And while she had more money in the bank and a higher future earning potential than 99% of the students bustling by her in both directions on the crowded walk, she felt somehow out of place, self-conscious even.
Ryan had spent the better part of the past three hours scouring the internet, reminding himself why he’d never had any interest in contacting this hollow social butterfly and convincing himself that it was not he who should be intimidated. Especially on his home turf. This time he was prepared for her call when it came.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“It’s me,” Annamaria whispered into her phone, almost demurely. “I’m at kind of a triple archway on Massachusetts Avenue at the entrance to Harvard Yard. Do you go here?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said coldly. “Stay there. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” Click — he hung up his phone, leaving the prima donna no time to protest. Now that’s how it’s done, he thought.
Ryan slowly descended the steps of his dorm, exited out onto the yard and strolled at a deliberately lazy pace toward Mass Ave, fighting the urge to peek toward the arched gate. As he walked through, he found Annamaria sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk with her back resting against one of the brick archways.
“I’m Ryan,” he deadpanned. “Follow me.”
“Nice to meet you,” Annamaria smiled, jumping up to a stand. “This place is amazing. I’ve never been here before. Any chance you could give me a quick tour on the way back to your place? And maybe we could just pick up a little snack? I’m starving.”
“You eat?” Ryan sneered.
“I’m not that skinny!” Annamaria shot back playfully.
“No, certainly not everywhere,” Ryan said, looking her up and down, convinced that she’d had some work done. “You are definitely uniquely proportioned,” he muttered just loudly enough that he hoped she would hear.
They walked on in uncomfortable silence through the Yard for another sixty seconds.
“See that there?” Ryan said condescendingly, pointing toward Widener library. “That’s a library. You may or may not be familiar with one of those. It is a place of learning, full of books. One of the books inside is an original Gutenberg Bible. The Bible is a popular religious text that I’m almost certain you’re not familiar with.”
“What the hell is your problem?” Annamaria snapped. “You contacted me!”
“Someone contacted you on my behalf,” Ryan clarified. “I thought it would be a waste of my time — and yours.”
“Oh, I see. So you think you know me?” Annamaria asked, her Spanish accent intensifying with her anger. “Please, don’t pretend that you know me,” she continued without giving him a chance to respond. “You get more looks around here than I do. How would you like it if I asked one of these ass-kissers about you, and I based my whole impression of you on that?”
I don’t give a damn what you think about me, he thought before thinking better of actually saying it aloud. “You’re right,” he conceded half-heartedly. “I don’t know you.”
He pointed out the statue of John Harvard and a few buildings of interest as they continued the awkward tour toward one of the science buildings where they ducked in to grab a snack before doubling back to Ryan’s dorm on the south end of the Yard.
Ryan’s “single,” a privilege of upperclassmen, was on the third floor of Wigglesworth dormitory. The unadorned walls were coated with thick white paint that had been caked on progressively thicker over the decades. A few of the beams of the original hardwood floor were just starting to buckle upward, but the floor was clear of clutter and his twin bed neatly made, an unusual state for his room — one which he’d argue to his death had more to do with the fact that he had a guest than with who that guest may be. A microwave rested on top of his perpetually empty dorm fridge at the foot of his bed, and his black wooden Harvard chair was pushed up tidily to his desk under the room’s lone window that looked down on the peaceful Yard below.
Ryan unlocked the door and invited Annamaria to have a seat wherever she liked, as he mulled over how much he wanted to reveal to her. From the doorway he could see that his laptop was still open, displaying a picture of a bikini-clad Annamaria on the cover of some trashy tabloid, toting some sort of fruity alcoholic drink across some generic tropical beach while flirtatiously smirking at a throng of salivating suitors. The headline teased “Off Again?” suggesting that her currently-rumored relationship with her Hollywood boyfriend du jour had ended.
Annamaria gazed over to the laptop with a hint of disappointment on her face as Ryan rushed over to close it. She shed her hat and her sweatshirt, under which she wore a form-fitting plain white T-shirt, and sat down on the side of the bed, curling one foot up underneath her as she popped open a can of Coke.
Ryan sat facing her in his black wooden chair, thinking about where he should begin (and grudgingly admiring the fact that she didn’t drink diet) when she completely disarmed him by speaking first.
“Tell me about your parents,” she said, sliding off her sunglasses for the first time, and looking him straight in the eye, as if the argument they’d just had had never taken place. The sincerity in her eyes was undeniable, and the depth was hypnotizing — like a bottomless volcanic lake in the dead of a moonless night.
The tabloid covers instantly vanished from his mind, and he was forcefully struck with the realization that the two of them shared a terrible, powerful, character-defining history.
He hadn’t talked about his birth parents to anyone for years, but not a single day had passed that he hadn’t thought of them.
“My dad runs a hedge fund,” he started, with a last-ditch effort to evade her question.
“Your real parents,” she interrupted, still staring directly in his eyes intently — but tenderly.
“They were both doctors,” he said, turning toward the window as tears began to well on his lower lids. “I remember every moment I spent with them from the time I first started to form memories.”
His voice stayed steady as an occasional tear trickled down his cheek and Annamaria listened. “My dad was a huge Cleveland Browns fan. Every Sunday at 1:00, without fail, we would park ourselves on the couch, eat popcorn, and watch the game together — the whole game — no matter how bad the score got. He told me when he was finally done with all of his training and making a real doctor’s salary, we were gonna go to a game and sit at the fifty yard line, no matter what it cost.
“My mom was busy, but she never let me feel it. She’d work on Saturdays if she had to to make it to my school so I’d have someone there on days parents were invited. She taught me to read and how to ride a bike.
“When I was scared or sick, one of them would come and stay in my bed with me and then go to work at the crack of dawn the next day on essentially no sleep. They loved me. Unconditionally.
“I was an only child. When they died, I was completely alone — devastated.
“I was seven, and…” he drew in a deep breath before continuing. “I saw it. I saw it happen. For the next few months I woke up with nightmares of that scene every morning.” He shook his head slowly. “It was terrible.
“But honestly,” he said, turning to Annamaria, “it was even worse when they stopped — when the images weren’t as vivid, and the pain wasn’t as intense. My parents didn’t have anyone else in the world either. I was their entire legacy, and as hard as I tried not to, I could feel myself… forgetting them — at least emotionally.”
“My dad worked security at the Canal,” Annamaria jumped in, sensing he was reaching his limit. She hadn’t talked about her family for years either — since she’d left Panama. “And my mom stayed home with my little brothers. We weren’t poor by Panamanian standards, but we didn’t have much. I shared a room with my two little brothers, and we’d converted our living room into a third bedroom for my grandmother.