I rolled back onto my bed and stared at the ceiling, mentally kicking myself. First I insult the guy, and then I go ahead and add him randomly on Facebook. What an insane set of mixed messages. I had no clue what he was going to think, but it couldn’t have been pretty.
Exasperated, I wracked my brain for something more productive to do. I got up and sat back down at my desk, and paged through some reading assignments I had to do for class the following week. It was Thursday, and I had nothing to do Friday, but I could get a jump on my next week’s work. After a few minutes of fitfully trying to read, I threw the book down with annoyance.
I grabbed my phone and texted the only person who could make me feel better: my mom.
6:45pm Me: Hey, Mom, any plans for tomorrow?
7:10pm Mom: Nothing special, just classes. Want to visit for lunch?
7:12pm Me: Yes! See you in your office at one?
7:13pm Mom: Okay sweetie, see you then.
Feeling slightly relieved already, I turned back and tried studying some more. I knew my mom would have good advice, even if she disliked Noah’s dad.
Maybe I could even use my visit as an excuse to dig up more about his family.
I went back to my reading, and eventually I got into the flow of things, and forgot all about Noah Carterson for a few hours.
The University of Pennsylvania’s campus was in west Philadelphia, a relatively short subway ride away from Temple. I climbed up from the Blue Line, and looked out across Penn’s campus. It was one of the prettiest parts of west Philly, with smooth cobblestone walkways and plenty of trees. Everything was nice and manicured, and on one hand I loved it, but on the other it was very unlike Philadelphia. The area surrounding Penn had gone through a lot of changes over the years, and Penn was like an oasis in the middle of a bunch of bad neighborhoods. Temple was like that too, but somehow Penn was worse.
I walked across campus, feeling like an outsider, and entered into my mom’s building. It wasn’t crowded, and I moved easily through the lobby and up the stairs to the third floor. My mom had been in the same office for ten years, and I had visited her a bunch of times since moving into the city. It was a pretty typical-looking college administrative building with a bunch of different rooms and areas. I walked down the carpeted halls, found her door, and knocked.
“Come in,” she called out.
I pushed the door and entered. Inside, the space was cramped. Books were stacked everywhere, and every shelf was brimming over. That was typical of my mom; she probably hadn’t read half the books in there, but she was a huge collector. I stepped over a stack of magazines, careful not to start an avalanche of paper.
“Hey, Mom,” I said.
She looked up at me and took her glasses off, smiling.
“Hey, sweetie, how are you?”
I sat down in a chair in front of her desk. I felt like her student for a second.
“I’m good, how’s the grading?”
She sighed and leaned back. “Fine, I guess. Feels like I’m reading the same awful essay over and over again, though I seem to always give them at least a B.”
That felt better. She would never talk like that to her actual students.
“Do all teachers hate their classes as much as you do?”
She laughed. “You know I don’t hate it, I just like to complain.”
“Yeah, I know. You passed that on to me.”
She nodded, looking thoughtful. “I sure did. And you got your father’s nose. Speaking of which, call your father. You haven’t spoken to him in a few weeks.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Working on his next masterpiece, like usual.”
We both laughed. It was tough to keep in touch with my dad. He was a poet, but he was also pretty spaced out and difficult to pin down. He was constantly starting new projects, floating around from one thing to the next, dropping old projects when he got bored and starting new ones. He seemed to always have at least ten different things going on at once, and he rarely finished any of them.
There wasn’t anything in the world he loved more than to obsess over some new thing, whether it was 18th century Japanese ship making or indigenous Australian butterflies, he’d lose himself in whatever his new thing was for weeks. Sometimes, I’d call and he’d do nothing but talk about some African tribe that dyes everything blue for hours. I loved him, but he’d always been distant, and we never developed a great relationship. My younger brother, Andrew, got some of our father’s obsessiveness, and they seemed to get along pretty well.
“So, where’s lunch today?” I asked.
“I was thinking sushi, there’s a new place nearby.”
My mom, ever the adventurous eater. I liked sushi as much as the next person, but my mom was always hunting down new places and trying whatever they made. She loved to drag me along for the ride, and usually it was pretty good. I couldn’t complain about free food, although sometimes it wasn’t the best. Once, she took me to an Ethiopian restaurant, and while it was delicious, I didn’t love eating with my fingers the whole time.