Nineteen
Nineteen
“Four orders of spicy chicken wings for table eleven, plus two pitchers of light beer,” I tell Maggie quickly as she passes me on her way to the bar. It’s James’s usual order, but it’s not for him; this Saturday, for the first time since I’ve started working here, he hasn’t shown up at the bar.
I seat a family with kids at the last open table. I set the table, hand them their menus, and take their drink orders.
“Ugh, I don’t know about you, but I hate ’em,” Cassie exclaims, irritated. She leans back against the bar and looks out at our customers.
“Who do you hate?” I ask curiously when I get to the taps.
“Them,” she says, gesturing with her head at the family I’ve just seated. “How much do you wanna bet that, in another five minutes, those brats’ll be running around all over the place screaming like maniacs?”
I shake my head. “They’re just kids, Cassie.
Give them some paper and crayons, and it’ll be like they aren’t even there,” I reassure her.
From the look she shoots me, I don’t think she’s persuaded.
I hand her some blank sheets of paper and a cup full of markers, and urge her to bring them over. She rolls her eyes but humors me.
When she returns, she fills two glasses of Sprite and asks me in her usual strident voice, “Hey, what happened to your boyfriend?” She looks up, scanning the room. “It feels kinda wrong, you know, not seeing him here,” she finishes in a vaguely sly tone of voice that I don’t appreciate at all.
I repress a grunt of frustration. I don’t have anything against Cassie, but she takes a little too much interest in Thomas’s personal life.
She’s always asking me about him, how he’s doing, what he’s doing.
And then there were the many times I’ve caught her undressing him with her eyes, probably when she thought I wasn’t watching.
And of course, there’s the fact that I don’t actually have the faintest idea where he is today.
“He’s busy,” I say simply, not looking at her as I put the mugs of beer on a tray and take them over to table eleven, where I find Matt, Finn, and Vince, along with some other kids from school.
I set the glasses down on the table and notice that Vince is waving the flyer that Athena gave me this morning in Matt’s face.
“Howell Hall, tonight, half past ten, are you in?” I hear him demand.
“Howell?” Matt echoes, confused. “Why would anyone from there invite you? Those people are snobs; if you don’t belong to their little clique, you’re out. Fuck them,” he says, before taking a pull from his mug and wiping the corners of his mouth.
“No one invited him, actually. He invited himself,” I say, inserting myself into the conversation.
Matt gives me a questioning look, so I clarify: “This morning, I went to get the keys to my new suite in Howell. Vince demanded to come with me and got obsessed with the girl who was showing us around. Which is why he’s now acting like a stalker. ”
“Hey! I’m not a stalker. There was a definite vibe between us.”
I almost laugh right in his face. “A ‘vibe’? She gave you the brush-off from start to finish. And how can you blame her? This morning you were looking like a college-edition Frank Gallagher.”
Everyone at the table bursts into laughter while Vince affectionately whacks me on the belly with the flyer.
“I assure you the vibes were there, and you would have seen them too if you weren’t so bummed out today. I’ll prove it to you tonight,” he grins, a devilish glint in his eye.
I shake my head and leave them to their conversation while I go over to an elderly couple’s table to collect their empty plates.
When I put them back behind the bar, the front door jingles, and my heart momentarily skips a beat.
Because yes, I am furious with Thomas, but even just seeing him would put my mind at ease.
Instead, what I see when I lift my head just makes me even more anxious.
Logan.
He’s the last person I want to see right now. I take a deep breath as I watch him take a seat on the stool right in front of me.
“Hi,” I greet him tonelessly, rinsing a glass under a jet of warm water. “Can I get you anything?”
“Yes, a tonic water, thanks.” His head is bowed and his shoulders hunched.
He looks like a kicked puppy when, actually, he should be angry at me and at Thomas for the beating he received.
But he doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit resentful.
And, seeing him like this, I’m starting to feel that annoying sense of guilt growing inside me again.
How cruel would it be to stay mad at him after the way he was treated?
“Sure, I’ll get it right away.” I pour a glass for him, and he immediately lifts it to his mouth. I move over to the cash register, where I print out a customer’s bill. But then our eyes meet for a split second, and I look away like a coward.
“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” he says softly, drumming his fingers on the wooden surface of the bar.
“No, of course not,” I answer hesitantly.
“You are. And you have every reason to be. It was stupid of me to rush in and run my mouth like that without making sure you’d told him first.”
“Look, what’s done is done. Let’s not dwell on it, okay?”
“No, it’s not okay. I know I made a scene.
If you’ve decided to back out and don’t want to tutor me anymore, I understand.
I don’t want my presence to screw up your life, Vanessa.
I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I realized that you were right.
I shouldn’t have asked you to do it. Thomas is apparently convinced that I have bad intentions, and I don’t think he’ll ever believe otherwise.
I don’t know what I was thinking…” He gets up from the stool, leaves a few bills for me on the counter, and turns to go, looking defeated.
I glance at him out of the corner of my eye as I wipe down the bar, but I can’t remain impassive in the face of his unhappiness. “Logan,” I call out to him before he can leave the room.
He turns around with his hands tucked into his pockets.
“I haven’t changed my mind, okay? I said I would help, and I’m going to. I just…I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”
He nods submissively. “Okay. You’re always so good. I don’t deserve it.”
“Do you know what you really didn’t deserve? That,” I say, pointing at the bruise on his cheek. “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry that it always seems to end that way between the two of you.”
He rubs his cheek, inclining his face slightly. “Ah, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.” Before he leaves, he smiles at me, and I do my best to smile back, but all I can manage is a grimace that only vaguely resembles a smile.
***
Once my shift is over, Vince drags me to the party at my dorm.
He’s been following me around all day, and I don’t get why.
I tried to convince him to go without me, but he wouldn’t listen to any of my objections.
“I’m not going to let you hole up in your room all night being depressed,” is what he said.
To be clear, that was not my intention. I would have merely curled up in my bed and surrendered to the darkness and silence of my lonely room on what would have been my first official night in my new apartment…
by myself. Without him. For the second night in a row.
And yes, at that point I would have almost certainly burst into tears.
Okay, I admit it, I would have been depressed.
“So you made it. I’d almost counted you out,” Athena says when she sees me emerge from a long dorm hallway crowded with students.
“Work kept me later than expected, but yeah, I decided to take the plunge.” I smile at her a bit awkwardly, toying with my hair.
I’m not quite sure how to act with her. If it were Tiffany in front of me, I’d give her a hug, but Athena seems a bit aloof to me, and I don’t have the guts to give it a try.
“Yeah, and I see you brought your friend too.” She turns her attention to Vince, who is gorging himself at the snack table.
“Yeah, sorry… I couldn’t talk him out of it.”
“Don’t worry about it; I don’t know why I thought you could.
At least he had the decency to get cleaned up this time,” she points out, chuckling.
“In terms of the party, as you can see, everyone’s spread out a bit in the various rooms.” She gestures at the open doors on either side of the hallway, a different genre of music coming from each one.
“In G13 they’re playing some poppy stuff; wanna come by and cut loose a bit? ” she suggests.
“Um…I don’t think I really have the energy to jump around to ‘There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back.’ I think I’d rather get something to eat.”
Vince interjects himself into the conversation, wrapping an arm around Athena’s shoulders. “Good evening, Athena. While my friend here may be tired, I have all the energy you need.”
She wriggles free. “No, thanks. See you around, Clark.”
I nod and smile gratefully at her. I give Vince a pleading look, silently begging him to behave like a civilized human being.
Or at least like a properly domesticated animal.
Athena heads for G13 with Vincent hot on her heels.
I may have been imagining it, but I could have sworn I saw the littlest smug smile on her face when Vince put his arm around her.
After an hour of uncomfortably rejecting numerous pitches and invitations, I swallow the last sip of orange soda from my plastic cup and decide that the time has finally come to leave this party.
I’m not in the right mood for this at all.
Everyone around me is having fun in one way or another, while here I am just sitting in this uncomfortable chair, repeatedly checking my phone in the hopes of getting a call from him.
I feel a bit pathetic, but damn it, it’s 11:45!
Is it possible that it just hasn’t occurred to him to reach out?