Chapter 8
Freshman Year, Second Semester
“Bad writing day?” West leans over my shoulder.
He nods toward the English building. “Dr. B’s class just ended.” He drops his notebook next to me, sits on the back of the bench, and swings his legs over. The nails on his right hand are forest green; his left hand is bare. “You look pretty miserable considering spring break just started.”
I tip my head back to look at him but find myself squinting into the sun instead. “Not for me. I still have one midterm to go.”
“No camping trip for you?”
“Yeah, what’s the deal with that?” Amber mentioned it in passing, but I didn’t ask for details because, apparently, I’m the only loser with a midterm the Friday before spring break.
“Amber, Kyle, and the crew are driving up to Mount Lemmon in”—he checks the time—“about an hour. They have three blankets, a twelve-pack, and a dream. I give them a twenty percent chance of starting a forest fire.”
“Is that all?”
“I wore my Smokey Bear T-shirt this morning as a reminder. Hopefully the message permeated the thick layer of spring break debauchery.”
“You’re a real environmentalist, Mae West.”
He smirks, leaning ever so slightly closer. “I do what I can.”
“Does that mean you’re not going with them?”
He makes a face. “I don’t need to hear Kyle and Amber humping each other more than I already do. Unless you’re driving up?”
“As riveting as that experience sounds, I can’t think about anything except studying right now. If I fail—”
“The matrix you’re living in dematerializes, I’ve heard. Hey—should you write a story about that?”
“Sci-fi? Not really my thing. But you should write a story about that.”
He rolls his eyes. “Right.”
“Wait, what does that mean?”
He takes my computer and opens it back to my online math portal. “What that means, Mars, is that you’ve found yourself a math tutor.”
“What’d you get for C?” West drums his pen against his knee while he waits for my answer.
“I’m still working on it.” I squint at the triangle on the page. I’m sitting cross-legged on the bench, my back is starting to hurt from hunching for the last two hours, and my brain feels like it’s melting out my ears.
“Do you remember how to solve for cosine?”
“C squared equals A squared plus B squared minus two AB times the cosine of C,” I repeat numbly. Memorizing the formula has never been my problem. Making the numbers make sense within the formula is the issue. I drop my head into my hands.
“Do you want me to show you again?” West leans toward me, and as his hair falls forward, I inhale a lungful of his woodsy shampoo scent.
It’s possible the nearness of him is making it hard to concentrate, but I can’t bring myself to care.
Campus is dead, the sun on my shoulders feels like the first beach day of the year, and I’d rather be doing anything other than trying to make sense of trig.
“I want ice cream,” I announce. West looks up at me, a spot of blue on his lower lip. I stare at it a beat too long. “Do you want ice cream?” I force my eyes to meet his.
“I could eat ice cream,” he says. I start to smile, but he holds up an ink-stained palm. His left hand is always covered in ink from dragging it across the page as he writes. “Under one condition.”
I groan. “Fine. I’ll finish this problem first.”
“Not that. I want to read the scene you had to run off and write the other night.”
This time I can’t help my wide grin or the feeling of champagne bubbles in my chest. I’ve never been precious about my writing—I’ll happily give it to anyone who asks, but not that many people ask.
“Done. Are you sure that’s the scene you want, though? I have better ones.” I’m mentally sorting chapters in my head, weighing the funniest bits of dialogue versus my best world-building versus that clever metaphor I spent twenty minutes perfecting in chapter fourteen.
He makes a show of pretending to consider my request before shaking his head. “That scene or no deal.”
West is concentrating. He’s a living, breathing Do Not Disturb sign, from the unbroken eye contact with his phone to the plastic soft serve spoon hanging forgotten from his lips as he slowly scrolls his way through my scene.
I reached the end of my ice cream a good ten minutes ago and have nothing to do but hyper-fixate on his facial expressions.
“Did you get to the part where—”
“Shh.”
“I just want to explain why—”
“Shh!”
I bite my lip and try to count to one hundred. At nine, I break. “What’s taking you so long?” This is excruciating. I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin.
“It’s too bright out here, and I hate reading on screens.”
“Should I have transcribed it by hand just for you?”
“That would have been helpful, yes. Now shhhhh!”
I inch closer and strain my neck. “Stop reading over my shoulder,” he says.
“But I—”
His phone beeps with the sound of an incoming text. The name Bethany flashes across my words. He swipes it to the side without reading it, and I feel like I’ve won a competition I didn’t even know I was in.
“Who was—”
“Mars.” He turns to me, our noses inches apart, and takes the spoon out of his mouth. His next words are achingly slow. “What can I do to make you stop talking?”
I swallow heavily. “Let me read something of yours.”
Wordlessly, he slides his notebook toward me.
“Which page?” I ask.
“Don’t care.” I open to the first page, and his hand shoots out. “Wait. Not that.” He flips ahead a few chicken-scratched pages and jabs a paragraph with his finger. “That one.”
I snatch the notebook before he can change his mind and roll away from him and onto my side.
His paragraph is a description of his hometown in the summer, and I can feel the hot windburn on my cheeks and the dust between my teeth as I read.
It’s spare and stark but still evocative; it makes my chest feel hollow for reasons I don’t really understand.
I read it three times in a row and wish it were longer.
It’s good (maybe better than the Chia Pet story), and suddenly his opinion becomes even more important.
I glance at him in my peripheral and see another incoming text from Bethany. I close my eyes.
“Done,” he says.
My eyes jolt open, my heart pounding.
“Who’s Bethany?” I ask.
My open textbook rests face down on my stomach.
We’re looking at shapes in the clouds. A game of Frisbee is happening perilously close to us, but we persist in our laziness.
My shoulder blades have sunk into the grass in such a perfect way that it feels like the space was carved for me.
The first hints of sunburn sting my forehead, and I don’t even care. I’m completely blissed-out.
“Why’d you say her name like that?” West asks.
I turn to see him gazing at me, one arm bent behind his head. “Like what?”
“With such a heavy emphasis on the first syllable. Beth-any. It felt pointed.”
“I don’t like the name Bethany.” I don’t like the thought of another girl texting you is the surprising subtext underneath my lie.
“She’s my ex-girlfriend.”
My ears perk up. “Oh? Does she go here?”
“No. We dated in high school. I think she wants to get back together.”
“Why do you think that?”
He flips over onto his stomach and avoids my eyes as he pulls out a marker and fills in his bare nails. “Her text said that she wants to get back together.”
I squirm, my shoulder blades itchy from the prickly grass. I hold my hand up to shield my eyes from the too-bright sun. “That’s a good clue.”
“You already know it’s good, I already told you it’s good, so stop fishing for compliments!” West laughs.
“But what would you say if we were in Dr. B’s class?” I hop onto the edge of the fountain and train my eyes on my feet as I walk around it.
“Why do you wanna know?” He stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“Because I care about your opinion!”
“Why?”
“Because your paragraph was good.”
He looks like he’d rather jump off a cliff than talk about himself. “There’s no plot. Nothing ever happens in my stories. Let’s change the subject.”
“West—I’m begging! If I’m going to be published before I graduate, I need feedback, and people aren’t exactly lining up to read my weirdo magic books.
I read a page to Amber, and she fell asleep.
With snoring! I emailed my brothers my last story, and they never replied.
Even my high school English teacher had to clarify that she only had time to read my assigned essays and not the sixty pages of fiction I left on her desk. ”
“Do you think Amber was faking?” West asks.
“Well, now I do!” I groan and drag my foot through the fountain.
Water splashes his hair, and he quickly smooths it with his fingers. Like the wicked witch, West and his hair. “What’s the rush to get published?” he asks.
“Why wait?”
He rolls his eyes and holds his hand up to help me down from the slippery ledge of the fountain. “Fine, don’t tell me. Need brain fuel?”
“I could eat.”
“Frog & Firkin is right there.” He nods to a popular bar a few hundred yards away. “Or Bison Witches on Fourth?”
The sandwich shop is in the funky, artsy historic district a mile away, and since I’m in the mood to procrastinate as long as possible, I choose the long route, and we make our way toward Fourth Avenue.
His elbow bumps mine while we walk, and when I look up at him, I find myself wanting to explain.
“I didn’t really have friends growing up.
” He tips his head, indicating that I should continue.
“I was weird and introverted, and my brothers both played travel baseball. My parents dragged me all over the state every weekend, and all over the Southwest on every break from school. The number of hours I’ve clocked in the bleachers watching parents yell at umpires is enough to make anyone a little crazy.
I spent all those years with my nose in a book, and then in a notebook, and finally a computer.
It’s pathetic, but book characters were my only friends. ”
“That sounds lonely.”