidewalk, and nearly sent him falling for the second time in the span of just a few hours, just as he arrived back to his hall.
The climb up the few flights of stairs to his room passed in the same way it always did, footsteps echoing through the endless vertical corridor, brief greetings to his neighbors descending the staircase to go to class, the occasional passing conversation that he was decidedly not invited into.
Mark’s dorm room was quiet, as it always was, and empty, as it always was. The evening light filtering through the half-fallen golden leaves of the tree outside his window cast a perfect rectangle on the floor, like a scaled-up version of the blonde girl’s book. If he looked hard enough, he could convince himself that the curves of the few leaves that were left were something like her cursive.
He kicked off his shoes without particular care to where they landed, and dropped his backpack by the desk. He needed to tidy up, anyway; what was one more task to do?
The bed creaked as he hopped up onto it, phone in hand. He looked up directions from his dorm to the coffee shop they were supposed to meet at tomorrow: a ten-minute walk, according to Google Maps. The latest he could leave was 10:50, then, if he wanted to be right on time. 10:45, then, just to be safe.
Mark set an alarm for 10:30, and turned off his phone.
He laid back on the bed, hands up, sweater bunching underneath his back. The sensation went unnoticed as Mark started up at the now-blank screen above his face.
The reflection blinked when he blinked, but in the darkness of the screen, the bags under his eyes looked as though they’d been there his whole life, instead of just the last few years, and his face was pallid against the darkness. He needed a haircut, he needed to buy a new lip balm, he really needed to clean the silver cross necklace that hung around his neck like a dog’s collar, but looser. There was a tan line on his skin from the cross, a less permanent version of a brand, but a constant reminder of the faith he’d drifted from over the years.
Mark felt a confession bubbling in his chest, but only breath came out. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do penitence for, but wished to repent anyway.
His face stared back at him, impassive and fragmented as a stained glass window.
His fingers itched to turn on the phone again, dial someone, anyone, to tell them about the ridiculous day he’d had. But as his finger hovered over the power button, he couldn’t find a number he particularly wanted to call.
His father was certainly going to be home. Mark could already imagine the conversation:
‘Hey, Dad.’
‘Mark! What, failing out already?’
‘No, Dad. I met a girl.’
‘I’m not gonna pay a dime for your bastard child, if that’s what this is about.’
‘No– no! What the hell, Dad? I just met her today, and asked her out on a date!’
‘And she said yes? Huh.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, don’t get too excited. After all, you’re not exactly built to impress.’ The clinking of glassware against teeth, the faint sound of carbonation against the speakerphone. Silence, endless, disgusting, crackling through the speakerphone.
Then, after too many beats: ‘Good night, Dad.’
‘Eh.’ Click.
Mark moved on. There was no mother to call, unless he wanted to pray– even then, his mother was no saint, she couldn’t help him. She hadn’t saved him all the way back then, and she certainly couldn’t save him now.
He imagined dialing old friends from high school, their connections weathered, held together by just a few threads by now– those were people to call when drunk on moonlight and cheap beer, not high on whatever was swirling in his head.
Mark drummed his fingers against the phone case, fingernails clacking against the hard plastic, and closed his eyes. The rest of the contacts in his phone were all out of necessity– the sort-of acquaintances whose phone numbers were given for study groups that never materialized, the first-year friends now too busy with work and their own relationships to bother about him anymore beyond quick greetings in the hallway or half-baked promises to catch up over lunch ‘sometime.’
His reflection blinked at him again.
He dropped his phone onto his chest.
The next morning, Mark woke, stiff and sweaty, still in yesterday’s clothes. His alarm was blaring, had been for minutes now, it seemed, judging from the insistent knocking at his door.
“Turn that off!” came the annoyed shout from the knocker. Blindly, Mark reached out in the direction of the sound and grabbed his phone, tightening his grip around it until he finally hit the power button and his room was enveloped in blissful silence.
Face still crushed into the sheets, Mark looked at his lock screen, and shot up from his relaxed position. 10:37 A.M.
He scrambled out of bed and shot across his small room to change clothes and hastily brush his hair. He caught his reflection on his phone screen again after he was done, clad in a green sweater and blue jeans instead of yesterday’s red sweater and blue jeans– he still looked like he’d just woken up.
Strings of curses spilled from his mouth as he jammed his shoes on and popped a mint in his mouth. He was losing time, he had to go–
10:45 A.M. Mark was horribly, disastrously, unforgivably late to being ten minutes early to the only date he’d probably ever have in his life. He took the stairs down two at a time as he stuffed his wallet in his pocket with one hand and clung desperately to the banister with the other.
The cold outside air burned his lungs as he ran across campus, more than a few pairs of eyes following his strange dash across campus, past the science labs, past the path to the prettier buildings of campus, past the godforsaken (heaven-sent?) English lecture hall, through numerous quads, until finally skidding to a halt at the crosswalk, just meters away from the coffee shop.
The blonde girl (his date? His friend? His unwilling companion?) was already waiting outside, checking her phone every so often. Mark hardly had time to admire her before he was jaywalking through the street, making a beeline straight for the coffee shop.
“Hey!” she called out as he stepped over the curb and back onto the safety of the sidewalk.
“Sorry I’m late,” Mark panted, and promptly doubled over.
Then, at the same time: “No, no, don’t worry, I’m chronically ten minutes early–”
“I overslept–”
“You first–”
“No, you–”
Mark heaved in a breath, and she quieted. He took another two breaths before he dared speak again.
“Shall we?” he gestured shakily at the door, and she nodded, a spark of mirth in her eyes as they met his.
He held the door for her, sending her in with a clumsy ‘after you,’ then joined her by the pastry case. It seemed as though she was trying to psychically analyze each pastry.
“Like I said, ah–” he began. She whipped her face up from the pastry case, focus broken, and he swore he felt lightning pass in the space between them. Mark cleared his throat. “It’s on me. Don’t worry about the price or anything like that– I work in the summers, so I have a little saved up.”
“Mark, really, you don’t have to.”
“I insist.” He mentally congratulated himself on finally sounding confident instead of like a blundering idiot.
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Well, in that case, are you ready to order?”
Mark just nodded in reply.
“Good morning!” she greeted the cashier brightly, and God, she truly was like the sun, “I’ll do an almond croissant – warmed, please! – and a vanilla chai! Mark?”
“Oh– uh, just an Earl Grey, please. With milk.” He dug his wallet out of his pocket and didn’t even notice the final price on the screen as he tapped his card and left a generous tip on top of that.
They strolled away from the countertop and into the café proper.
“So, where do you want to sit?”
Mark resisted the urge to just concede to her, over and over again– he had to be a man, whatever that meant to his father.
“Those armchairs by the window, maybe?” She tried to hide the way she lit up, but failed miserably.
“I was hoping you’d choose those!”
“Happy to help?”
They sat down together, Mark in the chair facing the room, his date – still nameless, he remembered – sitting with her back to the room.
“I realized yesterday that I didn’t get your name.”
“That’s because I didn’t throw it!” He knit his brows in confusion. She let out a slow giggle, followed by an eruption of laughter. “Sorry, sorry, that joke’s so old it’s practically illegal at this point to use it– oops.” She covered her mouth with a hand and removed it after a few seconds, stained with her pink lip product. He couldn’t tell if it was lipstick or gloss, but he felt the strange desire to taste it.
The cross hung heavy around his neck, covered by his sweater and undershirt, whispering against his skin.
“I’m talking too much, I’m sorry.” Her shoulders slumped slightly.
“Not at all. I’m just no good at jokes.” Not good at most things, really, he wanted to add but did not. What good was there in scaring her off five minutes into their date?
“Oh! Hah!”
Their order arrived before she could keep the conversation going. As she bit into her croissant (with a very vocal ‘mmm!’ that made Mark feel the urge to bite it from the other side, then promptly repent for said urge), Mark decided to try again on a new topic.
“So–”
“Jesus, this is incredible– sorry, what did you say?”
“I was going to ask, are you studying English? You seem, ah, really good at it.” He took a sip of his tea and it burned his tongue.
“Oh, yeah! I just recently declared the major, but I always knew I was interested in that sort of thing.” She took another hasty bite and spoke around it. “I take it you’re not studying English, then?”
“Oh no, I’m a little too stupid for that.”
“Hey!”
“No, I mean, I really don’t get a thing that’s going on in class.” Mark chuckled self-deprecatingly, and took another sip of his tea.
“I could help you, if you want!” She took a sip from her chai, and her face melted into an expression of pure delight that Mark wasn’t sure what to do with. “I like to think I’m a bit of a Pride and Prejudice expert. I’ve read it, like, six times. Don’t even get me started on the movie adaptation we’ll be watching in class in two weeks–”
“I don’t know if I should be excited or scared.” His tea was at a more tolerable temperature now, and he took a few gulps. His face felt hot.
“Depends if you sit with me again or not.” She reached for her croissant again, and cupped it between her soft-looking hands for a moment before inhaling it.
“I mean, if you’re willing to have me–”
“Duh!” she exclaimed through a mouthful of crumbs. She swallowed. “Speaking of which! Can I get your number? So maybe I can give you a Pride and Prejudice crash course before next lecture? Maybe show you how to read the book instead of forgetting it at home?”
She held out her phone to him, and he fished his out of his pocket to hand over in exchange.
Her phone was heavy in his hand, and he felt the texture of the strawberry-patterned phone case littered with random stickers under his fingertips as he entered his contact information into her phone. Mark, without a profile picture. Forgettable. A text message popped up on the top of her screen; quickly, he averted his eyes and stuck her phone out over the table back at her. She finished typing her information in and passed his phone back to him.
The four words looking up at him from the screen made his phone feel holier than any communion he’d ever taken. Clarissa Suzanne (English Class) was bright in front of him, and she’d set the auto-generated contact photo (just the letter “C”) to have a pink background.
He heard Clarissa (Clarissa!)’s phone vibrate again, and her eyes widened. She downed the rest of her chai faster than was probably healthy, and stood up.
“Shit!” She exclaimed loudly. Nobody in the café batted an eye. “I’m supposed to get lunch with the art club today! I’m so, so sorry–”
“It’s no problem, really, if you have somewhere to be–”
“I’ll text you, and we can do this again! Set up that Pride and Prejudice crash course!”
“Of course–”
“Okay! Great! Sorry again! Fuck, I’m gonna have to run at this rate…”
“Go fast!” he supplied helpfully. She shot him a smile over her shoulder as she weaved her way though the patrons of the coffee shop, the curves of her form silhouetted by the light of the window. After the bell atop the door jingled to announce her final departure, he sank back into the armchair. His phone was still unlocked in his lap, and his tea was lukewarm at best in his hand.
Mark took a sip of the tea as he stared at the newest contact in his phone, tracing his eyes and the pointer finger of his free hand over the pink-backed “C” of her profile picture.
Clarissa Suzanne (English Class). Nameless no more.
He gulped back the rest of his tea like it could save him from the quickened heartbeat in his chest.