I’m not sure whether or not I say it aloud because my eyes are still transfixed on his drop-dead good looks--I’ve never really looked at him this closely before--but he has yet to gape at me like I’m insane, so I assume not. Thank god. I don’t need Logan, or anyone for that matter, knowing that Jaden is gorgeous enough to have fallen straight from the heavens.
So I ask suspiciously, “And you’re now Ruby’s…?”
“Friend,” he interjects.
“With benefits!” Ruby shouts from the corner and takes another sip of her empty bottle. I shoot her a look, and she just winks at me. The girl has zero morals. It annoys me how much I respect it.
“Well,” I say, holding open the door. “I guess it will be interesting to see what comes of this, Jaden.”
“Yeah,” he says, parting his dark hair with his hands and watching me intently. “I guess it will be.” Then he steps through the doorway and I close the door behind him, but not without peeking one last time at that perfectly chiseled body.
“Holy shit!” I say to Ruby as soon as Jaden is safely out of hearing range. “You seriously hooked up with Logan’s roommate?”
She sits up in her chair and rests the beer bottle on the floor. “You bet I did!” she shouts.
“You can stop playing drunk now. You can’t fool me.”
“Oh thank god,” she says, shifting her voice back to her normal loud and somehow endearing sound. She gets out of the chair and collapses onto her bed. “But honestly, that may have been the best sex of my life.”
“But with Logan’s roommate?” I don’t mention how I attractive I find him. He really is attractive, though. It’s funny how you never realize things about people until you get up close and personal with them.
“Hey.” She shrugs. “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
“I hate you,” I say.
“Thank you.”
I smile at her, and just being with her makes the knot in my chest my parents oh so kindly left disappear. Ruby is a different kind of friend than Lindsay and Sarah and people. She is a real, my only one too, and she likes me for me, although as my roommate and the only other sophomore girl who wanted to live off-campus with someone else, she’s kind of forced to. I enjoy our setup, though. She doesn’t judge me for my burning hatred for Logan or my constant questions about prank ideas, and I don’t judge her for her hookups. And let me tell you: I’m not exaggerating one bit when I say that Ruby takes meaningless sex to a whole new level. She goes to as many parties as she can and basically switches guys every night, then kicks them to the curb as if she never met them in the first place.
“I am going to have to mark this down in your file,” I say and walk over to my bed.
“I am so scared.” Ruby laughs. I always joke about having this file where I keep track of all the things Ruby does, saying that when she hits a certain point, I’ll be forced to “dispose of her” secret-agent-style. In reality, if I were actually keeping track of her misdoings, she’d have been killed off months ago.
It’s not until I reach my bed that I notice the small white envelope, with the simple word “Cali” written on it, lying on my covers. I open it up, frowning. Inside is a picture of some random cartoon character sticking up a finger that, let’s just say, is not exactly the index finger. Below it are the words, “Enjoyed the stunt today, Cal. But you can do better. -Logan.”
I smile as I crumple it up and toss it on the ground. Cute, Logan, I think to myself as if he can hear me. So cute.
“Logan again?” Ruby says, yawning.
“Yeah.” It’s always Logan, and we both know it. Pranks, notes, insults. Our rivalry knows no bounds.
Just how I like it.
“So about Jaden,” I say, collapsing on my own bed, which is covered in my own badass pink flower bedspread. “How exactly did that work?”
Ruby shrugs. “He always goes to my games and cheers for the team. And despite your… whatever… with Logan, I kind of like him. Which is weird. Because I’m not supposed to like people.”
“You poor thing,” I mock.
“Oh shut up,” she says, and tosses a pillow at me.
Ruby also happens to be the biggest basketball star at Williams University, something that is a way bigger deal than I thought it would be, considering the small size of the school. Ruby can beat out most of the guys on the boys’ team during one-on-ones, and she most certainly doesn’t have to exert much effort doing it. She is fast and aggressive, not afraid to face the competition head-on. Or punch it straight in the gut. But with that kind of title, she is pretty terrible when it comes to relationships. She doesn’t like commitment, doesn’t like putting herself into the hands of someone else, doesn’t like trusting others with her heart. She’s kind of like me in that way, the me after my childhood ended, the me who has taken care not to get too close to anyone since Ben died. The me who doesn’t want to be broken all over again.
“What about you?” she says. “Who was that guy you said you left with last night from that party? Jake something?”
“Yeah, he was super hot,” I lie without missing a beat, but I feel my stomach hurt just a little. I hate not being honest to Ruby, even though I can’t bring myself to stop it. There of course was no Jake in the first place, but neither Ruby nor Lindsay and everyone will ever need to know that. I just found some random guy to latch onto for the duration of the party and told everyone I was leaving with him. Everyone, including Ruby. In reality, I spent my Saturday night in the back of The Dungeon, editing some old poems on my laptop.
“Bad. Ass. You must be awesome in bed to get all these guys and get them to do it at their place,” Ruby says.
“Yeah.” I force a small smile. “Anyway,” I say, looking up at the ceiling and changing the subject as quickly as possible. “I have another date in a few days, courtesy of my incredibly generous parents.”
“Shit, dude,” Ruby says. “Another socially awkward math major?”
“Probably.”
She sits up in her bed, staring at me incredulously. “And you’re going to go? You know you can always skip, right?”
I hesitate, glancing down at my hands so she can’t see my face.
The thing is, I do know I can skip. It’ll enrage my parents, sure, but it’s not like I’m going to feel guilty about that. Secretly, though, I kind of like these dates my parents set me up on. Yeah, the guys are always either incredibly egotistical or incredibly boring, but it’s still nice to talk to someone who will listen, someone who reminds me of a living, breathing version of Ben.
“Nah, it’s not like I have anything to do anyway,” I say instead, which is also valid.
“This is true,” Ruby says and hops off her bed. “After all, you do spend your days in here moping about what a horrible life you have and your nights bitching to anyone who crosses your path. Oh, and of course, plotting for your rivalry with Logan.”
I narrow my eyes, biting back a laugh. “So I’m not a queen.”
“No, you’re more like a vampire. I wouldn’t be surprised if you slept in a coffin.”
“Who says this isn’t a coffin?” I gesture at my bed and do my best to bare my fangs at Ruby, but the only horror that washes over her face isn’t the kind I’m going for. I hurl her pillow back at her face and she immediately sticks her tongue out at me, because that’s how mature adults handle things these days.
“You’re worse than Logan,” I say, glaring at her.
She laughs. “Are you ever going to tell me why you hate that kid so much?”
Ruby, of course, knows and accepts my rivalry with Logan, but she does not even pretend to understand why we hate each other so much. Not that she should. I mean, she knows about what happened to Ben, but I never told her about Logan’s involvement in it. I never mentioned that he is part of the reason my brother is dead, and I certainly didn’t mention that I blame him for it almost as much as much as I blame myself.
I didn’t always resent Logan, actually. He used
to be sweet and cute and as much as I hate to admit it, back when he was my brother’s best friend, I kind of liked him. I liked being around him, liked laughing and talking with him, liked his personality, and one might even argue that I had a crush on him. (It’s a lie, obviously, because there is nothing crushworthy about Logan Waters. Nothing.) I miss back then. I miss those happy times when Ben was a high school senior, Logan was a junior, and I was the “itty bitty freshman” they used to tease, when I always put up the annoying little sister act and gave Logan and Ben the stink eye whenever they laughed at me, even though deep down, I loved them for it. I miss everything before nineteen-year-old Ben started working at our parents’ engineering company the summer of his sophomore year, really.
But after that night, I stayed as far away from Logan as possible, just like he stayed far away from me. I distanced myself from him, from my family, from everyone. I’ve barely said Ben’s name out loud since. My parents started calling me a failure, a waste, and I turned into Mean Girl Cali to hide how truly, painfully vulnerable I felt. But six months ago, when Logan transferred to Williams University after not talking to me in three and a half years, my anger intensified. I remembered all Logan neglected to notice about Ben, remembered how the turmoil of the recent years was all because of him, so I went right up there and started insulting him. And it felt good. Really good. I did it again and again, and Logan started returning the favor, and our rivalry grew and grew. It started with small pranks here and there, going out of our way to call each other assholes and bitches and profess our mutual hate, never once mentioning Ben’s name, until over time it blossomed into what it is now: a full-on, insult-driven prank-fest. Hating Logan in all of his textbook-reading glory has somehow made me feel better about this whole ordeal, and the fact that he fights back is a nice way to keep things interesting--which is why we make perfect rivals. I take out all of my anger from that night on him, and he does the same to me. It makes us forget, it makes us feel good, and for now, that’s all that matters.
So we hate each other. It’s really that simple. We make a game of our rivalry, of our pranks, and it’s weirdly fun to see what each person does to the other next. We’re almost on this whole new level with each other, like we have our own little corner of the world reserved just for us and our mutual red-hot hatred, so I embrace it. I love it. I live it.
After a while, I say to Ruby, “I don’t know.”
“So you devote so much time to making him miserable and you don’t even know why?” She looks at me dubiously. “Why do I find that so hard to believe?”
I shrug. “I guess I just… like doing it. It’s a harmless kind of rivalry, and it’s a nice distraction from everything. You know, with my parents and… that night… and everything. It’s also seriously addicting to prank someone else and try to imagine their amusement when they find it,” I add. I hate not telling her the truth, but I can’t bring myself to talk about what really happened, either.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Ruby says.
“I’m not--”
“It wasn’t accusation.” She narrows her eyes. “It was a statement. I know you don’t want to tell me whatever the real reason is, so we’ll leave it at that: that you’re a terrible liar.” Ruby’s gaze is trained on me, but she doesn’t sound angry. Her voice is hard but strangely gentle, and I feel myself blush because she saw right through my lie.
“You’re good,” I say after a minute. Ruby is almost too clever for comfort.
“I know. Just… whatever it is… be careful. Logan seems to be perfectly happy in his little circle of geekery”--I make a mental note to include that word in my vocabulary for future use--”but I don’t want you getting hurt again.”
“Okay.”
She turns back to her pile of belongings in front of her. “Anyway,” Ruby is saying, reaching into her bag. “I have something for you.”
I raise an eyebrow. Whenever Ruby says ‘I have something for you,’ it usually means ‘you’re going to regret looking at this.’
I watch as she pulls out a pamphlet of some sort. “I promise, this gift is a bit more up your alley,” she says as if she can read my thoughts. She hands me the piece of paper, and I take it hesitantly. With Ruby, you never know whether what you’re getting is a thoughtful gift or… something else.
I frown at her and decide to play it safe. “Can you confirm that this is not another informational packet on sex?” I really don’t need to experience another one of those Ruby-isms again.
“What does it matter? You know you loved the last one I sent you. You needed it,” she adds.
“Yeah,” I say blankly, staring at the pamphlet. It doesn’t appear to be about the female body, but with Ruby, who knows. I’m not taking my chances.
“But no,” Ruby says, “it isn’t. Just take a look.”
We both know I have nothing better to do today, so I open it up.
The pamphlet is that annoyingly red and colorful kind that shows a picture of a hotel and a pool like it’s some sort of oasis where if you go there, everything in your life will magically get better. This is most certainly not a vacation pamphlet, however, judging by the black and white photo of Robert Frost positioned in the right corner of the page and the famous quotes by him and E.E. Cummings and other poets typed below it. “National Poet’s Convention” is written at the top in large black and green font, with the words, “Los Angeles, California - 2013” directly under it. I start flipping through the pages, all of which detail the different activities at the convention--poetry critiques, recitations, book signings, conversing with fellow poets, and debates about famous poets and their poems.
I, of course, have heard of the convention before. It’s the biggest gathering place for hardcore poetry nerds, and Ruby knows it. All of the big names in poetry attend--the most popular poets, editors, agents, and bloggers in the industry--and all they do is talk poetry. It’s a pretty freaking huge deal. I’ve wanted to go since I was a kid, to meet people like me, but it’s also insanely expensive and being that I have no money and my parents refuse to fund anything for me that will potentially steer me away from my “destiny” of becoming an engineer, I never had a choice. It’s a nice idea, attending the convention, but it’s just not possible. Not until I can make a stable living.
I sigh vaguely as I flip through the pages, then glance back up at Ruby.
“Well?” she asks.
“Well, my first question is who the hell gives out pamphlets anymore?”
“Some weird nerdy kid handing it out on the sidewalk. Next question.” I can’t help but notice how eager she looks, which makes me hate myself all the more for not wanting to go.
“My next question,” I say, “is how can I possibly pay for it? I mean, it sounds cool and I’m glad you showed it to me, but I have no money and I also have classes during those days and I can’t…”
“So skip school. And I’ll pay for you,” she says simply.
“But I also need to bring a friend.”
She watches me suspiciously. “So bring me.”
I wince. “I don’t want you to do that,” I say quietly.
I want to go to the convention. I really do. But it just feels… wrong now. Ben always promised me he would take me there for the first time once he graduated college, said we would road-trip to wherever in the country they were hosting it that year and it would be awesome. He assured me he would turn me into a geek like he did Logan, that I would come to the dark side, and I always rolled my eyes at him and shoved his arm and told him that was a horrible idea, playing the tough girl routine, even though a secret smile always crept across my lips. Ben was the one who initially turned me on to the conference and poetry in general, and he promised me with that goofy smile of his that he would do everything in his power to be the first to take me to the National Poet’s Convention. So now that he’s dead, I can’t bring myself to go to the convention ever again, at least not for a while, because he can’t be the one taking me.
He
can’t ever be the one taking me anymore, and that might be the worst feeling of all.
“Why not?” Ruby asks.
I drop my gaze to my feet, not wanting to answer.
“Ben again?” She knows me too well.
“Yeah,” I say, my throat tightening.
Ruby pauses for a moment, still watching me, and then she sighs. “You sure you don’t want to go?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I am.”
She presses the pamphlet into my hands, and I hate how crushed she looks--all thanks to me. I have this insane talent for pushing away anyone who tries to get close to me. “Just… think about it, okay? I want you to be happy. And this”--she sweeps her hands around the same dark apartment I’ve spent most of my last week lurking inside--”this is not making you happy, Cali. Deny it all you want, but I know you well enough to tell that it isn’t. So promise me you’ll give the conference some thought?”
“I promise,” I lie, and then Ruby forces a smile and turns around, walking out of the room.
~
I DECIDE to go out for ice cream, because that’s what normal people do when they’re sad, right? I walk all the way down to some sketchy store at the end of town, order a chocolate ice cream that looks more like a slab of frozen chocolate milk rather than actual ice cream, and collapse into the chair in the corner of the room. My phone beeps several times--all texts from Sarah and Lindsay and company, probably wanting to know all about what I’ve been doing today and whether I met any hot guys and oh, don’t forget how great these new shoes they saw are! I ignore their texts altogether, though. I can’t believe I am idolized by such shallow morons.
But as I sit in the ice cream shop, I don’t cry. I have no reason to. I just stay there, tired and empty and wishing Ben were here and Logan and I were back to normal again and my parents weren’t so freaking clueless, and for the millionth time, I find myself feeling so, so alone. I’m like this for a long time: sitting in the corner of the restaurant, picking at my failure of a chocolate ice cream and unsuccessfully ignoring the hurt in my heart.
The ice cream shop is almost completely empty, except for a few Williams University students talking in the middle of the room as well as a grinning little boy and his parents to my left. It’s a tiny store with yellow painted walls and a few drawings by customers hung up on a bulletin board beside me, and it has so much air conditioning on that I think I’m going to freeze despite the one-hundred degree weather outside. An older, gray-haired lady sits in a little stool behind the cash register on the other end of the store, staring boredly at her nails. I try to focus on my ice cream, on the phone on my table, on anything but the fact that I’m alone in an ice cream store and everyone else here looks totally happy except for me.
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