“You should have come with!” Mandi said. “Lex says you could use it.” My eyes snapped hard in her direction, but then she was squealing, “Patch!!” and tearing away from Alexis to take up the same position at the side of a junior douchebag.
“Really?” I said to Alexis.
“What?” She grinned and snuggled closer.
“You took your freshman cousin with impulse control problems ‘into the woods.’” Into the woods was code for a lot of things at North-brook. There were a lot of things you could do out there, away from supervision.
Lex nuzzled into my neck. “You should have come with us, then you wouldn’t care.”
I pushed my hand through my hair, took a deep breath and let it out, trying not to let her goading work. I thought again how different a year could be. I never thought I’d be here, with Alexis, like this. But I wanted to. It felt both wrong and good, and somehow that combination felt even better. “Did you miss me?” Lex kissed my chin and batted her eyelashes as we inserted ourselves back into the mix around the fire.
“I talked to Amy.” She was just at the edge of where we could see her, talking and laughing with people that, a year ago, I’d have been talking and laughing with too.
“How’s that skank doing?”
“Don’t.”
“Sorry. Old habit. I don’t even think she’s a skank, not really.”
“She’s not.”
“She’s more like a bitch.”
I sighed. “She thinks the same of you.”
Lex smiled. “So how’s that bitch doing?”
“Pretty great.”
“Yeah?” She blew out a breath. “Then how’s the other skank doing?”
My arm locked around her. “Lex.”
“What? It’s obvious you talked about her.”
Was it? “She’s not—”
“A skank. Sure. Of course she’s not. She’s a saint.”
“What the fuck, Lex? Are you trying to pick a fight?” I tugged on my hair again. I was more conscious of doing it, now that it was so short, but I couldn’t stop myself either.
She leaned in, mischief in her eyes as she planted a kiss on the edge of my jaw. “Maybe. You’re sexy as hell when you’re angry, you know. I might just want to take you to the Cove.”
I exhaled a long breath. “I’m ready to leave.”
“Wait,” she said softly, into my collar. “Sorry, babe. Really.” She kissed at my chin again. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay.”
“I just wanted one night where she didn’t intrude.”
Here? As if that was possible. Besides which: “You brought her up.”
Her mouth opened like she was ready to snap at me, before realization settled in. She giggled, nuzzling into me and looking up with glassy eyes. “I did, didn’t I? My bad.” We stood there for a moment, before Lex laughed again. “C’mon, let’s mingle! I haven’t even said hi to some of these assholes!”
I laughed and instead of what I always said—no—I agreed. “Lead the way, m’lady.”
I SLEPT LATE the next morning, from some combination of exhaustion and content. I’d run forever the day before, stayed up late, and didn’t have to get up. So I didn’t. The lure of my own bed, in my own room, in my own house was undeniable. Even after I woke up, I laid there a while, watching the familiar pattern of shadows change with the growing daylight. I watched Alexis for a while too. All the calculation she carried while awake, her style and precision, disappeared while she was asleep. She looked younger, more innocent. I liked it. It reminded me…
I stood up, fast. The bed shook and the floor creaked where my feet slapped it. Next to where I’d just been, Alexis stirred but didn’t wake. With more care for quiet, I slipped on a shirt and out into the hall. Aunt Mel was at the kitchen table.
“Hey.”
“Did you have fun last night?” she asked, taking a sip of coffee and pretending she hadn’t been waiting for me.
“Actually…yeah. I didn’t hate it.” I poured my own coffee and helped myself to a muffin before I sat across from her. God I had missed these muffins. It was apple cinnamon and still warm. She must have gotten up early to make a fresh batch. I ate it in three bites.
Aunt Mel smiled. “So are you sorry you never went to one before?”
Was I? “No. But I’m not sorry I went to one now.” I helped myself to another muffin. “How were sales?”
“Not as good as last year, but strong.”
It was strange even asking that question, worrying about the store but not being actively involved day-to-day. I couldn’t decide if it made me sad or proud that it was still standing, without my holding it up every day. My whole life had been Penrose Books, even before I was old enough to read. What did it mean when your whole life kept running without you? That you’d helped prepare it well, or that you hadn’t been that important to begin with? I didn’t want to think about that.
“It’s not the same without you, you know.” It was like Aunt Mel could read my thoughts.
“How could it be?” I said and grinned before I ate the last half of my muffin. She punched me in the shoulder, but she was smiling too. Dad’s smile. I thought I wouldn’t think of him as much, now that I didn’t spend my days surrounded by things that reminded me of him, like his sister. But I did. Whenever I looked in the mirror.
I’d always known we looked enough alike for it to be obvious, but I never used to see him in my reflection. Not until my heart was broken. Dad had worn heartache like a shroud my whole life. I’d hated it because it was my fault; I took my mother from him just by being born. And now that I understood, I hated it more.
“I mean it though,” Aunt Mel continued. For a second, I’d forgotten she was there. “No one will ever find books as fast as you. Or read so many. Did you see the galleys I left in your room?” I nodded. Of course I did. I’d already packed the ones I wanted to take and rearranged the rest in the boxes under my bed. A funny thing about selling books: you drowned in ones you got for free. “Nonfiction is down without you,” she added.
“I thought you were trying to cheer me up.”
“I thought a trip to Dad’s would do that,” she countered. It would, but I shook my head. Aunt Mel darted a look over my shoulder, down the hall toward my room, and came around the table to hug my shoulders. “Not ready for that step yet, huh?”
I shook my head again. I couldn’t. Not Dad’s Diner, not with Lex. Not to the place I’d only ever taken Lainey. “Not yet,” I said. Maybe never. Aunt Mel let me go so she could grab the coffee pot to warm my mug and hers. She sat back down with the sugar bowl and stirred.
“Do you think she’ll be here at all this weekend?” Obviously she wasn’t talking about Lex.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Do you want her to be?”
Did I? No. Yes. No. I caught myself just before touching the skin below my eye. I let my hand continue up to run through my hair instead, even though I was trying to break that habit. It felt good.
I didn’t want to lie to Aunt Mel, or to myself, so I said, “Maybe?” My voice sounded too hopeful and I hated it. I wanted not to want to see her, but I did. Want to. “I hope—”
My door opened and shut, releasing a bleary-eyed Alexis into the kitchen a few seconds later. I wondered if she’d been listening, for how long and how much she heard. She didn’t look like it though. She looked groggy and hung over, if that was the right word for it. I wasn’t worried Aunt Mel would disapprove. She wasn’t like that. She’d already forgiven Alexis for plenty of her less than stellar behavior in the past. Also, I was pretty sure she’d visited the woods with her friends many times.
“Good morning.” Alexis yawned. “What’s the matter, babe?” I dropped my hand from my head to around her shoulders and kissed her cheek.
“Nothing. I was waiting for you before I went downstairs.”
She nodded absently, and Aunt Mel smiled. “Can I get you something, sweetie? Looks like you had more fun than Cart
er last night.”
“Always.” She flashed her perfect, white smile. “Coffee sounds really good, thanks. Ooh, are those muffins?”
I hesitated to leave Lex alone with my aunt, but there was nothing either could say that they didn’t already know about me. It felt good to spend the day in the store. I’d meant to stay out of the way and poke around in the background, but by noontime I was immersed in my old routines. Busy at work, for the first time all weekend, I relaxed.
Nothing had changed. Penrose Books was still mine. I still fit here. I still wanted to be here. For the first time in months, the dogging worry that I would leave and everything would change, was quiet. I felt good. I felt home.
The bell over the door jingled and in spilled Lex with an entourage of girls nearly but not quite as beautiful as her and cups from Anderson’s. I smiled. No, things hadn’t changed, but then again, they had. When Lex saw me, she scampered over, kissing me roundly and without an ounce of apology. She looked glossy and fresh, all traces of her exploits of the night before gone.
“Hey, babe. It’s sooo nice out today, like a real fall weekend, finally. I brought you this, figured you’d need one by now.” She stuck a coffee into my hand and kissed me again before flitting away in a whirl of dark hair and confidence. Lex settled in the lounge with Brooke Barros and some of her other friends who hadn’t graduated. The next time I passed by, they called to me.
“Hey, Carter!”
“We missed you!”
“Why don’t you come stoke my fire?”
I obliged.
I had missed this. Really missed this. Yet, as I settled more wood in the fireplace and bantered with the girls, I felt suddenly shitty, realizing that. I’d missed the store, and my family, and my life, but I’d missed, too, the feeling I wouldn’t have named before: of being a big fish. This was my pond. I’d jumped into a much bigger one, an ocean, and found I barely knew how to swim.
No one liked drowning. No one liked realizing they craved the attention of a captive audience either. I thought of it for the first time, how I was getting older but the students weren’t. Collectively, they’d always be no more than eighteen. I was almost twenty-one. I felt at once too-old and foolishly young. When I left the girls in the lounge, I kept my smile in place, but it lacked the ease it used to have.
And for the first time, I felt ready to leave, to go back to DC.
Chapter Nine
Lainey
The next week, I glided into my seat in discussion next to Serena right on time, not a second early, and spent most of the hour with my eyes trained on my notebook. It was possibly the longest hour of the entire semester. I’d thought about skipping outright, but I couldn’t do it forever, and besides, I didn’t like skipping. It made me feel guiltier than…whatever I felt about Jack.
When it was finally over and time to pass around our previous assignments, I barely looked at the stack before pulling mine off the top and passing it on. I was ready to dash out of the room until I was distracted by the bright pink sticky note covering the grade on my assignment. For the first time, it read:
Come see me during office hours
Ugh! I tried to look at Jack without looking at him. There was no way my assignment was that bad. No way. And he’d promised we weren’t grading each other at the show. If I wasn’t already so pissed at him, I’d have been pissed.
I went to rip the note off and check the damage, except I realized it was two notes. Underneath the ominous one was a second sticky.
Let me explain. Please?
Beneath that was a B+.
I peeked at Jack again to find him watching me, his expression the very definition of chagrin. I sighed. I couldn’t avoid this—avoid him—all semester. He was still my TA. In the brief second our eyes met, I nodded. His expression melted into relief, a tiny smile bringing out that damned dimple. God, he was cute, and I was afraid—no, sure—my attraction to him was clouding my judgment.
I WAITED UNTIL near the end of Jack’s office hours to arrive. Then I waited at least three more minutes in the hall. I stood there doing some covert yoga breathing and trying to work out my emotions. I’d been trying to work them out for over a week now. The problem was I couldn’t decide if I was being rational or just emotional. Or something. It wasn’t Jack’s fault he was who, what, he was, but I was still scared. If anyone had reason to be, I felt like I did.
“Office hours are usually in the office,” Jack said from the door and I jumped so high I was surprised I didn’t hit my head on the ceiling. “Sorry.”
He looked good, leaning there, in his perfectly worn in shoes and Brooks Brothers casual. I wasn’t used to guys who were so…put together. It didn’t seem like he tried to dress like an executive-in-training. More like he was born to it. The look suited him and he owned it.
When I didn’t move, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m glad you came. Did you want to come in? Or if not…well, I can apologize out here just as well.”
“That’s the thing,” I said, finally finding my voice. “I’m not sure you actually have anything to apologize for.” Also, I was just blatantly checking you out which I should not have been doing.
“Why don’t you come in and we’ll figure it out. Fair?”
I nodded and followed him into the office. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this. It was small and cramped and windowless, a rather miserable place to have to spend time, especially if any of the other three TAs were around. The scent of someone’s cologne still lingered, which made me wonder how powerful it smelled when the wearer was actually there.
Jack sat at his assigned desk, furthest in the corner, forcing his visitors to sit awkwardly out past the other two. I called to him, “No offense, but how do you stand it in here?”
He grinned. At least I think he did, in the murky office distance. He rolled his chair forward, past the other desks, until he was positioned across from me on the opposite wall. “What?” he said. “You don’t like my cave?” I laughed, breaking a bubble of tension that had lingered between us. “I assure you,” he went on, “my cavemates are as charming as our shared space. Maybe you’ll even meet them.”
“If I’m lucky, right?”
“Right.” He leaned back in his chair, more relaxed now. Glancing at his watch, he pushed the door until it was almost closed. “Do you mind?” he asked, looking at me and waiting for permission to close it all the way.
Strange, I thought. In high school, this would never have been allowed, being closed together in such a…private space. The hardest thing to get used to in college was freedom. Plenty of opportunity to make your own decisions, and your own mistakes. I hoped this wasn’t one. I nodded.
“Thanks,” Jack said. The door closed with little more than a click. “Hours are almost over anyway. I thought our conversation could benefit from a little…discretion.” He looked at me when he said this, and I cleared my throat.
“Yeah. Probably. I kind of got out of the habit of worrying about that.”
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” he agreed. “My grandfather liked to say my most important class every year at Webber was discretion. My father, on the other hand, called it stress. You don’t realize how stressful it is actively keeping a secret every day until you don’t have to do it anymore. I assume it’s the same at ’Brook.”
“’Brook?” I teased. “Is that the slang?”
He grinned. “It is. For us anyway. I guess I don’t know if it’s derogatory.”
“Why even bother? It’s not like Northbrook is so long. It’s the same number of syllables as Webber!”
“But it’s a compound word. Much more snooty sounding.”
I laughed. We were joking. About secrets and compound words. I’d come here a ball of stress and now I was sitting casually with my knees tucked next to me and my bag thrown on the floor. I wasn’t even sure how it happened.
“Well, that’s certainly better than the expression you left me with the other night. Maybe I haven’t co
mpletely fucked this up?” Another thing that would never happen in high school. But he was smiling, not tense but more like hopeful. It made me unsettled, though not necessarily in a bad way. Like the dichotomy of power between us wasn’t all that uneven.
“About that…” My lips were dry, so I wet them, and I was pretty sure he watched the movement with interest. I didn’t know how to put into words what I’d been feeling without examining all the underlying mess more closely than I wanted to, but Jack saved me from it. He held up his hand.
“I think I understand. And I’m sorry.”
“I think,” I said, “I’m sorry too.”
“No no.” He shook a finger at me and I tried not to giggle. “This is my apology. I get what happened now. I’d never seen someone react so negatively before. Usually, I mean, there aren’t really that many of us, despite how it feels when we’re all smashed together at our academies. Other people I’ve met are always excited. But I understand why it was different for you: because I knew something about you that you didn’t know about me.”
Yes. That was exactly it. I nodded. “I mean, I guess just because someone went to Webber doesn’t guarantee they’re Sententia—”
He let his eyes widen. “What? What’s that?”
“Oh. Sorry. For guys? It means impotent…”
“Definitely not Sententia then.”
Laughing, I asked, “So what are you?” I knew the impropriety of asking so directly, but we were already being improper.
After a beat he said, “My grandfather says I’m a no-good Herald,” and winked. I must have pulled a face because he laughed. “What? Don’t like Heralds?”
“No!” I said, then blushed as I realized how that must sound. “Shit. I mean no, it’s not that. I don’t even know many of you. It’s just that one of them…isn’t my favorite person.” Heralds were what I thought of as just below Thought Movers in the Sententia hierarchy. Their gifts projected onto others. They didn’t have impetus—they couldn’t force anything—but they had influence. Alexis Morrow was a Herald.
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