CHAPTER 3
Dillan and Jessica hated each other. I had been hoping that Jessica might leave because of it, but she hadn’t. It seemed that Dillan had taken to winding Jessica up, too. Instead of avoiding her, he tagged along with everything that we did. He took every opportunity he could to annoy her, and I was the one who had to try to stand in between them as they tore chunks out of each other.
It was inconvenient. Jessica, at my college was severely inconvenient. I wanted to check on Sophie. I wanted to make sure that she was all right. I’d spent some time thinking about the way she had treated me the day after everything had happened, and I finally got it. I was a reminder of where she had been. I was a reminder of her home and the things she had lost there. I got that, perhaps, I wasn’t the right person to be around her that day. But I was also pretty sure she needed me.
I know that sounds ridiculous. I know that she didn’t actually need me in any real way. I’m sure that without my input she would work through everything on her own. She was strong. She had been dealing with her father’s crap her whole life. Perhaps she’d even known that one day he would do what he did. Perhaps, in a small way, she’d already made her peace with that.
I couldn’t judge her for anything. I had no idea what kind of life she’d been forced to live through, but I did know that she shouldn’t be forced to go through anything more on her own. That’s why she needed me. Sure, she could do it without me. She could do it with only herself to rely on, but she didn’t have to. I had to make sure that she knew that.
“I need to go out for a bit,” I told Jessica, as I pulled my arm from around her shoulders and pushed myself up on the bed.
She turned to me with an annoyed look on her face. “I was comfy,” her lips started to pout. “You don’t have any classes, so where do you have to go?”
I sighed. I couldn’t believe that she was making me explain myself to her. “I’m just going to see a friend.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said quickly, as she pulled herself up and reached over for her hoody, which was hung over a chair at the end of my bed.
“No, you stay here. I won’t be long.”
“Why can’t I come with you?” she asked with a mixed look of hurt and suspicion on her face.
“Look, my friend is kind of low key. They’re not big on people, so I’m just going to pop over and see them for a half hour and then I’ll be back, okay?”
“Okay,” she said with a frown. Her tone was filled with resentment and I could tell easily that it wasn’t okay with her. That didn’t stop me from kissing her on the forehead quickly and walking over to the door, though.
“Cool, I’ll be back soon.” I pulled open the door and walked out of the room before she could start to make a fuss about it. The door fell closed behind me and I quickly walked towards the back exit of the dorm building.
“Where are you going, man?” Dillan asked me, when I bumped into him outside. He scanned behind me quickly and then his face turned to thunder. “You haven’t left her in our room have you? I was just going back there.” He groaned. “When is she going to leave?”
“Yes, she’s back at the room. I’m not going to be gone long, though, so just ignore her until I get back. And I don’t know when she’s going to leave. She hasn’t said and, if you’ve noticed, she isn’t exactly the kind of girl you can just ask outright.”
He shook his head. “You know, when you told me you had a girlfriend, I was expecting some sweet little southern belle or something. What you’ve got is crazy time. I don’t even know why you put up with her.”
I shrugged.
“It’s the sex, isn’t it? I bet she’s a freak in the sheets,” he said with sudden enlightenment in his eyes.
“It’s not that,” I told him and the enlightenment turned to pity.
“Tell me you’ve gone there with her?” he asked me with serious concern. “Tell me that you’ve had the sex?”
I felt backed into a corner. I wasn’t the kind of guy who talked about my sex life. Perhaps that was because I’d never had a sex life to talk about. I shook my head, because there was no point in lying about it. “To be honest, I’ve never gone there with any girl.”
Dillan looked at me as though he didn’t believe me. I could feel his eyes going over me to double-check that my body was presentable and I wasn’t missing any arms or legs. “Dude, why lie?”
“I’m not lying,” I said with my hands sinking into my pocket. The conversation was putting me on edge. I didn’t want my virginity put under a microscope. What business did Dillan have pushing me for answers about it, anyway?
“How did you make it through school without getting laid?” he asked and I could see a serious curiosity in his eyes.
I sighed. “Things were just different in school.” I really didn’t want to go into my parents’ divorce and my overeating. “I need to go anyway,” I took a step forward and away from him.
He reached out and grabbed my arm. I turned back to look at him. “Don’t be long. I don’t think I can handle Pouty Jessica by herself for any real period of time.”
I nodded. “I’ll be a half hour, tops.”
“Where are you going?” So now we were back at the original question he’d asked me.
I quickly thought about my options. I had two. I could lie to him or I could tell him the truth. I didn’t want to lie. “I’m going to check on a friend.”
“What friend?”
“Sophie.”
“Crazy Sophie?” Dillan asked with surprise.
I pulled my arm away from his roughly and my eyebrows pulled together with a heavy frown. I don’t know what it was.
No, I do know what it was. He’d insulted Sophie. He’d called her crazy, when he had no idea what was going on in her life. “She isn’t crazy,” I told him firmly, even though I could see him reading my reaction in all the wrong ways.
“Does Jessica know about this?” he asked.
“Know about what?”
“That you’re trying to get with Sophie?” he asked, as though it was obvious.
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I said quickly. “I just want to make sure she’s all right.”
“Because you care?” he asked in the same leading way that he’d used to bring Jessica to her knees.
It was true. I did care about Sophie, but it wasn’t in the way that Dillan was implying. Sophie was hurting, any decent person would care. “Sure, I care, but that doesn’t mean that I want to get into her pants.”
“You don’t get into your girlfriend’s pants, either, so I’m not sure that’s a valid point,” Dillan pointed out.
The seams of my jeans pockets were tearing into my skin as my hands continued to push down against them. “Sophie’s got some stuff going on and she doesn’t have a lot of friends. I am her friend, so I’m going to make sure that she’s all right. If you want to make this about more than it is, then that’s fine, but it doesn’t make it true,” I told him firmly without dropping his gaze from my own.
“Whatever you want to tell me,” Dillan shrugged and I could tell that he didn’t believe me. He believed his own version of events. He believed the story that he’d fabricated, with the few details that he’d managed to get his hands on.
I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t see any point. Innocent until proven guilty is a great concept. It was a concept that I tried to adhere to whenever it was relevant, but a concept was all that it was and all that it ever would be.
I walked away from Dillan. I walked out into the shadow-filled day that was bringing me my own personal cloud, as I made my way over to Sophie’s dorm building.
CHAPTER 4
“What are you doing here?” Sophie asked me, when she opened the door a bit and found me standing outside. It was like she thought that sentence was my name.
“I thought I’d made myself clear.” She pressed her face up against the crack in the door. “I want you to leave me alone,” she said slowly and carefully, as thoug
h I’d failed to understand her the first time because I was a bit slow.
“I know what you told me,” I said through a sigh. “I know that you said that you wanted me to leave you alone. But the thing is I can’t do that. I can’t just leave you, knowing that you’re going through all of this crap. It’s not what a good person does.”
“So, what, you’re doing this because you think you’re a good person?” she asked as her nose pulled up into a bunch of wrinkles on the bridge. She snorted. “I don’t need a good Samaritan. I don’t need your pity. I don’t need you to come here and pat me on the back. I’m fine. Leave me alone.”
“I’ve already told you that I can’t do that,” I told her flatly. “The way I see it,” I pulled out my hand from my pocket and held it out to her with two fingers raised. “You have two options.”
“You think you get to give me options?” she asked with a cocky smile, which let me know that her guard was quickly being raised to protect herself from me.
“Yeah, I’m giving you two,” I told her firmly. “You can either let me in so that we can talk about stuff or we can talk about it out here.”
“What if I close the door in your face?” she challenged me.
“Then I’m going to have to talk real loud, so that you can hear me,” I said seriously.
She frowned at me. “Why are you here?” she asked again. The edge in her tone had dropped. It wasn’t gone, but it had lowered. “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I said. I could tell the concept was foreign to her. “I just want to help. If what happened to your family had happened to mine, then I know I’d want people to be around. I can’t imagine anything worse than being alone,” I told her honestly.
She tilted her head at me slightly. “I am alone, though,” she told me. “I don’t have a mother, my father is going to be in prison and it’s not like I’m fighting back friendship offers. People on campus have started to call me Crazy Sophie, you know. I’m pretty sure that your roommate was the one who started that off.”
“You trashed our room and he has no context to work from. What did you think he was going to think?”
“It wasn’t something I’d really thought about until I heard the name being whispered behind my back,” she told me frankly. “I’ve had other stuff on my mind.”
“I get that,” I said quickly, because I hadn’t meant to make the destruction of our room seem like a big deal, when it really wasn’t. “I just meant that he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know what happened. All he knows is that he asked a girl out on a date and she trashed his room at the very start of it. I’m sure you can see things from his side?”
“I don’t think I have to,” she said, opening the door a bit wider. “I don’t see why I should have to. People are calling me names behind my back. He did that to me. Why should I see things from his point of view?”
I wasn’t sure if I should have said what I said next. “You did that to me.” I barely even breathed it, but she heard.
She looked at me with a long and hard stare, as though she was trying to figure me out. “I suppose I did,” she said finally. “It’s kind of a crappy time for karma to hit back, though.”
“I didn’t mean that you deserved it,” I shook my head. “I meant just that I’ve been willing to see things from your point of view. I’ve been willing to step back and understand that you had your own stuff going on too, so maybe just try a little to see things from Dillan’s point of view, is all that I meant.” I stopped talking when a couple walked past us.
I was completely sure that they hadn’t even noticed Sophie and me standing there. They only had eyes for each other. The girl’s lips were pulled high in a smile and his hands were wrapping themselves around hers with the gentle ease of new love.
I waited for them to pass, before I turned back to Sophie. “Are you going to let me in?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I appreciate you coming over, but I’m fine. I don’t need you to worry about me, even if you feel like you have to. You’ve proved that you’re a good person, so you can drop all of this now,” she told me with her shoulders rising up and then falling again quickly.
“I’m not doing this because I have to,” I said, and it was only when I was saying it, that I realized that it was the complete truth. I was there because I wanted to be there. I was caring because I wanted to care. Sophie’s puzzle was getting closer to completion every day and I couldn’t walk away leaving it unfinished.
“Yes, you are,” she said in an all-knowing way. “I made your life a misery for years. You helped me when I most needed help and, honestly, I’m grateful, but you don’t have to do any more. I get it. We aren’t friends. We will probably never be friends and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with having no friends.”
Was she convincing me or was she trying to convince herself? “Why did you kiss me?” I asked.
Surprise blew up in her eyes. Her sun kissed cheeks turned a flushed pink. She looked down at the floor. She started to scuff the front of her boot against the floor. Her dark purple hair fell in front of her face covering whatever piece of the puzzle it was revealing.
“I don’t know,” she said eventually, when the silence had hung long enough to put a thick wedge between us.
“You don’t know?”
She shook her head, but she didn’t look up. Her hair was covering her face like a curtain she had drawn. I wanted to pull it back. I wanted to tuck it behind her ears, so that I could see whatever was going on, so that I could help her, but I knew that I’d probably have my fingers broken for even trying.
“I just, that night was messed up,” she stuttered out. “I was all over the place. The kiss meant nothing.”
I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. She seemed serious. I could understand what she was saying, too. I could understand that she’d been messed up. I could understand that she’d probably been riding an emotional roller coaster and I had just been there at the time. I knew that her excuse was perfectly reasonable and totally believable, but that’s what it felt like to me, an excuse.
“I believe you,” I lied, because I knew that she needed to hear it.
“Good,” she said in a rough and tough kind of way. She looked up, but not into my eyes. She was kind of staring at the side of my face, or maybe at the wall behind me. I couldn’t be sure.
“I should probably go,” I told her, because more than a half hour had passed and the chances of Dillan and Jessica not being in death match already were pretty slim.
She nodded. “That’s what I’ve been telling you from the start,” she said with a sad smile.
She started to close the door and then paused. She looked down as if trying to find the right thing to say, and then looked straight at me. “I’ll see you later,” she said in a low voice, and then she closed the door.
So there I was standing on my own outside her door, staring at the place where I’d last seen her face.
CHAPTER 5
The silence was putting me on edge. I was standing outside of my dorm room. My hand was hovering over the door handle, but I hadn’t touched it yet. I hadn’t given the people inside any clue that I was back.
I listened harder. They were both inside. I could hear the occasional shuffle of movement and the slightly rarer clearing of somebody’s throat.
That was it, though. There was no screaming. There were no sounds of cups being thrown against walls or death matches in progress. I waited another minute just to be sure and then I walked in.
Jessica turned to me. She smiled and I smiled back. My smile dropped as my mind started to see the warning signs behind her smile. It was too bright. Her eyes were too narrow. She was leaning forward towards me, but her shoulders were squared and open.
“You’ve been longer than a half hour,” she told me.
“I guess I lost track of time,” I explained, as I looked over at Dillan’s bed. He was there. He was watching me and Jessica. I could tell
that he was expecting something to happen. I could see the way he was hanging on the moment, just waiting for it to explode.
“I suppose you would,” Jessica said and I could hear her bitterness reaching out its frostbitten fingers around her throat.
“What do you mean?” I asked, because I couldn’t work out what was going on.
“You went to see that girl,” Jessica told me knowingly. “You went to see that girl Sophie, who you were with when I phoned you the other day.”
“So?”
“So?” she spat back at me. “Is that all I get? You’re cheating on me with some slut and all I get is ‘so’?” Her cheeks were burning red. Anger flashed in her eyes like lightning, her voice the thunder to match.
“Say something,” she screamed.
“I’m not cheating on you,” I told her straight. “Sophie is a friend of mine. She’s been having some trouble and I’ve been helping her through it.”
“Oh, Dillan told me all about the trouble.” The poison in her voice was so potent that I wondered how she was surviving with it inside of her. Surely something that violent would have taken its host down by now.
“I doubt that,” I said, as I glanced over at Dillan. That was his part in all of this. That was why he was sitting on his bed and quietly observing the scene. He’d told Jessica and about me going to see Sophie. He’d told Jessica about what Sophie had done to the room.
His eyes met mine for less than a second, but I questioned him with the time that I had. His eyes gave me no answers, though; they just dropped to the ground and waited for me to look away.
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