Finding Dell (24 page)

I scrolled through my phone to find the unread message. I read it quickly and furrowed my brow, and then I read it more slowly a second time, then a third. With a shaking hand, I gathered my typography textbook and notebook and slid them into my bag. Helen looked up at me in surprise.

“Listen, could you do me a favor? Don’t tell Will I was dating anyone. I don’t want him to know,” I whispered. I zipped my bag and pushed my chair back from the table. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. Cam just broke up with me in a text.”

Helen’s eyes widened. I heard her call after me—
“Sweetie, are you okay?”
—But I was already turning the corner, heading for the staircase. I was four floors up but I couldn’t stand to be crowded in an elevator with strangers right now.

I hurried through the first floor with its modern, glassy structure and chrome fixtures. It had already been renovated last spring. I pushed through the wide glass doors and welcomed the cold air on my hot cheeks.

In front of the fountain, I stopped to look at my phone again and reread Cam’s message:
I can’t be what you need right now. I’m sorry
.

I stared at the phone in my hand and tears sprang to my eyes.
Did he know I kissed Alex? How could he have found out?

Another thought sprang to my mind. If he didn’t know I cheated on him, then he broke up with me because of me. I thought he’d never break up with me. Suddenly, that thought seemed worse than him knowing I cheated on him, because then he’d have a good excuse at least.

Audible cries escaped my lips and I felt overheated, feverish. I kept my head down and hurried back to Paso Fino.

If I cared so little that I cheated on Cam, then why do I care so much if he breaks up with me? Wasn’t it just a few days ago that I thought about breaking up with him?

Through blurred eyes, I took the stairs two at a time to my room. When I turned the corner, I heard Levi call after me but I ignored him, fumbling with the key in the lock.

Luckily, Natalie was still in class and the room was empty. I gathered my bathrobe and a clean towel and retreated into the bathroom.

I pushed the shower curtain aside and turned on the water to drown out the sound of my crying. I found the light switch as an afterthought and stripped quickly, leaving my clothes in a pile on the bathroom rug. I settled into my familiar spot seated on the floor of the shower stall, letting the water droplets pound down on my shoulders and head.

The insistent stream of water matted down my hair and pushed it in front of my eyes. I huddled with my arms around my knees, drawn tight to my body. The last time I’d sat on the floor of the shower stall like this, I’d been trying to counsel myself on the feelings of guilt I had after Cam had ran after me in the rain. That was November. It wasn’t even February yet.

I sat in the shower until I felt cold despite the hot water running down onto my body. When I stepped out of the bathroom, waves of steam exploded into my room, and I was surprised to see Natalie sitting on her bed.

“Hey,” she said. She took a long look at me. “What’s the matter?”

I burst into tears again and the thin veil I’d put on slipped away when I saw the concern in her eyes. I missed when Natalie was my best friend, and missed how she could look at me and know when something was wrong.

Natalie jumped off her bed and leaped across the room to hug me. I rested my dripping hair on her shoulder and cried into her cozy sweater for a few minutes. She squeezed me encouragingly and soothingly repeated, “It’s okay, Dell, it’s okay,” while I cried.

I stepped back and looked at her. “I’m sorry,” I said between sniffles. “I’m overreacting. Cam just broke up with me.”

Her eyes widened and she opened and closed her mouth in confusion.

Finally, she spoke. “Did he find out you cheated on him?”

I exhaled a shuddering breath and shook my head, my wet hair spraying droplets of water on the rug. “I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure till I talk to him.”

“You haven’t talked yet? How did you two break up, then?”

“He broke up with me in a text message this afternoon.”

Natalie stared at me. “That is so pathetic. He needs to grow
some balls to go along with that dick he doesn’t know how to use.”

I gave a small laugh. “That’s a plus to the breakup. At least we won’t have to have bad sex anymore,” I said. “Honestly, I’m not that surprised we’re breaking up, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon. And I always thought I’d be the one to do it. He beat me to it.”

Natalie shook her head in confusion. “I don’t get it. If he didn’t know you were cheating on him, why did he break up with you? He was crazy about you. Remember that dramatic kiss at the Capture the Flag game? What happened? What did the text message say?”

I tightened the belt on my bathrobe and reached for my phone. I handed it to Natalie and stood before the vanity, brushing wet tangles out of my hair.

I eyed her reflection as she searched for Cam’s message.

“I wasn’t cheating, you know. It was just that one time.”

Natalie ignored me and read the message. “This sounds like a variation on ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’” she said as her eyes met mine in the mirror. “He needs to man-up.”

Natalie marched over to my closet and thumbed through the shirts. She reached the end of the rod and moved on to her closet as if it were just an extension of mine. She selected an expensive black sweater with a deep V-neck. She held it out to me graciously.

“Get dressed. It’s pizza and cupcake night at Georgian Grande. We’ll have dinner and spend the night catching up here.”

I took the sweater and handed the hanger back to Natalie. The sweater was a gift from her mom, one of her favorites, and I knew she was making a conciliatory gesture by letting me wear it. Our fight seemed far behind us.

“Can we listen to our favorite songs from freshman year?” I asked, feeling nostalgic.

“I’ll fire up the old playlist.” She smiled and a sentimental look crossed her face. “Remember that time when we told everyone at the bar that we were girlfriends so the creepy guys would stop hitting on us?” she asked, laughing.

I laughed, too, and the message from Cam suddenly felt insignificant. I gently pulled the sweater over my head and smiled at my reflection. I could get answers from Cam tomorrow. Tonight, I just wanted to spend time with Natalie.

“I missed my girlfriend, my hip,” I said, referencing our old nickname for each other.

Natalie reached over and ruffled my hair. “Me, too. I don’t know why Cam would ever break up with you!”

The ashy, gray Saturday sky fooled me into sleeping longer than I planned. I woke with a certainty, a relief even, that breaking up with Cam was the right thing to do. But I still needed closure before I could move on.

The dismal afternoon kept most students inside. The sky stubbornly remained a pitying shade of dove gray as I walked across campus, past the library. A pack of dedicated cross-country runners sprinted past me and I stumbled into the brittle, ice-covered grass lining the sidewalk.

As I walked, Cam’s searching gaze appeared in my mind. At once, I understood it wouldn’t have worked with him. Cam didn’t know me as resolutely as Will did, and it showed in the way he looked at me.
How did Alex look at me?
I wondered. I couldn’t remember.

I trudged over the incline of the bridge that curved over Railroad Pass and led to Cam’s building in Collier Loop.

The triad of buildings that made up Collier Loop couldn’t be
more different than those of Wild Mare Point. Even though the towers were only twenty stories tall, the way I craned my neck to see the top reminded me of being home in Chicago. Suddenly I felt nostalgic for all the things I missed: the way I used to play with my pastel dollhouse, the sound of the sizzling frying pan in the kitchen on Sunday mornings, the way it felt when my mom folded me into an endless hug. Everything about home was easier.

I took the stairs to the fifth floor while a knot of dread grew in my stomach with every flight. When I emerged from the stairwell, I was again reminded of the differences between this dorm and my own. Instead of window-lined hallways overlooking the lake, the buildings in Collier Loop had wood-paneled, narrow hallways with mismatched, scarred furniture. Down the hall, a group of students lounged on couches faded from wear, not sun, like in Paso Fino.

A quick glance around the couches told me Cam was not with them. They regarded me silently and I knew I was the cause of their halted conversation.

Gus was near the table, perched on the arm of a couch, eyeing me with a hesitant gaze.

“Where’s Cam?”

The boys kept their heads down and their fingers traced the initials carved into the old furniture. The girls busily shared knowing glances with each other.

“Gus,” I said. “Please.”

Gus’s cheeks turned as red as I knew mine were from the cold outside. He nodded down the hallway without speaking and averted his eyes to the floor in front of the radiator.

In a room at the end of the hallway, I found Cam sitting on a futon in his pajama pants, watching a guy play video games.

His eyes widened when he saw me in the doorway.

“We need to talk.”

I stepped back into the hall to wait for Cam to follow me.

He appeared in the doorway and refused to meet my gaze. He shuffled listlessly toward his room while I followed. His hair stuck out wildly and his shoulders slumped forward. His pajama pants, childishly patterned with Bazooka Joe gum wrappers, were too short, and faded enough to be a decade old. He was barefoot and wearing his favorite sweatshirt.

He guided me into his room and shut the door while I pulled out his desk chair to sit down. Cam brought Gus’s chair into the middle of the room as well, but he sat a considerable distance from me.

I wanted to break the silence with a joke about how short Cam’s pajama pants were when he sat down, but he studied his hands in his lap with such intense scrutiny I knew a joke wouldn’t go over well now.

“What happened, Cam?” I whispered. “We barely even started dating.”

Cam continued to look down at his hands. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care about ‘sorry,’ I want to know what happened.”

He sighed heavily and looked up at me with large, sad eyes.

“It was all too much.”

I stared at him. “What was too much?”

“Everything. We moved so fast, and I thought that’s what I wanted, but I was wrong about us.”

“Was it because we slept together so soon?” I asked. “We could slow down and start over.”

The pleading whine in my words surprised me. When I was away from him, I understood we needed to break up, but in his presence I fought a need to fix things, to avoid failure once again. I thought about what Natalie had said about feeling obligated to stay in dying relationships, and I cringed inwardly.

“No, that won’t help. I . . . I don’t know how to explain it. I can’t give you what you deserve. Not now, and not in the future.”

I thought of his muffled words in the financial aid office—
I’m in over my head
—and I wondered if he was breaking up with me because he couldn’t afford to have a girlfriend. For the first time, guilt at cheating on him blossomed in me. My selfish blindness was overwhelming.

“How did we go so wrong, so fast?” I asked quietly, rhetorically. It was my turn to stare at my hands in my lap.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“Can we still be friends?”

Involuntary tears sprang to the corners of my eyes and I kept my head down so Cam wouldn’t see.

Silence.

I looked up in alarm. Cam studied me.

“Were we ever just friends, Dell?”

I thought about it. “You’re one of my best friends now,” I said. Even as I spoke, I wondered if it was true.

Cam shook his head. “Guys and girls can never be just friends. There was always something more between us.”

“But what now?” I countered. “Now, there’s nothing? That’s not okay with me.”

“We can try to be friends. But not yet.” He dropped his head once again and I found myself staring at his mess of dark hair.

I sighed and stood up, lingering in the center of the room, unsure of what to do.

“Cam,” I whispered, barely audible. “Please give me a hug.”

I was on the verge of tears again, but I held them back. I knew if I said any more they’d fight their way through regardless of how hard I tried to keep them at bay.

Cam stood reluctantly and leaned in for a forced hug with
his elbows bent at severe angles. I wrapped my arms around his thin waist and pulled him closer, tighter to my body. The finality of the hug brought with it the guilt I thought I’d escaped. It seared through me in sudden waves, so I hugged him tighter, to fight it, and to apologize silently. I rested my head on his shoulder until, finally, his elbows softened.

“I’m going to miss you,” I whispered into the fabric of his sweatshirt, where my face was smashed into his shoulder. I barely breathed the words, and I wasn’t sure if he heard me. When I pulled away, I couldn’t meet his eyes, and my gaze fixed on the damp spot my teary eyes had left on his sweatshirt. I wondered if he could smell Alex’s cologne on my coat, but then I remembered that it didn’t matter anymore.

It never had.

CHAPTER 26

TWO WEEKS LATER
, on Valentine’s Day, Dean asked Ruby to be his girlfriend. He did it impulsively when she bought him a zombie themed calendar on clearance at the mall.

Since then, they were inseparable, not that their togetherness was any different from the months since Ruby broke up with Nicholas.

Dean stood in the hallway in his thick sand-colored jacket and shadowed Ruby’s thin frame. Her skin was a pale alabaster against her hair, bright in the winter sunlight reflecting on the frozen lake. Dean’s shoulders were stiff as he held Ruby’s hand gingerly. There was a tension in his face, as if he was scared that Ruby might realize who she was holding hands with and leave him. A fear of others turning against him simmered under the surface, though it was almost invisible behind his macho muscles. It snuck out in his hesitant touch, but he didn’t see the way Ruby bit her lip to hide a smile that crept to her face.