Page 90 of Play Dirty

I go back eight months to the house. Because for some reason everything goes back to that house.

I call Evangeline.

“Hey, Jordan, what’s up?” She sounds out of breath, like she’s been running.

“Am I interrupting something?” I ask.

“No, not really. I’m walking the treadmill as I play the violin. It’s a training exercise. I have a show planned for late fall and I’m trying to step up my game and… you know, do something kinda flashy. I’m tired of classical music and why should I have to sit down or stand still while I play? You ever see fiddlers, Jordan?”

“Fiddlers?” I ask, suddenly lost.

“Yeah, you know how they go crazy on stage and do these little dances and shit? I think I want to be a fiddler. I’m putting the band back together.”

Which makes me huff out a laugh. I thought Evangeline was kinda stuffy and uptight when I first met her. But I was wrong. She’s kinda… funny. And weird. But in a cool way.

“What band?” I ask. Because I can’t not ask.

“That was a joke. I don’t have a band. But I’m gonna get one. I’m having auditions and I’m gonna put together a fiddler band. You know anyone who plays the banjo?”

This time I don’t hold in the laugh. It comes out like a guffaw. “Oh, my God. You just made my day. But no, I don’t know any banjo players.”

“I know,” she says. And I can almost hear her smile. “I just wanted to throw you off balance today and make you happy because Ixion came home last night and… wow. Whatever you guys did, it made him happy. I wanted to make you happy back. So what’d you need?”

“You know my house?”

“Yeah?”

“You never told me their name. Who was that family?”

I write down the name, tell her good luck with the fiddler band, and hang up.

A few seconds later, my phone buzzes. It’s Augustine again.

But I let her go to voicemail as I walk out of my office and tell everyone I’ll be back tomorrow.

Because I’m dialing Darrel’s number.

At six forty-five I’m sitting in my car down the street from my parents’ home, waiting for Darrel’s call. I feel sick. Like… wanna-throw-up sick. I don’t know why. It’s just that feeling you get in your gut when someone unleashes a secret you didn’t see coming. Some terrible thing, only it didn’t just happen. It’s been happening for a long time and you never knew about it.

A girl cheated on me once. I was in college at Stanford and I was like, I dunno. Nineteen. And we’d been going out for a while. Like all through freshman year and into sophomore year. A pretty long time for college. And I really thought I loved this girl. Like couldn’t eat kinda love, ya know? The kind that just stops your life and you feel like you can’t go on without them. Can’t work, or pay attention to anything. Can’t imagine living without them. Or you can, it just looks like misery.

And she’d dodge my calls. Not show up for dates. Shit like that. And I’d ask her, “Are you seeing someone else? Do you wanna break up?” Because that’s how I deal with conflict. I just want the truth.

And she’d always say, “No, of course not. I love you.”

And that was all I wanted to hear. All I needed to hear. OK, she loves me. And she’d stick around for a week or two and everything would be great.

But it always happened again.

She’d just ghost me. Just disappear and forget about me.

And then I wound up in this downward spiral of depression. I lived in this stupid apartment off-campus in sophomore year and I can remember so clearly sitting in bed listening for the sound of her shoes on the metal stairs outside that led up to the apartment.

Like… I knew that sound. I knew it. And every time someone else would come up the stairs, like a neighbor, I’d hope it was her, but I knew it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t.

I almost failed two classes that fall semester. That’s how off my game she had me. And looking back, God, why? Why did I act that way? I don’t miss her. So that love wasn’t real.