“Yeah,” she said, taking another handful of popcorn and tossing it into her mouth as the crowd closed in. “Don’t I know it.”
Everyone has their weak spot. The one thing that, despite your best efforts, will always bring you to your knees, regardless of how strong you are otherwise. For some people, it’s love. Others, money or alcohol. Mine was even worse: calculus.
I was convinced it was the reason I would not go to college. Not my checkered background, or that I was getting my applications together months after everyone else, or even the fact that up until recently, I hadn’t even been sure I wanted to go at all. Instead, in my mind, it would all come down to one class and its respective rules and theorems, dragging down my GPA and me with it.
I always started studying with the best of intentions, telling myself that today just might be the day it all fell into place, and everything would be different. More often than not, though, after a couple of pages of practice problems, I’d find myself spiraling into an all-out depression. When it was really bad, I’d put my head down on my book and contemplate alternate options for my future.
“Whoa,” I heard a voice say. It was muffled slightly by my hair, and my arm, which I locked around my head in an effort to keep my brain from seeping out. “You okay?”
I lifted myself up, expecting to see Jamie. Instead, it was Nate, standing in the kitchen doorway, a stack of dry-cleaning over one shoulder. Roscoe was at his feet, sniffing excitedly.
“No,” I told him as he turned and walked out to the foyer, opening the closet there. With Jamie hard at work on the new ad campaign, and Cora backlogged in cases, they’d been outsourcing more and more of their errands to Rest Assured, although this Saturday morning was the first time Nate had shown up when I was home. Now I heard some banging around as he hung up the cleaning. “I was just thinking about my future.”
“That bad, huh?” he said, crouching down to pet Roscoe, who leaped up, licking his face.
“Only if I fail calculus,” I said. “Which seems increasingly likely.”
“Nonsense.” He stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans, and came over, leaning against the counter. “How could that happen, when you personally know the best calc tutor in town?”
“You?” I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”
“Oh God, no,” he said, shuddering. “I’m good at a lot of things, but not that. I barely passed myself.”
“You did pass, though.”
“Yeah. But only because of Gervais.”
Immediately, he popped into my head, small and foul smelling. “No thanks,” I said. “I’m not that desperate.”
“Didn’t look that way when I came in.” He walked over, pulling out a chair and sitting down opposite me, then drew my book over to him, flipping a page and wincing at it. “God, just looking at this stuff freaks me out. I mean, how basic is the power rule? And yet why can I still not understand it?”
I just looked at him. “The what?”
He shot me a look. “You need Gervais,” he said, pushing the book at me. “And quickly.”
“That is just what I don’t need,” I said, sitting back and pulling my leg to my chest. “Can you imagine actually asking Gervais for a favor? Not to mention owing him anything. He’d make my life a living hell.”
“Oh, right,” Nate said, nodding. “I forgot. You have that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The indebtedness thing,” he said. “You have to be self-sufficient, can’t stand owing anyone. Right?”
“Well,” I said. Put that way, it didn’t sound like something you wanted to agree to, necessarily. “If you mean that I don’t like being dependent on people, then yes. That is true.”
“But,” he said, reaching down to pat Roscoe, who had settled at his feet, “you do owe me.”
Again, this did not seem to be something I wanted to second, at least not immediately. “What’s your point?”
He shrugged. “Only that, you know, I have a lot of errands to run today. Tons of cupcakes to ice.”
“And . . .”
“And I could use a little help,” he said. “If you felt like, you know, paying me back.”
“Do these errands involve Gervais?” I asked.
“No.”
I thought for a second. “Okay,” I said, shutting my book. “I’m in.”
“Now,” he said, as I followed him up the front steps of a small brick house that had a flag with a watermelon flying off the front, “before we go in, I should warn you about the smell.”
“The smell?” I asked, but then he was unlocking the door and pushing it open, transforming this from a question to an all-out exclamation. Oh my God, I thought as the odor hit me from all sides. It was like a fog; even as you walked right through it, it just kept going.
“Don’t worry,” Nate said over his shoulder, continuing through the living room, past a couch covered with a brightly colored quilt to a sunny kitchen area beyond. “You get used to it after a minute or two. Soon, you won’t even notice it.”
“What is it?”
Then, though, as I waited in the entryway—Nate had disappeared into the kitchen—I got my answer. It started with just an odd feeling, which escalated to creepy as I realized I was being watched.
As soon as I spotted the cat on the stairs—a fat tabby, with green eyes—observing me with a bored expression, I noticed the gray one under the coatrack to my right, followed by a black one curled up on the back of the couch and a long-haired white one stretched out across the Oriental rug in front of it. They were everywhere.