Crush

by Celia Loren

  In the ensuing silence, I try to predict how I'll feel when Chase Kelly peels himself away from me, face contorted in mock apology, slurring out some classic Dude excuse. I know him well enough that I trust I'll be able to detect the BS in his eyes, the lie lurking behind “of course I'll call!” Will it crush me? Having to lose him twice?

  And I suppose it isn't fair, asking a dashing college sophomore if he's willing to wait for you, a nobody, for an open-ended amount of time. I shut my eyes tight and conjure his hulking body above me. This ground cedes fast to the Anger, the righteous Anger of Angry Avery. Anger directed at the boy in Georgia who thought he could ruin me. Anger at the twin brother, for thinking he could shame me for it. Anger at myself, for letting all these men get to me.

  “Hey,” Chase is saying, his fingers suddenly on my cheek. I only realize I've been crying when he holds up the pads of his left hand, demonstrating the dampness. And then I'm crying harder and more, because he's actually saying what you want a guy to say in this moment, and he's saying it while his green eyes stay steady on mine. “I've waited for you for years, Avery. A little longer is nothing.”

  Then he holds me, enveloping my body like a sunny day. I shut my eyes against his pressed, white shirt and feel at home.

  Chapter Twelve

  It's a party in my dorm room, and the gang's all here: RA Jeff, Tara, Trevor, and two fresh strangers—a tall, skinny girl with dyed grey hair and red pleather stiletto boots, and a compact Asian guy with a half-sleeve of tattoos racing up his right arm. Hostess Tara ashes her American Spirit around our squalid room with abandon. Our home may be a disaster, but my roommate's made the time to get all-dolled-up once more. She wears a long ponytail of hair extensions, black mane skimming her butt.

  “Annnnnnnd?” the lady drawls, as soon as I've set my clutch down on my desk. A nineties jam comes on the playlist, and the other people in my room begin to shout and dance. Red Hot Chili Peppers, a part of me concedes. Nice. RA Jeff and Trevor lope an inappropriate tango across the crowded floor, and the skinny girl and the tiny boy nod their heads to the beat.

  “It was nice.”

  “'Nice?' What's that supposed to mean?”

  RA Jeff dips Trevor, and I realize that both of their faces are smudged with glitter.

  “What is this? Like, a 'dress-up' party?”

  Tara shrugs, her eyes fixed in a way that won't allow distractions. Without glancing at the two newbies, she indicates them with a sweep of her bejeweled hand. “Mabus, Louise—this is my roommate, Savannah.”

  “Avery.”

  “You see, Georgia here has already got the hottest sex life on campus. She's the hypotenuse of a love triangle with...wait for it...twins.” Tara smiles wickedly, and I deduce from the dopiness in her smile that she's wasted. Mabus and Louise nod their heads a bit faster, apparently approving of me just a little bit more than they approve of the music.

  “I'm not in a love triangle, Tara. Give me a break. This isn't As The World Turns.” I flop backwards onto my bed, just as Trevor pirouettes in my direction. His glittery face is scrunched.

  “You didn't sleep with him tonight, either?”

  “Nope,” I sigh, reaching for a blanket. Then, to elude more of the third degree, I flutter my eyes at the ceiling. I'm a big fan of my roommate and her motley gang of weirdos, but right now, I wish there was a quieter place in which to rehash my evening. I'm exhausted. I feel like I've been up for days and days, and now I want to cocoon myself in a ball where no boys exist.

  I can hear Tara murmuring to our guests, and just then I wonder—what if I had known her, before all the shit went down in Savannah? My new roommate is easily the baddest bitch I'd ever met. I'd never told anyone but a few campus authorities (and now, Chase Kelly) about what had driven me from school, from the South, from painting—but what if I'd been able to tell someone like Tara? Something tells me that everything could have been different. She might've encouraged me to be strong in a way that Zooey couldn't. Or maybe the whole thing might have been avoided.

  “Guys, let's disperse,” I hear Trevor say quietly.

  RA Jeff protests, audibly, “But I'm an RA! I'm here to listen!”

  But after a few moments, the door shuts with a click behind the little party. I hear Tara breathing raggedly, then the sounds of pots and pans, ministrations above our mini-fridge. The microwave pinging. I try to make myself small and silent.

  “This simply won't do, bitch!” my roommate cries. With a sharp gesture, she yanks the blanket away from my face, and regards me with something like contempt. “You've been here three whole days. You can't get your heart all broken already. You're pretty and cool and better than that noise.” Smiling tightly, she hands me a steaming mug of microwaved green tea, and clinks my glass with her own half-drunk PBR.

  We don't have to say much, which I don't mind. Tara begins the slow work of taking off her make-up, by now a comforting routine. I'm reminded of being a kid and watching my mother prepare for an evening out. The calm, close feeling of watching someone you love performing a task that gives them pleasure.

  On the open laptop, the 90s playlist resolves in an old up-tempo Blink-182 song, and after a few seconds of silence, Tara rustles over and changes the station. The sweet tang of green tea floods my mouth at the same time I hear his words again, right here, in our sacred space. Brendan's band. They're playing electric instruments, but their sound is so intimate and clear, it still seems like they could be in the room with us. His hand on my shoulder, perhaps. His raging eyes buried in my skin.

  If Tara realizes she's awakened some beast, she doesn't acknowledge it. Just keeps taking her make-up off. My eyes scan the room, uneasy. I note with a blush that The Enlightened Orgasm has been returned to Tara's slim book-shelf. Sheepish, I swivel my eyes towards the foot of my own bed, where I find something I've missed.

  Propped up in the corner by the window, folded in on itself, is a plywood easel. Cheap. My paint box rests beneath it, looking dusty and grim as ever.

  “What's that?” I ask, setting my mug down on the ground. Tara doesn't turn her head.

  “Mabus had an extra one lying around. He's in the art department, too. You'll meet.”

  “I'm not 'in the art department.'”

  “You're really starting to bug me with this damsel in distress thing,” Tara says, her voice cutting, edgy. I could easily chose to pick a fight, but I decide that now is not the time for one. Instead, I hop to my feet and creep up behind my roommate, who watches her own reflection in the mirror. I wrap my arms around her taut middle, and put my chin on her shoulder. When she looks up at me, surprised, I don't speak. I just mouth the words: “Thank you.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I do what she says. I should know by now. Tara Rubenstein is, after all, like weather: unavoidable, and best when submitted to without protest. In the last few days of Fuhgettaboutit, I am drawn through class registration like a puppy at its owner’s heels. Also during these waning days, I watched the SDU campus inflate itself with students—bleached blonde bimbos, hackey-sacking pseudo-jocks, and khaki-corporate types begin to roam the quad. I keep waiting for a remaining contingent of fashion outsiders and hipsters to make their way out of the woodwork, but as the days grew longer, it becomes more apparent that Tara has found the only five weirdoes at SDU and colonized them, like a new world.

  “She doesn't want any AM's,” I watched my roommate yell at a frazzled registrar. “She's got an artist's temperament. What about the Core at 12:15?” Tara bullied both our ways through registration, finally handing me a schedule the both of us could live with. Holding the piece of cardstock in my hand, I felt a little sad. We had no classes together, and shared no free time. Between daily schedule conflicts and her nightly policing of the Fashion Merchandising Club, it looked like I wouldn't be seeing a whole lot of my roommate—and first real friend in the city—during the school year.

  “Oh, you'll get over it,” Tara'd said, rolling her eyes at my doe-eyed proclamation. �
�You have a boyfriend. You're the one who's abandoning me.” She spat out the word 'boyfriend, like it was a tobacco flake on her tongue. Apparently, things weren't going so well with RA Jeff.

  I’d considered her words without protest because here's the thing: the boyfriend comment was somewhat true. I've seen Chase every night this week. Thursday was mini-golf, at some place in the city that we needed to drive to—a miniature thrill, because I found I remembered the exact smell and feel of his old junk bucket LoveMobile. Friday was a B- horror movie, drinks after. Saturday we went for a run, and Sunday we went back to The Cottone Brothers' pizzeria. Each date ended about as chastely as the first two. I'm pleased that Chase is so respectful of my boundaries, but it's gotten to the point where I'm unsure which of us will break first. Every evening he's kissed me good night, with one foot on the threshold of my dorm lobby and the other in retreat, and every evening I wait for my stomach to flip. I wait for some braver version to supplant Angry Avery, someone who will tuck two fingers into the V of his shirt and tug him towards me, healed and ready to jump this hot guy's bones. Yet, still nothing. But whatever, you know? These things take time.

  In the interest of recreating butterflies, I've also invited Chase to come out clubbing with Tara and the gang, but he is, apparently, “not much of a dance guy.” At the same time, he's managed to skirt any mention of his own friends. In particular, my meeting them.

  “Maybe he doesn't have any friends,” Tara wisely pointed out. “He was alone at the Halloween party, remember? Well—except for Tatiana.”

  “It doesn't seem a little weird to you?” I press my roomie, slurping down some more bubble tea. Tara's made a point of taking me to her favorite San Diego food joints before classes start, and this particular Thai stand is apparently the best on our coast. It is also conveniently en route to my very first class at SDU: A Survey of Modern and Contemporary Lit, 101. “I mean, I know so many people here from high school and middle school. He doesn't have to hide me away, you know?”

  “He's not hiding you away. Don't be paranoid.”

  “Like I can help it, bitch.”

  Tara snorts on a tapioca ball, and we both laugh. She claims that whenever I say 'bitch,' it sounds completely unnatural.

  We arrive at the stone steps of Hampton Hall, where a queue of yelling kids mill around us, in no particular hurry. The kids at SDU, I've noticed, have an ease to their whole expression. Whereas the art students in Savannah were constantly hunched and beleaguered-looking, clawing the air for their next coffee or cigarette, the general populace here walks upright. They move like they're swimming—arms swinging and easy, the humid air seeming to buoy them through space.

  “You're gonna do great, sweetheart,” Tara says, in a Mom voice. (Or at least, what I think must be a Mom voice. It's been a while. I wouldn't know.)

  “Thanks, Sugar Butt.” We hug it out over the dregs of our bubble teas, and then I pin my eyes to my new world. No sooner has Tara begun to saunter away from me than a wave of dread crashes in my stomach. I take one step. Then two. Okay, Savannah, I murmur. You can do this.

  I don't see him at first, because the enormous lecture hall is teeming with distractions: a redhead with bangles rattling up and down each arm is locked in a shoving match with a tall, skinny guy whose eyes are closed. An improbable trio of dudes futz with Magic Cards in the front row, their fingers pointing and vexing like people at poker tables. A hippie guy in a poncho does squats in the back row. Toto, we are not in Georgia anymore.

  Brushing the platinum out of my eyes, I duck my head and make a beeline for the third row from the back. (Always a personal favorite. Not too close, not too far...) I try not to look at people looking at me, the men and women sizing me up. I toss my hair, for some stab at affect. God: let them like me. Please let them like me. Let me just sail pleasantly under the radar for the next three years, living my secret life with my party girl roommate by night...

  “You're on my coat.”

  “What?”

  The fantasy-killer beside me doesn't repeat himself. He just pitches forward in his stooped, collegiate desk, tugging the offending coat in his wake—sending me immediately rocking towards the ground. The fantasy-killer had his feet anchored on the floor, but I go flying. My heavy tote sails forward, smacking the back of some guy's legs. My carefully sharpened pencils all go skittering. And worst of all, I fall to the rough carpet on my bare knees, in a position I'm positive reveals my ass to the whole world of our lecture hall. “Real women wear thongs,” Tara had told me, days earlier, dispensing yet another pearl of feminine wisdom from her favorite book. If my ass could blush, it’d be doing it now. I am such an idiot.

  Though being face down ass-up reminds me of many nightmares, in reality, the room doesn't break out into breathless applause—I think hippie-squat guy actually snorts, from the back. Instead, I find myself quickly folded into the same cloth I was just sitting on. Bundled like a baby.

  “I'm sorry,” the fantasy-killer whispers in my ear, bending low to secure my dignity—and it's then that I recognize the voice. Brendan Kelly smiles at me, his green eyes wide with hope and apology. His mouth is screwed to the side in what I hope is an attempt to make me laugh. I can't help it. As I slug him on the shoulder, I break out into guffaws.

  “Annnnnnd, welcome to SDU, Avery.” I manage between laughs.

  “I'm so sorry!”

  “How many people saw my ass, do we think?” I lift my head out of the jacket cocoon, like a sheepish turtle. But most of my classmates are not watching me. They begin to amble towards their chairs, preparing for class. Brendan's hand remains on the small of my back, as I rise to a wobbly standing.

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of in that department,” my old friend says. I move to punch him again, but there's something in his posture that gives me pause. Brendan's gaze is even, and his lips are slightly curled. I'm not entirely sure he's joking.

  So I duck my head.

  Right. We're awkward together, ever since a certain someone had to go writing a cryptic song about me. It is no longer like old times.

  “I'm sorry about the show,” I say, to the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I spy our professor: a tall Asian woman, her long hair piled up in a messy bun.

  “Sorry? For what?” Brendan doesn't let me off easy. His eyes appeal to my own, even as I search my useless imagination for words. Green pools, identical to his brothers'—yet so different. If irises were water, Chase is packing a pool and Brendan is packing...an ocean.

  “I'm...”

  But also, oh my God do I need to stop comparing these two brothers. Especially as one of them is my almost-boyfriend, and the other one is just some rock star who owes me money for life rights.

  Someone clears her throat at the front of the lecture hall, and that's when the laughter I was expecting before sets in around us. When I pull my eyes from his face, I register our Professor, who's placed two hands on the square center of her desk and is bending low in our direction, looking unamused.

  “Would the two lovebirds center stage please take their seats?”

  I watch Brendan grow coy. He flicks his hair, pushes his bangs back behind an ear with an irritated gesture, and begins to mutter protests in the direction of our professor. I watch the little gold hoop glint in his ear and can't help smiling. He's so 1992 with this whole Kurt Cobain thing.

  The professor waves us silent, and I resume my seat. She starts to speak, emphatically—she's the kind of lady who moves her hands around a lot as she talks. Around us, people begin to take furious notes. But I suddenly feel like I'm trapped in a bubble. All I can see or hear, all I can consider of the world around me, is the sound and motion of Brendan's breath in the chair beside me. At one point, he lifts a golden, peacock-sleeved arm, placing it on the median between our two tiny desks. I strain to feel the tickle of his arm-hair through my shirt. It's a silly (not to mention, impossible) task, but I'm hypnotized. A moment later, he leans on the arm, so he's pressing ever so slightly again
st my skin. I hold my breath, irrationally fearful that if I move too much, he'll pull away. Another moment passes, and I feel his eyes on me—like, I feel the exact second his gaze shifts. The Professor carries on below us, but my notebook is blank in front of me. Brendan's chair squeaks. He swings forward, hair falling into his eyes. I'm drawn into his soapy, vanilla smell. It's intoxicating.

  “What's a matter, kid? You have the hiccups?”

  Oh, right. Because I'm holding my breath like a crazy person.

  Because I can't very well do anything else, I turn to him and nod my head, shrugging my shoulders in a cartoony way. Brendan smiles with half of his mouth. Then, he leans forward again, until his mouth is inches from my ear. His breath is tobacco and something spicier—cinnamon or nutmeg or cloves. The sound his parting lips make when he opens his mouth nearly ends me, and my ruse, right there.

  “You know the only way to cure the hiccups?” he asks. I feel myself drifting towards his body. Driftwood caught in a current.

  I shake my head so rapidly that a few blonde strands smack him on the face. Which makes Brendan laugh. Not loud, but just loud enough.

  “Lovebirds!” our professor is in crouching position again, her brows furrowed over the half-moons of her glasses. “We're all adults here, people. Do I need to separate you two?”

  “We're actually just old friends.” I respond. I'm immediately aware of the mistake. The whole hall seems to swallow its laughter. I imagine I can feel Brendan shift a few cells away from me, distancing himself from Crazy McCrazygirl.