Chapter 10
Freshman Year, Second Semester
Failing a test is a bit like falling down a hill.
You trip and lose your footing, and then you’re sliding.
You put out your hands and scrabble for purchase.
You grab for a rock or a tree, anything to stop the momentum.
It might feel slow at first, fixable even.
If not this question, you’ll get the one after.
But next thing you know, you’re steamrolling hard and fast toward the edge of a cliff, and there are no options left.
All you can do is close your eyes and hope you’re alive at the bottom.
That’s what it feels like when I sit down for my trigonometry midterm only a few hours after I finally drifted off to sleep.
I don’t know the answer to the first question. Whatever. It’s just one.
I don’t feel good about the second one, either, but missing two questions never killed anyone.
I’m almost positive that the third question came directly from my study packet, but when I close my eyes and try to see the answer, all I see are West’s ink-stained fingers playing with a loose strand of my hair.
After we left the library last night, he walked me to my dorm, where we made out against a column for an unknowable amount of time.
Twenty minutes? An hour? All I know is that I was dizzy when I finally stumbled into my bed, drunk on the feeling of West’s lips on my skin and his weight pressed against me.
And now I can’t concentrate on cosines, because how am I supposed to care what a cosine is when my lips are still swollen and sore from the best night of my life?
I press my fingers to my puffy mouth and stifle a yawn; I was up until four a.m. because my hyperactive imagination refused to settle down.
I tend to brainstorm in bed, but in the early hours of this morning, I was weaving daydreams about someone real.
Numbers shuffle around on the page. I check the clock—time is moving at warp speed—and set my pencil down.
I lean forward until my head hits the desk.
I’ve entered the free-fall portion of the test. I stop flailing and admit to myself that there’s no saving this one.
I tuck in my arms and legs and hold my breath, praying the ground is soft upon landing.
The bell rings. I turn in my exam and walk numbly through the halls of the math building with new eyes, and it’s even worse than I remember.
I can’t believe I’ll have to spend another semester looking at these cold white walls and the backs of frat boys’ heads instead of sitting cross-legged in a Socratic seminar with the rest of the humanities majors.
I want a TA to write Impressive in blue ink at the top of a short story I wrote the night before class.
I want to laugh under my breath with West when a classmate’s purple prose gets out of control.
I blink dark spots out of my eyes as I step into the sun.
“Mars!” West’s voice zaps my heart like a defibrillator.
If the test nearly killed me, he’s reviving my will to go on.
(Too cheesy. I’d delete that line in revisions.) West jogs toward me, a coffee in his hand.
“You did it!” He wraps his free arm around me and pulls me in for a hug that leaves me speechless.
Half of me wants to relax into him; the other half still can’t believe what just happened.
He offers me the drink. “I don’t know how you like your coffee, so I took a shot in the dark.”
I don’t like any kind of coffee, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I take a sip.
As expected, it tastes like burned tar. I make a face, and West grimaces.
“Not good?” He runs a hand through his hair, which is still wet from the shower and starting to curl.
If I were in a better mood, I’d write a poem about those curls.
“It’s, um, I’m surprised that you’re here.”
His expression falters. “Oh, well, I was up anyway. I thought you’d be in the mood to celebrate.”
I take another asphalt-flavored sip. “There’s nothing to celebrate, because I failed worse than anyone else has ever failed a one hundred–level math exam. It’s shocking how badly I did.”
“How do you know?”
“I left half the test blank.”
“It’ll be okay,” West says in the self-assured voice of someone who has no actual skin in the game. “If you get A’s the rest of the semester, you can pull your grade up.”
“What are the chances of that?”
“I can help you study.”
I snort. “That sounds familiar.”
His gaze dips to his shoes, and I swear I see pink at the tips of his ears. “For real next time. I won’t let myself get distracted by your lips, or your cute snort-laugh, or the freckles you have right here…” His eyes find mine again and he traces my cheekbone with his thumb.
My eyes well with ridiculous, unstoppable tears. “West!” I taste salt water on my lips.
His eyes widen in panic. “No! Hey, hey, hey,” he says, and I commend the effort, but it doesn’t help. When people notice I’m crying, I only cry harder.
I press my fingers to the corners of my eyes. “I have medically diagnosed overactive tear ducts.”
He jerks his head back in surprise. “Really?”
“Who’s gullible now?” I ask, but he doesn’t laugh. “I cry a lot. I can’t help it.”
He wraps me in a hug while I take several shuddering breaths. “I’m sorry you had a bad morning,” he says at last.
“Thanks,” I mumble into his tear-soaked shirtsleeve. It occurs to me that it’s slightly embarrassing to be crying all over the guy I just kissed for the first time last night, but I’m too sad about my midterm to care.
He pulls back, and I can tell by the way he slouches and hesitates that his burst of confidence is retreating. “So,” he says.
I mop myself up and run a hand through the tangles in my hair. “Was there a question in that ‘so’?”
His mouth twitches. “Do you have plans today?”
“I’m going home for spring break, so my plans are a six-hour drive and an obsessive rumination on where it all went wrong.”
“Sounds thrilling.”
“Spoken like someone who has never driven through Yuma.” I rub my heavy eyelids. Crying plus sleep deprivation is not the best way to pregame a road trip.
“Call me. I’ll keep you company on the drive,” West offers.
“You will?”
“What else do I have to do but spend my entire spring break distracting you?”
I hesitate, and he sees it.
“Unless you don’t want me to,” he adds.
The problem is that I do want to be distracted by him, a little too much. “When are you leaving?”
“I’m carpooling with Burger—”
“The guy with the—” I hold my index finger above my lips.
“The finger mustache tattoo? That’s him.”
“And the…” I mime tapping on cups.
“The annoying habit of playing the ‘Cups’ song on every available surface? Yes.”
“Oof. Good luck.”
“We’re leaving at two, but I’m free until then…” He trails off, the invitation hanging unsaid in the space between us, and every bad thought I had about this day vanishes into thin air. Somehow West has magicked me into a good mood.
I twist my lips so he can’t see how badly I want to smile. “I can be free until two.”
“Yeah?” He doesn’t bother to hide his smile, and my stomach ties itself in the good kind of knots. Not the failed-your-midterm-and-ruined-everything kind that were demanding squatters’ rights just a few minutes ago.
Huh.
I nod, and West leans in for a kiss.
“I think we should just be friends!” I blurt out, my hand on his chest.
He backs off. “Sorry! I…it’s just…you do?”
I do? I didn’t realize it until I said it, but the instant West kisses me, I’ll stop caring about anything else.
It happened last night, and I know myself well enough to know it’ll happen again.
I’ll hyper-fixate, and I’ll stop studying, stop worrying, stop thinking of anything but him.
I might even stop writing. I could easily spend the next nine days texting West from my bed in California, my feet up on the wall and my heart in my throat.
Who needs ambition when you have a cute guy who kisses you like the world is ending?
“I do,” I whisper.
Something flares behind West’s eyes. “Of course. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“It’s not you! It’s…” I wince, the cliché dying on my lips. “I need to focus on school.”
“Right,” he says flatly. “I’ll see you around, Mars.” He turns to leave, and I call him back.
“I thought we were going to hang out?”
His brow ticks up. “And I thought you were blowing me off.”
“No! I want to be…friends.” The last word takes effort. It’s true, but it’s so fucking trite. My brain is a math-deficient, cliché-ridden void.
“Usually when people say that, they don’t mean it.”
“Well, I mean it,” I say. He doesn’t move. “West, look at me.” He forces his gaze to mine, his expression hard. “Do you still want to be friends with me?”
He swallows heavily, and I feel a surge of panic. I want to rewind the last sixty seconds, anything to avoid hearing him say no. But the truth is stuck behind my teeth.
He scrutinizes my face for a long time. “Okay,” he says eventually, and just like that, our fate is sealed.
Nine days is longer than you’d think. It’s enough time to add twenty thousand words to my manuscript, decide I hate it, and start something new.
It’s enough time to binge the entire first season of Girls and wonder if I should move to New York like Hannah Horvath.
It’s even enough time to go to a USC baseball game with my brothers, get relentlessly mocked for checking my texts between every pitch, and learn the meaning of the word regret.
I’m an idiot! I admit it! It seems that turning down my crush didn’t make me think about him any less.
The first text from West (Drive safe, Jupiter) set off a ripple of stomach flutters that quickly upgraded to a constant, unavoidable tug.
I spent the week with my nose in my phone, either grinning to myself or wanting to delete our whole thread, depending on how long it’d been since he’d replied.
By the time I pull back into Tucson on Sunday afternoon, my stomach is chaos. I’ve replayed the kiss with West so many times that it’s burned itself into my brain, like a person who stares at an eclipse too long and sees crescent shapes for the rest of their life.
Making lunch? West’s lips on mine. Falling asleep at night? West’s hands on the small of my back, pressing me closer. Standing in a steaming-hot shower? West’s breath on my neck, a shiver tracing my spine. I don’t want to do anything else until I’ve kissed him again.
I drop my clean laundry in my room and walk straight to West’s dorm.
No one answers when I knock, so I sit on the floor with my back against his door and wait.
I jump to my feet when the door to the stairwell opens, and every muscle in my body draws taut in anticipation.
West steps into the hall and does a double take.
“Mars?”
I smile. His nails are hot pink, and his hair is straightened within an inch of its life, and I’m officially obsessed with him. “Hey.”
He props the door open behind him, and a pretty girl with short blond hair steps into the hall. Her mouth turns into a frown when she sees me. She glances quickly up at West’s deer-in-the-headlights expression before looking back at me. “Who are you?”
I blink at her in surprise, wondering when and how they met. If she knows him from class. If she has a crush on him. If she knows that he likes me.
“I’m Mars.”
She tilts her head and adjusts her thick black frames. “Like the planet?”
West flinches, and I feel it in my bones. I swallow heavily. “Like the Roman god of war,” I tell her, my eyes on West. When he doesn’t crack a smile, I know it’s over. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Bethany.”
“Like West’s ex-girlfriend?”
She wraps her arm around his waist. “Like his current girlfriend.”