When I push through the doors, I’m in a nondescript hallway—beige wall, beige tile floor—with closed offices lining both sides, and she’s nowhere in sight.
But then I spot the bathroom a few doors down.
“Lexi? Are you in here?” My words echo off the acres of white tile when I step inside. This must be one of the bathrooms the crowd uses during games. It’s huge.
“Go away, Caroline.” She’s in one of the closed stalls farther down. She sounds raw and close to tears.
I edge deeper into the room. “I wanted to make sure you were okay and to say thank you for—”
“Jesus Christ!” she shouts. “I said get out! It’s bad enough that I have to live with you; I don’t need you in my business, too.”
I suck in a breath, then turn and bolt from the room.
Chapter Nine
I hurry through the back hallways of the athletic center, trying to find my way out without going through the gym. I can’t go back in there. Derek and the Ash-holes will have to carry on without me. I’m sure they’ll be horribly disappointed.
Pausing at a corridor intersection, I force myself to breathe and look up. The exits have to be marked.
I pick a direction that feels right, like it might lead to the front, and keep walking.
Okay, so clearly, there’s something going on with Lexi and Jordan. Lexi’s getting upset wasn’t my fault.
At least that’s what I try to tell myself.
But I know better. I should have left her alone. She was very clear about not wanting to be friends. I was only trying to help, but clearly, she saw that as me barging in where I definitely was not wanted.
Panic rises in me before I can squash it. Being here, reinventing myself, it’s so much harder than I thought it was going to be. Ashmore was supposed to be my fresh start, all of us on level ground. Everyone figuring it together. Instead it feels like an intricate dance that everyone else knows the steps to, while I bob my head in the corner, jumping in every once in a while and completely floundering.
In other words, just like high school.
Finally the doors to the outside appear straight ahead of me, their windows glowing with the bright light of the sun. I feel a pulse of relief. Escape.
I know I should be trying harder. Going back into the gym with a smile and searching for Liam, like nothing ever happened. But right now my skin is too thin. I need to curl myself up in a protective ball and block out the world for a while.
On my right, a couple of the student counselors are standing at the entrance to the gym, talking to each other. And possibly keeping people from escaping. I don’t care. I’m not going back in there, swimming in that sea of noise, and they can’t make me.
I hurry down the hall and slam through the doors to the outside before the counselors can spot me and try to pull me back in.
Outside, my only focus is on getting back to my room to bury myself under the covers with my laptop and Felicity.
Except it’s not my room; it’s our room. Lexi’s probably not there yet, but she will be at some point.
How am I supposed to do this? If I’m there when she comes back, will she yell at me again? Does that mean even my room isn’t a safe place?
The thought only makes me feel more panicky, and I walk even faster, and in the process I nearly plow down someone in my path.
“Sorry,” I mumble, stepping to the side.
“Whoa.” The person-shaped roadblock puts out his hand. “Caroline?”
It’s Liam. Of course. It’s always Liam when I’m sweaty and flustered and running away.
He’s wearing another Merriman T-shirt—Tory would be so exasperated—this one with our bulldog mascot dribbling a basketball. He looks tired, his hair is rumpled, and he’s holding a large water bottle.
“I overslept,” he offers with a sheepish expression. But his gaze narrows in on me. “What are you doing out here? Are you okay?”
To my horror, my eyes well up at his kindness.
“Fine!” I say, trying to smile, like everything is normal. “Allergies!” I run a finger under each eye. Please believe me. Please let it go.
“Caroline.” He reaches out hesitantly to touch my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
And that’s all it takes for the tears to really start. Why is it always so much harder to keep yourself from crying when someone’s being nice to you?
“I . . . It’s nothing. Dumb, really.” I wipe at my damp cheeks. “I thought it was going to be easier here. I thought it would feel like home, but it’s just me in a different place.” Exactly as Dr. Wegman had said. “My orientation group was awful, and I think my roommate hates me,” I add, because that’s somehow the worst thing, the final straw on the overloaded camel.
Liam regards me for a long moment. “I don’t think my roommate has left the room since his parents dropped him off yesterday,” Liam says. “And then this morning I woke up to what I hope is a water bottle filled with apple juice on his desk.”
In spite of everything, that startles a laugh out of me. “Ew,” I say, sniffling.
“Yeah.” He chucks his empty bottle toward the wire-mesh trash can ten feet away, and it drops in neatly, the crinkle of the plastic liner the only sound.
“Nice shot.”
He waves off my acknowledgment. “No buzzer, no pressure.”
“You made the game-winning basket against Fiatville,” I remind him. “From half-court.”
His face lights up. “You remember that?”
“I was at the game.” In the bleachers, near the top, away from everyone else in my class. After going to the first few, Joanna refused to attend any more sporting events unless they involved the phrase “to the death.” But it was one of the last games of my senior year, and I felt the need to share in what everyone else was experiencing, even if I wasn’t a part of it. “Are you on the team here?”
The light in his expression dims. “I tried out. But there are players with actual talent here, not high school talent, so . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I say, stricken. I should never have asked.
Mouth tight, he shrugs. “No big deal.”
Except it clearly is. Oh my God, I am ruining this.
He glances from me to the entrance of Knutsen behind me, as if calculating how soon he can make his getaway.
“You’re already late. I’m keeping you from . . .” I choke, and my words die out.
But then he shakes his head as if coming to a decision. “Come on,” he says.
I blink at him, unsure I heard him correctly. “What?”
He jerks his chin in the direction of across the street. Away from Knutsen, away from Brekken, too. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Then it clicks. “I don’t want to go to the dean or my advisor or—”
“No, not there,” he says. “Somewhere else. Away from here.” Then he starts across the street.
I should probably say no, pretend everything is great, and hope he forgets about my hysterical breakdown after a couple of days. I want him to like me, not feel sorry for me.
But it’s Liam.
So I follow.
• • •
Liam leads me off campus to a Starbucks a few blocks away.
I hurry to catch up with him as he’s holding the door open for me. “What are we doing here?”
“Almost everyone else goes to the union or the Broken Mug on the other end of campus,” he says, as if that’s an explanation.
The overpowering smell of coffee, immediately familiar and reassuring, washes over me as soon as I step inside. If I closed my eyes, I could be back at the Press, the hole-in-the-wall coffee shop that Joanna and I used to hang out in sometimes after school. A place that I, weirdly enough, miss at the moment. Things seemed simpler then, and there was still the prospect of college, like a fairy-tale land, where everything would be perfect.
Liam points me toward a table in the corner and then gets in line.
A few minutes later he’s back
. He sits across from me with a paper coffee cup in one hand and an oversized plastic cup that seems to be mostly whipped cream and caramel drizzle in the other.
I never pictured him as a Caramel Macchiato Frap type of guy.
“Here.” He offers me the napkin that’s wrapped around the paper cup.
Suddenly I’m aware of the dampness on my cheeks and that my nose is on the verge of dripping. “Thanks. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. I have three sisters. Someone is always crying at my house,” he says.
“Three? Wow,” I say, though I already knew that. The newspaper wrote an article on him when the basketball team went to state. There are five kids in his family. He has one older sister and two younger. And a brother in there somewhere.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m the middle child. Only one brother. Mason, he’s one of the twins.”
Once I’m done drying my face and—ugh—blowing my nose, he pushes the big whipped-cream-and-caramel-striped thing toward me.
“It’s what Stella drinks when she’s upset. Well,” he amends, rolling his eyes, “upset enough that she doesn’t care about calories.”
I frown. I’m not Stella’s biggest fan, and she definitely was paranoid about her looks and her weight—I witnessed it every day in the gym locker room, her studying her reflection in the mirror with an intensity that suggested there would be a test on it later—but I knew that part of that, at least, was about him. Liam likes my hair like this. Liam hates this skirt. Every other word was about him. I was jealous at the time.
Still, it was nice of him to get it for me. I take a cautious sip from the straw, and it’s not, thankfully, as syrupy as I imagined.
“Do you think you made a mistake coming here?” he asks, fidgeting with the cardboard sleeve on his coffee.
I stare at him.
“I’m wondering if I did,” he says, his mouth twisting in a grimace.
“H-how? Why?” I can’t get out more than one word at a time, my shock is so great. He looked like he was having the time of his life last night. Fitting in way better than I was. Well, except for those girls laughing.
“No,” he says. “You’ll think it’s lame.”
“I won’t,” I say fiercely. Too fiercely.
Liam laughs, holding his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay.” He pauses. “I begged my parents for years to let me go here,” he says. “My cousin Josh went to Ashmore.”
I remember, suddenly, Liam wearing an Ashmore sweatshirt as early as sophomore year. That day that I tried to go up to him and his friends at the bake-sale table, in fact. (I wanted to ask for a lemon bar but couldn’t get the words out with all of them looking at me. Liam was nice as always, but Stella made fun of me. And Donielle thought I was deaf and tried signing to me. It was a disaster.)
“Josh used to tell stories and show me the pictures on his phone at Christmas. He loved it. It looked awesome. And even then, when I was like thirteen, I was ready to be gone. There are five kids in my family, and my older sister is out of the house, and my parents are always working. Brynn has like a hundred activities every other day, and the twins have a bunch of health stuff because they were so premature, so it’s like someone always needs something. A breathing treatment, a ride to ballet class, or shoes that need to be tied.”
He grimaces. “I know that makes me sound like a selfish asshole. But I wanted a chance to get away, start somewhere new where I didn’t have all these attachments and obligations. I mean, I’ve been friends with the same people since kindergarten. We tell the same stories, do the same fucking thing every weekend.”
It sounds perfect to me—exactly what I want, actually. Friends, attachments, obligations. But I can understand longing for something different.
“Anyway, I mowed lawns and worked four different jobs during the summers to help pay for it. And they eventually decided that if it meant that much to me, I could go, even though they still needed my help at home. But now that I’m here . . .” He hesitates. “I’m not so sure. I don’t know anyone here. I’m not used to that.”
My mind immediately summons the image of those two girls at the party walking away from him. That would never have happened in high school. Plus, Tory’s disdain for him as a freshman and wearing the wrong thing . . . yeah. Liam Fanshaw is not king of the castle here.
“It’s hard being new,” I confirm.
He looks at me with a new glimmer of respect. “I guess I never realized how hard.” He takes a deep breath. “And the dumb thing is, now that I’m here, all I keep thinking about is home. I wonder what my friends are doing. Where Stella is,” he says, with a shrug, as if trying to minimize it.
He’s still in love with her. I try to swallow my disappointment, but it’s a lump in my throat that won’t go down.
“I mean, I used to go to basketball camp for a week and never think twice about home. But this . . .”
“It’s because it feels more permanent. Because you’re not going back in a week,” I say.
“Yeah. I guess,” he says. Then he takes a long sip of his coffee. “What about you?”
That catches me off guard. “What about me?” I ask, eyeing him warily.
“I told you my sad story; now you tell me yours,” he says.
“What makes you think I have one?” I ask, folding a napkin carefully into fourths.
“I have never seen anyone more miserable at a party,” he says. “You might as well have been reporting to detention or something. Why did you go, anyway? I didn’t think that was your kind of scene.”
I stiffen. “Maybe I want it to be my scene.”
“Right.”
“I’m serious!” I fold my arms across my chest. “What’s so wrong with me that I couldn’t belong there?”
“Whoa, Caroline!” he says. “I wasn’t saying there was anything wrong with you, just that you didn’t look like you were having fun.”
I slump in my chair. He’s right; I wasn’t. “It’s complicated.”
“Come on, Caroline,” he says, sitting back in his chair. “I showed you mine.” He grins, and I blush in spite of myself.
The truth is that I already feel closer to him, like there’s a bond forming between us, after what he shared. Maybe if I do the same, he’ll feel it too. After all, I don’t think Felicity and Ben would have ever figured out how to make it work without those first vulnerable talks, in the stairway (where she confesses that she followed him to New York) and on the rooftop (where they talk about seeing the city in the snow).
I can’t—I won’t—tell him everything, but a little bit probably won’t affect my plan.
“After we moved, I never really found my place,” I say slowly. “And my mom was worried about me. After she and my dad split up, she moved us to take a new job. I think she was freaking out that I wasn’t fitting in in Arizona, and that it was her fault. One night she was crying about it, and I . . .” Careful, Caroline. “I felt like a total freak. I didn’t end up making many friends, so high school sucked. I decided that I needed to start over, and here I am,” I finish.
There. The vague shape of the truth, with the embarrassing details excised.
Except Liam is now leaning back in his chair, his stare pinning me to my seat. I start to squirm.
“Jesus, Caroline,” he says with a laugh. It’s not mean-sounding. Not exactly. “Why didn’t you just go out? Talk to people?”
“It’s not that easy,” I argue. “How are you supposed to go out when you don’t have friends?”
“Not even to Fetterman’s party junior year?”
“I wasn’t invited.”
Liam looks at me in disbelief. “No one’s ever invited to blowouts like that. If you hear about it, you show up. That’s it.”
“Really?” I ask.
“So now you’re here and trying to start over,” he says. “Trying to make friends.”
“Yeah.” I blush.
He gives a low whistle. “Caroline, it’s not that hard to meet people—” h
e begins.
“Of course it’s not hard for you,” I say, frustrated. “You can talk to people. And everyone loves you.”
Liam picks at the cardboard sleeve on his cup, avoiding my gaze. “Not everyone,” he says, his jaw tight. “And definitely not here.”
I don’t know what to say. What I want to do is reach across the table and touch his arm. But I’m not sure if I should.
“So what’s your plan?” he asks.
“My plan?”
“Oh, come on, you can’t tell me you don’t have a plan,” he says. “I’ve known you for years.”
“You have not,” I say immediately, even though the idea brings a rush of pleasure. Is there anything better than someone saying that they know you? Especially when you thought you were invisible?
“Okay, I kind of knew you. You always had the answers in class, even if it was hard for you to say them,” he points out.
I open my mouth to protest and then clamp it shut. “I had a plan,” I admit. “To be a new version of me, to fit in and make friends.” I leave out Phase II, the part about being his friend and where I hope that might, one day, lead.
He chews his lower lip in thought. “You have to double down and get out there. More parties. More social stuff. It’s like that . . .” He pauses, snapping his fingers while he thinks. “What’s it called when someone’s afraid of spiders so they dump the person into a tank full of tarantulas?”
“A nightmare?”
He ignores me and then it clicks. He points at me. “Immersion!”
“Immersion therapy?” It sounds vaguely familiar.
“Yes, that,” he says, looking pleased. “And I can help you. I’m not exactly busy these days.”
I stare at him, stunned. This is exactly what I was hoping for. Sort of. I wanted our friendship to evolve more organically, but this could work.
Unless he’s only doing it because he feels sorry for me.
I’m caught suddenly between the desire to say yes, to get more time with Liam, and the humiliation of needing his help. I mean, maybe it could work. Felicity tutored Ben, after all. It’s just a bit of role reversal with us.