FORGE TO A NEW DAWB
Chapter Two: The Ultimatum
"Someone serious," Wren read out loud, for JJ's benefit, in the flattest voice she owned. "You know what your father and I discussed about the tuition."
JJ, halfway through pouring himself a bowl of the cereal he had personally replaced, two boxes, as an apology, paused with the box tilted in the air. "That sentence is doing a lot of work."
"It's doing exactly one thing. It's a threat with a bow on it."
"Read me the rest."
Wren sat down at the kitchen table and smoothed the cream card flat, because crumpling it, however satisfying, would not make the words on it different. Marisol's wedding was in six weeks. The venue was a lake house two hours upstate that her Aunt Carol had been planning since Marisol got engaged, possibly since Marisol was born. And somewhere between the calligraphy and the RSVP card, her aunt had found room to remind Wren that her tuition top-up, the money that made the difference between her staying enrolled and her not, was not, in fact, unconditional.
"They've never actually pulled the money before," Wren said, mostly to herself. "It's always been a thing they say. Stay focused. Don't embarrass the family. It's never had a deadline attached."
"This one has a deadline attached."
"This one has a deadline attached," she agreed.
Her phone buzzed before she could decide how she felt about that, and her aunt's name lit up the screen like a small, cheerful emergency. Wren answered it because not answering it had never once made her aunt go away, it just made her call again in forty minutes with more feelings.
"Wren, honey, did you get the invitation?"
"I got it, Aunt Carol."
"Isn't the calligraphy gorgeous? Marisol found a girl on the internet who does it all by hand." A pause, the specific kind of pause Wren had learned to dread since roughly the seventh grade, the one where her aunt regrouped for the real point. "I hope you saw my note."
"I saw your note."
"I'm not trying to be difficult, sweetheart. You know how much your father and I want this to work out for you. But it's a family wedding, and last year at Thanksgiving you told us you were, and this is a direct quote, I wrote it down, 'not really dating anyone, not really looking.' And I understand that, I do, you're focused on school, that's wonderful. But your father has been talking to Uncle Neil about how the tuition support looks going forward, given the economy, given that Marisol's whole side of the family will be there watching, and he just wants to see that you're building something. A life. Not just a transcript."
"A life."
"A serious relationship, Wren. Someone we can meet. Someone who makes it clear you're not just, I don't know, floating."
Wren looked across the kitchen at JJ, who had abandoned all pretense of eating cereal and was watching her with the openly delighted expression of a man watching a car accident happen to someone else's car. She turned slightly away from him, as if that would help.
"I have a lot going on right now, Aunt Carol."
"I know you do. Which is exactly why your father wants to know you're not letting it all go to waste on, I don't know, whatever it is young people do now instead of settling down. Preston asked about you again, by the way. He's coming to the wedding. He's finishing his residency, did I mention that. Very stable."
"You've mentioned it. Several times."
"I just want you happy, sweetheart. And secure. Bring someone, and this whole conversation about the tuition disappears, I promise you. Your father just needs to see it. He needs to see you're not, and I'm only repeating what he said, floating."
The call ended the way it always did, with three more topics Wren hadn't agreed to discuss and a promise to text the final headcount by Friday. She set the phone down on the table like it had personally wronged her, which, in a sense, it had.
She thought about the version of the conversation she wished she'd had. The one where she said, calmly, that her transcript was a 3.8, that she'd worked two campus jobs on top of her scholarship all year, that whether or not she had a boyfriend to parade around a lake house had nothing to do with whether she was building a life. She had that version fully written in her head, delivered in a voice that did not shake. She had never once said it out loud, because her aunt had a way of already moving on to the seating chart before Wren finished the first sentence, and because some small, stubborn part of her still wanted the phone call to end with her aunt saying she was proud of her instead of relieved she wasn't floating.
"You went somewhere," JJ said.
"I'm fine."
"You have the face of someone doing algebra with feelings in it."
"That's an oddly specific description."
"I've seen it on myself in mirrors. Professional courtesy." He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, cereal apparently forgotten now for good. "For what it's worth, whatever the actual math says about your transcript and your two jobs, that's the real number. The floating thing is just what it sounds like when somebody's scared and picks the wrong word for it."
Wren looked at him for a second too long, surprised, the way you are surprised when a person you have decided to think of as background noise says something that lands exactly where it needed to. She filed that away too, next to the joke about the three jobs, in the growing folder in her head labeled things I am absolutely not going to think about regarding my roommate.
"Anyway," she said, briskly, because briskly was safer than whatever the other option had been. "It doesn't matter what the real number is. It matters what my dad sees at that wedding."
"So," JJ said. "Floating."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying, as someone who is currently floating professionally between three different part-time jobs, I take some offense on behalf of floaters everywhere."
"This isn't funny."
"It's a little funny. From the outside. I want to be clear I understand it is not funny from the inside, where you are."
Wren pressed both hands flat against the table, the way she did when she needed the surface of something to hold still because nothing else would. Six weeks. A wedding full of people who had watched her since she was small, measuring her against Marisol's easy, effortless version of adulthood, a fiancé, a house down payment, a five-year plan that had actually happened instead of one that lived in a binder. And now a tuition check with a string tied to it that led directly to a stranger named Preston who was finishing his residency and was, apparently, very stable.
"I don't have anyone," she said, out loud, which she had not meant to say out loud.
"No boyfriend hiding in the wings," JJ agreed. "I would know. I live here."
"I don't have six weeks to find one, either. That's not how it works. You can't just, produce a serious boyfriend on a deadline."
"You cannot," JJ said. "Unless."
Wren looked up. She recognized that tone, even after only a handful of days living with him, the particular brightness that showed up right before he said something that was either going to be brilliant or catastrophic, and so far the ratio had not been in brilliant's favor.
"Unless what."
"Nothing. Forget it. Bad idea."
"You don't get to say unless and then take it back, that's not how sentences work."
JJ set his cereal bowl down, and for one strange second the joking dropped off his face entirely, replaced by something more careful, like he was doing math he didn't love the answer to. "I'm just saying. You need a serious boyfriend for one weekend, in front of people who've never met me and never will again after the reception. I need, and I probably shouldn't be volunteering this information to my landlord's proxy, a very specific letter of recommendation from a chef named Alvarez who does one, exactly one, culinary program interview a year, and who happens to be catering a wedding upstate in six weeks that I am absolutely not invited to unless I show up with a plausible reason to be there."
Wren stared at him. "You're not saying what I think you're saying."
"I'm saying I already know the caterer for your cousin's wedding. I'm saying I have been trying to get five minutes of that man's attention for eight months. And I'm saying you need a boyfriend who disappears cleanly after one weekend, and I need one weekend inside a kitchen I cannot otherwise get into, and neither of us has to actually feel anything about it, because it would be, and I want to be very clear about this word, fake."
"Fake."
"Extremely fake. Aggressively fake. The fakest thing that has ever happened at a lake house."
It was, Wren thought, the single worst idea she had heard in the six days since a stranger had eaten her cereal in this kitchen, and also, somehow, standing in the wreckage of her aunt's phone call, the only idea currently on the table that solved both her problem and, apparently, his.
"If we do this," she said slowly, "there would have to be rules."
JJ smiled, the same smile from the first morning, the one that had made something small and unhelpful go off in her chest before she'd learned better, and it went off again now, right on schedule, which she chose, for the moment, to ignore entirely.
"Wren Kessler," he said. "I would expect nothing less than a folder."