9. Lenni
NINE
lenni
It’s him. Forrest. How did I not realize it before? One look into those amber eyes and there was no doubt. It’s him.
Forrest—er, Cam—was the most beautiful guy I’d ever seen in the flesh and, sweet Jesus, he’d only gotten better. Sure, he was handsome when he was Cam Forrester, elitist athlete and best friend of Reeve, but something happened when he revealed himself. I’d stopped to see him. He was no longer some cold statue of male perfection. He was that charming boy that, for a few hours, I thought I knew.
I slip out the door of the football house and send a quick text to Jade, who was supposed to meet me after her date with Sam. I tell her the party was boring and I don’t feel great, so I’ll see her at home. But she’ll have a hundred questions about Reeve that I can’t handle until morning, so I plan to be in bed when she gets in.
I can’t believe this. I can’t wrap my head around Cam and Forrest being the same guy. How did our magical connection in the garden that night turn to disdain without my even knowing it?
The night we met I was lost. Not literally—the dorm I was staying in for orientation was barely a hundred yards from the garden. But inside, I was completely disoriented. I’d been waiting years, maybe even since birth, to leave the town I grew up in, desperate to be somewhere nobody knew me. And then I got it: A campus of twenty thousand students and not a single one knew my name. It was a dream come true, and one that left me almost instantly disillusioned.
I’d thought the power of anonymity would reveal me as relaxed and sociable, perhaps even witty. I’d never been witty, not even before the high school incident, but I’d hoped to find it hiding somewhere within me. For the first time, I would use my real name—Lenore—and perhaps find myself as mature and sophisticated as the name suggested. But as I moved from orientation check-in to the welcome meeting to the dorm tour, I felt completely unchanged. I didn’t want to converse with strangers and when I did, I was awkward and uncertain. My smiles were painfully forced. I couldn’t stand the quick, assessing glances I received, girls appraising whether I was competition, a potential friend, or better off ignored. Boys simply assessing whether I was fuckable. I was locked up as tight as ever. The only thing that had changed were the faces around me.
Until that night, wandering campus, when I discovered what was different: here I could cry.
Back home, I excelled at holding it together for Mom and Gus. Of the three of us, my tears were the least justified, and with the shitty apartments we lived in, the walls were always too thin for my crying to remain private. But at Shafer, once the day’s events were over and night fell, I had total freedom to walk the campus and seek an uninhabited corner.
I was crying quietly when I found the garden and the beautiful man inside it. I still remember the way he stood when he saw me, like some biologically driven act of chivalry.
He didn’t know what to do with me, but everything he did was right. I’d walked into the garden lonely and overwhelmed, the weird crying girl who didn’t want to be here and didn’t want to go home. By the time I left, the loneliness had lifted. The garden was the first place at Shafer I felt okay.
His name was Forrest. I’d never considered what my dream man would be like until I met him and realized, he was it. With him, I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t graceless and scared. The way he spoke to me without any hint that he’d expect something at the end of the night in exchange for treating me like an actual human was revelatory. Talking to him was safe. And the things he told me about his family and his unease about where life was heading made me think he didn’t share these things with just anyone. Of course I’d thought he was gorgeous with his long hair falling over his eyes and half his face in shadow all night, but it was bigger than attraction. Looking at him, I felt hope unfurl inside me.
Forrest revived the dream that Shafer would be the start of something new and wonderful, that if I looked for good people, I’d find them. That there would be a thousand more nights like this.
As I pass the alley behind my building, two guys from the apartment below mine are throwing empty beer bottles up against the brick wall and cackling drunkenly at the spray of glass raining down. There haven’t been a thousand more nights like that. There hasn’t even been one.
But I’d carried that hope through the rest of the summer, imagining our next meeting, and into the new school year. I fed on the feeling for months, and for a short time, college was fun. I made a few friends, went to a few parties like normal girls do, always expecting this would be the night I’d run into Forrest again, always regretting I hadn’t gotten his number. But I didn’t see him or any other guys like him. And the more I looked, the more I hated what I saw.
All around me, my new friends were crying over boys who never called after a hookup, who slept with their sorority sisters, who ignored them after a night together. I wasn’t missing out on anything. I gave up on Forrest. Maybe he’d decided not to attend Shafer after all, or maybe he’d lied and he was never a student here, just some local kid wandering campus. I stopped hoping for love, and I stopped caring; it was an easy transition back to a role I knew. And I gave up on all the Forrests I’d believed were just around the corner. My family was suddenly in crisis back home; that was the love I needed to focus on.
And now here he is, and he’s not Forrest at all. Okay, maybe I can blame some of his cold behavior on the fact he thought I was blowing him off, but that doesn’t change what he is. Cam is a conceited, swaggering athlete. A rich boy who dates rail-thin blondes he probably handpicks from some European modeling agency portfolio. Just another jock with a pack mentality. And most offensive of all, he’s arrogant enough to think he can tell me what’s best for me. Like he thinks he knows me. Does it matter that the girl he met that night would never have even a spark of interest in a guy like Reeve? Why should it? That girl isn’t me anymore.
Back home, my apartment is mercifully empty. I change into comfy pajamas and move halfheartedly through my bedtime routine.
No, Cam is the one I need to stay away from. It doesn’t matter how he made me feel years ago or that just thinking about his perfect face makes my insides tighten up with longing. Reeve is the safe choice here; I know what I’m getting with him. Fun and nothing more. Except as I lie in bed, all that fluttery excitement that Reeve inspired has gone cold.
When I hear Jade come in and open my bedroom door, I pretend to be asleep. If I tell her what happened, she’ll have some sort of indignant, emotional reaction, and I don’t need that clouding my thoughts yet. I need to process this my way. Rationally.
I lie awake for hours, replaying every memory I have of Forrest and Cam, his face and his voice. I keep getting tripped up on his smile. The image of it pulses in my brain, a painful, throbbing reminder of everything that’s changed. I thought I’d stopped wishing for Forrest to walk back into my life years ago, but now I know that’s not true. I was always hoping for him. But finding Cam feels like losing Forrest all over again.