Chapter 11
We spent Sunday in our room, me only going out to the convenience store that sat on the edge of campus to buy supplies for the day—ice pack for Jane’s head, saltines and ginger ale, stuff like that. We ordered a pizza later in the day after Jane felt like eating.
“You don’t have to babysit me, Lily,” she said throughout the day. “I can’t get up to any illegal hijinks in this shape. You can have the day off.”
Yes, I knew it was pathetic, but I wasn’t quite so desperate to see him that I called him. I at least left that up to him. Last night he’d said he very much wanted to call me today. But as the day dwindled, I got edgier and edgier. I made a pretense of wanting to be in the room to study.
Syd came over for most of the day. Once seeing Jane’s condition, she left for an hour, then come back bearing some crazy concoction that she swore was good for hangovers.
Jane looked at it skeptically, but drank it, and it seemed to do the trick.
We lay on our beds, Syd camped out on mine, and did postmortems of the previous night.
With both Jane and me AWOL, Syd had gone to another party that our friend Jeff had told her about. I suppose hoping that Jeff’s older brother would be there, though she didn’t add that part.
“Hook up with anybody?” Jane asked her.
Syd shook her head, her gorgeous black hair rippling.
Every girl practically, except Jane, had long hair.
Most of us wore ours up on days like this, in ponytails or buns, just casual.
But Syd always wore her straight black hair down, loose and straightened, even on a lazy, casual day like this.
In so many ways she tried to copy all the other girls, but not in this.
“I talked with this guy for a while, but…”
“How much did you talk?” Jane asked, not afraid to push, when I probably would have left it at that.
“Talking” and “hooking up” were done in varying degrees, and it could be anything from actual talking to full-blown sex on the hood of a car in the middle of a crowded parking lot.
“Just some kissing,” Syd said. “Maybe a little more.”
Jane’s eyes lit up, and she propped her head up with her hand, elbow bent, lying on her side. “You ho bag. Tell us everything.”
Syd flopped down beside me on the bed. “Nothing to tell. Like I said, a little more than kissing.”
“Details,” Jane yelled, tossing a throw pillow at Syd. Syd ducked, of course, and the pillow hit me instead.
“Oh, you know,” Syd said casually. “Nothing the two of you weren’t probably doing. A little fumbling below clothes is all. I started to give him a hand job, but he wanted a blowie and I just wasn’t into him enough to make the effort.”
Jane nodded as if agreeing, then rolled onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. “Damn, I was so close to bagging Montrose. I would have totally given him a blowie.”
I felt Syd stiffen next to me. She knew Jane’s story, and must have realized what a colossal fuck-up Jane blowing her prof would be. Especially if people were around and saw them leave together.
The kids our age at Bribury were too young to know who Jane was, or know her story. But those people at that club last night were probably old enough to put it together. Hell, it’s a wonder Montrose didn’t know who she was.
Maybe he did.
“Jane, just how much time did you spend with Montrose last night?”
“Clearly not enough,” Jane said, pouting.
“Yeah, but before we got there? Were you, like, with him? With the group he was with?”
“Who was he there with?” Syd asked, asking a question I didn’t care about. I wanted to know what Jane had done.
“Relax. No pictures are on anybody’s phones.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I didn’t get that close to him, okay?” she said, a bit embarrassed. “I tried to get him to dance with me, but he turned me down. Totally ignored me.”
Syd’s body relaxed, as did my fear. And I knew I wouldn’t need to tell my father about Jane’s night of clubbing.
But I knew I wouldn’t have anyway. I knew I was stepping away from my father’s every command, becoming my own person.
I suppose that’s what college is about…becoming your own self, shedding who you were.
Again I wondered if that was what Lucas was to me—a way to rebel, a way to test myself, a way to move away from the hold my parents had on me.
And yet Lucas didn’t feel like a rebellion. He felt like comfort and safety, even though I knew the life he led, and the world he lived in, were anything but safe and comfortable.
I just knew what I felt for him was beyond the way he made my body tremble when he put his hands on me, or the way his eyes burned into mine just before he kissed me.
After hearing his story last night, all he’d gone through, how he’d turned his life around after the Oxy, and was now taking care of Andy while his mother got clean…I had thought it before, but now I knew I was in deep with Lucas.
I had looked forward to doing the casual hookup thing that was so prevalent here at Bribury. Nobody actually dated. You “talked,” you “hooked up,” you “hung out,” and it was all good. You were able to meet lots of people that way, with no expectations, and no hurt feelings.
Certainly with no wasted Sundays waiting for someone to call.
And I had wanted that, had embraced the casual culture after coming from a high school that was all about traditional “going out” coupling.
But now…now I just wanted the damn phone to ring.
“Why don’t you just call him?” Jane said, as if she could read my mind.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” I lied. “He’s got to work later tonight, anyway. We kept it casual.”
Jane snorted at that. Syd reached a hand behind herself and patted my hip.
We sat in comfortable silence for a while, until Jane said again, almost to herself, “I was so close to gettin’ with Montrose.”
“Give it a rest,” Syd said in a lazy voice. She was nearing sleep, and I wished I could doze into a nap like that. But no, I lay quietly next to Syd, praying for my phone to buzz.
But it never did.