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five-and-a-half-foot stature and could perform
with a three-quarter sized instrument, no height adjustment needed, though it
was a close thing.
    For the past year,
I’d been giving lessons to local students—all of them boys—each of them some
version of smug and impertinent until they heard me play.
     
    Jacqueline,
    Upright bass? Interesting.
    I’m busy in the evenings this week, and most weekends as well. I don’t want you to
lose time on this, so I’ll send you the project information later tonight, and
we can discuss it over email until we can sync our schedules. Will that work
for you?
    LM
    PS – I’ll keep you in mind if I buy a large appliance or need to move.
     
    Landon,
    Thank you, yes—that would be great. (Re: sending the project information, I mean, not
your brazen resolution to use me for my truck’s hauling capacity. You’re no
better than my friends! They dodge U-Haul rentals and delivery fees, and I get
paid in beer.)
    JW
     
    Jacqueline,
    I’ll send the project specifics when I get home, and we can discuss.
    The barter system is just primitive economics at work, you know. (And are you old enough for beer?)
    LM
     
    Landon,
    Far be it from me to knock an effective use of prehistoric economics. And I suppose
friends who pay in beer are better than friends who don’t pay at all. (Re: my
age—I don’t believe the job description of Economics Tutor makes you privy to
that sort of personal information.)
    JW
     
    Jacqueline,
    Touché. I’ll just have to trust you not to get me arrested for supplying alcohol to minors.
    You’re right—impoverished, auto-lacking college students like myself should respect tried-and-true methods of transport negotiations.
    LM
     
    I smiled at his candid
admission of being carless, my face falling when I contrasted it with the sense
of self-importance Kennedy got from his car. Right before we graduated, his
parents gave his two-year-old Mustang to his sixteen-year-old brother, who’d
wrecked his Jeep the weekend before. As an early graduation gift, they replaced
Kennedy’s Mustang with the brand new BMW—sleek and black, with every available
upgrade, including plush leather seats and a stereo system I could hear from a
block away.
    Dammit . I
had to stop linking every single thing that happened to me with Kennedy. Realization
dawned then, that he was still my default. Over the past three years, we’d
become each other’s habit. And though he’d broken his habit of me when he
walked away, I’d not broken my habit of him. I was still tethering him to my
present, to my future. The truth was, he now belonged only to my past, and it
was time I began to accept it, as much as it hurt to do so.
     
    ***
    As soon as we hit campus freshman
year, Kennedy had pledged his father’s fraternity. Despite my boyfriend’s need
for cliquish affiliation, I’d never shared that aspiration. He didn’t seem to
mind when I said I preferred not to rush any sororities, as long as I supported
his future-politician need for brotherhood. He told me once he sort of liked
that I was a GDI girlfriend.
    “A GDI? What’s that?”
    He’d laughed and
said, “It means you’re goddamned independent.”
    When he walked out
of my room almost three weeks ago, it hadn’t occurred to me that he was taking
my carefully cultivated social circle with him. Minus my relationship with
Kennedy, I had no automatic invitation to Greek parties or events, though Chaz
and Erin could invite me to some stuff since I fell under the heading of
acceptable things to bring to any party: alcohol and girls.
    Awesome. I’d gone from
an independent girlfriend to party paraphernalia.
    Running into
clusters of my former friends was uncomfortable at best. Just outside the main
library, tables of frat boys sold coffee, juice and pastries every morning for
a week to raise money for leadership training. Armed with portable grills,
Tri-Delts camped out in tents on their lawn to showcase the plight of the homeless.
(I