“Can you send me a file?” He talked me through finding it and I sent him an email. “I’ll be home today. I’ll see you soon,” César told me. “I want to put my arms around you.”
“I miss you,” I admitted.
“I miss you, too,” he answered. “I think about you all the time. It almost feels like my chest hurts, I miss you so much.”
I rubbed where mine had been aching, too. “I was thinking about names for the baby,” I said. “What about Eliana? Then it’s for my sister and also your mom.”
“I like that a lot. It’s better than what I had on my list.”
“Is that in the Camdyn file, the one you have to identify with my last name, too?” I teased him. The icon labeled “Camdyn Riordan” was on the screen in front of me. “I want to see what baby names you came up with.”
“Cam, no, don’t open that, please.”
But I had already clicked. I stared now at the list of documents; the one at the top was titled, “Camdyn Riordan: issues.” “My ‘issues?’” I asked César. “What is this?”
“I wrote that when you first told me about the pregnancy, before I knew you.” He was talking very fast. “It was when I was thinking that—”
“You made a list of my problems to solve?” I asked him, reading down the screen. “Unstable living situation” was on there, as was finding doctor for me and a better job, and improving my diet. “Are you fucking kidding me? Did you get me my job with the Woodsmen?”
“No, I absolutely didn’t,” he answered quickly. “You got the job, yourself. We need—”
“I see that you planned to tackle something pretty big,” I spat out. “You wrote, ‘Family: mother, sister, father.’ There’s a question mark after that one. How were you going to fix me and Warren Wilde?”
César sighed. “I wasn’t. That was just me putting down things I was worried about.”
“All the things that are wrong with me.”
“All the things I wanted to help you with! Can we wait and talk about this more in person—”
“Here’s the questionnaire I filled out so you could get to know me,” I interrupted, opening the doc. He had scanned it in, and I looked at the pages of my scribbles that he had annotated. My mouth hung open as I read what he had written back then: “Smart?”, “Parties, drinking problem?”, “No address—can’t handle adulthood?” and a lot more comments that made it obvious how little he had thought of me.
“You questioned my intelligence?” I asked him. “You wondered if I was an alcoholic?” I reeled. “Holy shit, that’s why you wanted me to move in with you! You wanted to keep an eye on me, because you thought I was so fucked up!”
“You have to understand, I was really concerned after I read some of what you wrote,” César said. It sounded like he was pleading. “I didn’t know you at all and there you were, pregnant with my baby, writing about parties, about going out, not having a place to live, eating unpopped popcorn kernels for meals. Can you imagine how it looked to me?”
I couldn’t speak. I kept scrolling through what he had written, like, “Multiple partners?” and, “Mother: mentally ill?”
“Camdyn, please listen. I was trying to get to know you, and I made some very poor assumptions at first. For me, the night we spent together back in October was aberrant behavior, but I didn’t know about you. Not back then.”
“Aberrant behavior?” I exploded. “So you’re saying that I was some kind of slut for sleeping with you, but for you, it was just aberrant behavior? Funny, given what I know about your history! I’ve been told that you screwed every woman who walked by! What about Sadie, or Kimora, or Lola? Or Coco, both of them?” Yeah, I remembered their names.
“I wasn’t screwing all those women!” he said, his voice rising. “You know me! And when I got to know you too, then—”
“How dare you?” I asked him. “How dare you pretend like you wanted to learn about me so we could be friends, but what you really wanted was to pick me apart and figure out how bad I was?”
Silence. “I didn’t think I was doing that. I wasn’t pretending to want to know you, I really did. Camdyn, I don’t think you’re bad, or a slut, or anything else. I lo—”
“Great, I’m so happy you feel that way now! Here’s something I really want you to know about me that I didn’t write down on the questionnaire: I think that you, César Hidalgo, can go fuck yourself.” I threw the phone down on the desk, not wanting to even see his name on the screen.
Oh, shit, I was going to throw up. I stumbled into the bathroom and retched, then I got myself into the car and over to the stadium. I still needed a job, now more than ever. At stoplights, I calculated how much I’d spend on gas to drive myself to Florida to live with Ellie.
“Camdyn, I’m so glad you’re here this morning,” Brenda from the marketing department told me when I walked in. “We’re having a few issues with the new Dames’ coach. I mean, not the Dames. Mike, what are we calling the cheerleaders now?” she asked her co-worker.
“Uh, the Woodsmen Cheerleaders.”
“Right, we’re having some issues with Sam Gillies, the new Woodsmen Cheerleaders’ coach. He’s a little opinionated.”
“Crusty, rude, mean,” Mike added.
“Right,” Brenda agreed again. “He and the Dames—that is, the Cheerleaders are starting spring tryouts over at the Woodsmen practice facility and there are some questions about their uniforms and dance style. Can you drive over there to discuss things with him? Let him know about our new direction and the team’s image realignment. How he has to go along with
