SOMETIMES YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR LIFE has been on pause until someone or something hits play. My someone was Rebecca. My something was that leg of hers, lifted from the cracked and crumbling concrete of the old patio where we sat facing each other, and lowered onto my lap, bridging the gap between us.
It was beautiful and it was brash and it completely blindsided me.
We’d met a month earlier on the first day of orientation for our graduate program in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She’d spent most of the month going out of her way to connect with me, sending me signals that had gone well over my head. Finally, she’d decided to send me one that landed right in my lap.
The day had begun typically enough. A morning of study followed by a hot dog in the microwave for lunch, carried on a paper plate to the back patio of the dilapidated duplex I was leasing for the year. The patio was just outside some sliding glass doors that didn’t look very glassy with all the grime caked on them and, for that matter, didn’t so much slide as grind upon opening.
It was a Friday in October, a fall afternoon poised so perfectly between summer and winter that the former seemed a distant memory and the latter an impossibility. I was sitting in a plastic forest-green deck chair left behind by some previous renter of the duplex—the half-eaten hot dog perched on my lap, my face turned to the sun, eyes closed—when Rebecca walked around the corner of the building. Her shadow darkened the backs of my eyelids as she cautiously said my name, and I startled so dramatically the flimsy chair nearly toppled backward, the hot dog rolling to the ground where it collected flakes of fallen leaves.
She picked up the gritty frank, examined it theatrically, and said with bemusement, “Campbell, I’m not sure if I should apologize to you for ruining your lunch, or if you should thank me for saving you from this mystery meat.”
My embarrassment about being seen in such an unguarded moment was momentarily relieved by her playfulness. I paused for effect, then folded my hands into a namaste pose before bowing and saying with exaggerated solemnity, “Thank you.”
She laughed, and her laughter sounded like the autumn light.
Then she dragged the only other deck chair—a white one originally, now soiled and aged into a dull khaki color—so it faced mine, and she sat down with our knees almost touching. As we made small talk about our classes and our classmates, I asked her casually what she was doing that evening. Cue her leg in my lap. And her response:
“I don’t know, Campbell, what areyou doing this evening?”
The whole thing sent a surge through me, twin threads of hope and fear intertwined—the conflicted response of someone whose loneliness is both their greatest wound and their most dependable defense. I stared down at the tattoo of a great egret on her ankle, framed by skin still bronzed by summertime, and I suddenly felt like an understudy called into the spotlight on opening night. The heat of her attention brought out prickles of sweat on my brow.
“I, uh, well, you know, I’m not sure. Actually, I think I do have some plans, but, uh, yeah, they’re no big deal. I could probably cancel them. But, well, probably not, so, um, yeah . . .”
The truth was, my roommate had set me up on a blind date for that evening.
I took a deep breath and tried to recover my most reliable way of responding when my walls were about to be breached: a smile so bright no one’s scrutiny had ever
