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Ben met Donna on the quad at 7 a.m. (his suggestion), and they walked to the SUB to get bagels for breakfast (her suggestion). Donna was acting strangely right from “hello” — really formal and distracted. Out of the blue, she asked how his class was going. Normally they only talked about their classes if they had a gripe or if a professor had told a funny joke or said something weird. Ben felt his brain on hyper drive, and it was possible he was reading too much into such an innocent question, but he didn’t think so. She knew what he had in mind. Now it was inevitable, even if neither knew how to begin the cease-and-desist. As they walked side-by-side across the grass to the SUB, he countered her small talk with small talk. And so he began acting strangely, too.
“How are the wedding plans?” he asked. Her sister was getting married.
“Same as always,” she said.
“Your mom still bugging you about the dress?”
“Yes.”
“Your sister still set on the peach one?”
He felt like strangling himself. Why did Donna not just start jabbering about the dress and the wedding and allow Ben to start working up the energy to break up with her? She was being cruel.
“I don’t care about the color anymore,” she said. And that was it. They lapsed into silence all the way to the food court. The bagel shop had just opened, and a dozen students waited in line. Ben and Donna fell in behind a squat guy wearing tattered cut-off army surplus shorts, and who smelled, of all things, like formaldehyde. Ben asked another wedding question and got another clipped answer. Donna’s face had a scrubbed and slightly puffy look to it. She wouldn’t look at him.
Finally, they reached the front of the line and he gestured for her to order first. She bought an onion bagel and went out into the court to find a table. He bought a cinnamon raisin and had to wait for coffee to be brewed. She was half-finished with her bagel by the time he sat down across from her. She’d chosen a table in the far corner of the court, several tables from the nearest people. Before he could even finish saying the words, “We need to talk,” she had wiped her mouth and said, “I need to get to class early, I’m sorry.”
He almost let her go, but the thought of enduring more suspense made him nearly sick. As she was wrapping up her bagel and about to stand up, he said, “Wait, can we talk about something?”
She set her mouth in a straight line and then said, “What is it?” She was daring him. Or pleading with him.
“I think we both —“ he began, and then had to restart. “There’s something —“
“I know,” she said, looking away and then at the table and then away again. That made Ben realize that he was looking so intently at her face that he was probably creeping her out. He looked away, too. And then he realized they were sitting there not saying anything, each waiting for the other.
Finally, she said, “But you need to know why.”
Ben had no idea what she was talking about. He found himself holding one half of his bagel and squeezing it between his fingers. He set it down, then picked up his coffee cup and put it to his lips, though it was still too hot to drink. For some reason, what flashed through his mind right then was the phrase he’d found hand-written in ink in his copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. You are not who you think you are. He wanted to ask Donna, “Who do you think I am?”
He found she was looking at him intensely now, and she said, “Do you want to know?”
“Know what?” he asked.
About Patrick Kelly Joyner
