by Hughey, J.
“So, you kicked him to the curb and broke his heart?”
“Something like that.” And then he rebounded.
“Why?” He stirred his ice cubes around with his straw. “I mean, what ended it?”
“I knew I was going away to college, and I didn’t see him in the picture. He…he wasn’t part of my plan, not the way he wanted to be. Not even close.”
Boone nodded, smile gone. “I wish I’d been smart about my high school girlfriend. I tried to hold on for a few months of freshman year, but I knew by Thanksgiving.”
“And then came Twyla?”
“Second part of sophomore year.”
“I take it you broke up with her?”
He shifted in his seat. “It was mutual.”
My eyebrows went up. “Well, Boonie, I think she’s changed her mind.”
He shrugged. “Only because she hasn’t scored this year’s jock.”
A figure swooped over to our table, startling him. “Jocks? I adore jocks. You must be Boone,” Mia said, arm extended, limp at the wrist, as if she expected him to kiss it. He knuckle-bumped her instead.
“Boone, meet my roommate, Mia. She’s very shy,” I said. I noticed the waitress trying to get past her. “Pizza’s here.”
“Ooo yay!” Mia said, sliding in with me.
Anyone else I would have shoved right back out of the booth, but Mia was no man-stealer. Plus, I knew she’d vacate the instant things got weird.
“No, this is all wrong,” Mia said, sliding back out of the seat. “You go over there, Violet, or all the homophobes will think we’re dykes.” The neighboring table turned to look at us again. They all laughed when Mia winked at them.
Leave it to Mia to make sure Boone and I ate pizza shoulder-to-shoulder. We laughed at her description of the opposing teams’ cheerleaders blowing up a stunt that ended with the top girl head down with her skirt around her neck. When my laughter made me lean against him, Boone leaned back into me, sturdy as one of the maple trees ringing the quad.
After one piece of pizza, Mia flitted away.
“I didn’t even notice the cheerleaders at the game,” Boone said.
“Don’t let them hear you say that,” I advised right before taking another bite.
He shook the ice in his cup. “You helped me last year, you know,” he said quietly.
With a mouth full of stringy cheese, I could only chew in helpless ignorance. I finally made a rolling motion with my hand. Keep talking, boy.
“It sounds vain, but meeting someone who didn’t know I played football, had no interest in the game…probably the best thing that could’ve happened.”
I swallowed hard. The lump of cheese slid like a golf ball down my esophagus.
“All day, everyone pitied me. ‘Poor Boone. Poor Boone.’” He tossed a bit of burned crust back onto the pie pan. “I’ll admit it. I moped like Cramer. Then you came along. ‘I don’t know who you are. I don’t know anything about your knee, and I bet you can’t pedal your butt up this hill fast as me.’”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to. Keep up or shut up.”
“I took it easy on you, too, you ingrate.”
“I know.”
I turned sideways on the bench seat to speak to the little bowl at the base of his neck revealed where the stretched-out neckline of his shirt skimmed below the points of his collarbone. “You said before you weren’t sure this was a good day for us to do this. You know, for me to be with your friends and stuff. But, I’m having a good time. And I thought it was really nice you helped Cramer though I busted you about it. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I did know who were last year, when we met on the ride. I knew your name, I mean, not the other parts.”
I screwed up my courage to check his reaction. He smiled, not in a ha-ha funny way, but in a thoughtful, I-think-I-might-like-you way. How I knew that, I’m not sure, since not many guys had exactly gone gooey for me over the years. Or, to be accurate, no guy had ever gone gooey over me.
He reached out to cradle my hand in my lap, under the table, then he leaned in for a kiss. I may have blacked out for a minute ’cuz the noise of the pizza place disappeared, and the next thing I remember is me with my eyes closed, his breath soft on my lips, “I’m having a good time, too, Violet.”
I was a goner.
A week later, Mia and I spent our Saturday studying on the quad. Big difference between high school and college—no weeks of review at the beginning of a course. Professors came in hard and fast with tests and papers. I’d already lost my grip on calculus and had two chapters to read in geology. Mia drowned in Homer’s Odyssey. She swore she’d meant to read it over the summer but the lure of the aristocrats with their own version of hard and fast had led her false.
“It’s so depressing,” Mia moaned after Odysseus’s shipwreck. “All this struggle, and if he ever makes it back to his wife he’ll be a shriveled old man and she’ll be a bitter woman.”
In the real Pennsylvania world, the afternoon sun baked my tank-top bared shoulders. Mia wore a candy-striped halter top with a pair of denim short-shorts. Guys stopped by her side of the blanket like ants at a saucer of sugar water. Those who dragged themselves away must have gone back to the nest to tell the other worker ants because new ones kept coming. “Do you think any man in modern times would love his home and family enough to continue an epic journey?” she wondered.
“I think he’d find somebody with a cell phone and send a text.” I studied a graphic of the geologic time scale, another epic story. 4.54 billion years. Humans—anything anatomically the same as us—came into existence, at the earliest, 200,000 years ago. Math might not be my strongest subject, but even I knew 200,000 had a lot less zeros than 4.54 billion. Through all those billions of years, the tectonic plates and the atmosphere were forming and changing, then we arrived, thinking it was put here for our convenience when we showed up at 11:37PM on December 31 of the earth’s year of existence. If the earth were a sentient being, would it consider us twenty-three momentous minutes of its history, like when you conceived your first child, or the twenty-three minutes you snoozed away in the parking lot while your mom got groceries? For all we knew, to the planet Earth, humans carried the import of a sitcom rerun on a TV turned on non-stop for a solid twelve months.
Thoughts like this rolled around in my mind while I studied, fascinated by the different theories and the current understanding of the planet. What if scientists were still wrong, I wondered. It seemed like this geology differed from what my mom and high school science teachers had told me, so who was to say the textbooks wouldn’t change again? And again?
I closed the book with my thumb marking the page. My fascination with science pissed me off. I feared turning into my mother with an unused geology degree. Yet, I needed to pick a major next semester, and I had no idea what I wanted to do, either in college or after it.
I sometimes wondered if I should have come to college at all. If it would pay off.
I loved my life here. That’s why I had been so anxious for summer break to end. And I didn’t goof around. I worked hard and learned a lot. All this knowledge had to lead somewhere, didn’t it, though Lord knew a degree was no guarantee of a career anymore.
For dinner, Mia and I wandered down to Snokes to use our meal credits at the food court. Most students hadn’t gone to the away football game, so the dinner crowd packed the high-ceilinged rectangle. Male voices booed at the TV when a news brief came on during a commercial break in a game between schools much bigger than ours.
Produce prices are expected to spike this fall, following the hurricane devastation in the southeast. The storm wiped out the citrus crop in Florida, and farm fields as far north as Virginia have been destroyed by winds and flooding. Power crews are still arriving from as far west as Kansas to help restore electricity. The President announced —
“Screw the President,” someone yelled. “Put Pitt back on!”
A smattering of appl
ause broke out, while others chided the rebel for his outburst.
A few hours later, Mia slicked on a coat of lipstick. We stood near the stage of an 18-and-over club for the first fall performance of the popular student band, Cappy Hates You! Cappy graduated two years ago, and the rest of the band members were seniors. I sort of felt sorry for Cappy, still trapped in his college life. I would probably be like him at age twenty-three, looking back at Western Case like a dog looks through a kennel’s wire fence at its family, packed up for fun in the departing minivan.
We crammed elbow to elbow with a group of friends on the dance floor. Our bodies bounced and writhed in time with the deafening music. Between the sound and the motion, I didn’t notice my text alert go off, but a message waited when I checked it during the first break.
Text from Boone:
I smiled to myself. We hadn’t hung out since last weekend, but we’d been texting, and I’d known he’d be at the game with the other misfits.
Text to Boone:
I chewed on my thumbnail.
And it was. Both for me and the poor freshman guy.
Mia jabbed me with her elbow. “Hotness?” she asked. My glowing smile must have given me away. “Tell him to put on his dancin’ shoes.”
“He’s busy advising the residents.”
“Oh, c’mon,” she said. “Not the RA excuse again.”
I started to defend him then shut my mouth. Mia flinched, realizing she’d struck a nerve, but she wasn’t one to apologize for tiny slights. She turned when one of our friends held up her phone with a funny Instagram on the screen.
I pretended to be engaged in their banter while in my head I stood twenty feet from the entrance of the library on a cold, slate-gray afternoon last January, armed with French homework and my will to conquer verb conjugation once and for all. My mouth went dry when Boone pushed through the glass door right in front of me. Something flickered across his face when he saw me, as it had the other times we’d run into each other. (Living in the same dorm with your freshman crush resembled living above a bar as an alcoholic. Can’t touch this.)
“Hey, Violet,” he said, his voice the caramel syrup on my latte.
“Hi, Boone. How was break?”
“The usual. You?”
“Fine,” I said. I bit my lip as I searched my Hotness-befuddled brain for a topic to keep the conversation going. “My parents gave me a new bike for Christmas. That’s the highlight.”
“Nice. Pretty cold for riding, though.”
I shrugged. “Went out yesterday.”
His jaw dropped. “Are you serious? And you didn’t get frostbite?”
“No.” I bit my lip again. “I did get some road rash,” I admitted as I pushed the sleeve of my fleece hoodie up to reveal a big bandage on my elbow. The flesh-colored rectangle covered the worst damage, though red scrapes extended down the delicate underside of my forearm.
His brow furrowed in concern. “What happened?”
“Patch of ice on the shoulder. No biggie. I’m mostly pissed my long-sleeved jersey got trashed.”
“No other injuries?”
“I have a wicked bruise here.” I twisted and lifted the hem of my hoodie, though I didn’t roll down my yoga pants to show him skin. My finger poked at the tender spot on my hip. “It’s Technicolor.”
Boone’s face tightened, the same way it had in front of the dorm the day we’d ridden together. He cleared his throat. “If you didn’t have those clip-in pedals, you could have saved yourself.”
“Flat pedals are for sissies.”
His jaw dropped for the second time. “Are you calling me a sissy?”
“If the biking shoe fits, you gotta wear it.” I let my jacket fall back into place. Giddy hope launched, propelled by the teasing combined with his eyes reluctantly leaving my meager curves. I’d spent months forcing myself into mental placidity where Boone Ramer was concerned, the mantra “not into you” repeating like an endless ride through “It’s A Small World” at Disneyland. Now, unexpectedly, I climbed the rails right before the steepest drop of “Thunder Mountain.” Dark. Disoriented. Exhilarated.
“You’re not like most girls, are you?”
The confusing question spurred me to blurt my own, a thought barely formed in my mind, much less my mouth. “Do you want to go to the Valentine’s formal with me?”
His head shook “no” too quickly, automatically, as if I’d offered him a cube of disgusting, moldy cheese. “I can’t,” he added, in case I hadn’t gotten the unequivocal message.
I looked past him into the warmth of the library, wishing I could reverse the clock and return to “It’s A Small World.”
No such luck. The bottom of the roller coaster dropped, leaving me, well, screwed. In less than five minutes I’d gone from time-to-study-French-verbs to a fresh hell of obsession for Boone Ramer.
Not.
Into.
You.
“Okay,” I said as I ducked around him. “That’s embarrassing.”
“Violet, wait,” he said when I was halfway to the door.
I jerked to a stop. “What?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. I can’t.”
“You don’t owe me any explanations,” I said, not wanting to hear his reason. I didn’t want to know about a new girlfriend—Twyla had been history since the fall—or the lucky gal who’d asked him to the formal yesterday, or something equally pathetically crushing.
He held his hands out to his sides. “RAs can’t get involved with students in the same dorm. School rule.”
At my suspicious over-the-shoulder glare, he walked in front of me. “I swear if I could say yes, I would.”
At that moment, I believed him, though freshman year ended with no more real conversations. I decided he’d been trying to let me down easily. Because that’s the kind of guy he was. Nice. A rule-follower. Ladies first, and boys don’t make girls cry.
My flashback ended when Cappy Hates You! blared to life with enough volume to give my breastbone sympathetic vibrations. I turned away to re-read the texts from Boone and find the cube of moldy cheese Mia’d made me think was there.
Doubt lifted. He’d voluntarily checked in with me tonight, given me an update on his day, told me to B safe. I was going to consider his contact a good sign and accept he took his work responsibilities seriously. Couldn’t hate him for that.
We studied together in his room on Sunday afternoon while rain poured outside. Afternoon textbooks led to ordering Chinese food we ate sitting cross-legged on his bed, laughing about the fortunes in the cookies.
Boone’s said, “You broke my cookie.”
Mine said, “Rivers need springs.”
“Are you kidding?” I muttered. “We have a couple of springs around our house. Ugh. Here, you got mine by accident,” I insisted, shoving it at him. “I don’t want any reminders of Indiana.”
“No way. I don’t have any springs, just a bunch of watering troughs.”
I tried to force the slip of paper into the pocket of his T-shirt, and we ended up kissing. He reached behind him to shut the door for ten minutes of privacy before, by unspoken agreement, we stopped and sort of gazed at each other. It sounds sappy but I could tell he really liked me by the way he looked at me, by the way his hand curved over my ribcage but didn’t stray north or south.
I imagined myself a rebel, a girl who wanted to run with the bulls, but I had to admit we were moving glacially slow by college relationship standards. Nothing felt forced with Boone. We’d “talked” for three weeks at a comfortable, steady pace with no particular goal except “talking” the next time. We held hands and kissed and both wanted more without the rush, which suited my whole inability-to-show-affection hang-up.
He tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I thought he might be about to say something when a freshman whom I would kill later knocked on the door.
“Duty calls,” he said with an apologetic, playful wink.
The next Friday, September 13th,
I walked into geology class still feeling lucky. Dr. Potter had given our first tests back on Wednesday, and I’d earned a 105% ’cuz I rocked it—no pun intended—on the extra credit essay question. Maybe my science grade would offset calculus, which already threatened to spiral the drain.
Boone came over to say hello, as he did before every class. “Hey, did you take calculus?” I asked before noticing the odd, unreadable expression on his face.
“What?” he said, finally registering my question. “Oh, yeah, I took calculus. Why?”
“Because I stink at it.”
“I don’t remember much, but I can take a look.” He rubbed his hand over his short hair, messing it up in a distracted way I’d never seen before. His biceps looked awesome, but his frown worried me. “Make sure I get a chance to talk to you after class, okay?”
Red alert. Could someone officially break up after three weeks of talking? Was our make-out session on Sunday subpar? Doubtful, when the memory of my boobies pressed against his chest made me wiggle in my chair. If glacially slow didn’t work for him he should stop answering the door for his freshmen charges.
The prom scene from Carrie played in my pessimistic brain. What if our three weeks of talking had been some kind of intricate setup to make me look like a fool?
Dr. Potter arrived, uncombed and wrinkled. Even though his presence indicated he knew we had class, the view of us students gathered in the lecture room startled him out of intense concentration. He fumbled with his laptop then covered the lesson’s ideas with a Power Point minus his usual engaging spoken details.
Boone hunched forward in his designated chair in the front row, far opposite from me, his arms braced on his thighs in his thinking posture.
Potter finished twenty minutes early, told us we could go and scrambled out the door with his computer tucked under one arm. The power cord trailed him like a baby blanket behind a toddler.