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“So the two things I need to tell you are as follows.”

He stopped speaking again, and in the silence in between one Yaz song and the next, I could hear the scratch of his chin stubble against the leather. I thought about his razor-sharp cheekbones, and how they could slice up that chair straight through to the stuffing. I held my breath. I had no idea what he was about to say. None.

“Number one: I know your grandmother, Gladdie.”

“What?”

“The old fogues’ home, where I work—”

“Is Silver Meadows?”

“Yes.”

Holy shit.

“I didn’t know that she was your grandmother until the other day, when you visited her. I happened to see you walking down the hallway together. Suddenly, everything I’d been hearing about her granddaughter, ‘the smart cookie with great gams,’ made perfect sense. You were J.D.”

Smart cookie with great gams. Marcus had effectively complimented me on both an intellectual and superficial level. Sort of. Right?

“So you’ve been talking to my grandmother? And my grandmother has been talking to you? About me?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” he replied, his dark eyes daring me to look away. “I wanted you to know that so you couldn’t accuse me of doing it all on purpose and tell me to go fuck myself again.”

“But why would it matter? We aren’t . . . or . . . uh . . . weren’t . . .” Which is it, Jess? “Aren’t” or “weren’t”? Present or past tense? Now or then?

“We haven’t been talking to each other.”

Past imperfect tense. How appropriate. Ha. In more ways than one.

“No,” Marcus replied.

“So you could’ve kept this to yourself. Or waited for me to find out on my own. Why tell me this at all?”

He rose from the chair. “There’s too much tension in the world,” he replied solemnly. “What hope is there in the Middle East if you and I can’t make peace?”

This whole scene was just so bizarro that I had no clue whether he was kidding or not. I had no idea what to say. Alison Moyet’s voice filled the silence.

“Sometimes when I think of the move and it’s only a game / And I need you . . .”

Christ. I was falling now. Falling, falling, falling.

“And number two . . .”

Oh, dear Lord. I’d forgotten there was a second thing he had to tell me.

“Len likes you,” he said.

Marcus was almost out the door, when he turned to say one more thing.

“Be easier on him than you were on me.”

And with that, he was gone. Poof!

A millisecond later, my mom was knocking at my door, bubbling over the possibility that another “catch” was courting her younger daughter.

“Jessie, that was the nice b— Why are you on the floor?”

At some point during my conversation with Marcus, I’d sunk so low, so deep, that my molecular makeup was indistinguishable from that of the carpet.

“I like it here.”

My mother didn’t know where to even begin to interpret this, so she blithely pressed on. “Was that the nice boy from New Year’s Eve? Marcus?”

“I believe so,” I replied. “Yes.”

“What did he need to talk to you about?” Mom kept doing and undoing the top button on her cream-colored cardigan, a clear sign that she was getting impatient. “What did he say?”

“I don’t know.”

She rubbed her temples. “Honestly, Jessie. Why can’t you ever give me a straight answer? Why do you have to make things so difficult?”

I wanted to ask Marcus those same questions. Even at his most candid, he’s confusing.

Then Mom babbled about having just gotten off the phone with Bethany and how she and G-Money have decided to fly out to New Jersey for Thanksgiving and how marvelous it is that the whole family is getting together and how she can’t wait to see the golden couple because she simply could not imagine celebrating another holiday without them. . . .

When I didn’t respond, she walked out the door in a huff.

The song came to its end, with the last plinks and plunks of the synthesizer, with the final line.

“And all I ever knew,” she sang. “Only you.”

I stayed on the floor for a long, long time.

November 1st

Hope,

“We are what we pretend to be.”—Kurt Vonnegut (via Mac)

Halloween is a fascinating