"Good luck with that. I hope you find someone." I fought to keep the sadness out of my voice.
"I already have."
I swallowed hard and stared at Mia, wishing I were a baby with a daddy who doted on me. Life would be so much simpler. Babies didn't even know the meaning of heartbreak.
"You," he said.
I turned and stared at him. "But—"
"You owe me two. I'm calling in one now. I need you to pretend to be my girlfriend. Just for Dad's Weekend."
I hesitated. This was such a bad and horribly dangerous idea.
"You promised, El. Whatever I needed, whenever. I need this."
I swallowed hard. I had promised, but I'd thought any request would be more of the "my battery died, come pick me up or give me a jump" kind of thing.
Just then the door to the office swung open and Karen breezed in. "That was the longest dentist visit. Never crack a tooth, Ellie. Half my mouth is numb." Which explained why she was talking funny.
In unison, Logan and I held our fingers to our mouths and shhhhed her, pointing to the baby.
"Oh, oh, oh," Karen whispered as she walked over and smiled down at Mia. "What a little angel. Where's Jason?"
"At a meeting," I said as Karen took her coat off. "He'll be back soon."
She nodded just as the phone rang and we all jumped.
As Karen lunged for it, I gently rocked Mia's car seat and turned to Logan. "Okay."
"You'll be convincing?"
I rolled my eyes. "Totally."
He grinned. "I'll be in touch with the details."
"You mean you'll be giving me a list of things your dad does and doesn't approve of?"
His grin deepened.
Chapter Eleven
I was so stunned I had to talk to someone. After work, I headed directly to Nic and Taylor's room, texting Nic to tell her I had to talk to her. Tay didn't get off shift from the dining hall until six. Nic met me at the door. Their room was the envy of the floor, mostly because Nic's aunt was an interior designer and had furnished the room with sample eighteen-inch carpet squares taped together on the bottom to form really cool wall-to-wall designer carpeting. The rest of us had to make do with area rugs over the ancient, cold linoleum that probably dated to two centuries back.
The equally ancient steam heat was on, banging the pipes and fogging the windows.
"What's up?" Nic closed the door behind us. "Even your text sounded excited."
"More like confused. I'm officially Logan's fake girlfriend." I dumped my backpack and fell into her dish chair as I spilled the details, every minute detail complete with insecure commentary. Except for Mia being my sister—I left that part out. "So he called in a favor and practically demanded that I play his girlfriend for the weekend. What do you think it means?"
"Other than you're crazy?" Nic was sitting on her bed. She shook her head. "Fake girlfriend? Have you never watched a romantic comedy? That way leads to disaster."
"And then a happy ending."
"This is real life," Nic said. "In real life we don't scam dads by pretending to be girlfriends of guys who have issues. Anyway, what's in this for you? And what happened to his mysterious commitment issues?"
"There's nothing in it for me," I said. "I'm keeping my promise."
"Uh-huh."
"And his issues?"
I shrugged. "Still there. We're just friends."
She gave me thin, suspicious eyes. "I thought that was the point—you two can't be friends. You want my opinion?"
She didn't wait for me to answer.
"This way leads to madness. He's stringing you along, keeping you on the hook. And when you go too far afield, he reels you back in. The timing is awfully suspicious, don't you think?
"He sees Dex kiss you and then, suddenly, there Logan is, asking you to pretend to be his girlfriend. As a favor. Right.
"First this Austin you told us about and then Logan. I hate to say this, but you have terrible taste in men. I thought you weren't over Austin, anyway. I thought that was the issue."
"Time has passed," I said. "The heart heals."
"This is a bad idea, the worst—"
The door swung open and Tay charged in waving her phone. "I just had the best shift ever!" Her eyes were bright and shining, her cheeks flushed, and she looked like she'd just jogged the two flights of steps from the dining hall to her room.
"Best shift ever, seems like there's some kind of work craziness virus going around." Nic shifted on her bed. "Don't tell me someone asked you to be his fake girlfriend, too?"
Taylor shot us both a confused look. "No. But Jordan, the cute guy who works the grill, was on shift with me!"
Yeah, we all knew all too well who Jordan was. In fact, we pretty much knew his life story. Taylor talked about him non-stop. A shift she worked with him was heaven. A shift without him was hell. We all had our favorite hot dining hall guys. We picked them out for fun the first week of class and argued over their attributes. Nic and I were happy to worship our dining hall guys from afar like eye candy on a shelf, but Tay had actually fallen for hers. Our tastes were wide and varied.
While the three of us agreed Logan was hot, we argued the various merits of our dining hall guy faves. I didn't see what Taylor saw in Jordan, but that was me.
"He made me a heart-shaped grilled cheese!" Taylor swung her phone around so we could see.
"You took a picture of it?" Nic leaned in for a closer look. "Wow! That's a good one."
A heart-shaped grilled cheese sandwich was a real score in dining hall terms. It was made by cutting the sandwich in half diagonally and then flipping one half of the sandwich so that the rounded side made a heart with the other half. It took like an extra second and a half to make. But in a busy dining hall, mostly you were lucky to get your sandwich slapped on your plate so that the cheese didn't ooze over the side. Since the beginning of the semester, when we saw a girl—whom we later learned was a class-one bitch—get one from Nic's hot dining hall guy, Taylor, Nic, and I had all been angling for one. Until now, our flirtatious efforts with the dining hall guys of our choice had yielded exactly zero heart-shaped grilled cheeses.
I squealed with Taylor and gave her a high-five. "You did it! You are the queen. Did he ask for your number?"
"Not yet. But it's only a matter of time." She had a devilish look in her eye. "I haven't told you the best part…"
"It gets better?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah." Taylor pressed the picture of the heart-shaped grilled cheese to her chest, smiled, and brought up another picture. "Today the cook made cobblestone bars. Jordan created a distraction while I snapped this!" She swung her phone around with the dramatic flare of a detective revealing a murderer.
I took the phone from her hand and gasped when I realized what I was looking at. "OMG! The cobblestone bar recipe? No way." I broke into peals of laughter.
Nic grabbed the phone and grinned her diabolically happy grin. I grabbed Tay and hugged her. Then the three of us did our happy dance and squealed.
When we calmed down, I took a better look at the recipe. "Two gallons of eggs, ten pounds of flour, pour into six full-sheet pans—whoa! This is like an industrial-size recipe." My elation started to ebb.
Nic grabbed the phone and took a look. "We'll have to cut it down."
"Yeah, but how?" I squinted over her shoulder at the recipe.
"Online conversions." Nic sounded more confident than I felt.
"Yeah, but how are we going to change gallons of eggs from commercially packaged cartons to the number of eggs needed for a thirteen-by-nine pan? How many eggs are in a carton? How much of a commercial sheet pan is a thirteen by nine?" I frowned in thought. "Dex! If anyone can figure it out, he can. He's the conversion king. Text it to me. I'll forward it to him."
While Tay texted away, Nic prompted me. "Aren't you going to tell Tay about your fabulous news and how you agreed to be Logan's fake girlfriend?"
I made thin eyes at Nic, paying her back for her sarcasm
.
"What?" Tay looked up from her phone as she pressed send. "Oh, that explains the fake-girlfriend question. What's this about?"
I explained it again to her.
"What's his game?" Tay's brow furrowed like she was confused. "I thought you two couldn't even be friends? Haven't we spent the last month and a half trying to cheer you up? And now this? It's crazy, Ellie. Logan's an awesome guy and all, totally hot, but he uses that to keep girls on his string."
"Why am I having a déjà vu moment all of a sudden? Are you two in collusion, because you're sounding an awful lot like Nic."
"Great minds think alike," Taylor said. "If you insist on playing girlfriend, proceed with extreme caution, Ellie."
"Yeah, I know. He only asked me because he knows I know the situation. I'm the one girl he can trust not misconstrue things and get the wrong idea."
Nic rolled her eyes. "Yeah, it's real smart to pick a girl who can't keep her hands off him. It does add authenticity to the act, I'll give him that."
"Shut up!" I frowned at her. "I wonder why he asked me so far in advance? It's weeks away. What does that mean?"
Tay and Nic shook their heads in unison, looking like I was being totally pitiful.
"Yeah, he really picked wisely." But beneath Nic's snarky tone lay an undercurrent of sympathy. "Self-delusion is grand, isn't it?"
On Tuesday night, our chem study group met in Kirk's dorm room. He had a single and the topic of the night was top secret, for our ears only. I had to fight my way through a game of assassin to get there and was shot twice with airsoft guns. Both times in the chest, meaning my breasts. Guys!
Dex was in an excited mood. He pushed a printout of the cobblestone bar recipe to me. "There you go, darling. Perfect timing. You'll need them to distract Byron. I just emailed a copy to you. Am I a genius or what?"
"Yeah, you're humble. That's what I love about you, Dex." I was barely listening to him brag as I scanned the recipe. "What is this? One whole egg and two tablespoons? You don't measure eggs in tablespoons."
"You do when you convert from gallons. I looked up the volume in cups of a standard large egg, figured out how many would make a gallon, and then sized it for a thirteen-by-nine pan just like you asked. And it came out one full egg and two tablespoons. Just crack an egg and scoop two tablespoons out."
"Of the white part or the yoke?" I was pulling his chain. There was no way I was using two tablespoons of egg. That was just silly. I clicked on the recipe in my email and edited it to two eggs.
"Hey! What are you doing? Recipes are like precise chemical formulas. You can't mess with them."
"Can too. Apparently, I'm our baking expert for good reason. Adding two full eggs will only make the bars slightly cakier, if anything. Chill."
He looked at me skeptically. "You're going to have to make a test recipe and try your theory. And do it soon. We need those bars. Our supplies are in place. We move as soon as we get the last logistic secured."
I eyed the recipe again. "I can't make these in the dorm. Taylor's deathly afraid our cook will find out she pinched the recipe and she'll lose her job." I looked around the group, settling on Kirk. "How are your ovens here?"
"Do we even have ovens?" Kirk shrugged. "We could check, but I haven't seen any. I think it's only those old-fashioned girls' dorms that have them. The new ones, the coed ones, and the old guys' dorm don't."
"Anyone?" I asked.
Blank looks all around.
"Go to Clark Hall across the street from yours," Dex said. "It's the same vintage as yours. It should have an oven."
I shook my head. "Too close. It uses the same dining hall. Word could get out."
"I don't see the problem." Dex looked put out and unenthused about my baking problem. "You've been experimenting all semester in your dorm."
"Yeah, but if we suddenly show up with a recipe in hand and everyone sees we're successful, first of all everyone will want some. Second, word spreads and all the girls will want the recipe. Then the cook finds out." I shook my head. "It's too risky."
"Find someplace," Dex said. "Or find another way to divert Byron. He's key to the plan."
I protested. "Wait a minute! We all agreed to keep Byron out of this."
"That was before we did our recon on the chem building. They lock the doors each day at midnight." Dex pulled out a hand-drawn diagram. He was paranoid about leaving any digital footprint, saying part of his dad's success in not being caught was that nothing had been digital back then. "The janitor moves through this part of the building first and is done by two a.m. That's when we strike." He grinned like he was enjoying the planning way too much.
Like any good sidekick, Joe grinned with him. "I've double and triple checked. We should be clear by then. The parking garage is usually empty then, too. We're golden."
Kirk nodded. "I've been over and over the security system. The building entrances and all first-floor windows are alarmed. The windows on the second floor are not. We can reach them by climbing across the four-foot gap between the parking garage and the chem building. Byron's office is positioned perfectly to make our entrance." He looked at me. "We need you to make sure his window isn't locked."
"That's where the diversion comes in," Dex said. "Distract Byron and unlatch the window."
My heart raced with excitement at the thought. I couldn't wait for Dr. Rogers to get a taste of her own nasty medicine and I was more than happy to dish it out. "I can't guarantee he won't notice and lock it again before you arrive."
"That's a risk we'll have to take," Dex said. "'Tis the season of pranks. We'll strike next Tuesday night. Wednesday morning when she turns the projector on for class." He rubbed his hands together and laughed, turning serious just as quickly. "We can't have anything out of the ordinary. Ellie will show up for her regular help session and make her move. Get the cobblestone bars ready or prepare to throw yourself at Byron, baby. Whatever it takes."
I could have asked any number of different girls in one of my classes if I could bake my cookie bars at one of their dorms or apartments. But the fewer people we involved, no matter how peripherally, the better. That was my reasoning. It may have been faulty. It was definitely needy and self-serving. Because the only other person who knew I baked for Byron was Logan. He had an awesome kitchen, the best I'd found around campus, for baking. And I wanted to see him. Could not keep my mind off him. Had to see him. A month and a half of resisting him out the window. I was back to the achy longing of square one.
So I texted him when I got back from Kirk's. Desperately seeking kitchen to bake top-secret cookie bars in. Can I use yours? Payment in said cookies. Rates negotiable.
Then I waited in agony for his reply text. Will he or won't he? Will he reply right away, showing he was near his phone and I'm still a top priority with him? Will he play it cool and ignore my text for a decent interval, even though he got it immediately? Is he really out of reach? There are only a few places, like the shower, to be truly out of reach. And someday soon someone is going to invent a waterproof cell phone and then even the shower won't be off limits.
Five minutes passed, then ten. Fifteen minutes later, he replied. When?
I made some mental calculations. I absolutely needed them to be fresh on Tuesday. I could hardly ask to use Logan's kitchen twice. The ice-cube-sized freezer in my mini fridge would hold exactly one bite of cookie bar, and things disappeared from the freezer downstairs. Which left me with one risky option. Monday after work, I texted back.
You got it. Need a ride?
Yeah, that would be great.
See you then.
Fall always made me melancholy—the way the sun sat low in the sky and made shadows long, hinting at darker, shorter days to come. On campus, leaves of stunning gold, orange, and red fell from the trees lining the streets of Greek Row and the edge of the old dorms in the quad and along the main mall. They rustled against the blue sky of an absolutely perfect fall as I wondered what kind of crazy I was made of.
&nbs
p; I knew I was walking a reckless path, but was powerless to stop myself and so eager for Monday it was ridiculous. I had to hang out with Logan and convince myself what I felt during the first hot weeks of the semester had been just an illusion. That in the intervening time I'd made him into a fantasy man no real guy could live up to. Maybe then I could let him go.
I went to the student bookstore with Bre to pick out a Halloween card for Dan and tried not to crack and cry because I had no one to buy a card for, no one to prepare Halloween treats for, and no one to take me to a Halloween party. There was no sexy devil in my future, no hot zombie. I was a solo ghost.
My mom had the audacity to send me a care package. It arrived on Wednesday, a week and a half before Halloween, five days before I was going to Logan's to bake cobblestone bars, six days before the caper that could get me expelled. I tossed it in the garbage unopened with the same ferocity I deleted her texts with, tore up her letters, and marked her email as spam. She'd changed her email address six times already trying to fool me. But she hadn't succeeded yet.
Yeah, I know. I seemed harsh, cold-hearted, cruel. But she'd made the choice to hurt me, not the other way around. I never in a million years would have done to her what she did to me. And with the douchebag guys she'd dated, I've had the chance, too. A Halloween care package wasn't going to placate me. Honestly, I didn't know what it would take to fix us.
"Aren't you going to open it?" Bre pulled the white priority mail box out of our wastebasket, horrified.
"Do I look like I'm going to?" I held my hands out for it. "My mistake. I should have taken it to the garbage dumpster. Then my intention would have been clear."
"No." She shook her head and clutched it to her chest. "You can't throw it away without looking at it. There could be something valuable in here."
I laughed bitterly. "Right."
"What if I open it and see?"
I arched a brow and cut her some slack. She was trying to be helpful. "Out of my sight?"
"Of course."
I shrugged. "It's up to you. If there's nothing obviously valuable like gold coins or diamond jewelry or something that clearly already belongs to me, you can have it. Just don't show it to me. Don't tell me what it is. Deal?"