The nurse nods a final time to Van in thanks, and wheels Nolan out the door and down the hall.
It’s weird in the room without him, without the bed. It makes Alice think about what will happen if he dies, about the huge gaping hole in the middle of the room, everyone standing around the edges and staring at where he should be.
Unable to handle it, Alice abruptly straightens up. “Who needs coffee?”
Somehow the wordcoffeeseems to cut through Marie’s music. Her head snaps up, and the dark bags under her eyes explain why she says, “Oh my god, me,” with such fervor.
Alice has never had finals, but, damn. Seems rough.
Dad/Uncle—Alice is pretty sure Dad? At least fifty-four percent sure—wants some too. Van doesn’t put in an order but rather stands herself, unfolding her long legs and easily towering over Alice. Alice is only five foot three, so it’s not that it’s hard to be a lot taller than she is, but something about Van’s height, or maybe her proximity, makes her feel startling everytime. “I’ll join you,” Van says in that deep voice of hers, and Alice blinks quickly, trying to keep it together.
“Great,” she says, her voice strangled, like Van wasn’t one of the things she was trying to escape from.
Van leads the way down to the cafeteria on the first floor with her ridiculously fast strides. She must have been here before because she goes directly to the coffee without looking around. Alice grabs a couple shrink-wrapped pieces of banana bread before joining Van, who is already double-fisting, and making herself and Marie enormous cups.
This whole work-by-night, lie-by-day thing is surprisingly exhausting.
Van pays for all of it, which makes Alice feel itchy. It shouldn’t—Van clearly has a good job and it’s not like Alice can afford to go around blithely buying things for other people—but it does. Alice hates being poor, hates having to track her money so obsessively that she knows she would have had to skimp on something else this week to compensate for the extra twelve dollars if Van hadn’t paid. She hates, judging by how quickly Van whipped out her wallet, the way she rolled her eyes at Alice’s feeble attempts to reach for her own, that Van already seems to know that about her.
She hates how clearly Van sees her. It’s not just dangerous for this lie, but for how it feels like Van could destabilize Alice’s entire life. She’s never really been one for wanting to be seen. Not like that. Not for a long time, anyway. She doesn’t feel at all ready for someone like Van.
After they bring everything back upstairs, Van suggests that she and Alice drink theirs out on one of the tiny hospital balconies to take advantage of the four seconds today without rain. The closest one is empty, and Alice isn’t sure they’re supposed to use it without a patient in tow, but Van slides theglass door open without hesitation, and Alice figures Van probably knows what’s what.
It’s not a particularly nice view—they’re looking out over parking structures in front of the backdrop of the interstate—and Alice is immediately shivering in her oversize sweater, but it means every sip of coffee won’t taste like rubbing alcohol, so Alice would settle for much worse.
They sit down in two chairs on either side of a small round table, and it’s quiet for a while, other than the rush of cars on the wet surface of I-5 three stories below. Alice slowly unwraps a slice of banana bread and sets it between them.
“Is Marie in finals?” she asks after a while.
“Yeah,” Van says, breaking off a piece of bread. “Last one is in a few days. Her professors are mostly letting her take them from here, which I guess is nice, but means she isn’t getting extensions.”
“Rough.” Alice watches as Van looks around for a napkin and then settles for wiping her greasy fingers on her pants. “What’s she studying?”
“That’s kind of the million-dollar question,” Van says, squinting as she looks over at Alice. “Or, well, whatever this degree is costing everyone. Hundred-thousand-dollar question. Dad wants her to major in business, but she wants theater.” Van shrugs. “Still up in the air who’s gonna win.”
“Theater, wow.” Alice tears off a piece of the bread and eats it. It’s too oily, but it’s nice and soft inside. A chocolate chip melts on her tongue. “That sounds fun, but I mean, definitely not practical.”
Van makes a little humming noise to show she heard, but she’s carefully not making eye contact with Alice as she takes what feels like a pointed sip of her coffee. “That’s the thing, I guess,” she eventually says, which is wildly unhelpful.
“The…thing?”
“Is college supposed to be practical, or, like, you know. Intellectually interesting and challenging?” She shrugs again, but not like she doesn’t care. More like she wants Alice to think she doesn’t. “Is the goal a trade and a salary, or to grow as a person?”
Alice doesn’t mean to pick a fight with the kind, compassionate, super-hot sister of a guy who might be dying, she really doesn’t, but she finds herself pulling a face anyway. “I mean, seems a little wasteful to spend a hundred thousand dollars to grow as a person and put on plays, doesn’t it? Like, you can do that on your own time.”
Van finally looks over at her, but this time her gaze is hard in a way it hasn’t been since the moment Alice was first introduced as Nolan’s girlfriend. “What did you major in?”
A familiar shame rises up in Alice, and as usual, she sharpens it and uses it as a weapon. “I didn’t go to college,” she says, trying to sound like it’s something she’s proud of, like it was a choice. “I made my own way.”
“Oh,” Van says softly, and the cruel parts of Alice relish the way she looks uncomfortable. Van clearly went—Alice is pretty sure you can’t be a physical therapist without it—and Nolan must have too. So that’s all three of them; maybe they’re not rich, but that puts them in an entirely different class of life circumstances than Alice.
“It’s not that I think you have to be in college to grow and challenge yourself,” Van says softly. “I don’t think that, at all. But I also…I don’t know.” She takes a sip of her coffee, clearly stalling as she thinks of how to say it. “Marie has the rest of her life to have a career, to be practical. She’s only eighteen. I wish she could…you know. Be a kid for a little longer. Do things because she loves them and theychallenge her, not just because one day they’ll help her make more money.”
Alice forces herself not to retort right away. She tries to be thoughtful, like Van. To consider everything Van has said, and especially to consider what she hasn’t.
“It’s hard,” Alice says softly. “To grow up too quickly.”
Van’s head snaps over to her, seemingly against her will. She’s staring hard at Alice, her eyes a little narrowed. She opens and closes her mouth without saying anything, and Alice wonders if Van is feeling the way Alice often has since yesterday morning, like the two of them already know each other in ways no one else has bothered to.
