FIFTEEN
When Cath saw it was Levi standing outside the door, she was so happy to see his always-friendly face, she just let him in. She didn’t even bother telling him that Reagan wasn’t there.
“Is Reagan here?” he asked as soon as he was in the room. Levi’s face wasn’t friendly. His forehead was furrowed, and his little bow lips were drawn tight.
“No,” Cath said. “She went out hours ago.” She didn’t add: With a giant guy named Chance who plays lots of intramural football and looks like he could play John Henry in the movie version of John Henry.
“Fuck,” Levi said, leaning back against the door. Even angry, he was a leaner.
“What’s wrong?” Cath asked. Was he finally jealous? Didn’t he know about the other guys? Cath always figured he and Reagan had an arrangement.
“She was supposed to study with me,” he said.
“Oh…,” Cath said, not understanding. “Well, you can still study here if you want.”
“No.” Angry. “I need her help. We were supposed to study last night and she put me off, and the test is tomorrow and—” He hurled a book down on Reagan’s bed, then sat at the end of Cath’s, looking away from her but still hiding his face. “She said she’d study with me.”
Cath walked over and picked up the book. “The Outsiders?”
“Yeah.” He looked up. “Have you read it?”
“No. Have you?”
“No.”
“So read it,” she said. “Your test is tomorrow? You have time. It doesn’t look very long.”
Levi shook his head and looked at the floor again. “You don’t understand. I have to pass this test.”
“So read the book. Were you just gonna let Reagan read it for you?”
He shook his head again—not in answer, more like he was shaking his head at the very idea of reading the book.
“I told you,” he said. “I’m not much of a book person.”
Levi always said that. I’m not a book person. Like books were rich desserts or scary movies.
“Yeah, but this is school,” she said. “Would you let Reagan take the test for you?”
“Maybe,” he huffed. “If that was an option.”
Cath dropped the book next to him on her bed and went to her desk. “You may as well watch the movie,” she said distastefully.
“It’s not available.”
Cath made a noise like hunh in her throat.
“You don’t understand,” Levi said. “If I don’t get a C in this class, I get kicked out my program.”
“So read the book.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple,” Cath said. “You have a test tomorrow, your girlfriend isn’t here to do your work—read the book.”
“You don’t understand … anything.”
Levi was standing now; he’d walked to the door, but Cath wouldn’t turn to face him. She was tired of fighting. This fight wasn’t even hers.
“Okay,” she said, “I don’t understand. Whatever. Reagan isn’t here, and I have a ton of reading to do—and nobody to do it for me—so…” She heard him jerk open the door.
“I tried to read it,” he said roughly. “I’ve been trying for the last two hours. I just, I’m not a reader. I’ve … I’ve never finished a book.”
Cath turned to look at him, feeling a sudden guilty grab in her stomach. “Are you trying to tell me you can’t read?”
Levi pushed his hair back violently. “Of course I can read,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
“Well, then, what are you trying to tell me? That you don’t want to?”
“No. I—” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. “—I don’t know why I’m trying to tell you anything. I can read. I just can’t read books.”
“So pretend it’s a really long street sign and muddle through it.”
“Jesus,” he said, surprised. Hurt. “What have I ever done to make you be this mean to me?”
“I’m not being mean,” Cath said, knowing that she probably was. “I just don’t know what you want me to say—that I approve? What you and Reagan do isn’t any of my business.”
“You think I’m lazy.” His eyes were on the ground. “And I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“It’s like I can’t focus,” he said, turning away from her in the doorway. “Like I read the same paragraph over and over, and I still don’t know what it says. Like the words go right through me and I can’t hold on to them.”
“Okay,” she said.
He looked back, just far enough to face her. Levi’s eyes were too big in his face when he wasn’t smiling. “I’m not a cheater,” he said.
Then he walked away, letting the door close behind him.
Cath exhaled. Then inhaled. Her chest was so tight, it hurt both ways. Levi shouldn’t get to make her feel this way—he shouldn’t even have access to her chest.
Levi wasn’t her boyfriend. He wasn’t family. She didn’t choose him. She was stuck with him because she was stuck with Reagan. He was a roommate-in-law.
The Outsiders was still sitting on her bed.
Cath grabbed it and ran out the door. “Levi!” She ran down the hall. “Levi!”
He was standing in front of the elevator with his hands shoved into his coat pockets.
Cath stopped running when she saw him. He turned to look at her. His eyes were still too big.
“You forgot your book.” She held it up.
“Thanks,” he said, holding out his hand.
Cath ignored it. “Look … why don’t you come back? Reagan’s probably on her way.”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said.
“Did you yell at me?”
“I raised my voice.”
She rolled her eyes and took a step backwards toward her room. “Come on.”
Levi looked in her eyes, and she let him.
“Are you sure?”
“Come on.” Cath turned toward her room and waited for him to fall into step beside her. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t realize we were having a serious conversation until we were.”
“I’m just really stressed about this test,” he said.
They stopped at her door, and Cath suddenly brought her wrists up to her temples. “Crap.” She held her hands on top of her head. “Crap, crap, crap. We’re locked out. I don’t have my keys.”
“I got ya.” Levi grinned and pulled out his key ring.
Her jaw dropped. “You have a key to our room?”
“Reagan gave me her spare, for emergencies.” He unlocked the door and held it open for her.
“Then why are you always sitting in the hall?”
“That’s never an emergency.”
Cath walked in, and Levi followed. He was smiling again, but he was still obviously operating at thirty degrees below regular Levi. They might be done fighting, but he was still going to fail his test.
“So you couldn’t find the movie?” she asked. “Even online?”
“No. And the movie’s no good anyway. Teachers can always tell when you watch the movie.” He flopped down at the head of her bed. “Normally, I listen to the audiobook.”
“That counts as reading,” Cath said, sitting at her desk.
“It does?”
“Of course.”
He kicked one of the legs of her chair playfully, then rested his feet there, on the rail. “Well, then, never mind. I guess I have read lots of books.… This one wasn’t available.” He unzipped his jacket, and it fell open. He was wearing a green and yellow plaid shirt underneath.
“So, what? Was Reagan going to read it to you?”
“Usually we just go over the highlights. It helps her, too, to review it.”
Cath looked down at the paperback. “Well, I’ve got nothing for you. All I know about The Outsiders is ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy.’”
Levi sighed and pushed back his hair. Cath shuffled the pages with her thumb.… It rea
lly was a short book. With tons of dialogue.
She looked up at Levi. The sun was setting behind her, and he was sitting in a wash of orange light.
Cath turned her chair toward the bed, knocking his feet without warning to the ground. Then she rested her own feet on the bed frame and took off her glasses, tucking them in her hair. “‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house—’”
“Cath,” Levi whispered. She felt her chair wobble and knew he was kicking it. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Obviously,” she said. “‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight—’”
“Cather.”
She cleared her throat, still focused on the book. “Shut up, I owe you one. At least one. And also, I’m trying to read here.… When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had just two things on my mind.…”
When Cath glanced up between paragraphs, Levi was grinning. He bent forward to slide out of his coat, then found a new way to rest his legs on her chair and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes.
* * *
Cath had never read out loud this much before. Fortunately it was a good book, so she sort of forgot after a while that she was reading out loud and that Levi was listening—and the circumstances that got them here. An hour or so passed, maybe even two, before Cath dropped her hands and the book into her lap. The sun had finished setting, and the only light in her room was from her desk lamp.
“You can stop whenever you want,” Levi said.
“I don’t want to stop,” She looked up at him. “I’m just really”—she was blushing, she wasn’t sure why—“thirsty.”
Levi laughed and sat up. “Oh … Yeah. Let me get you something. You want soda? Water? I could be back here in ten with a gingerbread latte.”
She was about to tell him not to bother, but then she remembered how good that gingerbread latte was. “Really?”
“Back in ten,” he said, already standing and putting on his jacket. He stopped in the doorway, and Cath felt tense, remembering how sad he’d looked the last time he stood there.
Levi smiled.
Cath didn’t know what to do, so she sort of nodded and gave him the world’s lamest thumbs-up.
When he was gone, she stood up and stretched. Her back and her shoulders popped. She went to the bathroom. Came back. Stretched again. Checked her phone. Then lay down on her bed.
It smelled like Levi. Like coffee grounds. And some sort of warm, spicy thing that might be cologne. Or soap. Or deodorant. Levi sat on her bed so often, it was all familiar. Sometimes he smelled like cigarette smoke, but not tonight. Sometimes like beer.
She’d left the door unlocked, so when he knocked again, Cath just sat up and told him to come in. She’d meant to get up and sit back down at her desk, but Levi was already handing her the drinks and taking off his coat. His face was flushed from the cold, and when his coat touched her, it was so cold, she jumped.
“Five below,” he said, taking off his hat and riffling his hair until it stuck up again. “Scoot over.”
Cath did, scooting up toward her pillow and leaning against the wall. Levi took his drink and smiled at her. She set the drink carrier on her desk; he’d brought her a big glass of water, too.
“Can I ask you something?” She looked down at her Starbucks cup.
“Of course.”
“Why did you take a literature class if you can’t finish a book?”
He turned to her—they were sitting shoulder to shoulder. “I need six hours of literature to graduate. That’s two classes. I tried to get one out of the way freshman year, but I failed it. I failed … a lot that year.”
“How do you get through any of your classes?” Cath had hours of assigned reading, almost every single night.
“Coping strategies.”
“Such as?”
“I record my lectures and listen to them later. Professors usually cover most of what’s on the test in class. And I find study groups.”
“And you lean on Reagan—”
“Not just Reagan.” He grinned. “I’m really good at quickly identifying the smartest girl in every class.”
Cath frowned at him. “God, Levi, that’s so exploitive.”
“How is it exploitive? I don’t make them wear miniskirts. I don’t call them ‘baby.’ I just say, ‘Hello, smart girl, would you like to talk to me about Great Expectations?’”
“They probably think you like them.”
“I do like them.”
“If it wasn’t exploitive, you’d harass smart boys, too—”
“I do, in a pinch. Do you feel exploited, Cather?” He was still grinning at her over his coffee cup.
“No,” she said, “I know that you don’t like me.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“So, this is old hat for you? Finding a girl to read a whole book to you?”
He shook his head. “No, this is a first.”
“Well, now I feel exploited,” she said, setting her drink down and reaching for the book.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Chapter twelve—”
“I’m serious.” Levi pulled the book down and looked at her. “Thank you.”
Cath held his eyes for a few seconds. Then she nodded and pulled back the book.
* * *
After another fifty pages, Cath was getting sleepy. At some point, Levi had leaned against her, and then she’d leaned back, and it was hard to think about what was happening on that side of her body because she was busy reading.… Though there was almost an entire chapter there where her lips and her eyes were moving, but her brain wasn’t keeping track of anything but how warm he was. How warm her roommate’s boyfriend was.
One of her roommate’s boyfriends. Did that matter? If Reagan had three boyfriends, did that mean this was only one-third wrong?
Just leaning against Levi probably wasn’t wrong. But leaning against him because he was warm and not-exactly-soft … Wrong.
Cath’s voice rasped, and he sat up away from her a little bit. “Want to take a break?” he asked.
She nodded, only partly grateful.
Levi stood up and stretched. The tails of his flannel shirt didn’t quite lift up over the waist of his jeans. Cath stood up, too, and rubbed her eyes.
“You’re tired,” he said. “Let’s stop.”
“We’re not stopping now,” she said. “We’re almost done.”
“We’ve still got a hundred pages—”
“Are you getting bored?”
“No. I just feel like it’s too much, what you’re doing for me. Bordering on exploitive.”
“Pfft,” Cath said. “I’ll be right back. And then we’ll finish. We’re half done, and I want to know what happens. Nobody’s said, ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy’ yet.”
When she came back, Levi was in the hallway, leaning against the door. He must have gone up to the boys’ floor to use the bathroom. “This is weird now that I know you have a key,” she said.
She let him in, and he dropped down onto the bed again and smiled at her. Cath glanced at her desk chair, then felt his hand on her sleeve. He pulled her down next to him on the bed, and their eyes met for a second. Cath looked away as if they hadn’t.
“Look what we sell at Starbucks,” he said, holding an energy bar out to her.
Cath took it. “Blueberry Bliss. Wow. This takes me back two whole months.”
“Months are different in college,” Levi said, “especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they’re like dog months.”
She unwrapped the protein bar and offered him half. He took it and tapped it against hers. “Cheers.”
* * *
It was really late. And too dark in the room to be reading this much. Cath’s voice was rough now, like someone had run a dull knife across it. Like she was recovering from a cold or a crying jag.
At some point Lev
i had put his left arm around her and pulled her back against his chest—she’d been fidgeting and rubbing her back on the wall, and Levi just reached behind her and pulled her into him.
Then his hand had fallen back down to the bed and stayed there. Except for when he stretched or moved. When he moved, Levi would bring his hand up to Cath’s shoulder to hold her against him while he adjusted.
She could feel his chest rising when he breathed. She could feel his breath on her hair sometimes. When he moved his chin, it bumped into the back of her head. The muscles in Cath’s arms and her back and her neck were starting to ache, just from being held so long at attention.
She lost her place in the book and stopped reading for a moment.
Levi’s chin bumped into her head. “Take a break,” he said in a voice that wasn’t a whisper but was just as soft.
She nodded, and he held her left elbow while he reached his right arm across her to get the glass of water. His body curved around her for a second, then settled back again against the wall. He kept his hand on her elbow.
Cath took a drink, then set down the water. She tried not to squirm, but her back was stiff, and she arched it against him.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded again. And then she felt him slowly moving. “Here…”
Levi slid down the wall onto the bed, resting on his side, then tugged Cath down so she was lying on her back in front of him—his arm beneath her head like a pillow. She relaxed her shoulders and felt warm flannel against the back of her neck.
“Better?” he asked in his superscript voice. He was looking at her face. Giving Cath a chance to say no without having to say it out loud. She didn’t speak. Or nod. Or answer. Instead she looked down and shifted slightly toward him onto her side, leaning the book against his chest.
She started reading again, and felt Levi’s elbow curve around her shoulder.
* * *
Cath didn’t have to read very loud when he was this close. Which was good because her voice was almost gone. (Gone.) God, Levi was warm, and up close, he smelled so much like himself, it made her tear up. Her eyes were tired. She was tired.
When Johnny—one of the main characters—got hurt, Levi took a sharp breath. By that time, Cath’s cheek was on his chest, and she could feel his ribs expanding. She took a deep breath, too—her voice broke a little more, and Levi tightened his grip around her.