Chapter 12
Sophomore Year, First Semester
“Honey, we’re home!” Amber’s voice carries from the front door to the small sunlit kitchen at the back of the house, where I’ve been deleting and writing the same paragraph for the last half hour.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I yell back. When Amber asked if I wanted to live with her this year, I jumped at the chance.
I hit the roommate jackpot with her; not only is she easy to live with and spends half her time at Kyle’s frat, but also her parents bought a house close to campus over the summer, and they’re only charging me a couple hundred bucks in rent.
I’m confident that Amber and I wouldn’t have been friends if we hadn’t been roommates—she likes to party, and I like to spend my weekends talking to people I made up in my head—but the forced proximity and shared trauma of watching Grey’s Anatomy every week in a two-hundred-square-foot dorm room really bonded us together.
She doesn’t let me get away with being a hermit too many days in a row, and I inexplicably make her laugh every time we meet someone who asks Like the planet?
She never gets tired of my bit, and I love that about her.
The moment I knew our friendship was going to last, however, was the night we couldn’t fit microwave burritos in our freezer because of the frost buildup, so we dragged it down the hall and defrosted it in the shower.
Something about the shower spray mixing with our tears of laughter made our friendship permanent.
The door slams, and Amber’s sandals thud against the tile floor as she kicks them off. “Me and Kyle,” she says as she enters the kitchen. “And West,” she adds as he trails after them, ducking to fit under the low archway.
“Hey.” West nods and runs a self-conscious hand through his hair.
Bethany convinced him to buzz it over the summer, and now it’s too short to straighten and too short to fully curl, so it’s this fluffy sort of in-between that looks like it would feel like silk under my fingers.
Last time I saw Bethany, she was bugging him to cut it again because it looks better short, and I had to wire my mouth shut to avoid telling her that her opinion sucks.
“We need to talk,” Amber says as she scans the pantry and then the refrigerator and emerges with a tub of questionable hummus and a half-empty bag of pita chips. She offers the hummus to Kyle to sniff. He makes a face but then takes a bite anyway.
“I think it’s expired,” I say.
“Tastes fine,” he says.
Amber shrugs and takes a nibble. “We need to grocery shop.”
“Soon,” I agree. We’ve been saying it for the last five days, though, and I doubt today is the day either of us will make it happen. It’s getting dire, and Kyle’s presence isn’t helping, but I’d be an idiot to argue with two-hundred-dollar rent. “What do we need to talk about?”
She drops the pita chips dramatically on the table and fixes me with a serious face.
“If this is about the dishes in my room, I swear I’m going to—”
“Halloween party,” she cuts me off. “Tonight. Rishi’s house. We’re all going. Plus Bethany, right?” She turns to West for confirmation, and when he nods, she looks back to me for an answer.
I never imagined that West and I would hang out with Amber and Kyle as much as we do, but Kyle was iced out of his fraternity after he reported them for hazing and thus found himself with more free time this year. He’s not so bad. “Okay.”
She frowns. “That’s it?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t have to stay home and study?”
I click to one of the dozens of open tabs on my laptop and tilt it so she can see my trigonometry grade. I’m four weeks away from finally passing this class and saying goodbye to math forever. Hallelujah.
West leans over Amber’s shoulder and grins when he sees the B-minus. He reaches across the table to give me a high five.
“That was anticlimactic,” she complains. “I had a whole speech prepared and everything. It was about being young and hot and how few Halloweens we have left to celebrate before we get too old to dress like slutty nurses.”
“Aren’t you planning to go to nursing school?” West asks.
“Yeah, babe. If you dream hard enough, you can be a slutty nurse every day,” Kyle says earnestly.
Amber ignores the men. “If my speech didn’t work, West was going to talk you into it.”
“This is news to me,” West says.
“Why do you want me to go so badly?” I ask.
“Because Connor is going to be there tonight.”
“Connor who?”
“Rishi’s friend. English major. He was in your Pop Culture and Politics class.”
“He was?”
“Yes. And we sat with him at the improv show in the Modern Languages building that one time.”
“Riiiight,” I say, though I’ve blocked most of that night from my memory.
It was the first weekend that we all hung out with West and Bethany while she was in town, and I was trying exceptionally hard to act like a girl who didn’t know what it was like to grind on her boyfriend in the library stacks.
I was nervous that if she didn’t like me, West and I would have to stop hanging out. “What about him?”
“He’s going to be at the party tonight,” Amber says.
“And?”
“He thinks you’re hot,” Kyle says through a mouthful of expired hummus.
“Oh!” My spine straightens. Three pairs of eyes watch me with interest; what I say next will get relayed to Connor before the party tonight.
I avoid looking at West, because even though it’s been six months since our one and only make-out session and neither of us feels that way anymore, it’s still awkward that he’s here for this conversation. “Cool.”
“Can we tell him you’ll see him tonight?” Amber asks. When I confirm, she squeals her approval and then disappears into her room with Kyle.
West takes the seat next to me while Amber’s Slow Jams playlist filters through the thin walls. “You don’t remember that Connor guy at all, do you?” he asks.
“I do!” I protest while West laughs.
“What does he look like?”
“He has blond hair.”
West shakes his head.
“Brown?”
“Wrong again.”
“The redhead,” I say, finally putting a name to the face of a guy I’ve seen in Kyle’s Facebook pictures. And in the seat in front of me in Pop Culture and Politics. And apparently at improv night.
“He’ll be flattered to know how well you remember him.”
“No need to tell him.”
West laughs—until something about my expression makes him pause. “Wait. Are you interested in him?”
“Maybe.” I shrug, and an uncomfortable silence settles around us. West and I are the kind of friends who talk about everything—except who we’re dating. I don’t ask about Bethany, and he doesn’t ask about my love life.
“I emailed you notes an hour ago. It’s your best one so far,” he says, opting to forcefully change the subject.
“You always say that.” I roll my eyes, though I’m secretly pleased. A West Emerson compliment is like a good hair day; there’s no such thing as too many.
West started freshman year as a history major, switched to psych halfway through second semester, and is now flirting with the idea of coming over to the English Department. Every day, he gets a little bit closer to admitting that he loves words almost as much as I do.
After that surprising, snowy night during freshman year, I started to wonder if my growing crush on West made him my muse.
Thank god that’s not the case. West’s impact on my writing is entirely separate from the brief period of time when I wanted to kiss him.
He hasn’t even looked at me since he got back together with Bethany, but he’s always first in line to read whatever fantasy worlds my brain conjures up.
“It’s always true,” he says casually, and my stomach flutters to life with the familiar praise. “When you’re famous, I get to say I was your first fan.”
I pick up the pad of blue sticky notes next to my laptop and write Margot Darling’s #1 Fan.
I sign my name at the bottom with the signature I’ve been practicing since I was thirteen years old and stick it to his forehead.
“When I’m famous, that’ll be worth money.
” I grab the strap of his backpack and tug it toward me.
“Do you have anything for me to read this time?”
He snatches the bag to his chest.
“C’mon! It’s only fair.”
He throws his head back with a groan. I know he’s working on something new because of the way he shielded me from seeing what he was writing last week at the library. He almost failed Dr. B’s final because he was so reluctant to turn in his short story. “I’m new to this,” he grumbles.
“So?”
“It’s not as good as yours.”
“Bullshit.”
He grimaces. “Mars—”
“Please!” I beg, pouting my lips and batting my eyelashes.
He mutters something that sounds like “Bambi” under his breath and turns to a dog-eared page near the back of his notebook. A rush of satisfaction zips through me.
He rolls his eyes as he hands it over. “Don’t look so smug. It’s basically fifteen hundred words on rain.”
“I love it already,” I tell him seriously as my eyes fall to the first sentence.
“I can’t be here while you read that,” he says.
“I know.” My nose is already buried in the pages, my attention slipping from West to his writing. “I’ll give it back at the party tonight.”
“And leave you with my notebook? Not a chance. I’ll wait outside.”
“Do you want to watch TV?”
“I can’t even be in the same house with you while you’re reading that.” He shudders and nearly trips over his own feet as he leaves the room. When the screen door swings shut behind him, I take it as permission to dive back in.
The thing about West’s writing is that it always makes me feel something, even if it is fifteen hundred words about a summer storm and even if he has run-on sentences or fragments or whatever.
For some reason, he gets away with breaking the rules that I can’t, and damn if it doesn’t hit me square in the chest every time.
His writing transports me right out of Amber’s parents’ off-campus house to the inside of West’s brain.
I don’t ask myself why I like it there so much.