I Don't Want to Be Friends

  Right.

  Still, she couldn’t avoid looking at the buildings, the halls, and the familiar faces of her fellow Computer Science students with a bit of ruefulness as she walked into her first class of the day.

  The professors, however, didn’t seem to share any of her nostalgic musings. Her schedule was pretty packed already, and each of her instructors opened their lectures with a right-off-the-bat, we-don’t-want-to-waste-any-time teaching approach, which didn’t leave Haley much time to romanticize over the past and the future as she was barely able to keep up with the present.

  So much so that the end of the last lecture of the day came almost as a surprise. All melancholy lost and glad the day was over, when Haley walked outside the main SEAS building, the sun warmed her skin, and the air still smelled like summer.

  Smiling, she fished her phone out of her bag.

  Scott picked up on the second ring. “Hi, babe.”

  “Hey, how’s my favorite patient?”

  “Tired.”

  “You didn’t overdo it today, did you? The doctors said you should take it slow.”

  “I did, I promise… Just had a long day.”

  “Yeah, me, too. Where are you now?”

  “Crossing Harvard Yard as we speak. You?”

  “I was heading toward your place, but I’m too tired to cook. What do you say we grab a bite together?”

  “Perfect, also because I suspect we left an empty fridge at home.”

  “It was David’s turn to go grocery shopping.”

  “And I’m sure he’ll go, but I’m hungry now and who knows when he’ll be back.”

  “Yeah, I’m starving, too. Meet me at the bookstore?”

  “Perfect.”

  “I’ll get to you in five.”

  ***

  If the day could’ve been described as one of the last of summer when they entered Pinocchio’s to grab a square-cut slice of pizza, the weather had definitely switched to “Hello, fall” when they walked out.

  “Oh, it’s raining!” Haley shouted, opening the restaurant’s door to get out.

  She made to run under the downpour, but Scott grabbed her waist and pulled her close to him—her back to his chest—under the shelter of the restaurant ledge. “Come here, silly,” he murmured. “You’ll get all wet.”

  Haley struggled to breathe, trapped in his grip. No, not trapped… only torn. Splintered in two. One part of her wanted to be exactly where she was: warm and dry, safely wrapped in Scott’s arms. Secure, protected. But there was another part of her that wanted to run free in the rain, to be wild, spontaneous, and who cared if she got wet…

  “It’s only water…” a familiar voice whispered inside her head.

  Haley tried to stop the thought before it took shape in her mind, but she was too late. Already an image of David standing under a summer storm and beckoning her to join him had invaded her thoughts, clear as day.

  His dark, wet hair plastered to his forehead as he caught her wrists and held her hands close to his chest. The intense look in his eyes as he leaned his head down. The phantom of his lips on her forehead after he’d kissed her. A whispered promise: “The next time we kiss, you’ll want to just as much as I do now…”

  And then, his rage. “You’re a liar, Haley. You’re lying to me, and you’re lying to Scott, and most of all you’re lying to yourself.”

  And the dark emotions in his eyes as he’d made another promise.

  “I won’t go away, Haley. I’ll always be here for you.” David’s words echoed inside her head with the same intensity as if he were saying them to her now. “I love you.”

  Haley leaned back against Scott, gripping his arms more firmly. No, she definitely couldn’t think about that day… not now… not ever…

  Eight

  Alice

  On the first day of school, Alice woke up with a start long before the alarm clock was scheduled to go off. On impulse, before even fully opening her eyes, she grabbed her phone and checked her texts. Jack had disappeared on her the day before, and she’d gone to bed worried. It wasn’t like him not to reply to her messages or at least to reach out to wish her a good night.

  As soon as she touched the screen, a multiple text notification appeared. Alice sighed in relief and opened the chat. Unfortunately, the unlocked phone revealed two clipped, not so comforting, possibly I-don’t-love-you-anymore speech bubbles:

  No

  See u there

  No ‘good night,’ no kiss, no ‘I love you.’ Alice scrolled up to her part of the chat.

  Hey, you

  Where have you been all day?

  Excited about school tomorrow?

  I could’ve used another week vacation

  Want to grab a coffee before class?

  Jack, are you there?

  Guess not

  I’m going to bed

  Night

  :*

  Love you

  She honestly didn’t see where she’d gone wrong with her texts. Okay, she’d asked him where he was twice, but only because he hadn’t hit her back. That couldn’t be labeled as oppressive or clingy, right? So what was up with him? Was he already getting tired of her? No, impossible. This was the old, insecure Alice talking. Jack’s Ice was confident her boyfriend loved her. So why was Jack being such a—Okay, let’s stop right there… Keep calm and don’t insult the boyfriend. You’re going to see him in a few hours and everything will be fine.

  I hope you’re right, Alice concluded her mental rant with herself.

  After a quick breakfast and a gigantic cup of coffee, she put extra care in choosing her outfit and doing her hair and makeup, feeling half-silly, half-cute. After all, Jack had now seen her in every possible state: dressed up, down, not at all, with spot-on makeup, with morning-after panda eyes. Maybe he hadn’t seen seriously hangover Ice yet, but that was it.

  Ready and pampered, Alice walked to the Science Center, enjoying the still warm sunrays of late August. Along the department hall, she passed a boy and a girl—clearly freshmen, from the way they stared around themselves, disoriented—and shook her head with fondness. She remembered another couple of freshmen three years ago, who’d stood with their heads bent close over a map, trying to figure out where the hell they were supposed to go on their first day of school.

  Not needing to look at a map anymore, and alone, Alice navigated the corridors and stairs of the building with the casualness and confidence reserved for senior students. The first lesson of the day was a large one, and so it took place in one of those movie-theater type classrooms: rectangular—longer than it was wide—with sloped floors and rows of chairs with attached mini-desks on each level.

  Alice poked her head inside to check if Jack had already arrived. For Chemistry major students, this was the auditorium where most of the large classes took place, and they had a favorite spot: the first and second chairs in the center, next to the stairs, three rows back from the front. No one was sitting there yet, so Alice quickly hopped down the steps to grab the two seats. She sat in the one farther away from the stairs, placing a notebook on the other one to save it for Jack.

  Once settled with her desk up and notepad ready to take notes, Alice turned toward the back of the room to search for her missing boyfriend. Nothing. She pulled her phone out of her bag—five to nine, and still no sign of Jack.

  Alice was about to send him another text asking where he was, when a quick succession of flashbacks passed through her mind. They all involved Jack complaining about girls who “kept texting him and didn’t get the message” while he tried to ghost them. Most of his breakups had consisted of him simply disappearing until the poor girl eventually did get the message.

  Am I that girl now?

  A lump of dread clogged Alice’s throat, and she had to swallow. With clammy hands, she grabbed her water bottle and sipped a few gulps to calm herself. Not that it worked very well. Especially since the professor—Mr. Harrison,
a new guy—had just walked down the stairs and Jack was still MIA.

  It wasn’t like Jack to be late. Had something happened to him? Horrible accident scenarios started playing in her head. But then she remembered that Jack had replied to her texts. No matter how short, unsatisfying, and unloving his reply had been. So her boyfriend probably wasn’t lying in a hospital somewhere. That was something, at least.

  He could still be at the gym. The basketball team had an informal meeting scheduled that morning. That fresh intel came from Haley—whose boyfriend had not gone incommunicado—but the meeting was supposed to be only a pep talk, and it should’ve ended well before their 9 a.m. class started.

  Whatever Jack’s reason for being missing, texting him now that Harrison had arrived wasn’t an option anymore. With the advent of social media and other distracting apps, smartphones had officially become teachers’ number one public enemy. All professors seemed to lose their bearings at the mere sight of one in the hands of a student in their classes. So, not wanting to destroy her participation score on the very first lecture, Alice promptly stashed the offending piece of smart tech away.

  All throughout the lesson, however, she sneaked glances behind her shoulders whenever Harrison was busy writing on the blackboard. Eventually, on her eighth or ninth try, she spotted Jack sitting in the last row, his face half-hidden in the shadows. He was looking straight ahead and gave no sign of having seen her.

  She kept looking at him for as long as she dared, but she had to turn back to the front of the room without having met his eye. This made no sense. Why was Jack sitting back there? Well, he could’ve arrived so late that he hadn’t wanted to attract too much attention toward himself by walking down the stairs.

  But usually, whenever Jack was late for class—which happened a lot once regular practice with the team started, and he had to run to lectures straight from the gym—he’d wait for whatever professor to turn around and jump into the chair she’d saved for him at the first good occasion.

  Not today, it seemed.

  For the next hour and a half, Alice wasn’t able to concentrate on the lesson. Not a word of what Harrison said filtered through her mental noise. By the end of class, she had no idea how they were going to be graded, how many midterms they’d have, when—if—there was going to be a group project, if the groups would be decided by the students or assigned, and when the first homework was due. Not to mention the actual content of the lecture. The board was filled with molecular structures, and Alice had no clue what they were supposed to do.

  For the entire morning, there’d only been one recurring thought drilling a hole through her brain. Jack was mad at her. He was clearly avoiding her… putting distance between them. Why? Why? Why? Why? The question kept pushing on her skull from the inside-out and left no space for anything else.

  Familiar with Jack’s avoidance techniques, Alice shot out of her seat the second Harrison dismissed them and ran up the stairs, barely managing to catch up with him as he walked out of the class.

  She grabbed him by the elbow. “Hey.”

  Jack turned toward her and didn’t smile. “Hi.”

  Alice came close to kiss him, but he pulled free of her grip, saying, “Not here. It’s not professional.”

  Professional? They’d been working together at a pharmaceutical company all summer, and Jack had had no problems kissing her in the hallways. And this was only school. True, it was their first day of class as boyfriend and girlfriend, and they hadn’t discussed an on-campus PDA policy… but… Jack had never refused to kiss her. Except… that day at the library, when she’d first tried to kiss him and he’d turned her down without room for interpretation.

  Alice forced the déjà vu away and vowed to keep calm and try not to kill her boyfriend. “Why didn’t you come sit next to me?” she asked in a neutral tone.

  “I was late. I didn’t want to come down to the front row with the professor looking.”

  “That never stopped you before.”

  “I knew the teachers. Harrison is new.”

  It all sounded so reasonable, so plausible, and also so much bogus. Alice couldn’t shake the feeling Jack was lying to her. She was about to call him out on it when he spoke again.

  “Let’s go, we’re going to be late for our next class.”

  Seething inside, she followed him along the hall to their next lesson—a lab this time. Even though they shared a station, the situation didn’t improve one bit. Jack didn’t look at her once and didn’t speak a word the entire time unless it was related to the experiment they were conducting. And by now, Alice was so mad she was fine with not talking to him. She took it out on the lab equipment instead, handling the various alembics and test tubes with far less care than they deserved.

  If Jack wanted to be an asshole, he could be her guest. She would be an asshole right back. But, just maybe, he wasn’t the wisest to be such a jerk to his girlfriend when, with a few, well-mixed chemicals, she could cook up an explosive and torch him to the ground. Especially not when she had all the ingredients all nicely lined up in front of her.

  Steady, Alice. Keep calm and do not torch your boyfriend.

  When the lab was over, Alice decided to keep her mouth shut and see what Jack would do. They had no more classes for the day, so she was curious to see what his next excuse would be. She didn’t have to wait long.

  As soon as they stepped out of the building, Jack said, “I have to go meet Coach Morrison.”

  “Didn’t the team meet already this morning?”

  Jack shrugged. “He asked me to meet him again for lunch.”

  “Okay, see you later?”

  “Yeah, sure. I gotta go now.” He took a step backward, as if to make it clear she wasn’t getting a goodbye kiss. Not that she wanted one. Right now, all Alice wanted to give Jack was a goodbye punch. “I’ll see you around.”

  “You’ll see me around?” Her nostrils flared. “Jack, what’s up? You’ve been weird since last night—”

  “I don’t have time to do this right now.” He jogged another couple of steps back, and added, “I’ve got to go.”

  Jack turned on his heel and sprinted away.

  On the way home, Alice had to fight back tears. When she got home, she stormed inside, so angry she even scared Blue, her pet bunny, when she banged the door to her room shut. What now? Being the first day of school, she didn’t have much to do. No papers to write, no studying, no reading… nothing. She was free to stare at the ceiling and keep asking herself what she’d missed. She tried to read a book—something Madison had insisted she read—but of course not a single printed word filtered through the Jack haze.

  Eventually, the four walls of her bedroom made her so claustrophobic that she moved into the slightly more spacious living room. And that’s where Haley found her when she came home much later: sitting on the couch, staring into space, nibbling at her fingertips.

  “Hey,” Haley said, frowning at her. “What have you done to your nails?”

  “They were collateral.”

  Haley’s frown deepened. “For what? Are you alone? Is Madison home?”

  “She put her ‘go away, I’m reading’ sign on the door, so she must be in there.”

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Jack is mad at me.” Alice dropped her elbows on her knees, bouncing them up and down in a nervous gesture as she kept staring into space, waiting for an answer to appear out of thin air. “And I’ve no idea why.”

  “Could it have to do with the article?”

  Alice’s head snapped up, and she focused on her roommate, who was now occupying the armchair in front of her. “What article?”

  “The one about Peter. He gave an interview to the Chicago Sun-Times, and they’ve re-posted the piece on the team’s website. You haven’t seen it?”

  “No. I don’t regularly check the Crimson’s website.”

  “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. Scott told me about the i
nterview; I just got back from dinner with him.”

  “No, sorry, I’m not mad at you. Is Scott doing okay?”

  Haley mmm-hmmed yes, so Alice continued, “I’ve been going crazy since last night. First Jack disappeared, and then today he’s been…” Alice took a breath. “…not very nice. You think it has to do with this interview?”

  Haley shrugged. “Scott said Jack was as much fun as assembling IKEA furniture at the team meeting this morning.”

  Oh. Ooooh!

  “Do you have a link to the article?”

  “Wait.” Haley took her tablet out of her bag, unlocked it, tapped multiple times, and handed it to Alice. “The good stuff is at the bottom.”

  Alice paused a second on Peter’s picture. Well, there was no denying it: he looked dashing, smiling at the camera in his red Chicago Bulls uniform, muscular shoulders peeking out of the tank top and bright blue eyes piercing the screen. She skim-read the first part of the article and scrolled to the near end as Haley had suggested, stopping when she caught the words broken hearts. She backed up a little and started reading.

  “So, Peter, did you leave any broken hearts back in Boston?”

  “Only mine.”

  “A bad relationship?”

  “Actually, a perfect one.”

  “And what happened?”

  “My girl told me our lives were about to change. I guess she wasn’t much into the long-distance scenario.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that. Whoever that girl is, she surely let go of a wonderful man. But good news for all our single ladies here in Chicago…”

  Alice stopped reading. She returned the tablet to Haley and grabbed her phone to text Jack with a vengeance.

  Have you been horrible to me all day because of that stupid article???