11. No It Girl
ELEVEN
No 'It' Girl
SHANNON
Missy rubbed her hands together, blue eyes shining, then patted the tabletop over and over until Shannon sat down with her bagel. “Okay, can I tell you now?” she asked.
Shannon shot a quick glance at her cousin’s left hand. Her fourth finger was bare, and she was suddenly more interested in the big news, since it obviously had nothing to do with an engagement. Rings and a boyfriend named William had occupied Missy’s mind since September. Shannon shook her head, remembering afresh a ring that would have made Missy’s head explode. She couldn’t make herself delete the photo evidence of how foolish she’d almost been.
“Let’s have it,” Shannon said, picking up her knife and cream cheese.
“I have a date for you.”
The knife clattered onto Shannon’s ceramic plate. “You certainly do not,” she said.
“I do.” Missy grinned. “And he’s lovely.”
“Then you go out with him.”
“He’s in calculus with William and me. They’re friends, so you should come out with us sometime.” She took a dainty sip of her tea. “See? Out with friends and favorite cousin. That’s not so bad.”
“You really don’t want me to go out with Caleb. Is that what this is about?” Shannon asked.
Missy narrowed her eyes. “ Are you going out with him? I thought you didn’t like him.”
“Oh, I definitely do not like him.”
“Then this conversation has nothing to do with him, does it?”
Shannon sighed. “I don’t want to put a bunch of effort into dating right now.”
“Maybe just come hang out and meet William’s friend,” Missy wheedled. “Let’s not call it a date. It’s just meeting someone.”
Shannon pointed the knife full of cream cheese at her cousin’s nose. “I got burned last time,” she said softly. “And I do not mean Caleb Fields. You have no clue what happened with Hayden, and trust me, you do not want to. I will date again when I’m ready, not when you are, and if you try to push me on that, I will… I will tell you what it was like sleeping with Caleb.”
Missy’s shoulders dropped. “I’m sorry,” she said, eyes welling. “I only meant to help. If you want to talk about what happened…”
“I don’t.”
“Ok, I won’t say anything else about it. It’s just that… Shan? Shannon, are you crying?”
Shannon swiped a tear from the side of her nose. “I am not.”
Missy glanced around the cafe in a panic. She hadn’t seen her cousin cry since she broke her arm falling off a trampoline in middle school. Even before the blue hair and the boots, Shannon was tough. Shannon was the girl in the family that no one worried about because she could handle just about anything, cool and calm, where Missy’s mother fretted and called to check in at least three times a week. She was physically strong—an All-State swimmer—and emotionally resilient.
And she was crying over a boy.
Missy scooted to the other side of the booth and put an arm around her. “Sweetie. I don’t know what he did, and it doesn’t matter if you tell me. I’m sorry he hurt you. It will just take some time to feel better, that’s all. You seemed to be holding up so well. I didn’t know it was like that.”
“He didn’t hurt me.”
“He… he didn’t?” Missy asked. “Then what is it?”
“He hurt other people,” Shannon said, wiping her eyes again. “Any hurt I felt at the end of it was my stupidity for not seeing it sooner. I am not falling for another man’s sweet talk, only to find out later that he’s a monster.” She faced Missy. “This is when you’re supposed to tell me I’m well-rid of Caleb Fields, too. Since he’s like that.”
“Caleb’s not a monster,” Missy said. “Look, I don’t know what Hayden did, but the way you just said it… I don’t think I’d say something that way about Caleb. I really don’t like him anymore, and I definitely do not want to hear about you sleeping with him, but there’s a difference.”
“I guess that’s comforting.”
“If you ever want to talk about what happened with Hayden, I’m here.”
“It’s really not very interesting,” Shannon lied.
Shannon said no to every other date with Hayden at first and enjoyed his polite overtures, followed by comical pouts. She didn’t particularly care if he hooked up with anyone else in the meantime as long as she had the satisfaction of not being easy. Together with Elouise, she decided he was required to make things official on social media and kiss her in front of his friends—sober—before he got any of her clothes off.
Hayden claimed to worship her for making him understand what the right girl was worth. He wooed her with generic, thoughtless gifts like roses and chocolates, which she professed to love because it didn’t harm anyone to have flowers and snacks. He stayed by her side at every party and brushed off anyone else’s attentions—at least that she could see.
Despite his displays of devotion and her silly schemes, Shannon told herself none of it mattered. It was just fun for him, so it would be just fun for her. His appetite for girls was legendary, and if she was the only one at any given moment, she probably wouldn’t be for long. But the attention and affection were more flattering than she liked to admit, and to her more skeptical friends she insisted she’d just enjoy it while it lasted. After all, she got to sit behind the bench at the stadium with Elouise instead of in the remote student section with the rest of their friends, and one time she stood next to him in a cute school hat he bought her when he was interviewed by a major sports network.
He bought her lots of things to wear on Saturdays, including a pair of diamond earrings she refused half a dozen times, then wore nonstop to make him happy. He was thoughtful, in a way, and generous with whatever he thought she wanted.
She never pestered him about jealousy or rumors—and there were many unflattering rumors about him—and was rewarded with compliments, romantic dates, and lavish attention at his convenience. After all, it was football season. Hayden didn’t have much free time, and she didn’t like to waste hers dwelling on the new, baseless suspicions that in addition to the entire relationship feeling a little unreal, something about him wasn’t quite right. For a spoiled kid from a wealthy family, he had a rough childhood, he said. The pressure as the only son was unrelenting. Football was his escape, and those other girls were nothing. Those two cheerleaders were attention-seekers. The red-haired sorority girl was a dumb groupie. Shannon was the one he needed, he said over and over.
She began to believe him.
In November, he said he loved her and repeated it often, especially when wheedling a promise she’d come to visit him in Massachusetts in December after finals to meet his family before the holidays. He was very specific about what dates she should come so she could meet everyone, and after he bought her plane tickets mentioned it was unfortunate she’d be there while he had to tend to some minor legal matters—but her support meant so much to him, and he was the luckiest man alive.
Even at his side, she was no ‘it’ girl, and the ones in the shadows—girls from parties, sororities, and cheer—waited for a moment of weakness to pounce and pry the mousy, preppy girl from their stud’s arm. They might get their claws in him for a night, but people began to talk about Hayden Hamilton changing his ways, well and truly whipped by some pretty little nobody.
Shannon sniffled one more time, dabbed her nose with a napkin, then sat up straight and brushed her fingers over her hair. “I’d rather leave that in the past, Missy, but thanks.” She nudged her uneaten bagel aside, her appetite gone. “How are classes treating you?”
“Better than first semester,” Missy said, relieved at the change of subject. “I have a couple of papers and might come your way for help around midterms.” She slapped her forehead, and Shannon jumped. “Oh, my goodness. I forgot the obvious thing. The guy in my calculus class?—”
Shannon groaned.
“No, I’m not pushing. It’s just funny. I forgot to mention you might already know him. That was the reason I figured I’d ask and we could just hang out. He said there was a girl in his writing group who looked a little like me, also named Van Pelt, and her hair was part blue.”
Shannon sliced a hand through the air. “Wait. Who from my writing group?”
Trenton McDaniel—he asked her to call him Trent—was a freshman accounting major like Missy, but Shannon remembered he knew enough to name-drop a few Philip Roth titles, and that made enough of an impression for her to agree to coffee, party of four. They stayed for an extra cup after meeting Missy and William, who disappeared early. Trent asked if she enjoyed any of Roth’s film adaptations, because The Human Stain would be playing on campus in two days.
She had seen it a dozen times, but said she would meet him there.
“How are you finding Ray Bradbury beyond Fahrenheit 451 ?” she asked as they strolled aimlessly after the film. March had come in like a lamb for once, and the evening remained warm enough for unbuttoned coats as they wandered the campus. “He and Roth both are most well-known outside our time frame.”
“That’s the intriguing part for me,” he said. “I’ve read his earlier and later stuff, so this is an opportunity to see the era for the author’s growth, not just the wider impact on American literature. How did he get from Fahrenheit 451 to A Graveyard for Lunatics , anyway? It’s a microcosm of the bigger shift.”
Shannon nodded. “I’m digging through a little of the same, but looking in reverse. I loved American Pastoral , and my roommate suggested I try The Ghostwriter because it was the first one where Roth used the Nathan Zuckerman character.”
“Decades before, right?” he asked. “ Pastoral was in the nineties.”
“Very good.” Shannon smiled and elbowed his ribs. “Yeah, it turns out the character in Pastoral is just a reincarnation of one of Roth’s own favorites, and all these earlier books become his backstory. So I’m sort of reading him in reverse, if that makes sense.”
“It does, and it’s fascinating.”
He was from Pennsylvania and rowed in the university’s crew club—a nice way, he said, to keep up an old hobby without a hyper-competitive environment. Blond-haired and blue eyed, he spoke with prep-school polish, but his shy smile offset any cocky edge, giving Shannon an overall impression of a boy her parents would approve of.
On her own terms, she decided she approved of him, too. He was earnest and inquisitive, open to banter, and quick to laugh. They swapped impressions of the other members of their group. After pouting about J.D. Salinger, Blake Sutton settled for Truman Capote so she could write about Breakfast at Tiffany’s , which she claimed to have seen a thousand times. (“She’s in for a wake-up call,” Shannon said.) Olive, the group leader, was an elementary education major and had chosen A Wrinkle in Time . Two students nearly came to blows over Dune , before one settled for Stranger in a Strange Land .
The most intriguing selection was from DeShaun Conway, the wrestler, who requested Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique .
“I want to edit his paper,” Shannon said. “Totally self-indulgent curiosity, but I’m dying to know what’s going on in that guy’s head now. He might be my new best friend.”
“I want to know what’s up with Salinger guy,” Trent said. “Caleb. When he said that stuff about how he tried and couldn’t get some of it on his own, that was raw. He put that book up there like it was a Bible, and you could just tell how much it meant to him.”
Shannon looked away. “Well, Salinger can be polarizing. There’s a reason The Catcher in the Rye is banned by people who don’t get it.” She brightened, thinking of a redirection. “Just like The Human Stain . The themes are timeless. Conversations about race happen every day. People can like it or dislike a book like that, but they shouldn’t ignore it.”
“You could say that about a lot of literature,” Trent said. “Like it or dislike it, but don’t ignore it.” He nudged her shoulder. “You could say that about most people, too.”
She smiled and looked down. “I don’t dislike you,” she said, stifling a laugh.
“So am I liked or ignored?”
She tossed her hair in an exaggeration of Blake’s frequent dramatic sweeps. “Oh, I suppose it’s too soon to say.”
“Then you give me your phone number, and I’ll send you a message that you can either like or ignore,” he suggested, eyes shining.
Her life before Hayden had been peppered with exchanges like that one. Polite and teasing, a hint of promise, in which he was always a gentleman and she was always a lady, and no one flung themselves into anyone’s arms and said fate demanded they take their clothes off. Love at first sight was simply too impractical—and the youthful, simpler Shannon who believed in a love that could change someone was as far gone as the diamond earrings she tried to place in Hayden’s hand and ended up chucking in his face at the TSA checkpoint where she dumped him.
When did it get so complicated?
Hayden entered her life as a stranger, and the more she knew about him, the less she slept at night. She never had to see him again. She was supposed to be healing, not playing hero for girls she didn’t know. She should walk away, safe and sound, to nurse her foolish pride so that one day, she could appreciate love again with someone kind and stable and normal like Trent. The slight attraction might be a step back onto the right path.
And Caleb…
Caleb was never a stranger, and he was home and chaos and ecstasy until she learned his name. Love at first sight shattered at her feet in two words’ time, and in the depths of his eyes she saw the same lightning strike of anger she felt in her own: not at one another, but at themselves for their stupid, stupid hope. The energy that pulsed in her veins and shortened her breath when she was in his vicinity in class or in the library was simply a leftover bolt from their storm.
She wasn’t anyone’s hero or trophy or Mystery Girl. She was moving on.
“Send me a message,” she said to Trent, and winked. “And I’ll think about it.”