Previously:
After surrendering to the kiss she had spent weeks avoiding, Lucia tried to contain what followed by insisting there would be no strings. Matteo agreed and drew her closer, leaving her inside an intimacy she wanted but still believed she had no right to claim.
New to the Serial? Start Here | Need the previous chapter? Chapter 18: Bent and Broken
Lucia
You are at once the tranquility and the turmoil of my heart.
~Franz Kafka
Rumors of their relationship spread faster than Lucia could fit them into any pattern she understood. As accounting class started, a guy who had never made room for her waved her toward the “smart group.” She instinctively looked behind her. “Lucia,” he waved harder. “We saved you a seat.”
“Thanks.” She frowned before she could hide behind indifference.
In Historiography and Methods later that week, Lucia walked toward the door with a pile of books in her hands. The girl who had called her an affirmative action admit held the door open before Lucia could reach for the handle. “Girl, you need two backpacks.”
“I’ve got it,” Lucia mumbled, fighting the urge to recoil when the girl took the top books from the stack.
“Here, let me help you.” Before Lucia could object, she set the books on her usual desk.
“Join us for coffee,” one of the girls in the group suggested at the end of class.
The pattern dropped in Lucia’s stomach like a cold stone. First an irritant, now a liability if dismissed. She had become access to a coveted social commodity. “I’m meeting someone.”
“Oh, Matteo Johnson?” Their eyes darted to one another.
She didn’t want to give them anything. Still, Matteo’s name had become protection in a language they understood. “Yes. Sorry. Gotta go.”
She bolted. Relief came later, when she told Matteo the story and he assured her they would lose interest with time. It was surprisingly easy to believe him.
Soon, however, she stopped bracing quite so hard between classes. Sometime around the third day, her shoulders relaxed. By the end of the week, her jaw unclenched. The relief should have felt good. Instead, she kept waiting for whatever had made her life easier to take itself back.
In the last class of the week, she took her usual seat at the front. It was the only room where friendship had found her. Well, it was more like people took in a stray, waited out her fear, found out they liked her, then decided she could stay.
Sure enough, Sheri pulled her to the side. Her voice dropped to a whisper, eyes wide with excitement. “Is it true? Are you and Matteo Johnson really a thing?”
Lucia watched her practically bounce in place. How could anyone be that giddy all the time? “Who told you?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Sheri rolled her eyes. “He’s the guy every girl wants, and he follows you around like a puppy.”
“He does not,” she replied, offended on his behalf.
“Does too.” Sheri grinned and leaned closer, lowering her voice another notch. “Come on, let’s sit together so you can tell me what he looks like naked.”
“I don’t know what he looks like naked!” The idea made Lucia blush, heat spreading to her toes.
“But you’ve seen him in swim trunks, right?” Sheri winked and nudged her as they sat next to each other.
“Hot,” she admitted, and the memory of his wet body entangled with hers rushed in before she could stop it. “He looks hot.”
“Must be serious. He’s been hanging around you since last year, hasn’t he?”
“What? No.” The denial came too quickly to sound convincing even to her. Did Matteo really understand how the label had changed the story? The first string had fastened itself to her.
As Matteo and Lucia walked to the SUV for her next driving lesson, she asked, “Do you know a girl named Sheri?”
He tilted his head ever so slightly, as if her name almost registered. “No one comes to mind.”
“Sheri knows about us.” She leaned against his car. “Well. Everyone does.”
“So, high school.” He rolled his eyes, uninterested, then leaned closer with a soft shrug. “I missed you.”
In the last couple of weeks, he had gone back to his warmer, cockier self, no longer moving around her as if one careless gesture might shatter something. Now she couldn’t stop looking at his dimples. She forced her voice into something steady. “This changes everything.”
“Only if you want it to.” Without breaking eye contact, he pulled off his sunglasses, tossing them carelessly onto the driver’s seat.
“What if you meet someone?” she asked, unable to keep the edge from her voice. Her thoughts stopped before they reached what that would do to her newfound peace.
“I have.” He leaned in, close enough that his breath grazed her neck, sending a shiver down her spine.
Somehow, because he hadn’t kissed her again, hadn’t given her what she’d refused to admit she wanted, she wanted him more. What the fuck was wrong with her? The word shocked her more than the question. She slid into the driver’s seat.
“Today, you’re going to drive to Torrey Pines Beach,” he told her with a confidence that she didn’t share.
At least when she was driving, she didn’t have to think about what she wanted from him or what it meant. She could just listen to him talk about Dostoevsky while his Castilian lisp became more pronounced as he relaxed.
“Great job,” he said when she eased the car into the parking spot before Tower 5, but the space between them remained. “Now back to campus.”
She adjusted her hands on the wheel as he started talking about the paradox of being a good person in The Idiot. She felt like the only idiot in the car.
As she parked on campus and turned off the ignition, he exhaled slowly. “I hate Sunday.”
“Huh?” Her question came out thin. His voice had dropped into something softer, threaded with something rougher that pulled her closer.
“And classes. Your shift at the bookstore. Anything that keeps you away from me.” He let the words hang between them.
Would he finally ask for another kiss? She held her breath, wanting to say something, anything that might make him lean closer.
Instead, he opened his door with maddening calm. “It’s getting late. We should get going before Mrs. Linda worries.”
Lucia had spread her cost-volume-profit analysis project across the dining room table. She avoided Abuela’s glare by focusing on the intricacies of the analysis. “You’re going to hurt your eyes. Girls don’t need to work so hard. Find a good man. Marry. Have kids.”
“You look different,” Doña Cuca remarked, her gaze sweeping over Lucia for evidence. “Eva, what are you feeding this girl?”
Lucia tuned them out and shifted her eyes back to her numbers. The extra accounting courses came at no additional cost. By the end of the academic year, she’d be a bookkeeper, qualified for work that did not depend on how many hours the bookstore could spare.
“New clothes? You look nice.” Doña Cuca’s eyes lingered, searching for clues, no doubt to report to the rest of the barrio.
Lucia nodded absently. It had been two years since she had purchased anything new, which meant Doña Cuca was looking at her too closely.
“She sounds different too.” Abuela narrowed her eyes the way she did when she smelled spoiled milk. “Mmhmm.”
Time to pay attention. Abuela didn’t sound happy. “Sorry, Doña Cuca. No new clothes.”
Doña Cuca’s voice brightened. “It must be because someone walked you home.”
“Did Alex finally break up with that girl?” Abuela’s eyes turned on Lucia with sharp expectation that made her squirm.
“I think he needs a little encouragement, knowing the right girl is waiting for him.” Doña Cuca turned to look at Lucia with the satisfied expression of someone finding something of quality in the bargain bin.
“I really need to finish this project,” she said, looking away. Her mind split itself three ways. She had to finish her accounting, keep her guard up around the women, and shove away the memory of Matteo’s lips before it showed somewhere they knew how to read.
Author’s note
Rumors about Lucia and Matteo change the social traffic around her. A classmate who questioned her place now carries her books. Another invites her for coffee. By then, the pattern has become clear. Her connection to Matteo has made her socially useful.
Sociologists call this status by association. Standing beside someone with higher status can change how a group evaluates you, even when none of that standing belongs to you. Research on interracial relationships finds a related effect in discrimination and negative social treatment, where the identity of a partner can alter how others behave toward the person beside them. [1][2] The language is academic. The transaction is not.
Years ago, my cousin and I rode electric bikes through Celebration, Florida, with our children and my white husband. My children are white-presenting. My cousin, her children, and I are read as minorities. Yet, courtesy arrived so consistently that it disappeared into the background. As a new immigrant, she read it as local friendliness because privilege prefers to pass as atmosphere.
After my family left the area, she continued biking there with her children. My husband’s presence had apparently placed her closer to whiteness in strangers’ calculations. Once he disappeared from the scene, so did much of the courtesy. The change stayed with her.
Sources
Overton, Jon. “When Does Status Transfer between People? A Crowdsourced Experiment on the Scope of Status by Association.” Social Psychology Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2021): 309–330.
Irby-Shasanmi, Amy, and Christy L. Erving. “Do Discrimination and Negative Interactions with Family Explain the Relationship between Interracial Relationship Status and Mental Disorder?” Socius 8 (2022).
