Chapter 15
Amy
Inotice her before she speaks to me.
She comes in late and takes the only open seat, which is next to me in the back row. Dark hair. A notebook she opens immediately, the way people open things when they want to look occupied. I know this because I do the same thing.
When class ends, she turns to me before I can pack my bag.
“Is that Plath?” she asks. She nods at the collection on my desk.
“Lady Lazarus,” I say.
Something opens in her expression. Just a crack. “I have read that one so many times I can hear it in my sleep.”
We talk for twenty minutes in the emptying classroom. She is careful about what she offers, and I’m careful about what I offer back, and in this way, we establish something without naming it. She asks if I want to critique each other’s work for the semester assignment. I say yes.
Then I mention the party. Off campus. Ohio house on Fletcher Street. I heard about it around campus. Would she want to come?
She considers it with the unhurried assessment of someone who has learned that quick answers cost more than slow ones.
“Yes,” she says finally.
I give her my number. She gives me hers.
I go back to my Plath and the afternoon feels, unexpectedly, like something I did not know I needed.
A friend.
I’m heading back to the dorm when I see her in the hallway near our floor.
She looks like she has left from somewhere that cost her something. I don’t ask. I have my own list of those somewhere, and I know the look of someone who does not want to talk about it yet.
“Want to grab a drink?” I find myself asking. “There is a bar across the street.”
She looks at me. Something in her face changes like she is recalculating how the night is supposed to go.
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “I would like that.”
Babylon is the kind of bar that stopped caring what it looked like a long time ago. Amber lighting. A jukebox nobody has touched tonight. We take the booth near the back.
Rose orders water. I order a beer.
“Make that two,” I tell the server before Rose can say anything.
“I don’t really drink,” Rose says.
“She won’t ask. I won’t either.” The server is already turning away.
“Different rules for anything connected to Kenyan.” I say it lightly, like a piece of campus trivia, not like something I have been quietly mapping since I arrived.
It’s obvious nothing about this place follows rules. It has its own.
The beers come. Rose takes a careful sip and holds the glass with both hands. I watch without watching.
We talk about the Plath assignment. The professor’s rubric. Easy things that take up space without asking much.
Then Rose says, after a pause. “The guy I’ve seen you with. In the quad. The tall one. Is he your boyfriend?”
I know exactly who she means.
Azriel.
I look at Rose, and I let my face do the thing it does when I’m buying time—a small tilt of the head, a mild crease between my brows.
“Which one?” I ask, playing dumb. “I tend to end up near a few people in the quad.”
“The swim captain,” she says. “But how about the other one? Dark coat. He was in the periodicals section in the library at the same time you were.”
I take a sip of my beer and keep my expression easy. A girl who ended up near someone in a library and did not think much of it because she was too busy reading what he wanted her to see.
“Honestly, I couldn’t tell you his name,” I say. “He was just there. We barely spoke.”
This is the version of the truth I’m offering her. Not a full lie. What I am leaving out is that I know who he is, and that I have been thinking carefully about what his presence on this campus means.
Rose looks at me for a moment.
I hold a convincing look. Open. Curious. A scholarship girl from Delaware still finding her feet is what I’ll go with.
“The one in the quad. I’m not sure if you know but his name is Azriel,” she says. “He’s a hybrid student. Mostly online. He tutors.”
“Oh.” I let the right amount of mild interest cross my face. “So that’s who he is.”
A beat passes between us.
“He’s nice to look at,” I say.
The corner of Rose’s mouth tilts to almost a smile.
“Be careful,” she says quietly. Just that. Like a warning she is not going to explain.
I file it away. Rose knows something about Azriel she won’t tell me. I know something about Azriel I won’t tell her.
We’re sitting in a bar booth, having a perfectly ordinary conversation about a man we both understand more than we are saying.
This, I think, is what two people who want real friendship look like when it starts and who have both learned to protect first and explain later.
“What about you?” Rose asks. “Where did you transfer from?”
“Delaware,” I lie. “Applied for a transfer and got a scholarship based on my GPA. I couldn’t say no.”
My eyes probably dim a little when I say it. They always do. Delaware is the clean answer between Roman and here, long enough to build a record, short enough to ask no follow-up questions.
“Nothing special,” I add. “Flat. Quiet. Good for studying.”
Rose nods. She doesn’t push. She Seems the type of person who understands that stories arrive in their own time.
We stay for another hour.
The bar fills with students from the swim meet, happy and loud, a different world from our booth at the back. We talk about going shopping, even if we probably don’t have money.
By the time we leave, we have established, without naming it, that we are going to look out for each other.
I think Rose might be too. In a way to protect someone who doesn’t deserve to be taken advantage of.
On the walk back to the dorm, she says, “The party is Thursday.”
“I know,” I say.
“I don’t have anything to wear,” she says. Flat. Just a fact.
“I have a dress,” I say. “And a jacket. Come to my room before we go. I think it would look good on you. I mean it.”
She looks at me with the wariness of someone not used to being offered things without a cost. I have a couple of dresses Roman bought me when I lived with him that I brought just in case. It’s not much, but I’m glad I could offer it to her.
“Are you sure?” she says.
“Yes. And don’t thank me. It’s nothing.”
She nods once. We walk the rest of the way in silence.
At the fork where our hallway meets the stairwell, she stops. “Same time Thursday?” she says.
“Come by my room at seven.”
“Alright,” she says and walks toward her room.
I stand in the hallway for a moment. The building is cold and dark, and I feel, unexpectedly, like something has shifted.
She knocks at seven on the dot.
I have the dress already laid out on the bed—the fitted black one, with the leather jacket folded beside it and my over-the-knee boots on the floor. I knew she would come exactly when she said she would.
She is wearing her usual dark jeans and hoodie, her hair pulled back. She looks at the dress on the bed through the open door, and something in her expression shifts with surprise.
“I have never worn anything like that,” she says.
“Good. Come in, and I can do your makeup.”
I have her sit on the edge of the bed, and I draw her eyeliner, then add a sweep of foundation and something along her cheekbones. She sits very still while I work.
When I turn her toward the mirror, she studies herself for a long moment.
I watch her look.
“You look gorgeous,” I say.
She meets my eyes in the reflection. “So do you.”
I am wearing my black skinny jeans and a long-sleeve pink crop top. My strawberry-blond hair is down. Red lipstick.
She looks at the five inches of thigh the dress reveals above the boot.
“You have the legs for it,” I say before she can talk herself out of it.
I insist on the Uber. She tries to object, but I don’t let her. I still have a bit of cash I took from Roman before I left. It’s not much, but it was enough to get me here and have some left for little things.
The house on Fletcher Street announces itself before we reach the door, bass through the walls, voices, the vibration of a space full of people who have decided not to be careful tonight.
Two guys hold the door with wide smiles when they see us coming up the pathway.
I take Rose’s hand. I pause at the threshold the way I always pause when it’s an unfamiliar place, the quiet inventory of exits and who is watching whom before I allow myself forward.
Rose doesn’t; she walks in ahead of me with the ease of someone who has been in enough rooms that she has stopped hoping the next one will be different and has simply decided to be in it anyway.
I follow her inside as she takes the lead. We find the edge of the room; we grab a couple of empty cups as we scan the space.
Neither of us is watching the party so much as reading it, which is a different thing entirely.
“This is a skill,” I say.
“Which one?”
“Not looking like you’re looking.”
She smiles. “I learned it young.”
“Me too,” I say.
I pour us a drink straight from the bottle. The rum is sweet and not unpleasant.
Two guys come over from the kitchen—football build, tall, large hands, the type who have never had to worry whether walking toward someone was safe.
One with green eyes. The other the color of chocolate. The one with green eyes watches Rose with interest.
I talk to Brown Eyes about nothing in particular. He is harmless and does not expect anything, which is its own kind of relief. I am aware of Rose beside me the whole time, scanning the room with the same peripheral attention I use.
An hour in, the air changes.
Saint is near the far wall. Dark hoodie. Bandanna. Not drinking. Watching the room with the expression of someone who arrived for a reason and is working toward it.
His eyes find me in approximately three seconds.
He doesn’t move toward me. He simply looks, and I look back, and the space between us does nothing to change the quality of it. It’s charged.
Rose follows my gaze not recognizing him, “Who is that?” she asks.
“Complicated,” I say.
She looks at him for a moment. Then back at me. “The way he looks at you,” she says quietly, “is not complicated. That is the simplest thing in this room. Wait…isn’t he the guy from the library?”
I look away.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t let the complicated part talk you out of the simple part,” Rose says. She is looking at the room as she continues, “I think that is what they count on. That we do their work for them.”
I don’t ask who she means by they. I look back toward the wall. He still hasn’t moved.
Every man who has ever had a reason to be near me has used it. Every one. The reason was always the door into something else, something I had not agreed to yet, and by the time I understood, I was already inside it.
Saint has his reasons, but he stays across the room.
Rose is right. Him watching me is the simplest thing here. I just don’t know how to let simple things be simple.