Jack nodded. She looked up at his face.
“I’m sure you can’t relate,” she said. “Given that you’re the king from jump.”
“It’s weird, though. You’re never really a part of it for real, you know? You’re taking classes during summer, you’re missing absolutely everything on campus during the season. It’s not like I got all that close to anyone, either.”
“I don’t want to make it sound like I was this pathetic…” she said, trying to force a laugh. “It’s weird, we just moved around a lot when I was young, never in the same school for, like, more than two or three years. So I just never found a super-close group of girls, you know? It never felt like it was ‘worth it’ or something. I just knew we’d move on. That’s what I liked most about soccer at first, I think. The club team, at least. That I was gonna be with those girls for years and years. I think it’s why I gave so much to it. I didn’t want to lose those new friends…”
He was thinking about himself as she spoke, she could tell. She could see it in the drift of his eyes. He shook his head and then sniffled and then laughed at his sniffle. “You know it has to end. That’s been the case forever. It ends in high school and college and in Norway and Germany. But they don’t tell you about the real end, where, like, your body and soul are put on fucking ice.”
“It was who you were for a really long time.”
“Who I was, but also just what I did. How I spent my time, you know? Every day since I was six years old, I’ve woken up knowing that the goal of today is to get a little bit better. I took it for granted, that even without anything else going on, there was always that main thing to turn to. If plans fell through like back there, I’d go steal a few hours in the gym. Now, though, I’m…”
“Well,” Whitney said, teasingly, “it seems like you’ve found plenty to do with your days this week…”
“You know what I mean,” he said, pink-cheeked. “She’s…she’s fun. But she’s a girl I probably won’t see again after we leave here. I don’t see her making it out for Christmas in Chicago.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“I didn’t say it was. You’re the one with that grin on your face, like you know something, like I have to explain myself.”
“No grins. No explanations required.”
“You don’t like her much, I can tell.”
“I like her. She’s fun. She’s just young. She can be kinda needling. To me, to you. Which is ridiculous. She has that attitude that maybe I had at her age? But I dunno, it’s a little extra with her,” Whitney said. “At her age—like I’m a hundred fucking years old.”
“So you were a Jenna in college, then?”
“Hardly. I just, I got caught up in some stuff. I started reading some heady things and watching some good movies and thinking I had my finger on something. I’m sure I was insufferable.”
“You probably hung out at that coffee shop, huh? What’s that one off campus? I had to go there for a class once, a documentary class with that one professor who actually makes documentaries?”
“That’s funny. No. No, I wasn’t much in that crowd, either. I really was pretty solo, just kinda figuring stuff out for myself. But sophomore year, I found this boy. Really, the one and only serious one before Will. And I glommed on. Became obsessed with his thing. He was from New York and looked like he was in the Strokes and all his friends were in college film festivals and things like that, and the one time I went home with him, he knew all these…He knew this taco shop where you’d go in the front door, then down the stairs and through the kitchen and into a dining room…”
“Sounds like Goodfellas.”
“Exactly! That’s what it felt like. And, anyway, I was pretty much ready to marry him on the spot. We were inseparable for a bit. And I was counting on spending the summer up there with him. Staying at his mom’s apartment. Waitressing like I had back home. Making movies for fun. I dunno, it was just, like, this thing I’d never wanted but suddenly very very much wanted. Then he broke up with me on the last day of classes and I spiraled pretty hard, and ended up having to go back home for the summer. I was…I was really down, like scarily down. I was humiliated. I was drinking too much. I was hooking up with anyone who looked at me. I was just a total fucking mess. I didn’t think I could go back to school in the fall. Truly. And so I basically called the study-abroad office every morning, trying to squeeze my way into a program. I would’ve gone anywhere. But nothing. And then as I was packing for the semester, I got a call that some kid had broken his leg in a boating accident and a spot was open in Paris. It was…very important for me just then. It was, like, life-alteringly important for me to have a place to escape to, where I could figure myself out all over…” She looked up at him. “And so, anyway: voilà. That’s how my Jenna phase began in earnest.”
“That thing last night…” Jack said. “What was that? That was super bizarre, I’m not gonna lie.”
“Well, good, I’m glad my new friends are so honest.”
“I’d never seen that move before.
