Chapter 1 #2
This is what I moved here for. I keep reminding myself of that.
I left a college where I had no friends to go to a university where I could make friends, and the difference is supposed to be that here, I tried.
Here, I said yes. Here, I climbed the stairs of a pretty apartment building and put my four boxes in a room that wasn’t built for me. I promised myself I was going to try.
“What is it?” I ask. My voice sounds normal. I’m surprised by how normal it sounds.
“A party,” Mara says. “At the Hawthorne House.”
The Hawthorne House.
There’s a house on Hawthorne Street where, a week ago, I knocked on the door with a paper bag in my hand and asked for Blue Golding because his little brother Devin had begged me to deliver something from home.
I’d been stupid enough — soft enough, hopeful enough, na?ve enough — to say yes.
Blue had opened the door, and his face had done a thing I have replayed in my head approximately a thousand times since.
He had looked at me like I was the last person on earth he expected to see, and the second-to-last person he wanted to see, and somewhere underneath all of that, like he was furious that I existed in his line of sight.
He’d taken the bag. He’d said thanks. He’d started to say something else, and then his shoulders had gone up, and his jaw had gone tight, and another guy behind him invited me inside.
Blue rushed away and came back with a red face.
Then suddenly, another tall friend of his appeared and said something about the coach calling a last-minute meeting.
That was a week ago.
It’s still living rent-free in my head.
I grip the mug with both hands like it might steady me.
It doesn’t. I’m not even sure if it’s the same house — there are a lot of houses on Hawthorne, it’s a long street — but I don’t want to take any chances.
I have a boyfriend coming over in a few hours, and my boyfriend does not know who Blue Golding is.
I learned in the first three months of dating Chase that he does not do well with other men in my vicinity.
“I don’t know,” I say.
I’d planned the night. I’d planned all the way down to the takeout we were going to order. Penelope said she’d be out, and Chase liked the idea of having me to himself.
“It’s just a party with a bunch of guys from the hockey team,” Mara is saying, and I tune back in too late, halfway through her sentence.
“They throw a party basically every two weeks, and the entire school shows up.” She waves a hand, dismissive in that way only girls who have been invited everywhere can be dismissive. “You’ll see. Bring your boyfriend.”
She pauses.
“Is he hot?”
I set my mug down on the counter very, very carefully.
“My boyfriend?” I say, stalling to answer that question.
She nods like it’s the most natural question in the world, like it’s the kind of thing a girl asks another girl on a Friday morning over coffee.
I think about Chase.
His beard comes in patchy along his jaw now that we’ve gotten a couple of years older, and he doesn’t shave for our dates anymore.
His hair sits flat against his forehead because he’s started using too much product.
There are four inches between us — he’s five-nine, I’m five-five, we don’t quite fit the way I’d like, but being picky about height seemed shallow of me, so I gave him a chance.
I think about whether I find him hot. The honest answer is that I find him familiar, which is not the same thing as hot. Or is it?
I take too long.
After a long moment, Mara’s face softens as she says, “He must be really nice.”
I don’t say anything to that either.
Yes, he’s nice. And somewhere in the last two years, I found him attractive.
He’s been very good to me. But Mara is a pretty girl who attends Camden U, a college town crawling with all kinds of attractive men.
And I think she took one look at me and decided I could be dating the hottest guy in this state, and I’m not, and I know it.
I pray with everything I have that she doesn’t ask me if I’m in love, because I will have to bolt out of this room.
“We’re going to get ready at G’s place tonight,” she says, sliding past it kindly.
“Who’s G?” I ask, grateful for the lifeline. I don’t do well with boyfriend questions.
“Gianna Reeve. Her brother is the captain of the Wolves.”
“Oh.”
Oh.
The captain. The tall guy in the doorway, the one who told Blue about the coach’s meeting. The one I saw last weekend, take an elbow to the face for Blue.
Penelope’s connected to the hockey team?
Penelope, my beautiful new roommate, with her hand-thrown mugs, her beautiful paintings on the wall, and her quiet, observant face, is connected, by way of her group of friends, to the entire roster of the Camden U Wolves?
I would have thought twice –– no, I would have thought ten times as hard before moving in here.
I would have stayed at the sublet if I’d known this vital piece of information.
“I’ll probably just get ready here,” I hear myself say. “Chase will be here this afternoon, and we were planning to get dinner.”
I inhale. The breath comes in shallow.
“Okay. Cool.” Mara is unbothered. She’s the kind of girl who is unbothered by everything, I am realizing, and I both admire it and want to ask her how she does it. “What’s your number?”
I tell her across the room, so she taps away on her phone. My phone buzzes in my pocket a second later.
“That’s me. I’ll send you the address.”
I nod. This is my way out. I take my coffee and walk back toward my bedroom, and as I pass behind the couch, I hear Mara say, half a beat too low for me to be sure I was meant to hear it —
“So, tonight’s going to be interesting. Do you think they’ll be all over each other?”
I shut my door.
I stand in the middle of my new bedroom with the coffee in my hand.
I stare out the window at the brick wall of the building across the way, and I try to figure out how I have managed, in seventy-two hours of living in the prettiest apartment in town, to engineer the worst possible Friday night of my entire life.
In Felsom Hall, I find my seat and uncap my pen. Then I write the date in the corner of the page like I’m going to take notes, and then I sit perfectly still for eighty minutes and stare at the wall.
I do not hear a word of Hayworth’s lecture on research methods.
The midterm is next Thursday. I know this. I have known this for three weeks. I should be writing.
Instead, I am thinking about a boy who wants nothing to do with me.
He has always wanted nothing to do with me.
That’s the thing. That’s the part that makes this so embarrassing, even now, even at twenty years old in a lecture hall in a town where nobody knows me.
Blue Golding has always wanted nothing to do with me, and I have always wanted everything to do with him.
For one stretch of months in our senior year, the universe got confused and gave me what I wanted, and I spent the entire spring of that year walking around in a kind of religious daze.
We were something.
That’s the word I have for it. Something.
We were never official, because Blue Golding does not do official, and I knew that going in, and I still — God, I still let myself think that maybe I was different.
I let myself think it the way you let yourself think anything when you’re seventeen, and a boy with a hockey scholarship is unbuttoning your jeans after a party.
I thought I was special. I thought he looked at me differently.
I thought the way he held my face after the first time, both hands, his thumbs against my cheekbones, his forehead pressed to mine, and his breathing not yet evened out, meant something, because what else could it possibly mean.
It meant nothing.
It meant a few months of late texts and locker walks, and one afternoon at his mother’s house when she wasn’t home. Then came graduation. Then a summer of being ignored.
He might be the reason I’m at Camden U. I haven’t admitted that to anyone.
Not to Mila. Not to my mother. Definitely not to Chase.
But somewhere in the back of my head, in the part of my head I don’t go into if I can help it, I know that when I was filling out my Camden U transfer application at the kitchen table at one in the morning last March, I was thinking about what it might mean to be near him again.
I couldn’t help the warmth I felt in my chest at the thought.
I am pathetic.
I pull out my phone to take my mind off him.
Me: My new roommate invited me to a party tonight.
Mila: Isn’t Chase coming tonight?
Me: They told me to bring him.
Mila: Who’s they?
Me: Penelope had a friend over. Her name’s Mara.
Mila: I know Mara. She’s a hoe.
My eyebrows go up so fast they almost leave my face.
Me: How do you know that?
Mila: I had her in a few of my classes, and I’ve seen her at parties.
Me: Will you come with me tonight?
Mila: Are you ditching Chase?
Me: No, of course not. They invited him too.
Mila: Are you sure that’s a good idea?
I huff out a breath through my nose because no. No, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I haven’t been sure about anything involving Chase for months now, and I’m tired of pretending.
Me: I didn’t ask him yet.
Mila: Bet he’s going to say no.
I don’t argue with that, because Mila knows everything about Chase because I tell her every little detail like a menace. She has, on more than one occasion, told me she thinks I deserve better, in the relentless way best friends say things when they mean it.
My phone buzzes, but it’s not her.
Chase: Be there in an hour.
I stare at the message until the screen dims. It’s like he knew I was talking about him.