“What part of Michigan?” I ask aloofly.
I wait for him to hold up his hand and point to where in the “mitten” he’s from. Locals call it that because the state is shaped like a mitten—the thumb on the east side by Detroit, and the Great Lakes bordering the land from all sides.
Sure enough, he raises his veiny palm. “Do you know the hand thing?” he asks.
“Indeed,” I say dryly. “I’m from Michigan too.”
“Holy cow,” he says, bubbling over with chummy energy that’s so far from the poised and polished man I’d imagined. “What a small world!” His amber eyes get wide, and he looks way too excited by the coincidence. “What part?”
“Southwest,” I answer, trying to keep it vague. (It now seems completely out of line that I should divulge the hundred-mile radius wherein my parents live, when yesterday I would’ve happily invited this man into my bedroom without ever having exchanged two words.)
“No way—I’m from Kalamazoo!” he says, as if this just keeps getting better and better. “Well, a super small town outside K-Zoo, but that’s the closest big city.” He taps his forefinger to his palm, right over the spot where I grew up.
I can barely keep my eyes from rolling out of their sockets at hearing Kalamazoo described as a big city. With its blink-and-you-miss-it “downtown” that you can walk across in five minutes, it’shardly a booming metropolis. I don’t weigh in with my opinion, though. I’m too busy feeling sorry for myself.
“Oh no,” I mutter under my breath, but not as quietly as I mean to. Though I don’t find any of this funny, I can’t deny the comedic elements here, at least to an outsider. Perhaps I wasn’t specific enough with the universe—I asked that my life be a romantic comedy, not anunromantic comedy. Maybe something got lost in translation as I was manifesting, and two abominable little letters were tacked on to thwart my happiness.
The non-prince, the anti-prince, keeps yabbering on in that too-friendly way that Michiganders do. “Yeah, so I grew up in Vicksburg and now teach at Three Rivers Elementary, and I’m doing a student-exchange program in London for this year,” he says. “Where did you go to school? Is your family still there?”
A pinched sound catches in my throat—the result of what happens when you try to laugh but can only cry. I went to Schoolcraft from K through twelve, the district right next to Vicksburg.
This can’t be happening. I’m almost expecting him to say “April Fools!” even though it’s October, or my alarm clock to go off and wake me to a day that is still unspoiled.
But this isn’t a joke, and it’s not a dream. It’s real life, doling out debris in as casually cruel a form as it comes.
“I went to Schoolcraft,” I grit out, resolved to get the bitter truth out of the way so I can come to terms with it and then forget this whole thing once I get off the bus in a few minutes.
“Holy cow,” he says again. Perhaps it’s his favorite phrase due to the fact that the cow-to-human ration in West Michigan is a solid four to one, or at least that’s how it feels driving through the country roads and vast open farmland. “You’re not kidding?”
Unfortunately not,I think to myself, but don’t say that aloud. I just shake my head. I’m not trying to cement any kind of connection between us, not when the bond I’d wanted has been so brutally broken.
“Maybe wehavemet before? This is crazy,” he says, delightfully oblivious to any signs that I might not be equally thrilled to discover our commonalities.
From a great and gloomy distance, I observe the irony in how fully invested he is in this conversation and how absent I am from it. Whereas just a little bit ago I would’ve given my right leg—potentially both legs—for him to be so fascinated by me. The depressing difference that ten minutes can make in the course of a life.
“Crazy,” I agree.
“I’m Rory, by the way,” he says. His Michigan accent makes the “r’s” so hard and twangy that it gives me bad flashbacks to that place I had to leave because all the dirt roads led to dead ends.
“Kat,” I say shortly. “I’m Kat.”
“Ah dang it, don’t think we can be friends then,” Rory says. “I’m a dog person, not a cat person.”
“Mmm,” is all I manage to say, unable to muster up a courtesy chuckle or even crack the semblance of a smile. It’s a terrible joke, and what’s even more terrible is that although I obviously have zero interest in Rory—negative interest, actually—I’m still offended by how he so quickly relegates me to the friend zone.
“Sorry,” he says. “Bad dad joke. Can I still blame it on jet lag? I moved here a few weeks ago, and it’s my first time out of the country, so I’m having some major culture shock. I know it’s technically the same language, but”—he lowers his voice and looks around sheepishly—“I can’t understand half of what English people say.”
I don’t even try to keep up an interested expression as he’s talking. My face falls into the sunken pits of despair, where my heart and hopes also now reside.
The bus screeches to a standstill, and I seize my chance to evacuate this situation before it spirals any farther. “This is my stop,” I announce, though it’s not. “Great to meet you, Rory,” I say as I abruptly stand up.
“Hey, Kat?” Rory asks, before I can make a clean getaway. “Would you be up for coffee sometime? Would be great to have a friend from back home.”
There it is, that offensive “f” word again. Prickling up, I reply, “I don’t really consider Michigan home anymore.”
He looks a bit dejected at that, and his face is much softer, much less chiseled, than I thought it was from my window sleuthing. He reminds me of my little brother for a second, and I have an absurd urge to reach over and wrap him in a bear hug, the kind my family still greets me with when I (sometimes) go home for the holidays. I don’t give him a hug, but I do say in a noncommittal tone, “Coffee sounds good, though.”
Rory grins that wide-faced grin and passes me his phone to enter my contact info. Blame it on my honest Midwest upbringing, but I enter my real number rather than a fake.
