by Rachel Shane
The gray December sky reminded me of the swirling color in his eye when he wore my contacts. Our cherry pink noses threatened to run. I hopped up and down to keep warm before he pulled off his giant orange North Face and draped it over my shoulders, leaving himself with nothing but a navy sweater. My heart tugged at such a simple fix, something neither of us had thought of the night of the accident.
“You’ll freeze.” I tried to shrug out of the jacket.
“Nah, I have you to keep me warm.” He wrapped himself around me, sliding his arms inside his own jacket.
“Not for long,” I teased, then clamped my mouth shut. The threat of winter break would rip me away from him for an entire month.
He nuzzled his chin on the top of my head. “Don’t say that, Mac. We’ll have Skype…sex. Phone…sex.”
“Sexting,” I added.
“Right. So we’ll be seeing plenty of each other—”
“—’s naked bodies.”
We both laughed.
A black town car pulled up and the driver popped the trunk. Corey lifted my suitcase and placed it inside as a tear slid down my cheek. In one swift move, he gathered the betraying drop with his thumb. Our lips entangled until the driver honked.
“I’ll expect a nipple shot when land.”
As soon as the plane touched down in New Jersey, I texted him a picture of Googled baby bottle top with the note: You didn’t say they had to be MY nipple.
He wrote back: weirdly enough, this makes me miss you even more.
And then he sent another text of a rooster and the caption: here’s a picture of my cock.
THE JOKE GENITALIA TEXTS continued to keep me afloat for the next few weeks. I’d text him cow udders and he’d respond with a pic of Country Crock butter with the r crossed out. I spent most days catching up on my animations. Now that I was away from all my distractions—boys and booze, mainly—I could clearly see how I’d been slacking off all semester. Plus, I was determined to be a better version of Mackenzie, more like the girl from last year who squandered away her fun in the graphics lab and hadn’t been responsible for adding to anyone’s criminal record.
For Chanukah, my dad bought me seven nights worth of art supplies. It was a safe gift, especially because I gave him a list of supplies I’d need for next semester. In much the same way, I bought him more sweaters. Without me, he’d wear the same ones year after year, despite how the threads started to unravel after several washings.
Maybe I needed to give my dad more credit because on the eighth night, he surprised me. He carried a box over, balancing it in shaky palms like it contained a bomb he didn’t want to set off. When he handed it to me, he retreated across the room, ducking his head and watching from beneath his eyelashes. Why was he so nervous? I caught the feeling like a contagious disease, now a little wary to find out what the box contained.
I unwrapped the paper neatly, saving it for an art project. Then I shook the box open and pulled out the most gorgeous black cocktail dress imaginable. It had a plunging neckline and a skirt that was way too short. I looked at Dad quizzically.
He cleared his throat. “Your aunt helped pick it out.”
“I love it. It’s—” I was going to say sexy but…not to my dad. Besides, it wasn’t like I had any place to wear it to during Winter Break anyway.
Dad fiddled with the cuff of his sweater. “It’s for your next semi-formal with that boyfriend of yours. Who I hope to actually meet. One day.”
I gave Dad a big hug.
That night, Corey called me while I was getting ready for bed. “Hey, babe. Get anything good tonight?”
“Actually, yes. But I’m not going to tell you about it because when you see it, I don’t want you to think of my dad.”
He snorted. “Uh oh, that statement scares the crap out of me.”
I flopped onto my bed. “It’s a dress. A really sexy one. That my dad picked out.”
“Stop! Don’t say anymore! I’m officially terrified.”
“To make it even creepier, he bought it for me to wear to my next semi-formal with you.”
Corey let out an exaggerated scream. “You hear that? That was my blood curdling horror movie scream.” Then, a pause. A heavy breath. “You told your dad about me?”
“Of course. I think he’s more excited about me having a boyfriend than about spending time with me.” He’d never liked my ex, and it wasn’t until the jerk had dumped me that I agreed.
Silence for several moments. My stomach twisted. Wrong thing to say?
“Oh no,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. I injected a little pep. “That killed you, didn’t it?”
“Hold on a sec, my dad’s here…”
I gasped. His dad got home. Holy shit. He’d been traveling for business since Corey left Throckmorton. Muffled voices. The sound of shuffling. After a few moments, Corey said, “Hey,” again, this time in a whisper. “I only have a minute.”
I let out a breath. “Phew. You’re still alive.”
“But possibly not for long,” he added. His voice contained no humor.
I twirled my blanket around my finger. “What did he say?”
“That he’d deal with me after Christmas. Translation: he’s going to make me suffer before he doles out his punishment. Clearly he doesn’t want me to ruin his holiday.”
I sucked in a breath. “Define deal with me.” His dad sounded strict but I wasn’t sure how far the strictness extended. Allowance restrictions or something worse, something involving fists.
“I’m sure they’re going to cut me off for good. They’ll pay for my tuition and rent still, obviously, because a college degree is too important to them. But they won’t pay for anything else. Which means no more car, no more spring break trip, no more drinks on me.” He sighed.
My stomach squeezed, that old enemy guilt surging to full force. This was all my fault. “Ugh,” I said, more to myself than to him.
“Trust me, it’s worse than hell. It’s—”
A beep from another call drowned out the rest of his sentence. My eyes bugged out when I read the name of the caller. Ryan. My ex. The phone slipped from my hands and tumbled with a soft patter onto the blankets. “Hold on, hold on,” I yelled.
I’d meant to only tell Corey I’d dropped the phone, but instead I used the hold on literally. And switched to Ryan’s call. The guilt that had already invaded my body swelled again.
“Hello?” My voice came out breathless, amped by my racing heart.
“Kenzie, hey.” His own voice sent stabbing pains through my stomach, so much nostalgia contained in a few decibels of sound. And his old nick name for me seemed so foreign now, like trying to shape my mouth around lines from the school play I acted in freshman year of high school. “It’s Ryan.”
“I know who you are.” My words came out harsher than I’d meant. “I mean, you’re still in my phone contacts.”
“Well, that’s certainly good news.” He let out a strained life. “That you haven’t erased me from existence.”
I sat ramrod straight, phone squeezed into my palm. My brain couldn’t supply a single thing to respond with as though I had nothing left to say to Ryan at all. Silence crept in for a brief moment before I heard the tell tale beep announcing Corey had hung up the other line.
“Listen,” Ryan said. “I was wondering if you wanted to…hang out. I haven’t seen you in months and it would be nice to catch up.”
I have a boyfriend now. The words hid in my throat. Instead, I found myself nodding. But Ryan couldn’t hear that. “When?” I ended up asking, not a yes or a no. Not a commitment. It was something Corey might say.
“Tomorrow? Say around five at our old stomping grounds? I have something for you.”
“Okay.” The word flew from my lips without consulting my brain. This wasn’t about seeing Ryan again, I told myself. It was to help me get a little refresher course on the old Mackenzie. So I could recreate her once again.
I hung up and called Corey and when he
asked if my phone got cut off, I didn’t correct him.
I didn’t have any residual feelings for Ryan, I knew that. He’d taken my heart and stomped on it with heavy combat boots, spike marks etched into the veins. Still, steam spiraled from my ceramic iron as I curled the edges of my hair. I smoothed down my elegant blue sweater, the same one Bianca owned that I found on sale at the mall last week. A spritz of Ryan’s favorite perfume completed the ensemble.
When I arrived at the cafe—the main hang out for high school students in my town, a.k.a. people without fake IDs—he was already seated, a giant plate of apple pie a la mode for two melting in front of him. Our usual. This, I thought, was a good starter for New Mackenzie (a.k.a. Resurrected Old Mackenzie), not a Hot Apple Pie shot but an actual apple pie. His blond hair, which had been cropped short the entire time I knew him, fell into his eyes now and obscured his glasses. The same frames I’d picked out for him during his last appointment with my dad. I could draw him from memory, but not this him. Not this new stranger sitting across from me with designer jeans sculpting his legs instead of the standard Levis he’d always worn. His features changed too, nose a little longer, chin a little pointier, his cheeks puffed out with the beginning of his requisite college weight gain. Or possibly I just never noticed his flaws before, turning them into strengths as if he were always on a perpetual job interview with me.
I pulled out a chair and grabbed the second spoon. “I haven’t had this in so long.” I froze at my words. I’d meant the pie, not him.
Ryan blinked at me, still staring, mouth parted like he’d forgotten he had one. “Wait. Don’t eat that yet. I have something better.” He bent under the table and unzipped something from his backpack. On the way back up, he knocked his head on the underside of the table, making the pie jump. Memories rushed back: him tripping while the two of us held hands in the school hallway and taking me down with him. The black eye that ringed one entire side of his face from an unfortunate brawl with a door knob in the middle of the night. The always awkward, always fumbling sex that barely felt good.
He set a homemade flan custard in a little tupperware container on the metallic table. The blue bow wrapped around it made my stomach clench. Every day in Spanish class, he’d bring me one of his special homemade flan treats. All last year while we dated long distance, he’d have flans delivered to me from every bakery and restaurant within a fifty mile radius of my dorm so I could try them all. “For old times’ sake.” He grinned with the smile that used to melt my heart but now it only made me squirm with guilt.
I set my down spoon. “Why did you call?”
“I felt weird with how things ended.” He drummed his slender fingers on the table. Then, softer: “I made a huge mistake.”
I blinked at him, repeating his words in my own head to make sense of them. Had he spent the last three months holed up in his dorm room wallowing over the loss of me? I’d barely even given him a thought since I’d gotten together with Corey. “A mistake named Alison, if I recall.”
“Consider it a momentary lapse in judgment?” He sucked on his lower lip. “But don’t worry, I plan to make it up to you.” Those were the same words Corey had said right after the accident. But it was Ryan nudging the flan closer to me, his crooked smile appearing on his face.
I scooted backward, my chair making a scraping sound that made me cringe. “Ryan, you really hurt me.” All the accusations I’d bottled up for months formed an arrow that I aimed straight at his heart. “You threw away years of us for the unknown. You didn’t even bother to call me to see how I was doing.” I’d always imagined flinging these words like bombs with the same volume and explosive force. But now I whispered them as facts, sentences with hard stops at the end, closure.
He nodded, absorbing all the blame. “I know. I wanted to give you space.”
I snorted at his joke that wasn’t meant to be a joke, at least by him. But the same words, uttered by a different boy, hung in the air between us, an invisible barrier Ryan didn’t even know was there.
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder, that kind of thing.” He sighed, big and heavy, his shoulders dancing. “I just wanted to make sure. That you were the one. That no one else could make me happy. I’m sure now.”
His words pierced my gut and twisted like a knife. He broke up with me so he could try out a few other girls to make sure there was no one better? “Did you sleep with anyone else besides Alison?” I had to know the answer. I didn’t want to know the answer.
He shook his head. “I didn’t even sleep with her. I couldn’t. It was just a single kiss. I realized I didn’t want to be with anyone but you.”
And I’d easily jumped into bed with someone new the first night and promptly forgot all about Ryan.
His face fell, features drooping as if caught in a landslide. “You slept with someone else.” It wasn’t a question. It was a realization.
“I have a boyfriend.” I lowered my voice to a whisper, to soften the blow. “I’m really happy.”
It wasn’t Old Mackenzie I needed to be. That girl was a doormat with the wrong guy. I’d finally gotten part of the equation right, the guy was correct, but now I had to work on the girl half.
I stood up, realizing I’d come today for the same reason as Ryan. To be absolutely sure there wasn’t anything I was missing.
There wasn’t.
ALTHOUGH SORORITY RUSH WOULDN’T start for another two weeks, fraternities began informally recruiting new members by throwing parties the first weekend back from break. The better the party, the better chance the potential recruit might decide to formally rush the fraternity. These parties couldn’t be lame, so of course a plethora of sorority girls were invited as eye candy. Which meant the first time I’d get a chance to see Corey second semester was at Beta Chi’s Afterhours event.
Since Fallon’s boyfriend wasn’t getting back until the next morning, I let her tag along with me to Bianca’s room where we planned to pre-game before we headed over to Corey’s. I’d tried to protest the plans since they violated my sorority probation—no drinking at the house or any Rho Sig events—but Bianca promised no one would find out. After all, hanging out at Rho Sigma was within my rights as a sister and we could conceal the alcohol.
Meeting up with Ryan helped me realize everything didn’t have to be so black and white. With him, I’d abstained from everything—booze, parties, friends—and all it had brought me was loneliness. At formal, I’d gone too far on the other extreme, overindulging in alcohol to excess. There had to be a balance, a happy medium, one where I could share a drink with friends and not stumble home at the end of the night with gaps in my memory. Tonight I was determined to prove that theory, find the exact blend of Kenzie and Mac that would crown me, well, Mackenzie, the perfect balance.
Still, Fallon and I snuck up the back steps to avoid any chance of running into any sisters that may have been named Layla. When we arrived at Bianca and Erin’s room, Corey and Nate were already seated. I let out a gasp since I hadn’t expected to see him until later. Everyone laughed.
“Surprise!” Corey said, holding out his arms.
I darted across the minefield of stretched out legs, vodka bottles, and pitcher of lemonade to reach him. After straddling him, I cupped his mouth with my hands to bring his face close to mine. His arms wrapped around me, tight. The kiss skipped right over chaste and went straight to hot and heavy. But only for a moment because Bianca tugged on my shirt until I fell backward.
“New rule of my room: no one makes out unless one of the participants is me,” Bianca said.
“Or me,” Erin added.
Corey raised his eyebrows a few times in succession. “Go on, you two.” He mimed his hands between them. “We won’t stop you.”
Erin shrugged. “Anything’s better than my awful date from formal.”
Bianca nodded. “I don’t have a lot of people on my shit list, but Harrison Wagner is numero uno.”
I cringed at the mention of formal, but Corey’s
strong arms around me helped ground me as we leaned against Erin’s bed, our legs outstretched on the floor. Fallon hovered awkwardly in the center of the room before Bianca patted down the air and instructed her to sit next to her. The room smelled flowery and sweet from the Peony scented candle burning on Bianca’s desk.
“Two shots, coming up.” Nate lined up two sixteen ounce cups that seemed to be doubling as shot glasses. The others already clutched the red cups.
I eyed the cup warily.
Bianca traced my line of sight. “If you’re worried about Layla, she doesn’t get back until tomorrow.” Classes didn’t officially start for two more days. “And you have a lot of catching up to do.”
I took the cup, which reeked of alcohol. “You guys are real bad influences on me.”
“Failing peer pressure one oh one is like a college rite of passage,” Corey said.
I swirled the cup and peered up at him, lowering my voice. “But I’m going to take it easy tonight, okay?”
He nodded, then kissed me.
I took a sip, then winced. “Wow this is strong.” I’d have to nurse it.
Fallon continued to clutch her cup for dear life. Every time she raised it to her mouth, she’d pucker up and place it back down, the contents never getting lower.
“Give me the cup, you wimp.” Corey grabbed it from her hand and poured about a quarter of its contents into his half full cup. He filled the rest with lemonade.
I wheeled on him. “Hey! Why does she get extra lemonade but not me?”
“Because I like her,” he said, then grinned at me. He leaned into me, whispering in my ear. “I’m just fucking with you. I missed the hell out of you.” He tipped some more lemonade into my glass, but it didn’t help much.
“Something tells me if we don’t start a drinking game soon, my no make out rule is going to be ineffective,” Bianca said.