“That was nothing!” I exclaim. But even as I say it I know I’m just trying to convince myself. Because I saw the same broken expression on her face mirrored on my own for weeks afterward.
“Did you know Lacey McRae won Miss Avilla Homegrown three years in a row?”
“Er...maybe?”
“I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised you picked her, but I thought we had an understanding. And I thought I could handle it.”
“Andi—”
“You asked me to practice, Kellan. And then you put all that practice to use on the prettiest girl in Avilla, while I sat there like an idiot.”
“I just—”
“You were supposed to wait!”
“It just started out as practice, Andi. You know it turned into more than that.”
“I was stupid enough to hope it could.”
“And I was stupid enough to hope it wouldn’t. But it did. I’m sorry about how it ended but I don’t regret it. I’ve never had anything better.”
“How can you say that when there’s a list of all the girls that prove it didn’t matter at all?”
“That list was after you, and before you. There’s never been a during. You drive me fucking insane but when you’re in the picture, you’re the whole thing. You’re all I see.”
“How many girls have you used that line on?”
“Like, seventeen. Was it good?”
She laughs reluctantly. “It was okay.”
I prop myself up onto my elbows, even though I know she can’t see me. “I mean it, Andi. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry I ever made you feel like practice. You’re more like that horrible boot camp that everyone hates but in the end when they’re at war they see how it prepared them for life.”
“What?”
“And you’re like that scene in Citizen Kane, where I’ve only been looking at the foreground without paying attention to what’s going on in the background, when that’s the whole heart of the story.”
“Kellan, stop trying to be poetic. I’m getting confused.”
“Are you hooking up with Crick?”
“Oh my God.”
“Want me to say it poetically?”
“Are you hooking up with Jazzy?”
The question throws me for a loop, but at least I know I have the right answer for once. “No,” I say firmly. “I never have. And after tonight, I definitely never will.”
“I didn’t hook up with Crick.”
“Good.”
“Why is that good?”
“Because he doesn’t deserve you. And I’d be...jealous.”
“You don’t get jealous.”
“I didn’t think I did.”
“Did you just admit you were wrong and jealous?”
“Whatever’s said in the dark stays in the dark.” So many times we’d had conversations like this, through our opened bedroom windows in the night, falling asleep mid-sentence, picking up the next day without ever missing a beat. So constant and natural I just assumed we’d never stop.
“I wish you’d told me,” I add.
“Which part?”
“About why you were so mad after the baseball game.”
“It should have been incredibly obvious.”
“Tell me now.”
“I just did.”
“Tell me whatever you would have said that night.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
There’s such a long pause that I don’t actually think she’s going to do it, then I hear her take a deep breath. “You’re an asshole,” she says softly.
Then there’s another really long pause.
“Is that it?”
“That’s the gist of it.”
“I know there’s more.”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Why not?”
Another pause. “I think you know, Kellan.”
My heart kicks in my chest and I want to press her for answers, for clarification, for articulation. I want her to say that I wasn’t the only one who ended that summer with a heart so shattered I didn’t think there was any point in even trying to put it back together. But she’s gone her whole life without ever telling me she loves me because she knows I’m not ready to say it back, and that’s one unspoken moment we could never recover from.
chapter eleven
I wake up to tiny shafts of light peeking around the edges of a strange curtain, slanting over cinderblock walls, a bar fridge, a desk, a wardrobe, a laundry basket. None of it’s mine. I’ve woken up in strange places before, but something about this feels different. Then I spot the Oakland A’s jersey draped over the desk chair and I remember where I am and how I came to be here.
I can’t see Andi on the bed but I can hear her soft snoring and I lift my head just enough to see the numbers on the alarm clock. 8:05. I lie back down and wait. I don’t actually know what I’m waiting for, I just know that whatever I’m waiting on is less terrible than the consequences of sneaking out again.
I close my eyes and think about my apartment. My landlord promised to have the door replaced first thing this morning, though I’m on my own for dealing with the mess inside. I can straighten up the furniture and buy some new groceries—and a television and dishes and linens—but I’ll have to hire someone to clean up the dried food and the mess in the bedroom.
I reach for my phone, which charged over night, and find a missed call and voice message from an unknown number. I half expect it to be a telemarketer, but it’s not. It’s Ivanka Ling. “Hi, Kellan,” she says, her voice smooth. “I hope you remember me. I wanted to be the first to congratulate you on advancing to the audition rounds for the She Shoots, She Scores segment host position. The auditions will be in December, which gives you plenty of time to prepare—not that you’ll need it. You’ll receive an email with more details, but I wanted to be the first to say congrats—I look forward to seeing you then. Talk soon.”
After the message I stare at the ceiling for ten full minutes. Ivanka Ling just called me. I have goose bumps, but the weird kind. The kind that make me wonder why I don’t have the good kind. Why I’m excited to have succeeded at something, but I’m not more excited. It’s kind of like the excess I enjoyed my first two years at Burnham: it’s great, but it feels like something I should want more than something I do want.
Andi groans and rubs a hand over her face, as though my guilt is waking her up. I’m practically crawling out of my skin with the urge to leave, but something makes me stay, something more primitive than fear or obligation or guilt. It’s the same thing that made me come here in the first place. Her.
I hear her stretch and mutter to herself, slowly quieting as she, like me, recalls the events of the previous night. I quickly stuff my phone back in my bag and after a second the bed squeaks and Andi peers over the edge to see me lying innocently on the floor. A swath of blond hair sneaks out of its bun and covers half her face before she pushes it back, and the collar of her old T-shirt droops over her shoulder, revealing skin burnished gold by the morning sun.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” she replies, yawning widely. “You’re still here?”
“Yep.”
“How long have you been up?”
“About an hour.”
“Why didn’t you...”
It doesn’t take a genius to know how that sentence ends. “Leave?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t want to.” I’m not about to admit I was afraid.
She rubs a knuckle over her eyes and something in my chest tightens. For so long I’ve avoided awkward morning afters, laughing at my friends’ embarrassing horror stories and doing my utmost to dodge my own. Now here I am, a morning after a night that involves no sex at all, knowing that even with our clothes on and the lights off, we revealed more of ourselves than we ever have. It’s a strange feeling, like we’re somehow closer together and farther apart than when we started. Then I wonder if instead of being introspective lik
e me, Andi’s thinking it was all a big mistake.
“Did you want me to go?” I ask, sitting up. “I can totally—”
“Well, you need to go eventually,” Andi says through another yawn. “But not right this second, I guess.”
“Okay, because I don’t actually have a place to go to right now.”
“You weren’t hallucinating that stuff about vandals? I thought you were drunk.”
“I wish.” I tell her about the whole of last night, the break-in, the stuff with Jazzy, attempting to cover up the list, the campus police, being ditched on the Frat Farm.
“That’s rough,” she says when I finish. “Do you want some cereal?”
I’m expecting a much different response and it takes me a second to form a response. “I guess.”
“Well, that’s all I have,” she says, misreading my hesitation.
“Cereal’s fine, Andi, but I just told you about the worst night of my life, and instead of compassion you offer cereal?”
She’s already pulling two bowls, two spoons and a box of marshmallow cereal out of a desk drawer. The sound of her pouring drowns out my righteousness.
“I can also offer two extra rainbows,” she says, plucking marshmallows out of one bowl and adding them to the other. “Better?”
“Give me a horseshoe, too.”
“Fine, but that’s it. Get the milk.”
I have to lever up a corner of the mattress to make enough room for the fridge door to open, but eventually I retrieve the carton and hand it to Andi. She tops up the bowls then passes me one, sitting cross-legged on her bed while we eat. It feels like we’re kids again, when sleepovers held no more weight or meaning than the name implied, when you got dressed and ate breakfast and went home and hung out again after lunch.
I miss that. I miss the ease of it, the reliability. The unacknowledged comfort of having someone who was going to be there whenever you needed them because that was just what they did. And now that I’m sitting here feeling it again, I finally understand what it is that Crosbie feels for Nora. Why he changed for her, why he gave up so much. Because what he gave up was nothing compared to what he got in return.
“What?” Andi asks, brows narrowed suspiciously.
“What?”
“You like you’re thinking about something.”
“Well, I’m a thoughtful person.”
“Liar.” She chomps on the last of her cereal then drinks the milk out of the bowl while typing on her laptop with her free hand. I recognize the login screen for Burnham’s email system and after a second Andi gasps.
“What?” I ask, sitting up a little straighter.
“I get to audition for She Shoots, She Scores,” she says, sounding stunned. “They liked my application. They called it unpretentious and ‘almost alarmingly well-informed.’”
“That’s great!” I exclaim, feeling far happier for her than I did for myself. “They made the right choice.”
She glances at me. “What about you? You must have gotten an email too. Want to check?”
“Ah...” I know if I check on her laptop she’ll read over my shoulder and I don’t want her to see any personalized messages from Ivanka Ling. “I’ll look on my phone,” I say, pulling it back out of my bag. My heart pounds guiltily as I call up my email, scroll past missed messages from Bertrand, and find one from She Shoots Productions. I relax a bit when I see the same form letter they must have sent to everyone who advanced, no special notes from Ivanka.
“Well?” Andi prompts.
“I get to audition,” I tell her, trying to sound shocked and enthused.
She rolls her eyes and stands. “Well, no kidding. It’s you. The only surprise is that they’re letting anyone else try out.”
I stand instead of replying, instead of admitting that Ivanka has visited, emailed, and called me. I know people think things come too easily to me. I don’t know if they come easy, but I know I’ve taken too many of them for granted and I’m going to make better use of my opportunities going forward.
I help Andi put the bed back together and when there’s nothing else to do, we stand there. I see her eying her shower kit, a little basket with shampoo and toothpaste and soap. I recognize the familiar red and green lettering on the toothpaste.
“Remember when we used to trade toothpaste?” we say at the same time. There’s a moment’s pause before we both smile. Growing up we hated the toothpaste our moms bought but liked the kind we had at each other’s house, so at bedtime we used to swap toothbrushes through the window, load them with toothpaste, then pass them back.
Andi fiddles with the tube, watching her unpainted nails twist the cap without actually trying to loosen it. It somehow feels like so much hangs in this one strange moment and though Andi is probably the person I’ve spoken to most in my life, finding the right words feels like the hardest thing in the world.
“Well,” she says. “Let’s go brush our teeth.” She scoops up the shower kit and a towel and I follow her down the hall to the co-ed bathroom. At nine a.m. on a Saturday there’s only one shower running and no one at the row of sinks and mirrors. It’s a basic public bathroom with an unappealing cream and orange color scheme and every surface that’s not covered in mirror covered in tile.
Andi sets the basket on the counter between us, refastens her hair, and quickly washes her face. I do the same then watch as she puts toothpaste on her toothbrush and gets to work. I squeeze some onto my finger and do the best I can.
“I floss and floss every day,” she says, the words muffled by the toothpaste. “To help avoid tooth decay.”
I laugh and spit into the sink, recalling the Avilla dentist singing during each cleaning. “I brush them slow, not too fast, because I want my teeth to last.”
Andi laughs. “Dr. Reyes wasn’t much of a poet, but—”
She breaks off as the bathroom door swings open and Jazzy steps in. She’s wearing a bright pink housecoat, matching plastic sandals, and carries a shower basket twice the size of Andi’s. She comes to a stop as she spots us, but doesn’t look terribly surprised or dismayed. Instead she arches a brow at Andi and offers a curt “Good luck” before disappearing into the shower area.
I scoop water into my hand and rinse my mouth. “Guess she’s still mad.”
* * *
I get the official Alpha Sigma Phi Halloween Party invite email a few days after my night with Andi. I haven’t seen her since, both of us needing some time to let our newly mended fences settle a little.
The last two years I went to the party alone so I wouldn’t be limited in my choice of hookups afterward. It might not be honorable, but at least it’s honest. So it’s kind of jarring to realize that the first person I think of when I read the invitation now is Andi.
This year’s party theme is “Puntastic” and I have absolutely no idea what that might mean. I figure I can ask Andi when I see her, and because I know she has practice on Tuesdays, I time my run so I’m jogging past the gym when she steps out the front doors. Or rather, I’m running my ninth circle around the parking lot when she steps out.
It’s a drizzly October afternoon, the sky gray and low, the ground pockmarked with puddles. Andi’s wearing sweatpants and a jacket, the hood up to shield against the light rain, and it takes her a second to spot me looking faux-surprised to bump into her.
“Hey,” she says, zipping her jacket up to her chin to ward against the cold.
I’m sweating from the run, the only honest part of this encounter, and I’m too warm in my shorts and sweatshirt. “Hey,” I reply. “Where are you coming from?”
“Practice,” she answers. “Every Tuesday.”
I try to look like I’m just remembering this. “Oh, right.”
I haven’t been on a lot of proper dates. Maybe none, now that I think about it. Making plans generally consisted of casual texts asking “What’s up?” and “Want to hang out?” all of which was not-so-subtext for “Let’s get something to eat then fool around.” Now that I�
�m face to face with Andi, the party invitation saved on my phone so I can ask her to define “puntastic,” I can’t think of a single thing to say.
“I’m starving,” she announces when we’ve stood in the parking lot for too long. Maybe we said everything we could say last time we saw each other and there’s nothing left. “I’m going to get a burger or something.”
“Sure,” I say, though she didn’t ask me. “I’ll come.”
“Oh,” she says. “Please do.”
I have my earbuds in, the music turned off, and now I take them out and tuck them in my pocket. I use a sleeve to wipe my face as best I can, feeling water condense on the end of my chin.
The volleyball team practices in Burnham’s third gym, the one reserved for the teams that aren’t doing well and don’t merit space in the newer and more centrally located gyms. It’s a ten-minute walk to the heart of campus, plenty of time to work my way around to inviting Andi to the party.
“Do you know where you want to eat?” I say instead.
“Hmm...” She absently rubs her stomach. “The Sling.”
I can’t hide a grimace. Last year I’d had to track down a sex partner known as Smells Like French Fries and suggest she get tested for gonorrhea. She’d suggested I go fuck myself and thrown a half-eaten stack of pancakes at my head.
Undeclared (Burnham College #2) Page 16