Finding Dell (11 page)

I turned back to Bernie.

“Is that how you feel?”

“All the time,” she said. She picked her glasses up off the keyboard and slid them back onto her long, aristocratic nose. “I
don’t think I’m meant to be at a formal institution like this. I’ll learn best through traveling and exploring the world. Not stressing over pixels and resolution.” Her smile was weak, but the light started to return to her eyes.

“That’s another thing. You’re spontaneous,” I said.

“If you want to reinvent yourself to be more confident and spontaneous, that’s easy. I can help you.”

“How?”

I tried for a moment to imagine myself like Bernie, with flowing hair and an unshakeable calm that meant I never needed validation from others. The image seemed so unlikely I almost snorted with skepticism.

“Stop surrendering to your rational thoughts and chase your most vibrant emotions. Be unapologetic about it,” she said. “Stop being so logical. Start being messy. Embrace magic and madness.”

Bernie reached a hand into her hair and plucked out one of the thin feathers. The fire returned to her eyes and she leaned forward and tucked it behind my ear.

“You’re a little hurricane. You made your storm, so you can’t be surprised when it rains. Look for the rainbow instead of the umbrella. The new you begins today.”

Bernie wrapped her long hair in a batik-patterned turban and shrugged her overcoat, the color of a blue spruce tree, over her shoulders.

She walked in a cloud of musky perfume, cigarette smoke, and confidence. Maybe it was her height, or her refusal to blink from behind her theatrical glasses, but Bernie projected an aura of irrefutable self-assurance. Being around her made me want to change, to transform myself into someone who wasn’t likened to a destructive tropical storm.

A silver bell on the door sounded our arrival in the tattoo parlor. A man with a pompadour and a thin red tie glanced up, his eyes lingering on Bernie.

She gestured to the mural of nautical-themed objects etched on the wall. Mermaids leaned off craggy rocks, bucking ships fought rough waters, anchors burrowed in sandy shorelines.

“We’re not here to get a tattoo of a lighthouse or a pirate,” Bernie said. “Can you still help us?”

The man tugged on his tie and I could tell he was intrigued by Bernie’s headstrong personality. She was, after all, the sassiest hippie I knew. He picked up a piece of tracing paper and gestured for us to sit on stools covered in a cracking red vinyl.

“Dell needs a cluster of stars on her body because she needs to remember that the stars we see now have already lost their light, and similarly, we have to give up our notion of what we understood to be true in the past.”

A swoop of brown hair fell from the man’s pompadour as he bent his head over the sketch paper.

“That’s a philosophical reason for getting a tattoo,” he said.

I watched the pencil scrape against the paper in sharp angles as he contoured the edges of the stars.

“When you learn that the past is mistrustful, either from dead stars shooting light or your own flawed perceptions of others, it’s important to impress it in your mind permanently.”

“Or, in this case, brand it onto your body permanently.”

The man pushed off the counter as he stood up, the paper waving in the icy air conditioning.

“If we place it here, the curves of your shoulder will complement the angled strokes of the stars,” he said as he touched the paper to my skin with cold fingers.

In my head I pictured a line forming between the old Dell, controlled and predictable, and the new Dell, spontaneous and
confident in her choices—with the ability to make bold, impulsive decisions rather than drowning in a swirl of what-ifs.

I nodded in agreement, and the man ambled around the shop to gather his supplies on a rolling metal tray. The sun had started to set and it sent a kaleidoscope of colors into the shop, bouncing off the marine-themed mural.

A whirling buzz filled the small shop and Bernie betrayed her cool, detached exterior when she reached for my hand and gripped it for reassurance. The man stopped every few seconds to blot away the excess black ink and examine his progress. The penetrating needle carved into the space on my shoulder, and it felt like a million endless, sharp paper cuts. I kept my eyes on Bernie as I felt the needle tracing the cluster of stars onto my body. She didn’t take her eyes off the digging needle, and I didn’t take my eyes off her face.

After we left the tattoo shop, Bernie directed us to stop at Tennessee’s apartment on our walk home.

As we walked up, Tennessee tossed a bean bag to Bernie and she glided effortlessly into their game. She lifted a lazy arm as she tossed the bean bag across the yard into a wooden platform. With her left hand, she sucked on a cigarette that sent a swirl of smoke across the sidewalk.

Tennessee, short at only five foot five but full of attitude, groaned loudly when Bernie’s toss missed the platform by several feet.

“Baby girl, you are a bad blues player on Beale Street tonight,” he drawled in his thick accent. Tennessee referenced his hometown of Memphis whenever possible.

Across the yard, Robert Rocco stood next to Charlie. Charlie had short blond hair, studied finance, and had a precise yet charming gaze that tended to linger long enough to make me
uncomfortable. His shoes were tossed aside in the yard to reveal pale white feet digging into the lush bluegrass carpet. He and Rocco clutched beers.

Bernie stepped away from the game with a conspiratorial look in her eyes behind her striking glasses.

“Don’t worry, I heard Will’s at the studio tonight,” she said.

I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed.

“I figured you’d expect Will to be here since he lives across the street.” She gestured to the discreet white apartment building with the cigarette in her hand.

I was embarrassed to reveal that I didn’t know where Will lived, so I nodded as I eyed the building across South James Street. An ache crept into my heart and I felt desperate to know what the inside of his apartment looked like.
Was it anything like his room in the dorm last year? Did he still have the fan, the one he couldn’t sleep without?

With my neck strained to watch the building, my shoulder throbbed with the fresh pain of my tattoo, a reminder to let go of the misguided emotions of the past month.

I smiled at Bernie, who looked graceful even when swatting flies from her face, and took a seat on the curb to watch the game.

We sat in the front yard until dusk started to fall and the mosquitos became unbearable. Tennessee drank beers until his Southern accent became strong and undeniable, and I wondered if he consciously tamed it during the day. The evening was filled with slow, languid movements and choruses of laughter, with cars slithering down the street, and, from me, a distracted desire to stay out front until Will returned home.

One by one, we migrated inside the apartment. Rocco’s pale, moony face was at odds with the golden aura of confidence Bernie emitted. I wondered how often Bernie spent time with
Rocco when visiting Tennessee’s apartment, and if Will showed up to lounge on the couch in that casual way I longed for every night. A pang of jealousy knocked at my heart, but I reminded myself that Bernie was no threat to stealing any man; she simply wasn’t interested in them.

When my shoulder started to ache and Bernie ran out of cigarettes, she agreed we could go home. I waited for her in the yard while she rearranged her patterned turban in the bathroom.

Down the dark street, someone approached on a bike. I wondered if it was Will, stopping home on a break from the studio. My heart caught when the bike slowed to a stop in front of me and the figure placed one foot on the street to level himself.

“Bernie told me you’d be here. I wanted to see your new tattoo.”

Cam’s presence surprised me, perhaps more than if he had been Will on the bike, after all. Never had I pushed someone away as forcefully as I did to Cam during the Capture the Flag game.

“What made you want to get a tattoo of stars?”

“Stars are forever.”

Cam wheeled his bike closer, tentatively. “I think it’s perfect for you.” He paused. “You’re made of stars.” He lifted his hand from the handlebars and reached out to me, his fingertips grazing my bare arm.

Out of the darkness, someone coughed and Cam jerked his hand back to its home on the bike.

“Oh, Dell, I didn’t see you. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Rocco said. A bemused smile played on his face. “If you want to wait for Will, you can stay in our apartment tonight. From what I’ve heard, you’re comfortable in his bed, so he probably wouldn’t mind if you slept over.”

I flushed in the dark and took a step backward, away from
Cam. He placed his foot back on the pedal and quickly maneuvered his bike into a pavement-squealing turn, racing away just as fast as he’d approached, disappearing around the corner.

The streetlights finally clicked on and South James was illuminated in a garish daytime glow. Rocco stood beside me fighting a smile.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to chase off your boyfriend.”

“No?” Bernie floated into the street with wild eyes. “What was your intention with that embarrassing display, then?”

“Protecting my buddy.”

“From what?” she demanded. I could feel a feverish intensity coming off her in waves.

“From her,” he said, jutting his thumb at me. “I mean, come on, have a little respect. Don’t flirt with some dude right in front of our house.”

Bernie scoffed. The sound was disingenuous from someone who talked about karma and moonbeams and wore feathers in her hair.

“That asshole kissed another girl right in front of Madeleine!”

Rocco rolled his saucer eyes and Bernie straightened her spine to her full height until she was towering over him. I took a step back and realized that even though their fight was about me, I wasn’t involved.

“Yeah, and good thing. At least he got to end it with the upper hand. Look at her with this other guy. It was basically a time bomb before she cheated on him.”

“She never cheated on him!” Bernie’s voice was shrill, reaching a comical pitch I’d never heard from her before.

“All I know is, it sucks enough to listen to him whine about it now, when he ended it. I couldn’t deal if she had her time to screw him over. Which would have happened at some point.”

He tried to come off as the protective best friend, but there was a needy, groping quality in his words that made me wonder if there was another reason he disliked me. It was as if our breakup robbed Rocco of the wild parties with Will that he’d envisioned before transferring to Seneca, and he resented me for it. But something else in his words struck me, too.

“Bernie,” I whispered, touching a hand to her evergreen coat. “That means. . .”

Before I could make Bernie hear what I heard—that Will still talked about me, maybe even missed me—a door slammed and the street became silent. It was the door to Rocco and Will’s apartment.

“Guess I won’t have to give Easton the recap of this,” Rocco said.

A light flicked on in the house and I felt the pieces of my heart shatter into a fine dust.

CHAPTER 12

THE ROOM SMELLED
like fresh pumpkins and greasy face paint.

Alex was hosting a Halloween party, and inside the room was the duo from
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, an Egyptian princess, and a giant banana. Less inventive people wore shirts that said things like “pedestrian” scrawled across the front in marker, and countless half-dressed girls buzzed around, showing more skin than not. At least two guys wore hollowed-out pumpkins over their heads. I squinted, but I couldn’t recognize the faces hidden in the shadows.

Alex sidled over to me in the chaos.

“I’m happy to see you,” I shouted over the din. “I need to borrow your aviators.”

I spotted the mirrored glasses hooked in the pocket of his cargo shorts and reached for them. I slid them onto the bridge of my nose and tilted my head to examine him.

“What are you?”

“Definitely not a law-abiding citizen, officer.”

Alex slid his hand down my too-small polyester police costume to my fishnet-clad thigh. A holster sat snugly on my hips, handcuffs and a toy gun dangling from it.

He winked at me and slipped my toy gun out of the holster. He released the gun’s plastic trigger, shooting off a satisfying puff of smoke. He looked at me, surprised.

“I’ve got a few more rounds tucked into my bra,” I said, smiling. I stuck my hip out at him provocatively. “Could you slide that back in there for me? Now, if I hear that you’re breaking any laws, you’re going to have to answer to me.”

“That sounds like a dare.”

“It’s a promise.”

A sudden loud, hollow drumbeat thudded on the coffee table and Alex and I turned. Dean was sitting on the futon, his face smeared with oily blue paint, watching us intently. He gestured to his black shirt and painted face with a drumstick while beating steadily on the table with the other.

“I’m in the Blue Man Group,” he called across the room.

Alex frowned. “Don’t break my table, man.”

I watched him glance around at the varying stages of destruction and wondered if the real reason he was angry was Dean’s blatant attempt at distraction. I knew Dean thought I shouldn’t be with Alex until I was over Will, but tonight, I didn’t want to think about him. After everything that happened lately, I just wanted to be with someone who wanted to be with me for the night, someone who didn’t have a girlfriend.

A whoop of delight went up in the kitchen and Alex pulled away to see the cause of the commotion. Several sophomores huddled around the sink, carefully siphoning tequila into water guns. Discarded packaging littered the floor and they harshly criticized the pourer, a boy in a bathrobe-turned-Playboy smoking jacket, for every drop he failed to get into the toys. The boys
tested a water gun by shooting it directly into each other’s open mouths, whooping in delight when a powerful stream of liquid shot across the kitchen.

Just inside the front door on the cracked tile entryway, a keg spilled sticky beer that trickled into the carpet.