Correct the Universe

When is doing the right thing for the wrong reason the wrong thing to do?

Fiction

I finally confronted my junior high school’s biggest bully in a lawyer’s office when I was thirty-six years old. I didn't seek him out for revenge or even closure; in truth, I hadn’t thought of Corey at all since high school. We ran into each other by accident. I was at the lawyer’s office to get a prenuptial agreement. Because my fiancé and I were getting a prenup primarily to please our parents and didn’t seriously consider ever needing it, the errand felt perfunctory and slightly dull. To pass the time in traffic during the long drive from my apartment in Orange County to Downtown LA, I allowed myself to imagine that I was a wrongfully accused person going to meet with my high-powered attorney, preferably one with a long list of previously righteously vindicated clients. I’d be charged with something serious and high stakes that I couldn’t possibly have committed, like murder or bank robbery. It wasn’t that I felt that was somehow romantic or didn’t respect that this does indeed happen to far too many people; instead, it appealed to my innate sense of justice and my need to correct egregious wrongs. 

My fiancé, Alex, liked to point out this irritating habit. About a year into our relationship, we went to an adorable mom-and-pop-owned 1950s-style diner called Wally’s Drugstore & Soda Shoppe for a casual Friday night dinner. In Anaheim, theme restaurants get quite tiresome, but this particular one struck me as charming in its wholesomeness, oddly devoid of crass commercialism you’d expect at a theme restaurant, and the food was actually quite good for a diner. Moments after polishing off both my own and Alex’s pile of seasoned curly fries, I’d noticed a group of teenagers whose heads were furtively checking around, seemingly to look for the waitstaff. When I observed the teenagers for a few moments, half-heartedly listening to Alex’s story about his grandfather’s ride-on tractor —the kids peeling off, one after the other — it became apparent that they were trying to “dine ’n’ dash,” or leave the restaurant without paying. I might not have cared quite so much if this were a large chain restaurant, a Denny’s, perhaps, but the idea of these kids skipping out on a bill at the expense of the small business owners irked me, especially for the servers, mostly also teenagers themselves, who would surely bear the brunt of the theft by not receiving any tips, and also maybe get scolded for negligence in not stopping the little criminals. As one of the last kids was making his way to the restaurant’s side door and against what I know Alex would have advised, I got up and ran over to the door, blocking his exit. “Hey,” I said. “Don’t do that. It’s stealing. Did you know that?” The boy pushed past me, not in an aggressive way, but with a shrug that indicated we both knew how little influence I had on the situation. 

“Why do you have to involve yourself like that, Mary Ruth?” Alex had asked me. “You have this insane need to be on the moral high ground and make sure that it’s all fair and even. It’s not ever going to be that way, you know. You just can’t seem to let that stuff go.” I did know that, but I also knew that I had a long history of this behavior, and it wasn’t going to change any time soon. Of course, Alex knew this too, though he was probably only starting to figure it out at that early point in our relationship. 

By the time we were engaged, we’d been living together for three years, so he knew many of my character flaws, like the fact that I am always running at least fifteen to twenty minutes late and that I am a terrible procrastinator. He adjusted to my running late by telling me that any appointments we had started thirty minutes earlier than they actually did, and though I figured it out quickly, he adjusted the programmable clocks on our oven and microwave to run early, too. He always seemed to work around my shortcomings, and because of that, I never felt like I had to present myself as anything other than I truly am in order for him to accept me.

 In turn, I knew about his faults, like his tendency to buy every new tech gadget that hits the market regardless of whether or not his previous model was still working, his tendency to forget birthdays and anniversaries, and his secret Monday-night addiction, watching The Bachelor. I found that I enjoyed having access to the latest tech items, which was something I never would have sought out for myself, and while the birthday and anniversary issue bothered me (how do you forget that kind of thing in the era of Facebook?), I learned to love the Bachelor, too. 

 Before Alex, I’d had several serious (but never live-in) boyfriends, and I had casually dated several men that I knew, even at the time, were utterly wrong for me. There was one pseudo-boyfriend, James, whose actions (but never his words) were quite clear about the fact that he was using me to make his ex-girlfriend jealous. Another boyfriend, whose name now thankfully escapes me, was court-ordered to wear an alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelet after crashing his car into a tree while being two times over the legal limit.

With Alex, though, I had found a partner who was a responsible, high-functioning adult, which he claims sounds like a subtle insult whenever I say it, but I mean it as a compliment. The first time we had sex, on maybe our fifth or sixth date, he brought up the issue of birth control, kindly assuming, I think, that after having presented myself to him thus far as a life-long Catholic, I might be hesitant to initiate that conversation. “We’re definitely using something, right?” he’d said early enough in the evening that we hadn’t taken our clothes off yet, but late enough when it was clear he would be spending the night at my apartment. “I can run to the drugstore if you don’t have anything.”

“Yes. I mean, I’m on the pill, so we’re good there. But...I don’t really know how to put this delicately, so I’m just gonna say it...have you been tested recently? You know what I mean. STIs.”

“Yeah, actually, I have. Not to be presumptuous, but I did a couple weeks ago. Just to make sure,” he said.

“Okay, me too.” I laughed. “I did the same thing.” This was the first instance of a pattern that would develop in our relationship. We’d often have the same, unspoken thoughts (in this case, that we liked each other enough to have sex on this night for the first time) and then act on them separately. As our relationship grew over the years, I’d occasionally think about this as an example of our inherent similarities and compatibility and confirm that I was right in choosing Alex as a partner.

“What do you think the Pope would say?” I asked.

“I’d rather not think about the Pope right now,” he said.

“Fair enough. But, honestly I think it’s fine. The Church has really started to loosen up and modernize. I don’t feel bad about it — the premarital sex part or the birth control part. I go to Mass most Sundays,” I said.

“Mary Ruth. You don’t have to atone on Sunday morning for the things you did on Saturday night, you know.” Alex and I still butt heads on this point, but now it’s often in a joking way and, in that obnoxious, cozy-couple kind of way, it is an inside joke that refers back to this moment. Sometime he’ll sing the Jimmy Buffett line to me, “There’s a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning,” and although these days, I’m not as though I’m doing something sinful every Saturday night, it still makes me laugh.

 Even early on in our dating, he was unequivocal that he liked me and was, in his words, “in it for the long haul.” His calm and consistent presence in my life, whether he was meeting me for coffee in our shared office space to help me rehearse my quarterly results presentation or listening to me complain about my period cramps without getting grossed out, allowed me to be myself with a boyfriend for the first time in my life. I realized that for almost the entirety of my life, perhaps starting in junior high school, I could stop trying to present myself as “a cool girl.”

***

In the spring of 1996, I was a shy seventh-grader at Midvale Junior High. In a cruel accident of fate, the administration somehow assigned me a locker located in a cluster of popular kids. While I wasn’t a total outcast, I certainly knew that I wasn’t popular enough to blend in among Cindy Gilinski, Brittany Taylor, Kyle Anderson, and Corey Bryce. Although I knew this, and I assumed it was also apparent to anyone else who paid even the slightest bit of attention to the school’s pecking order, each time I had to stand in front of my locker a moment longer than necessary (to shove in an ill-fitting book maybe, or to read a note one of my friends had dropped in), I had the sense that the whole school was judging me for using that time to pretend I belonged in the popular kids’ Pantheon when I so clearly did not.

It wasn’t as though I was a loner, I had my group of friends, but we were all fairly unremarkable in terms of popularity. Jessica Highsmith and Melissa Wilkerson were the only ones in my group of seven girlfriends who were nominated to the Homecoming Court, but neither of them made it past the second round of voting. Some of the girls in my group of friends occasionally had boys that were interested in them, but those boys tended to be of the nerdier variety, ones we couldn’t possibly view in a romantic way, and of course, we all had crushes on the popular boys who, in turn, didn’t know we existed. It was a food chain in reverse, the smaller fish always setting their sights on the bigger fish, and my group was right in the middle of the ecosystem. I desperately wanted any of the top three cutest boys at Midvale — all eighth-graders, Jeff, Jack, and Caleb — to notice me, but in my immaturity and paralyzing fear of boys, I didn’t do anything to get their attention. I existed in a purgatory of sorts, wanting desperately to be seen as pretty, the most important of all commodities for a seventh-grade girl as far as I was concerned at the time, but not wanting to be required to do any of the things that boys wanted pretty girls to do, like kissing. I’d feel the same way later, in my twenties, wanting to be asked to be a bridesmaid but not wanting to follow through with the associated responsibilities, like buying the floor-length gowns I couldn’t afford and weighing in on seating chart decisions. 

Corey Bryce was one of the seventh-grade boys who was in line to inherit the thrones left by graduating eighth-graders Jeff, Jack, and Caleb. We all knew this; the chain of command was clear. The eighth-grade boys sometimes included Corey in their hacky sack contests, and Caleb knew Corey well from their church, and because of our collective expectation and understanding of his social inheritance, he carried himself with absurd confidence. Outwardly, though, he was not conventionally attractive. Corey was beginning to have acne, but like most seventh-grade boys, he hadn’t realized he needed to implement a hygiene regimen beyond teeth brushing to manage it. He had red hair and lots of freckles, which I knew had made him an early target of bullies, and in turn, he had used that as a training ground to become a bully himself. 

Even as young as second grade, Corey got in trouble for forcing a first grader to pick a poppy that was growing outside the chain-link fence surrounding the schoolyard. The first-grader, a small, chubby-cheeked boy named Jose, was found by his teacher, holding the flower, wilted and missing several petals, sobbing that the policemen were going to arrest him because Corey made him pick the poppy. Corey had indeed announced to all the surrounding kids at the time, including me, that he was going to call the police and have Jose arrested for picking the California state flower, laughing all the while. But because elementary and junior high social structures aren’t meritocracies, his continuing meanness was overlooked, and he was accepted, broadly and without question, as popular.

Corey’s mother and my mother were in the same book club, so I’d seen small glimpses of him outside the context of his well-crafted school persona. This was why, although he and I were definitely not friends, I knew where he lived and had occasionally been inside his house while our moms dropped off books or took turns hosting. I’d never stayed inside the Bryces’ house for long, knowing I didn’t belong there, and always felt like an international traveler whose visa was moments from expiring. The Christmas we were in seventh grade, Corey’s mother, a talented pastry chef, brought a tray of impeccably decorated sugar cookies to our house for their December meeting, and Corey came with her in the car to help deliver them. Mrs. Bryce handed Corey the platter to carry, telling him to hold it flat and be careful. As he climbed out of the car, the cookies scattered out onto our asphalt driveway. My mother ran over to help scoop them up and try to salvage any, but nearly all of them had landed frosting-side down, and my mother picked them up to reveal that the pretty glittered snowflakes and sprinkles-covered trees now had asphalt chunks embedded in them. It seemed to me to be an honest mistake, but Mrs. Bryce admonished him, yelling, “Corey! You are such a klutz! Why didn’t you hold it flat like I told you!? Now, the Murphys’ driveway is a mess, and we don’t have any cookies! Do you know how long I worked on those? Get down there and help Mrs. Murphy clean this mess up!” Corey shrunk back in shame, and seeing him like this, someone whom I’d assumed was always the giver of insults, never the recipient, made me feel a twinge of sympathy for him. My inner justice seeker wanted to tell his mother that it was an accident, but even as a child, I knew better than to inject myself into their family dynamics. 

“Why did Mrs. Bryce yell at him like that?” I’d asked my mom.

“I don’t know, honey. I guess she was frustrated after spending all that time making them. I know she had to make quite a few for church too, so I’m sure she was tired.”

“Church? I’ve never seen them at Holy Trinity.” More specifically, I’d never seen her cookies there.

“No, they don’t go to Holy Trinity. They go to that LDS church on Fourth street.” I would later understand that this was why Corey, Caleb, and a few other kids often shared stories about trips to Utah — what on Earth is in Utah? I’d wondered, as someone whose family had never once mentioned it as a potential vacation spot — and why in classroom holiday parties he made a point about drinking 7-Up instead of Coke.

Corey knew that I was watching when his mother yelled at him, and afterward, we had a sort of secret, unspoken understanding. I was allowed to know that he was a kid whose parents sometimes scolded him; a kid whose seemingly unrestricted dominance at school did, indeed, have its limits at home. I never told anyone at school about the cookies, so I was rewarded by being spared from his bullying. When we returned to school from Christmas break, I wondered how Corey would treat me if we ran into each other. Here he mostly ignored me, which was my preference, but one afternoon that April, he caught me by surprise. 

I’d quickly stepped out of my algebra class to find my TI-83 calculator, which must’ve fallen out of my backpack when I’d stuffed it in my locker before gym class. Corey happened to be standing at his locker, too, even though this was during class time and no one was supposed to be loitering in the hall. For years afterward, I’d wonder what he was doing there that afternoon. As I approached, he heard my footsteps and looked up at me. “Mary Ruth!” The tone of his voice was as warm, friendly, and inviting as if I’d appeared unexpectedly on his doorstep holding a home-baked apple pie. He held his arms out to me like he was offering a hug, and although I knew, even as my body was moving toward him, that this felt like a trap, I kept going. It was a kind of morbid curiosity — was he going to thank me for never mentioning his mother’s rebuke that day in the driveway? No, of course not; his goal was to pretend it hadn’t happened, and mentioning it would explicitly violate that. My arms levitated to meet his, and just as I reached the point where we could have embraced, he dropped his arms and pushed me a few feet back. 

“As if anyone would ever want to hug you,” he spat out. “You’re sooo not pretty enough.” Startled, I looked around to see if anyone else noticed this inexplicable switch of tone, anyone to whom I could say, this is crazy, right? But no one else was in the hallway, not a janitor or a teacher, who at the very least could have reprimanded him for pushing me. Corey laughed and walked off, seemingly pleased with himself and his ability to successfully deploy cruelty on any desired target with remarkable precision. With my jaw dropped, I watched him walk down the hall for a few steps, and then because I didn’t know what else to do, I unlocked my locker and retrieved my calculator. I considered going straight to the administration office and telling them he’d pushed me, but I hadn’t fallen down and wasn’t physically injured, so what evidence of wrongdoing was there? Experience had taught me that his harmful words would go unpunished and generally unaddressed. I couldn’t fathom what his motivation had been to hurt me, and it struck me as even more sadistic that he’d done so without the payoff of an audience. It wasn’t to make himself look powerful in front of anyone, except possibly me, and what did he care what I thought?

Finally, I decided that, if nothing else, God must have seen it. At least He would know what’d happened, and hopefully, forgive me when I would scowl at Corey in the future. Corey had violated an agreement that I thought allowed me to escape his cruelty, but I should have known better than to make a deal, however subtle, with someone like that. I went into the girls’ bathroom and splashed water on my face, and with the water dripping down my cheeks as a decoy, I allowed myself to cry. The thing I couldn’t grasp, the thing that truly shocked me in its cruelty, was how he’d known exactly what words to say to me that would cut deepest. 

You’re sooo not pretty enough. 

What did stupid Corey Bryce know about prettiness, anyway? 

As if anyone would ever want to hug you.

Certainly not Caleb, Jack, or Jeff. None of the boys at Midvale wanted to hug me. I knew this because we’d had two dances, and not a single boy invited me to either one. The Sadie Hawkins dance was coming up, and not that I’d had anyone special in mind, but now I was definitely not going to ask anyone. Corey Bryce knew what boys thought, and I didn’t; he knew the things they talked about, and if he said that no one would ever want to hug me, if he said that I wasn’t pretty enough, who was I to argue?

*** 

Melissa Wilkerson’s law office lobby was decorated in a restrained, Danish modern style, with several tasteful cognac-colored leather chairs and a flat, low coffee table in the center. I sipped water from a miniature San Pellegrino bottle while I waited for her secretary to escort me back to her private office. It felt a little silly to think of Melissa Wilkerson as “my lawyer.” In fact, I’d grown up with Melissa; she was in my First Communion class, as well as going to Midvale with me. Melissa was known in our school as being the kind of girl you wanted in your group project. Like me, she’d call out the kids not pulling their weight, assign duties fairly, and ultimately make sure all the work got done. When I saw on Facebook that she’d become a family law attorney, it made perfect sense to hire her to do my prenup.

I was sitting in her fancy chairs, scrolling through social media on my phone, when the elevator doors dinged again and I looked up. His red hair now had some grey streaks, but there he was — it was unmistakably Corey Bryce. His face was red and blotchy, which made me think he must have been crying in the car. He looked distraught and clearly upset, but also disheveled and like he’d picked up a drinking problem in college. 

“Corey?” I heard myself say. “Corey Bryce?” I didn’t especially want to have a conversation with him, but it would have been far too awkward to sit in a confined space and pretend that we didn’t know each other.

He looked at me, confused at first, and then I watched a flash of recognition cross his face. “Mary Ruth, right? Melissa’s friend.” He rubbed his long sleeve over his face, seemingly trying to mop up any tears. As he did so, I saw a small, thin gold band on his left hand. Because this was a lawyer’s office, I wondered what he was doing here but assumed that, like a therapist’s office, there was no way of really asking. You were probably not even supposed to acknowledge seeing someone you knew. Or used to know.

“How’ve you been?” I said.

“I’m okay. Are you meeting Melissa for lunch or something?” he asked.

“No. I’m here....in a professional capacity, technically, I suppose,” I said.

“Oh. You’re getting divorced, too. Got it.”

I decided not to correct him. 

“Divorce sucks, doesn't it?” he said, sitting down a few chairs away from me. “Melissa’s supposed to be really good, you know? Hopefully, she’ll help me keep my kids. That’s all I want, honestly.”

He was reminiscent of a wounded lion or deposed leader on trial, someone I used to fear but now, disarmed, just looked pathetic and vulnerable. He looked almost exactly as he had the day he dropped the cookie tray, but with the strain that fifteen years of hard drinking will add to your face. We sat in silence for a moment after his comment — what was I supposed to say to that? His almost immediate outpouring of emotion was jarring. He continued.

“My family’s not really supportive of this. We’re Mormon, and Mormons don’t really do divorce. You’re Catholic, right?”

“Yes.” Was I really making small talk with the Corey Bryce?

“Yeah, so you know what I mean.” We both stared at our hands, sitting in silence again, while I considered how good, how smug it might feel to tell Corey that no, I was not getting divorced, that I was happily engaged, and that, for all he knew, Melissa and I were still good friends and she was taking me wedding dress shopping on her lunch break. Mentioning the prenup, the possibility that I might befall his same sad fate, seemed a little too vulnerable for the revenge fantasy I was hastily plotting.

“Nice that you and Melissa stayed friends,” he said.

That wasn’t exactly true, we hadn’t really stayed in touch much after graduation, but again, I didn’t correct him. “She’s a good person,” I said. “Super smart, too. I’m sure you’re in good hands.”

“All you girls in that group were,” he said. Maybe because of this unexpected compliment, a long-delayed vindication of what I’d always assumed Corey thought of us, I decided to take a risk.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Sure.”

“That day in the hallway, that day that no one else was around, you were just standing there and started to give me a hug. What were you doing there?”

“What are you talking about? I think we had lockers near each other one year. Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Sort of,” I said. “There was that one day you went to hug me.”

“I went to hug you? And then what?” he looked confused, his face still tear-stained, but now his brow furrowed in confusion. “Sorry, what are you talking about? I don’t remember.”

I’d been thinking about that moment for years, those words echoing in my head: Who would ever want to hug you? You’re soooo not pretty enough. I’d missed the Sadie Hawkins dance that year because of those words. Although I certainly couldn’t blame him for my own choices as an adult, it would be dishonest to say that I’d never stayed too long in relationships I knew weren’t working so that I didn’t have to be alone and acquiesce to his appraisal of me as fundamentally undesirable. For those months between Christmas and the locker incident, I’d believed I was exempt from his cruelty, and then when he finally decided to deploy it on me, it felt like a détente had been revoked. Now to find out it wasn’t deliberate or intentional — it wasn’t even an afterthought! — made it feel more like needless suffering. I decided to hide my righteous indignation.

“Oh nothing, maybe it wasn’t you then,” I lied. “Don’t worry about it.” And then, to change the topic, I asked, “how many kids do you have?”

“Three boys,” he said. “Aiden, Jaxon, and Kyler. Kyler’s the littlest one. He’s eighteen months old. He’s so cute, and he can say little sentences now. You can kinda start to see his little personality coming out, you know?” Corey teared up. “I just...I just really want to stay in their lives and see them grow up.”

Again, I was shocked that Corey was so expressive with me, like a dump truck of feelings, unloading its contents in front of me.

Because I didn’t know what else to say; because it’s odd to have a shared history with someone that they don’t remember; because complimenting their children is the easiest, and frankly, laziest form of conversation to have with someone who is a parent, I said, “Your kids sound really cute.”

“Yeah, they are. They’re literally the most important thing in my life. I can’t….” he stopped talking, I assumed, to prevent himself from breaking down in tears.

“Corey?” I asked. “I hope you don’t think this is weird, but….do you want a hug?”

I wish I could say I did this because I’d matured into a kind, caring person who could leave the past behind us, or as my priest would likely advise me to be, someone who forgave others. But as it turns out, Alex was right; I couldn’t let it go. As Corey walked over to me, I stood up and extended my arms, and as I embraced him, for just a moment, I reveled in the fact that I finally proved him wrong.