Chapter 2
A year and half ago, when I couldn’t stand the thought of spending another stultifying summer at home in Highland Park with my mother’s silence, I broke down and took Lennie up on her offer to stay at her place in Beecher.
She was going to be gone a good chunk of the summer anyway, back home visiting friends—and random European countries, as one does—but her lease at River Crossing was year-round and her building is swank.
Cool gray walls, faux hardwood floors, central air-conditioning, and built in the last couple of years instead of the last couple of centuries.
The problem was that Crossing, a Beecher University–owned complex, is inhabited mostly by grad students.
Which is where I messed up.
“Lennie,” I say now, slowing down. Carter’s gaze flicks past Lennie to land on me. His blue eyes meet mine and heat spreads up my neck and into my cheeks, my heart giving a tortured, anguished beat.
His nod at me is cool and brief. Like I’m some random undergrad that he vaguely remembers from a class he taught.
As if he’s never gripped my hips so hard he left thumbprint bruises on my skin, as if I haven’t felt the soft catch of his breath against my neck, as if the friction and pressure of his thigh between mine is just a fantasy in my head.
Fury rushes in, hot and tight in my chest, and I stop walking.
Lennie glances over her shoulder and pauses. “Don’t make it weird, Jo,” she says in a pleading voice. “Carter hasn’t been your TA for almost a year now.”
Like that’s the issue, the pure discomfort of hanging out socially with someone who used to determine my grade, my future. Then again, as far as Lennie knows, it is.
She turns to face me, walking backward toward the booth. “Come on, please? I think he’s single. But I caught him staring at Annie Caughey at my Halloween party. I need to find out if he’s interested before he moves on.”
I don’t know what Carter’s saying about his relationship status this year.
It’s not something we’ve ever discussed.
However, I do know that Annie Caughey—tiny, petite, adorable Annie—was standing in front of me at Lennie’s party, while I hovered awkwardly near the makeshift bar for most of the night.
Pretending not to notice Carter as he pretended not to notice me.
Guess one of us is better at that game than the other.
I should just turn around and walk out. I should.
But I’m not full, and I haven’t eaten actual food, either.
Plus, in spite of everything else, curiosity curls and flickers through me—why here, why now?
It’s a curiosity, though, like running your finger through an open flame, testing how long it takes before you feel pain—it’s going to hurt, you just don’t know when, exactly.
“Fine,” I say.
“Yay!” Lennie mock-squeals, before pivoting to face forward.
She heads toward Carter’s side of the booth like he’s a fridge and she’s one of those cute little miniature fruit magnets.
(Missy Banks, my best friend in fifth grade, had them in her kitchen.
My mother would never put anything so “gauche” up in her home; all our appliances are that nonmagnetic stainless steel anyway.)
I follow more slowly.
Lennie is already sliding in next to Carter, peppering him with questions—“How are you? What’s new?
How has this semester been going?”—by the time I drop my bag on the floor and shrug out of my coat.
Carter’s dark blue peacoat is hanging on the booth’s hook like it belongs there, right next to Chessa’s puffer coat and Daan’s ski jacket.
Carter nods in response to Lennie while she continues to chatter at him, but that’s it.
He doesn’t say much; he never does. Especially in a crowd.
I used to think it was because he believed he was better than the rest of us.
Than me. Because he was older. Because he was smarter.
Now, I suspect he’s that weird flavor of awkward that comes across as reserved, almost stilted, and semi-intimidating.
He doesn’t feel like he belongs, so he keeps his mouth shut. The thought sends a sharp, stabbing pang through me.
Absolutely not, Jo. We are not doing this again. And no, he doesn’t belong here because he’s made his position very clear.
I’m not enough? Not worth the risk? Fine. Then stay the fuck away. Don’t come find me with my friends.
“I mean, right?” Lennie asks Carter with a giggle, carrying on with her mostly one-sided conversation.
I could just leave. But I won’t. This Lennie is bright, sparkling, almost manic at the prospect of capturing Carter’s attention. There’s no hint of the dry bitterness from before.
But this mood won’t last. Carter, however little I may understand him in other ways, is not interested in Lennie in that way. And she will eventually realize it. With great disappointment or even hurt. I can almost taste it.
Very bad friend.
Chessa darts her eyes toward Carter, then raises an inquisitive brow at me over her clear plastic-framed glasses, asking if I’m okay without a word.
That is the benefit of being friends and roommates for so long. Not only does she know my drama—well, most of it anyway—she knows when to speak up and when to find another way.
I shrug my shoulders in answer. For the moment, I’m just going to do my best to ignore him.
Chessa gives her head a little shake, which might mean “Don’t do this to yourself, stay strong” or “I still can’t believe you’re in this mess.” Actually, it’s probably both.
“Jo.” Daan interrupts our silent conversation in a plaintive voice. “Tell Chessa she is wrong.” He tucks his shoulder-length dirty blond hair behind his ears and waits.
Grateful for the distraction, I smile at him. “I doubt it.” Daan’s insistence on how things should be has gotten him in trouble more than once.
Daan was my first real friend at Beecher. Ever since freshman year when he managed to get himself locked out of our residence hall.
Beecher is both literally and figuratively old school—founded on the grounds of a seventeenth century Puritan village, then converted to a “women’s teaching college” during the Civil War, all before its current incarnation—some of the old-fashioned ideas have lingered longer than they should have.
Residence hall floors segregated by gender (the year before I started they finally added a gender-inclusive wing as an option), visiting hours for non-residents, and a two AM curfew for incoming first-years.
For the first six weeks, the hall doors are locked and building access cards don’t work after curfew.
If you ring the buzzer, an advisor or director will let you in, but it costs: a hundred bucks for the first incident, doubling with every additional violation.
And if they catch you on camera letting someone in a side door, you both get fined.
It’s stupid, but Beecher admin is not fucking around.
For some of my peers, like Lennie, a hundred dollars is the equivalent of forgotten change tucked into a cupholder. But for the rest of us, it was more than sufficient deterrent.
On the night before classes were due to start, my roommate, Ryann, was already asleep—and snoring like a hibernating grizzly—when I heard the faint tapping of fingertips against the glass of our first-floor window.
When I got up to check it out, Daan’s anxious face was a pale oval staring up at me from the bushes just below. At that point, I only knew him as the tall guy in all black I’d seen in the lobby a few times.
He waved frantically, then gestured with a cranking motion for me to open the window.
“This is ridiculous,” he whispered to me, pushing leaves and branches out of the way.
“I was only out talking to people. Locking the doors, it only encourages onheil. Wat een onzin!” His grip on the bushes slipped in his quiet outrage, and the bushes retaliated, promptly slapping him across the face.
He stumbled back with a muffled curse, clutching at his cheek, and I tried not to laugh. I had no idea what onheil whatever whatever was, but the rest of it I agreed with.
“Please?” he asked, peering up at me hopefully, fingers still pressed to his reddened skin. “My roommate is not answering. Will you help me up? I promise, I will not trouble you again.”
I am a sucker for victims of draconian policy. Also, it’s hard not to feel for someone after you’ve seen them backhanded by a boxwood.
Once he pulled himself up, I helped him inside, yanking him across the sill by his belt. He slipped upstairs to his room without anyone the wiser or him the poorer.
Daan repaid his debt the next morning, bringing me coffee and a sealed bowl of Froot Loops. He is kind of impossible not to love.
“What is it this time?” I ask Daan. “Bartenders again?” The two behind the bar on most Friday nights, a man and a woman, are an ongoing fixation for Daan. They’re both his type—tall, skinny, dressed in black, with a variety of piercings.
He opens his mouth to speak, but Chessa beats him to it. “Of course it’s bartenders,” she confirms, rolling her eyes. But her mouth curves in an affectionate smile. She hasn’t known Daan quite as long as I have, but he doesn’t take long to grow on you.
“Daan,” I say. “We’ve talked about this. Just because they work together does not mean they do everything together.”
“You don’t know that,” Daan says with a pout, resting his chin in his hand. Then he straightens up with a longing expression. “Just look at them. How they move around each other without colliding, like a dance, it’s beautiful.”
I watch the two in question swirl in a coordinated whirlwind behind the scratched wooden bar. It is impressive how they keep up with the increasing demands of drunken college students with minimal spills and breakage, I’ll admit that.
“Also, you don’t want to be that guy,” Chessa adds. “That guy who hits on the bartenders while they’re trying to work.”
“That guy who flirts at a funeral,” I jump in. “With a grieving family member.”