Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [56]
“It was a dare.” He’d returned to his drawing. “And I wasn’t exactly sober.”
“Was there ever a time in your life when you weren’t abusing your body in every way imaginable?”
He pulled the reading lamp over my foot. “Sit here at least half an hour—until the ink dries.”
When I went to bed that night I was startled by a blur of light at the foot of my bed. It darted erratically like a stage Tinker Bell dancing. The pink daisies on my cast were glowing in the dark.
The next morning, Mom called to update me on her progress with Mr. Moore. This required a half hour conversation clarifying the difference between dating and going out.
“I just don’t understand why you say ‘going out.’ You’re not going anywhere.”
“It’s an expression,” I said. “It’s the modern equivalent of being pinned. It means you’re together.”
“I still think it’s unsensical.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you and Mr. Moore are going out?”
“Well, we’re not just holding hands at the park,” she laughed. I had no idea what this was supposed to mean.
“How’s your ankle?”
“It’s fine, but I have to wear this ridiculous air cast.”
“You’re not walking on it,” she stated in disbelief.
“Not everywhere.”
“Amy Gallagher! You go tooling around campus on a hurt leg and you’re libel to mess up the other one. Make That Eli drive you.”
My mother had more or less accepted the fact that Eli was a long-standing guest. She’d recommended we make him sleep in the garage beneath us. I told her that was a great idea, then did nothing to discourage her belief that I’d acquiesced. Despite her erroneous faith that there was now an entire floor between her only daughter and the traveling vagrant, she had not yet given up her right to disapprove. She only referred to him as “That Eli” and only when she’d come up with some new chore he should do for us.
I promised I would stay off my feet as much as possible. With the air cast I managed a stilted kind of walk. Driving, however, was out of the question since it was my right ankle. The bus that passed down our street went directly to campus, but I still had to make it to the stop some four blocks away and then hobble another ten minutes through campus, the bus stop outside the Humanities Building posing the impossible challenge of a steep hill. When it came to getting to work on time, I was forced to beg rides.
Eli was the first to volunteer. Wednesday he not only drove me to class, he insisted on walking me all the way to the Humanities Building, even carrying my books up to the classroom where his presence caused no end of excitement. Students love any interruption. One with a tattoo is even better.
He stood at the front of the room while I set up the day’s PowerPoint. He asked questions about the Spanish verb conjugations left on the board by the previous professor.
“I thought this was English class,” he said. “Voy, vas, va, vamos, van … You guys know this stuff?”
Some of the students laughed. A few stared at him skeptically.
“Dude, who are you?” one of the boys in the front row asked, nervously eyeing Eli’s many bracelets. Today he wore one with spikes.
“I’m here to observe,” Eli said matter-of-factly.
Of course, on this day my slide show would not play. I ejected the flash drive and tried again. I tried to reboot the classroom laptop. Eli kept the students entertained by attempting to read the chalkboard dialogue: Para celebrar su aniversario de bodas Juan lleva a su sposa a un restaurant muy elegante. When he learned that one of the students spoke fluent Spanish, he talked her into giving an impromptu translation of the novel in my bag for the entire class. He sat in the front row to listen and seemed frankly impressed.
“I think that’s enough,” I announced.
Eli told them they should pay careful attention and not give me a hard time and then walked out the door, leaving me to shut them all up. The girls wanted to know how long had we been together and why had I never said anything before, and the back row fraternity contingency wondered aloud if he belonged to a fight club.