I nodded, grabbing a cup of coffee. ‘Soon as I get out of my tutoring session. It ends at two.’
‘You’re such a sweetie!’ she beamed, following me to the back. ‘I’ll be back in time for you to get to your lab.’
I couldn’t help but smile in response as I stuck the photocopy in my file and left a note for my manager that I’d done so.
‘We need to find you a girl,’ Gwen said, out of nowhere. I choked on the sip of coffee I’d just taken, and Gwen thumped my back.
‘Uh …’ I stammered once I could speak. ‘Thanks, but I’m good.’
One of her pale brows rose, telling me without words what she thought of that statement. ‘You’re a good guy, Lucas.’ I must have made some expression of disbelief, because she shook her head. ‘Trust me. I’m an honest-to-God expert at finding dickholes, and you aren’t one.’
Kennedy Moore was in his usual centre-of-attention position, laughing and clueless as to what his ex-girlfriend of three years had been through two days prior. I wondered if he was even friends with the guy I couldn’t picture without having to do taekwondo forms in my head to calm down.
I slid into my back-row seat and pulled out a textbook, preparing to study for a quiz in my eleven o’clock class. Waiting for Heller to arrive so Moore and his buddies would sit down and shut up, I sketched something violent in the margin of my text. I’d often wondered what people who ended up with my used textbooks thought when they turned the page to one of my doodles. Usually, they were just designs – the product of momentary daydreaming. Sometimes, they were personal illustrations for the printed material. Rarely – very rarely – they included faces or body parts.
Heller entered by the door at the front of the classroom, snapping my attention from my pointless musing. Since Jackie had quit coming, class had grown incredibly boring. I knew the material inside out. I knew all of Heller’s jokes and humorous anecdotes. The personal touches he incorporated into his lectures made him an awesome instructor, but even so – three times was plenty for most of them, and four was bordering on torture.
‘If everyone will be seated, we’ll begin,’ he said. From my vantage point on the back row, everyone was sitting down, but he was clearly addressing someone with that statement –
Oh, God. I stared. I couldn’t do anything but stare.
Jackie – cheeks flushed, eyes wide and fixed on Heller – stood feet away from me, just inside the back door of the classroom. Suddenly, as if prodded from behind, she scampered three rows down, sliding into the only empty seat … except for the one next to me. Which would have been closer.
Maybe she hadn’t seen it. Or me.
Maybe she had.
What was she doing here?
Good thing I’d been through this lecture three times and could comfortably regurgitate it for my session later, because I couldn’t focus on a single word Heller said the entire fifty-minute lecture. It was all blah blah blah and swishes of lines on the whiteboard. Jackie didn’t appear to be faring any better, though I assumed her inattentiveness was caused by altogether different reasons than the shock I’d received from seeing her. She couldn’t seem to look up without glancing at the back of her ex’s head, which left her staring at the board – whether or not Heller was writing or diagramming graphs on it, or at the empty page in her spiral notebook – which remained unfilled the whole lecture.
She was there to drop, I thought, finally, relaxing. That’s what she was doing – dropping the class. She’d arrived too late to speak with Heller before class began, so she was sticking around to get his signature on the drop slip after it was over. Reinforcing my conclusion, she stepped down to the front at the end of class (once her ex had passed in the centre aisle – without even noticing her). After a quiet exchange with Heller, she waited for him to chat with two other students, and then followed him out the door.
I should have been relieved. No need to assume any further responsibility for her. No need to send that email I’d written this morning.
No need to ever see her again.
So why this conviction that I would surrender something irreplaceable if I let her vanish from my life?
The answer was just another question. What other choice did I have?
Just like the Halloween party, I saw her the moment she entered, taking her place at the back of my line. She was an invisible force, dragging at something equally hidden inside me. I wondered at the magnetic field we’d managed to create between us, and whether she’d feel the pull of it as she moved nearer. Maybe it was just me who felt it.
She was with the pretty redhead I vaguely recognized from the party, where they’d arrived together – Jackie in her red-hot devil costume and her friend dressed as a wolf – fuzzy ears and bushy tail, requisite skintight leotard … and granny glasses on the end of her nose. Which I didn’t get until a tall, shirtless guy in jeans and a hooded red cape jogged over, picked her up – literally – and carried her on to the dance floor.
Whenever it rained, people elected not to leave campus between classes, and the student-centre Starbucks was besieged. Snaking round two displays and trespassing into the miniscule seating area where every seat was taken, the end of the line trailed down the hallway. The rush showed no sign of letting up. I didn’t have time to be distracted, but I was, watching Jackie and her friend inch closer, one step at a time.
Her friend leaned out of line to check the wait and decided it would be too long. I thought they’d both leave, but she enfolded Jackie in a hug and darted off alone.
Jackie hadn’t noticed me, not that she’d fully focused on anything at all. Her empty gaze drifted over the other patrons or stared out the far window. Her mouth was a flat line, her pensive expression a contrast to the rainy-day smile in my sketchbook. Watching her made my heart ache, as if that organ had become linked to her emotional state, rather than targeting its primary task – keeping me alive. She checked her phone and scrolled through messages or some web page for a minute or two, before resuming her aimless gazing, shuffling forward behind a tall guy who blocked her view of me, for which I was grateful. I knew instinctively that if she looked up and saw me now, she’d turn and head for the exit.
Finally, the guy in front of her gave his order, paid and moved to the pick-up area.
‘Next,’ I said gently, rousing her from her musing.
Her lips parted, but whatever she was about to say dissolved, unsaid. A blush ignited under her skin. I held her eyes – which I noticed, now that I was staring straight into them at close range, were a bit bloodshot, as though she’d been crying recently. Surely Heller hadn’t made her cry? As much of a hard-ass as I knew he could be when necessary, I couldn’t imagine him making this girl cry because she wanted to drop a class.
My heart constricted again, attuned to her. I’d be forever associated with that night in her mind. Nothing would eliminate that fact. I scared her or reminded her – either way, she wanted to escape it. How could I ever blame her?
The girl in line behind her cleared her throat, impatient.
‘Are you ready to order?’ I grounded her with this question, pulling her back to where we were. It’s over. I wished she could read my thoughts. He’s not here. We’re not there.
She gave her order then, her voice a distorted hum that I somehow understood. I printed it on her cup, along with her name, and passed it to Eve. Late Saturday night, it occurred to me that I’d called her Jackie, when I had no cause to know her name, but there was no reason to pretend ignorance of it now.
When I looked up, she was staring at my right hand – still swathed in a light layer of gauze. Most of the blood Saturday night had been his, as I’d told her – but not all of it. Once I got home and cleaned up, I could tell how hard I’d hit him by the split, abraded skin on both sets of knuckles. The injuries were gratifying. Proof that I’d not held back. Little wonder he’d gone down and stayed there.
I rang up her drink and she handed over her card – the one I’d used to swipe her
into the dorm. The smiling girl beneath that protective laminate was incongruous with the expressions I’d seen her wear over the past few days.
‘Doing okay today?’ I asked, not recognizing the cryptic meaning until the words were between us. Damn.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, her voice still warbled.
When she took the card and receipt, my fingers grazed over hers of their own volition. She jerked her hand back as if I’d burned her, and I recalled how Saturday night, she’d made sure we didn’t touch when she moved past me into her dorm.
Was it me she feared touching now, or every guy?
I wanted to be the one to relax and unravel her, to show her the gentleness and respect she’d not received at the hands of the would-be rapist or, frankly, her ex.
I would never be that man for her, and I was all kinds of idiot to hunger for it.
‘Thanks,’ she said, her eyes confused and wary.
The girl behind her leaned too close, stating her order over Jackie’s shoulder, though I’d not asked for it yet. Jackie shied away from the physical contact. Biting back a retort to the impatient twit and taking the order, I reminded myself that I was at work, we were busy as hell, and as much as I wanted to make all of these people disappear, there was no doing it.
Our eyes met once more before she was swallowed by the crowd on the other side of the barista counter, where Eve worked her magic with manic speed and narrow-eyed ire towards anyone who grumbled about the wait time. When Jackie picked up her drink, she left without a backwards glance, and I began to wonder how many times I would lose sight of her, certain it would be the last.
8
Landon
The day started out for shit and went downhill from there. I was halfway to school when the humid morning morphed into an unforecasted thunderstorm. One minute, my clothes felt like warm, damp rags in the clammy air, and the next minute, a mass of clouds rolled in, opened up and dumped rain on my stupid ass the rest of the way to school.
When I pushed through the double doors, I cursed myself for not having turned round and headed home the minute it started raining. I couldn’t have been more lock, stock, and barrel soaked if I’d jumped into the ocean, shoes and all. The ends of my hair fixed into dripping points, like a faucet that wouldn’t turn off. The drips became streams pouring from the hem of my saturated hoodie, and from my jeans into my Vans. They squeaked and squelched as I slogged down the hall.
I blamed my bad judgement and yeah, desire to go to school – a first in the past year and a half – on Melody Dover.
The first two weeks of our project, we’d only worked together in class. And by together, I mean we sat next to each other. We barely spoke, not that I could blame all of that on her.
I had a cell phone, but not a computer, so she’d pencilled PowerPoint under her name. While we read up on climate patterns and geographic distribution individually, I began sketching maps and she scoured the Internet for images. Finally, we needed to get together to begin combining our individual sections, work on the written portion and practise the presentation.
Last night, she’d grudgingly invited me over to her house. I showered and changed clothes before setting out down the beach. The wind whipping off the gulf was cold and dry, swirling my still-damp hair into cowlicks and tangles. It riffled the pages of the sketchpad I’d used for topography sketches, threatening to tear it to pieces and fling my work into the water. I hunched into my hoodie, arm locked over the sketchpad and hands in pockets, hating Mrs Dumont and Melody Dover and whatever jackhole decided geography should be part of ninth-grade curriculum.
Melody answered the door in pink sweats and fuzzy white socks.
‘Hey. Want a Coke or something?’ Without waiting for an answer, she pushed the door closed behind me and walked into the house.
I followed, wondering at the word PINK spelled out across her ass. I arched a brow at the redundant label while eyeballing her slim hips, swinging smoothly, drawing me along until I realized we’d entered a bright kitchen the size of my grandfather’s entire house. She bent to pull two cold sodas from a lower shelf of a huge fridge and I pulled to a stop, staring. PINK was my new favourite word.
Leading me towards the granite countertop, she handed me a can and plopped her perfect ass on to a leather-topped barstool. Turning her laptop towards me, she indicated the adjacent stool and I sat, struggling to shift gears. Geography held even less allure than it had before. I hadn’t thought that possible.
She said words, and I didn’t understand them. The wind must have scrambled my brain. The wind, or the word pink. ‘Landon?’
‘Huh?’
‘Let’s see your maps.’ Her tone said she was anything but excited at the prospect. I opened the sketchbook to the first map. Her mouth dropped open. ‘Oh, my God.’
‘What?’
Her lashes swept up and then back down as she turned the page. ‘Wow. You’re … you’re an artist?’
I shrugged, releasing a relieved breath.
She turned another page. ‘Oh, my God,’ she repeated. ‘These are amazing. Are these figures tiny little people? And trees? Wow.’ She flipped slowly through the rest of them, until she turned to a blank page. Then she did something I hadn’t expected her to do. She turned back to the front of the notebook and opened it.
I reached for it, unwilling to snatch it rudely from her, but apprehensive of her examining sketches I’d never shared with anyone else. ‘Uh, that’s all the maps …’
Her mouth had fallen slightly open again, and she shook her head a little, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. I felt my face heat as her finger ran over a detailed sketch of a seagull cleaning its feathers, and then one of Grandpa, sleeping in his favourite chair.
Returning my hand to my lap, I waited while she examined each drawing, until she’d come back to the first map.
‘You should do me.’
I blinked and cleared my throat, and she reddened slightly.
‘Uh. Sure.’
‘Who’s this?’ a woman’s voice said then, startling both of us. We sprang apart and I nearly fell off my barstool.
Melody’s jaw set tight but her voice was all passivity. ‘This is Landon, Mom – he’s my partner on that geography project?’
Her mother’s gaze swept over me, and I was acutely aware of my recycled clothes, my shaggy hair, the cheap leather-banded watch on one wrist and the faded grey bandana I’d wrapped round the other. ‘Oh?’ One brow arched as her eyes, the same pale green as her daughter’s, turned back to Melody. ‘I thought Clark was in your geography class.’
‘Mrs Dumont assigned partners.’ A slight bit of defiance. Also an excuse – It’s not my fault or choice that he’s my partner.
‘Hmm,’ her mother said. ‘Well. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be in my office across the hall.’ Spinning, she disappeared through a doorway we could see from the counter.
Melody rolled her eyes – but this time, not at me. ‘I swear to God, she’s such a pain in the ass. Parents suck.’
I smiled, and she smiled back and my heart stuttered. Damn. So pretty. So out of my league. So girlfriend of some other guy.
We worked on the project for two hours, during which time she texted with Clark five times and was called by two friends. We were also spied on by her mother every fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally, she walked me to the door and glanced over her shoulder as I zipped my hoodie. ‘So maybe … I’ll walk down to your place next time?’ Her voice was soft. This defiance was to be a secret between us. ‘Mom can’t walk in on us every five minutes there. Unless your mom is worse? Which I doubt is even possible.’
I swallowed thickly and shook my head. ‘No. I mean, yeah, you can come over.’
Had I just invited Melody Dover to my house – where I had no real bedroom? Was I a total jackass? Yes and yes. But I couldn’t take it back. And I couldn’t get the idea of her in my bedroom – which was really a bed and nothing else – out of my head.
I leaped out of bed this morning, the first time my phone sounded an alarm. The sudden storm hastened the already rushed pace I’d set when I walked out the door, so I arrived way early – ten minutes before the first bell. Students weren’t usually allowed inside the building until first bell, but it was raining. They’d look like total dicks making us stand around outside.
My shoes squeaked against the linoleum, echoing in the near-empty hallways, and I knew without glancing back that I was probably leaving a trail of watery footprints. My strident footfalls were loud enough that I didn’t hear anyone come up behind me, and I was so distracted thinking about second-period geography that my usual self-preserving instincts were muted.
‘Take a dip in the ocean, Maxfield, or just piss yourself?’
I didn’t stop or turn, but I also didn’t run. Something about rabid animals and power-hungry assholes makes them chase what runs.
He grabbed my backpack and I almost shrugged out of it and kept going, but something wouldn’t let me kneel that far. I jerked round to face him and of course, he was flanked by two friends. He was almost as soaking wet as I was.
‘What do you want, Wynn?’ I sounded more composed than I felt. My heart was hammering, but I wasn’t shaking visibly.
‘What do I want?’ He stepped closer, the strap of my backpack still caught in his fist, the muscles in his neck bulging and his nostrils flaring like a bull on the verge of charging. ‘I want to make you pay for that little stunt in auto shop. I want to bring the pain and make you bleed and cry like the little bitch you are.’
I narrowed my eyes. The hell. ‘You might be able to make me bleed, but you’ll never make me cry. Crying is for cowards who can’t fight without the help of their bitches.’ I indicated his mates with a jerk of my chin, and they bristled. One of them growled.
Then a teacher rounded the corner. She slowed a bit, like she was assessing the details of the scene from a distance before judging what was taking place.
Wynn dropped my strap and sneered. ‘I’ll be watchin’ you, assface. There won’t always be someone around to save you from the whoppin’ you deserve.’ He bumped my shoulder as he passed.