Marilyn Brant - According to Jane

Sam knew.

Jane knew.

Hell, Camryn knew, and even that bastard Dominic might’ve guessed.

All these years later and I was still being driven to battle Sam — and my inappropriate feelings for him — by forces that seemed beyond my control. So, I decided my only hope for the dream relationship I longed for rested in finding a man who was the Anti-Sam. The Anyone-But-Him Hero of My Heart. I still didn’t know where, precisely, to hunt for such a mortal, but I was open to possibilities and more than willing to stalk a little, if necessary.

And I was just optimistic (and, well, desperate) enough to think I’d succeed in capturing a guy like that. One who’d be my Sam-Antidote and heal the hurt Sam had inflicted.

Women fancy admiration means more than it

does…And men take care that they should.

 — Pride and Prejudice

In the weeks that followed Sam and me running into each other at that bar, my life began the last stage of a drastic surface metamorphosis.

In one sense, I knew I was finally becoming the monarch I’d dreamed of. I’d emerged from my cocoon of adolescence, transitioned into young adulthood and was incredibly close to being able to float around the world of grown-ups in my butterfly costume. Inside, however, I remained much the confused caterpillar I’d always been.

The problem, of course, was that the people around me, with the exception of Jane, rarely looked beneath the surface so, to them, I appeared fine. Or, at least, as fine as they figured I should be. And this forced me to keep up the charade of fineness at home.

Case in point: we had a family dinner the night before I drove off to grad school. Mom made her famous chicken potpie, which I usually loved, but in the wake of having so recently seen Sam again and having just broken up with Dominic, I didn’t have much of an appetite. So I picked at my food while my family discussed me in their typical, ever-tactful manner.

My dad, smiling at the steaming potpie, said, “Our Ellie, off to do more studying. Hmm. I hope you like it.” He sounded slightly mystified. Dad was a pretty bright guy, but he let me know on multiple occasions how, when he was in school, he couldn’t wait to get out of college and get his first real job. “Two more years, right?”

I nodded. Two more years of going full time and I’d have dual master’s degrees: MA (Master of Arts in English Lit) and MLS (Master of Library Science).

“Well, good,” he said. “We know you’ll do well at that.”

Di snickered and hissed under her breath, “Yes. It’s the one thing ‘Our Ellie’ knows how to do well.”

I glanced at her mutely and sighed. Becoming Mrs. Evans had not improved my sister’s temperament one whit. Name change or no, she remained the same nasty Diana Lynn Barnett who’d hated me since toddlerhood.

My brother, Gregory, however, in a rare gust of goodwill, said to Di’s new husband, Alex, “Ellie was always the best student in the family. She got more A’s in one year than I got in all of high school.”

“That’s cool,” Alex said, his dangly silver earring swinging freely between strands of his long, dark hair as he nodded politely and dug into his dinner.

I shot Gregory a brief and grateful grin, but then Mom burst in. “Well, no. I think Angelique got more A’s than anyone in the family. She’s at Stanford now, you know.”

Mom said this for Alex’s benefit, but I was, indeed, well aware of my cousin’s whereabouts. Aunt Candice, whose move to Illinois those years ago had afforded her easy weekly visits to my parents’ house, proved herself incapable of speaking a multi-syllabic sentence without referencing her daughter’s battle against “those uncouth Californians.”

“Angelique is, of course, going to Stanford for her graduate studies,” my aunt often commented. “They overlooked her after high school, put her on a waiting list for undergrad entry — the nerve of them! But, they sure realized their mistake later. I told her, I said, ‘Angelique, darling, you should just forget about Stanford. Make them suffer. Give the Ivies another try, or keep living at home and continuing on at Northwestern.’ But — ” Aunt Candice sighed. “She insisted on moving out West and joining all those surfing and Rollerblading Californians.” She grimaced. “They’re going to get skin cancer, the lot of them. I keep sending her bottles of sunscreen, but I’m not sure it’s enough.”

Since I was staying safely in the frigid Midwest, I didn’t require nearly as much sunscreen as my genius cousin, but Mom tucked a bottle into my bag anyway. And the next morning I left home and soon found myself on my new campus in my new life, three hours south of Glen Forest, registered as an official grad student.

Unlike my undergraduate years, I wasn’t forced to take any sucky PE courses, pointless mathematics classes or boring humanities prerequisites. I could focus exclusively on literature with my side order of library science.

But, just like my undergrad years, and my high school years before them, it turned out that academic issues weren’t destined to be my problem — guys were. And just like my coursework increased in difficulty from the undergrad to grad level, so did the degree of conniving I encountered from the male members of the species. Brent Sullivan headed the 400-level class on Problematic Men.

“Check the list,” Brent said to me one early winter night during my first semester. “I dare you.”

The curly-haired, future MBA grad leaned across Wilder Hall’s front desk, where I was working the eight-to-ten p.m. shift. (I needed the money and wanted a job nearby. I lived on the third floor of Wilder, the only all-grad student dorm on campus, so it took me thirty-two seconds to get to work.)

Brent pointed to the reservation book. The saucy twist to his lips only grew more pronounced as he edged nearer to me.

I flipped open the book and, sure enough, his name was penciled in. Sauna key. Ten o’clock. That very night. In my best barbed tone, I said, “So, what then? Are you issuing a general invitation?”

He laughed and brought his nose a mere two inches from mine. “No. A very specific one. To you.”

“I see.” I pretended to be like a fine English lady I knew, and I forced my excitement and my anxiety under control. The sauna was our university’s equivalent to something like Make Out Point, a locale visited for the purpose of getting personal with someone of the opposite sex. A private invitation to the sauna was right up there with the come-on “My roommate’s gone. Wanna come up and see my beer-can collection?”

“Do you, Ellie? Do you see?” Brent asked me.

I stared at Brent but didn’t answer. He loved the chase and, having been his prey for a month now, I knew better than to give in too quickly. In studying his face for so long, though, I noticed that only a couple of small blemishes marred his smooth, golden complexion. His pores, though large, were somehow intriguing, especially up close like this. It made me laugh. That was my test to see if I had a bad case of lust — when even a guy’s pores looked sexy.

“What’s so funny?” he said, seeming surprised by my reaction and, for once, a little vulnerable. It was the vulnerability that finally got to me.

He pulled back a few inches, and I realized this was the moment of truth. The time when I needed to choose whether to follow up or not.

“You are,” I told him. I glanced down at my Poetry 417 notes, riffled through them until I found the Henry Vaughan page, and began quoting from a complicated seventeenth-century poem called “Corruption.”

I finished reading and Brent grinned carefully at me. “I have no freakin’ idea what that means.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” I said, pointing to the title.

His grin broadened. “Ah. So that’s what you see.”

“Exactly,” I said dryly, but I added a smile and a wink so he knew I was stepping into the game. “The verse is actually about death, but Vaughan named it ‘Cor — ”

He reached out and snagged my sweatshirt collar with his finger, tugging me toward him. He planted a kiss on my lips. A long, hot one. No doubt at all about his sexual orientation. (Given my vast history of mistakes, I didn’t want to misinterpret a guy’s intentions again. I’d already made that error as an undergrad.)

“I’ll be back at ten, then,” he informed me. And he strode away, the picture of fearlessness and unquestioned masculinity. The sauciness back in place. The vulnerability a well-used, now discarded tool.

The desk phone rang.

“Wilder Hall,” I said, my lips still smoldering from Brent’s kiss, my mind racing with the possibilities of where this relationship might be headed.

“Hi, Ellie! How are you?” The relentlessly cheerful voice of my cousin came across the line loud and clear.

“Angelique. What’s up?” I asked this although I already had a sneaking suspicion. She’d been calling me from Stanford with goofy questions about sex and dating all semester. California guys were, presumably, a new breed of male, and any prior advice about Midwestern men didn’t apply.

“I’ve got a question for you.” She paused to add suspense. “What do you wear to a bar mitzvah?”

“What?”

“A bar mitzvah. You know, that Jewish ceremony thingy where the boys — ”

“I know what it is, Angelique. But what are you doing going to one?”

“Oh, well, my boyfriend’s Jewish,” she said breezily, as if the knowledge of this wouldn’t give her mother — and half the members of our extended WASPy family — a coronary. “His nephew is having his next weekend, and Leo invited me.”