Unforgettable

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  Callie got really into it, striking a series of exaggerated poses around the rock, then getting up and pouncing on the birch trees. “O trees, o nature,” she said throatily, wrapping her arms around a skinny white birch tree and fake-kissing it, bringing her lips as close to the peeling white bark as she could bear without thinking too much about the bugs that lived in it. She tossed her hair like a real spotlight-loving prima donna and watched as Easy’s pencil flew across the page.

  But when she tried to pull away from the tree, she felt a sharp tug on her scalp. “Ow!” she cried, reaching up toward her head. Her hair was stuck on a branch. Fucking nature.

  “Are you okay?” Easy was at her side in seconds, his sketch pad and pencil abandoned on the ground. “Don’t pull.” As he reached over her to try and untangle her hair from the branch, she caught the familiar smell of his Ivory soap mingled with musty, stable-y smells. She glanced up at him, tenderly working on her hair, trying not to pull against her scalp, and she felt her hazel eyes fill up with fat tears.

  “There.” Easy pushed the branch away from her head. “You’re free.” And then he saw her face. “Did I hurt you?” Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, she chastised herself, but that just made the tears spill over. She covered her face with her hands. “Yes,” she said softly, meaning it. Not her hair though, her heart. She tried to turn away from him, but he was too quick. His strong arms pulled her to his chest before she could protest, and once her body was against his, she just melted into the scratchy wool of his sweater. Easy.

  She felt his cheek resting again her head. “I know. I’m so sorry, but I swear I will never, ever hurt you again,” he whispered as he kissed the spot where her hair had gotten snagged by the tree. She had to close her eyes. “I love you, Callie. I really do.” And before she could stop to think about it any more, she kissed him. His cheek first, then his eyebrows, his nose, and finally, his soft, warm, waiting mouth.

  19

  A WAVERLY OWL KEEPS HER LIPS SEALED. OR NOT.

  Brett glanced down at her calculus homework, unable to concentrate on the lines of letters and numbers. She’d come over to Kara’s for some study time, but so far hadn’t been able to focus. She bit the end of her pen.

  “What did you get for number twelve? It’s n2 + 2n, right?” Kara asked from her perch in her red butterfly chair, her calculus textbook balanced on her thighs. She pressed the eraser end of her pencil to her forehead, right between her eyes. “Because if it’s not, I’m going to take this book over to Dr. Goldstein’s house right now and set it on fire on her front lawn, right next to her freaky little gnomes.” Dr. Goldstein lived in one of the small white clapboard faculty houses at the edge of campus, and her lawn was peppered with brightly colored ceramic gnomes that would probably have been stolen by frustrated calculus students if not for Spike, Dr. Goldstein’s Rottweiler, which patrolled her yard, drooling and growling.

  “Good thing you’re right, because they say Spike can smell pissed-off student blood a hundred yards away.” Brett giggled. “A man-eating dog and garden gnomes—what is Dr. Goldstein’s deal, anyway?” Kara leaned forward conspiratorially, slamming her heavy textbook closed. “Didn’t you hear that, like, two years ago, she started hooking up with some genius graduate student from Caltech who was interviewing her for his senior thesis?” Kara’s eyes widened and she drummed her bitten-down fingernails against her notebook. “Apparently, he lives in the city now and comes up every weekend to, you know, interview her.” Brett gasped. Dr. Goldstein’s shirts were always buttoned wrong and she wore mismatched socks. Brett had taken it as a sign of her absentminded brilliance—but maybe it was because she was up late the night before, getting some from her hunky young grad student? “Isn’t she, like, a thousand? I definitely would not have guessed that she was—you know—having wild, passionate sex every weekend.” Kara let her pencil fly across the room so that it landed right in Brett’s lap. “I say more power to her.” “Whatever. I’ve been with younger guys and older guys, and I think they’re all the same breed of idiot.” Brett picked up Kara’s yellow number 2 pencil and examined it. No teeth marks. Brett’s pencils were all chewed up at the ends, no matter how gross she knew the habit was. Someone had told her once—probably Heath—that chewing on pencils was a sign that you were sexually repressed.

  “That sounds so pessimistic,” Kara said wistfully, dropping her calc book onto the floor and standing up to stretch, her gray American Apparel T-shirt rising to reveal a thin sliver of pale stomach above her black drawstring lounge pants. “I’m sure there are some good guys out there. Like, one or two.” “Right.” Brett ran her hand across Kara’s bright-blue-and-red Batgirl bedspread, smoothing out the wrinkles she’d made by sprawling out across it for the past hour. God, how much easier would life be if she had a single? No more nutjob Tinsley to have to tiptoe around, worrying about when her next eruption was due. And Kara’s room was just so . . . nice. It was so neat and clean, and smelled like new books and incense. She even had a leafy green plant dangling from her curtain rod. “They just happen to live in, like, outer Mongolia or something.” Kara spun the dial on her stereo, turning up the volume on the new Aimee Mann CD. She did a few dance steps on the hardwood floor, looking kind of silly but totally unselfconscious. Brett envied her that. “And they probably don’t have Internet there, do they?” Brett smiled as she watched Kara prance around her room. Until last weekend, Kara had hung out by herself—but after the lockdown party, she had sort of unquestioningly been taken in by the Waverly elite. Brett had noticed both Alison Quentin and Sage Francis wearing clothes from Kara’s closet this week, and Heath and some other guys had been seen hanging out with her at various times. And yet she still sat with Yvonne Stidder and some of the other loners at dinner. To Brett, that was just so unimaginably cool. “Are you saying you wouldn’t date someone who lived in outer Mongolia and didn’t have Internet access?” Brett teased. “That’s discrimination.” Kara nodded with a wicked grin. “Sure am—no cybersex, no deal!” Brett laughed loudly. It felt good to laugh, to forget about Jeremiah and how he had lied to her, and Mr. Dalton and how he had lied to her too. Forgetting guys was totally blissful.

  “Ladies?” There was a stern knock on Kara’s open door and Angelica Pardee, with her faded flowered bathrobe bunched tightly around her waist, glared into the room disapprovingly. “It’s late. Time to turn in.” “Sorry, Mrs. Pardee,” Kara answered sweetly, quickly turning her music back down. “We just have a few more calc problems to finish off, and then we’re done.” Pardee cinched her belt tighter around her waist and sniffed the air disapprovingly, but not seeing any banned candles in sight, she seemed satisfied. “Not much longer.” Brett got up and closed the door behind her. The hallway had already quieted down after Pardee’s patrol, and Brett was suddenly very aware of the fact that she and Kara were completely alone. “So, what about that last problem?” She returned to Kara’s bed and perched gingerly on the edge, her pulse racing. It was totally Heath’s fault for putting the thought into her head this afternoon, but she couldn’t help it now—she just kept thinking about the tiny kiss that she and Kara had shared.

  Kara scooped up her calc notebook and sat down on the bed. The stereo was still playing, but quietly, and there were no noises from the hallway. It kind of felt like she and Kara were the only people—or at least the only sane people—awake right now. Kara leaned over and placed her finger on Brett’s notebook. “I think you’ve got it.” She flipped a page of the math book, then glanced up at Brett. “It’s the summation, right?” Brett nodded, feeling kind of dazed.

  “Are you okay?” Kara asked, swiping at a strand of light brown hair that had fallen in her face. “Are you still thinking about Dr. Goldstein and her boy toy?” “No!” Brett laughed and grabbed for her bottle of Evian on Kara’s bedside table. “Don’t give me nightmares.” “Then what are you thinking about?” Kara asked, gently, her greenish-brown eyes curious.

  Could she honestly tell her? What if Kara th
ought she was a freak and demanded Brett get the hell out of her room? But she knew Kara wouldn’t do that. Everything with her seemed so natural—even this didn’t seem like a big deal. “Umm . . . about the meeting last night.” Kara finally blushed, but only a little, like she knew immediately what Brett was referring to. “Oh.” She played with the edge of her notebook paper, waving it back and forth. “That was . . .” She shrugged her slim shoulders, and a small grin crept onto her face. “Kinda fun.” Brett pressed her lips together. “Yeah.” A moment passed, as they looked at each other. Brett noticed a tiny freckle just below Kara’s pale pink lips. And then Brett leaned in, over the sprawled-open pages of mathematical problems and pencil scrawls, and pressed her mouth slowly to Kara’s.

  Their lips touched softly, and Brett closed her eyes, letting her mouth move almost imperceptibly against Kara’s. It wasn’t the sort of sloppy devouring she was used to from Jeremiah. Kara’s mouth was neat and small, and in a totally weird way, it was sort of like . . . kissing herself.

  It was nice.

  20

  A WAVERLY OWL CAN CONfiDE IN HER ROOMMATE . . . RIGHT?

  Jenny pounded up the stairs of Dumbarton on Wednesday night after spending the after-dinner hours in the library, working on her first long paper for European history. After three grueling hours, she was happy to come back to her room again. Finally, she didn’t have to tiptoe around Callie anymore. They were both beyond that, and it felt exhilarating. She tried not to think too much about missing Easy—she just kind of hoped that she could push that sadness aside until one day it wasn’t really sadness anymore, just nostalgia. It wasn’t the end of the world, she kept telling herself. And it wasn’t like she wasn’t ever going to see him again. Maybe she could still go horseback riding with him? And she’d still get to be in art class with him and joke around and see his FOOD NOT BOMBS T-shirt. She just wouldn’t get to . . . kiss him.

  Anyway. She paused in front of the door of 303, reading a note scrawled in red marker across her dry-erase board: Tomorrow night = 1. Coffee 2. Study 3. Gossip 4. All of the above? xo, Brett. Brett hadn’t shown up for practice today, but because she was junior class prefect, all she had to do was hint at some sort of important meeting and Smail let her skip, no questions asked.

  Jenny opened the door quietly, half expecting Callie to be in bed already. But she brightened when she saw her roommate was still awake. In fact, she was standing in front of a completely empty closet in a pink tank top and white girly boxers folded over at the waist, staring into it, all of her expensive clothes stacked in teetering piles on top of the spare bed, threatening to spill over at any moment.

  “You’re cleaning?” Jenny blurted out, surprised. The room looked like an exclusive SoHo boutique had just exploded.

  “Huh?” Callie glanced over her thin shoulder at Jenny and blinked a few times. “Oh. Yeah, I guess . . . I just got this urge.” Callie’s eyes ran over the towering stacks of clothing like she couldn’t remember how they’d gotten there. “I guess I didn’t think it was such a big project.” “Why don’t you just leave it?” Jenny suggested awkwardly. “Finish it tomorrow?” She dropped her heavy bag onto the floor and sank down on her own bed, grateful that she’d soon be curled up under her father’s old quilt that still sort of smelled like their apartment on 99th Street and West End Avenue.

  Callie bit her lip and fingered the sleeve of a transparent, muslin-y blouse on the top of one precarious stack. “But the room is a total disaster,” she finally answered, a little poutily.

  “I don’t mind if you don’t.” Jenny propped herself up on her elbows and kicked off her pink Chuck Taylors. They thudded gently against the hardwood floor. “It’s not like it’s usually clean,” she added with a giggle. The room, even with only the two of them in all that space, always seemed to be littered with empty Diet Pepsi bottles (Callie’s) and half-eaten mini-bags of Baked Doritos (Jenny’s), and the spare desk was always buried under massive stacks of clean laundry, notebooks, old term papers, and various objects that were not needed at any precise moment. There was even a neatly folded tapestry that neither Jenny nor Callie laid claim to that had somehow appeared one day.

  Callie bunched her hair into two fistfuls and tugged at it. Her arms looked as flimsy as plastic straws, and Jenny thought about how much she’d like to force-feed her roommate a cheeseburger. Maybe Callie was so out of it because she was starving? She didn’t really know what she should do about that. Should she talk to Pardee? Suddenly she remembered the two Tootsie Pops she’d picked up at the snack bar. Jenny patted the pocket of her Waverly blazer and held out the two of them, like a peace offering.

  Callie laughed, and Jenny mentally willed her to take one. She did, coming over to Jenny and taking the raspberry one shyly. “Thanks.” Jenny smiled. Maybe Callie just needed to take her mind off things. “Hey, you know that really tall, cute freshman?” she asked as she unwrapped her orange lollipop and stuck it on her tongue.

  “Julian?” Callie answered with her mouth full of lollipop, so that it came out sounding like “Mwwaniaw?” She pulled the sucker from her mouth, her lips already tinged purple. “What about him?” “I don’t really know.” Jenny tucked her feet up next to her on the bed and stuffed her folded pillow beneath her head. “He just kind of . . . keeps showing up around the dorm. Like, he was in the bushes outside when we got back from practice today.” She giggled, thinking about their funny conversation when she’d found him. “And he was in the broom closet yesterday. Downstairs.” “Wait, he snuck into the dorm?” Callie’s hazel eyes focused on Jenny’s face and lit up with excitement. She pulled the lollipop out of her mouth and waved it at Jenny. “Do you think he, like, likes you?” “Oh, definitely not,” Jenny said quickly, her cheeks turning pink. She hated it when people suggested someone liked her and she didn’t really think it was true. “I really have no idea what he was doing. He made up some lame excuse about looking for something.” “Right.” Callie rushed over to Jenny’s bed, feeling very sisterly all of a sudden, and sat down near Jenny’s yellow-socked feet. “I bet he was looking for you!” She felt energized just thinking about it. How perfect would that be? What Jenny needed was some cute guy to come out of nowhere and sweep her off her feet and make her forget that she had ever even known a boy named Easy Walsh. And Julian was totally hot—maybe a little tall for Jenny, but clearly she liked them tall. Callie patted her roommate’s feet excitedly.

  “No, that’s totally silly. It wasn’t like that.” Jenny’s whole mouth was orange from her lollipop and Callie had to giggle. She looked like she was just a little kid, albeit a really adorable one. And Julian was, what? A freshman? He couldn’t be more perfect for her. “But I mean, we had this really nice kind of flirty chemistry thing going on.” She sat up in bed, her eyes slightly dreamy, and toyed with a long brown curl.

  “Maybe you’ll run into him tomorrow?” Callie tried not to sound too eager—she didn’t want Jenny to suspect that she had ulterior motives or anything. A tiny wave of guilt passed over her as she realized that she was already lying to Jenny by not telling her about Easy. But it was for her own good, right? It would devastate Jenny if she knew that Easy and Callie were, kind of . . . Easy and Callie again.

  Jenny stood up and opened a dresser drawer, pulling out a pair of cozy-looking navy Nick and Nora pj bottoms, the white stick of the Tootsie Pop extending out of her mouth like some kind of über-skinny cigarette. She glanced at Callie and smiled devilishly. “Well, I did ask if he wanted to model for my art class project. So . . . I probably will see him tomorrow.” “That’s awesome!” Callie exclaimed. She couldn’t help it—she exploded off the bed and gave Jenny a huge hug. Please, please, please, please, please let Jenny and Julian fall madly in love! “Something’s totally going to happen between you two. I can feel it!” She just hoped it would happen fast.

  From:JennyHumphrey@waverly.edu

  To:RufusHumphrey@poetsonline.com

  Date:Wednesday, October 9, 9:29 P.M.

&n
bsp; Subject: Happy Wednesday!

  Hi Dad,

  Didn’t mean to sound like I was in a funk the other day—I think I was just a little drained after an excruciating Latin class. (But you should hear me recite Cicero now—I’ve come far in a month!)

  Things are totally going well. As always, I’m loving my art classes. I can’t believe I get credit for drawing. We just got a new assignment today that I’m hoping to tackle tomorrow—with the help of a cute boy who’s going to model for me. (I love school!)

  We’re reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in English class. Dad, I can’t believe you let me make it through fifteen years of life on this planet without ever reading this. How could you?? =)

  Miss you. Have an extra cupcake at Bernard’s for me (if you haven’t already)!

  Your favorite daughter and xoxo,

  Jenny

  From:JennyHumphrey@waverly.edu

  To:Julian McCafferty@waverly.edu

  Date:Wednesday, October 9, 9:45 P.M.

  Subject: Be a model citizen . . .

  . . . or at least a model Owl. If you’re still up for being part of my art project, will you meet me tomorrow in the art studio? Six-thirtyish maybe, or 6:45?

  Let me know. Looking forward to seeing what T-shirt you’ll wear next.

  —Jenny ;)

  21

  A WAVERLY OWL IS ALWAYS A GRACIOUS WINNER—ESPECIALLY WHEN SHE’S CHEATED.

  Thursday morning, Tinsley was buzzed into Mary-mount’s Stansfield Hall office. It was an enormous room on the second floor with huge bay windows that had sweeping views of the entire campus and, in early October, the flaming colors of the autumn foliage. As she strode across the dark mahogany floor and onto the distinguished, threadbare Turkish carpet in her Stuart Weitzman lace-up brown leather boots, Marymount stood up from his shockingly neat desk. It wasn’t that it was empty—it was in complete geometric order. A large paper calendar was spread out in the middle, filled with carefully penned-in appointments and notes. Tiny cups of pens, dishes of paper clips, a tape dispenser, and a stapler were all lined up as if in military formation, ready at any moment to attack. Even the silver picture frame of the dean’s family was angled perfectly toward his chair to allow his guests to just catch a glimpse of his blond, angelic-looking wife and children. Interesante. His wife was way prettier than Angelica freaking Pardee. Tinsley shook his outstretched hand.