Finding Dell (3 page)

“My shoes are soaked with beer,” a boy whined. He pulled his unlaced Converse off and opened the door of the front-loading dryer to toss his shoes inside. With a swipe of the dial, the dryer rumbled to life, the rubber soles of his shoes banging loudly even through the bass. The boy lifted his girlfriend by the hips and sat her on top of the rumbling dryer. She moaned and grabbed his face and they started kissing feverishly.

I pushed past them and filled an empty cup at the keg. I leaned against the wall scrawled with scores from past drinking tournaments and craned my neck for a gasp of fresh air in the muggy basement while I searched for Will.

“Are you Madeleine?”

I lowered my neck to see a wide-shouldered boy with ruddy cheeks and a careful haircut standing before me. He wore a university T-shirt, the white lettering crisp in its newness.

“You are, aren’t you? Madeleine Hewitt?”

I squinted at him in the dim red glow and was about to dismiss him when something about his broad frame triggered recognition. He was chubbier in person than I’d imagined. I nodded tentatively.

“It’s about time I meet you!” he shouted over the din of the party. I stumbled into his arms in surprise as he pulled me into a hug. I fought to crane my neck around him for another face I knew couldn’t be far behind.

“I’m Robert Rocco, Easton’s best friend from back home,” he said as he released me.

“I thought you looked familiar,” I said slowly. He had gained weight over the summer. I was immediately uneasy and embarrassed that I knew that, considering I had only ever studied him in photos. Will had been in countless pictures with Robert before he came to Seneca; Robert had been his best friend since Kindergarten. I wondered if he knew as much about me as I knew about him.

“You too. Will mentioned you to me. I think you’re the only person I know here, and this is the first time we’ve met.”

“Are you here with Will?”

“He’s parking his truck, so he’ll be here in a few minutes,” he said. “He’s my designated driver for the night.”

I nodded casually, trying not to betray that I was electrified by the sound of Will’s name and the promise I’d see him soon.

“How was your summer?”

“I spent most of my time at the cabin, whenever I could.”

“Will’s cabin?” I asked, alert.

“A lot of other guys stayed there, too. We swam and drank
beers all summer, in between part-time jobs.”

I wanted to pump him for information.
What had Will said about me? Why is the cell reception so bad at the cabin? Is it the reason Will hasn’t returned my calls lately?

I raised a finger to my mouth and gnawed on my thumbnail. “So, you, uh . . . did you see Will a lot?” I asked, settling on the least obsessive question first.

“Yeah. Will was there, mostly in the beginning of summer.”

I nodded distractedly. “So how do you like Seneca University so far, Robert?” I asked as I discreetly watched the stairs to see Will’s arrival.

“I know I’m going to love it. It’s hard to be a transfer student and not know anyone though, so I’m going to need to make a lot of friends fast.” He edged closer to me as someone bumped into him. “You can just call me Rocco, by the way. No one calls me Robert.”

“Rocco it is. You can call me Dell.”

Rocco stood just inches from me, leaning close with an air of imagined familiarity. I desperately wanted to survey the room so I didn’t miss Will’s arrival, but Rocco blocked me with his chubby build. With my back against the basement wall that thudded with bass, I stood in a shallow puddle of spilled beer.

“It’s not true that you don’t know anyone,” I continued. “You know Will.”

“I know that kid better than he knows himself. But I need to meet new people. From what he said about his freshman year, he had the best time. But I don’t think he’ll be going out like that this year. The studio might be his second home, after our apartment.”

My head snapped up.

“Apartment? But he’s living in Paso Fino. . .”

Rocco shook his head. “Nah, not anymore. Easton’s living
off-campus with me,” he said. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that already.”

“I’m surprised, too,” I mumbled.

I reached for my phone. My hand felt jittery and I could feel my cheeks turning red. I blinked at the blank screen as if it would hold a missed message from Will to explain this mess.

Rocco shrugged. “Easton’s grades for the spring semester last year were bad and he got in a lot of trouble with his parents when we were staying at the cabin over the summer. They made him come home early.” He paused and looked at me carefully for a long moment, as if I might be to blame for Will’s bad grades and his removal from the cabin.

Feeling scrutinized and uncomfortable, I avoided eye contact and searched for something to say.

“Have you met Dean yet? I can introduce you,” I said. “He’s upstairs.”

I gestured with my cup and Rocco stepped aside to follow me. I needed a distraction for him so I could be alone. I wanted to wait outside for Will to arrive so I could gather my thoughts and be the first person to see him walk up to the house.

Edging away from the claustrophobic corner, we wound our way through the crowd, past the hammering dryer and the sweaty bodies.

Shoulders parted and through the people I saw his hair. His shiny, thick, floppy hair. I saw his signature hair flip, a tic he didn’t realize he had until I pointed it out one lazy morning.

I saw jet-black hair mixing with his sandy brown hair. My eyes traveled down the strand of dark hair to a face. It was the face of a girl, with wide-set eyes that looked anything but innocent. She was sitting on his lap.

“Will?” My voice came out as a squeak.

“Hey! Hewitt! How’s it going?”

Will smiled at me, tossing his hair sharply across his forehead. The ebony-haired girl snuggled in closer to him and I took a step back.

“I . . . It’s . . . What are you doing?”

I dropped my half-empty cup. The red light throbbed in time with the beat of the bass. Will seemed oblivious to the girl on his lap. The girl noticed my discomfort and leaned in to kiss his ear.

I turned quickly on my heel, teetering in the crowded room, and pushed my way to the staircase where I almost pulled the shaky banister off the wall. Through the smoky haze to the back door, I stumbled out in the backyard, where fresh air made me gasp after the humidity inside.

I stumbled into Dean.

“Hey, hey. Calm down,” he said. “Breathe.”

Dean ushered me around the side of the house where the grass wasn’t worn down by frequent foot traffic and the cigarette smoke from clusters of freshman girls didn’t reach.

I took deep, greedy breaths of fresh air and dropped my chin to my chest. Dean’s hand was on my shuddering shoulder and I dimly noticed him set his drink down on the grass before he wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug. The pressure of his arms comforted me enough to slow my breathing, and when I stopped shaking he took a step back. He didn’t speak. The rumble of music from the basement sounded tinny and distant.

“I need to find Natalie,” I said.

“I think she left with the tall guy,” he said. “Do you want to talk about whatever happened in there?”

I shook my head. If I say it, it makes it real.”

Dean stooped to pick up his cup in the grass. He walked a few steps and turned back to face me. “Just promise me one thing. Whatever or whoever made you feel this way, you won’t
forget it. Don’t forget it, or it’ll happen again.”

I hung my neck and took a rough breath. On unsteady legs, I backed up until I felt the cool bricks through my shirt. My mind raced through memories of Will as I tried to block out the image of him in the basement. I thought of our goodbye in the stairwell of Sugarbush Hall on move-out day, the moment I’d turned over in my mind all summer.

Will lowered a black garbage bag to set it on the landing. It was shiny and stretched, filled with unwashed sheets, scratched CDs, and drafting paper. I’d watched him fill it haphazardly while I sat on his mattress that morning. On the stairs, I pushed damp, sweaty hair from my eyes, wrapped my arms around his waist, and raised my gaze to meet his blue eyes.

“Tell me how the cabin is once you get there?”

He flicked his neck to brush his light brown hair from his face. “I’ll tell you now. The lake is so big, sometimes you wonder if you can see to the other shore. At night it’s so dark the only thing you can see are the stars. There are millions of stars. More than you can imagine.”

He lowered his head until his lips fluttered at my ear. “But if a star falls every time I think of you this summer, there’ll be none left.” He kissed me and his shaggy hair stuck to my sweaty forehead.

With a ragged breath, I slid down the bricks of Dean’s house until I was sitting on a dusty patch of dry earth where the thin grass didn’t reach. There was nothing about our goodbye that led me to believe he would ever do this to me. But, at the moment, I didn’t see how I could ever forget the image of Will and another girl burned into my brain.

CHAPTER 3

NATALIE SET A
plastic cup of juice down on her serving tray and pushed a plate of salad in front of me.

“Isn’t this supposed to be a bowl of ice cream?” I asked, running my hand through my greasy blond hair.

“I don’t believe in getting fat after a breakup,” Natalie said. “The dressing is on the side.”

Natalie, Ruby, and I had been sitting at a tiny table on the dining hall patio for over two hours on Sunday morning. Natalie was on her fourth glass of juice.

I didn’t blink as I gazed down at the salad. The lettuce looked wilted already.

“Technically we’re not really broken up because he didn’t say so last night.”

“Dell, honey,” Natalie said, “when your boyfriend makes out with another girl in front of you, you’re over.”

The ice cubes in Ruby’s sweet tea clinked together as she nodded vigorously mid-sip.

I wanted to stab something, anything, with my fork. Instead, I took a bite of the salad and turned the lettuce over in my mouth
until I had chewed it thoroughly and I had to force myself to swallow it.

The sun warmed the table until Natalie’s juice glasses were sweating in the heat. A group of boys played flag football in front of Morgan Hall and girls passed by on the footpath, walking briskly while talking on their phones.

“Every time I think about Will’s hair mixing with that girl’s hair in such an intimate way, I want to throw up from embarrassment.”

“You have nothing to be embarrassed about.” Natalie leaned forward and swatted at a mosquito lounging on my salad after I stared at it, unmoving. “Will’s a jerk for what he did to you, and he is going to feel like an idiot when he realizes he lost you.”

I pushed the lettuce leaves around the plate with the fork. “He didn’t lose me. I never went anywhere,” I said. “Listen, this chair is making my ass numb, and all I want to do is take a nap. Can we go back to Paso Fino now?”

Natalie took a long drag from her cup of juice and stared at me defiantly. “Excuse me while I get a refill. I’m just so thirsty today.”

I squirmed in my seat while Ruby looked on with a pitying gaze. When Natalie came back a moment later, she plopped a small bowl of mint ice cream in front of me, next to the salad. A tiny smile played at my lips and I looked up at her.

“We’re not going back to the room until you realize you’re too good for a cheater like Will Easton. There’s nothing more pathetic than someone who cheats, no matter what the excuse.”

“Dell, I haven’t even started processing the fact that Will was with another girl, because I still can’t believe he wouldn’t tell you about moving to an off-campus apartment. It’s not an insignificant change, after all. Did you suspect anything was wrong when you talked to him over the summer?” Ruby asked.

I groaned and shoved a spoonful of ice cream into my mouth so I didn’t have to speak. I couldn’t tell them that Will stopped answering my calls over the last few weeks, but somehow I still didn’t see this coming. Any of it.

Natalie leaned forward, her elbow propped on the edge of the table, her index finger pointed at me. “It’s revealing. He was basically declaring his unreliability and disrespect for you. You’d be a fool to want to be in a relationship with him, even if leaving Paso Fino was his only crime against you.”

A well of anger bubbled up inside me and I tensed my muscles. I hated surprises. If only people would do what they were supposed to do, I’d be starting my sophomore year in a much better place.

“Maybe it’s just a series of misunderstandings,” Ruby said as she took a sip of her sugary drink. “You know Will, sometimes he’s an absent-minded professor. He probably just forgot to tell you about moving to an apartment with Rocco. You’re going to talk to him and sort things out, right?”

“Are you insane?” Natalie cried, turning her head so fast strands of thick hair tumbled from the artfully messy bun on the top of her head. She wore mounds of clip-in extensions to pump up the volume of her hair; she said it was a necessity in the South, just like the spidery false lashes she’d started to wear.

Natalie scoffed. “No. You’re not talking to him, Dell.”

I studied my spoon as I avoided Natalie’s flashing brown eyes. Of course I wanted to sort things out with Will. We weren’t supposed to end, and not like this.

Ruby smiled politely under Natalie’s sharp gaze.

“At least you’ve got Alex as backup. He still seems to like you,” she said in her light Southern drawl.

Disbelieving, I looked between them. Alex couldn’t replace Will. I wouldn’t give up on my relationship so easily, but they
were acting like they were ready for me to move on already.

With my hands on the edge of the table, I pushed away and stood up.

“I have to go,” I said shakily.

Natalie narrowed her eyes and Ruby flashed a worried look at her. I hated to leave the table when I knew they were going to talk about me once I was gone, but I couldn’t sit there anymore.

When I returned to Paso Fino, the hallway was Sunday afternoon quiet, intercepted by the bass-heavy growls of a video game. Sunlight glimmered off the lake and sent ripples of light playing down the hallway. I edged past the doors quietly, peering closely at the nametags hanging on them. It was a sea of unknown names. I stopped when I reached a door with only one name on it. I stared at the empty space where I knew Will’s nametag should hang. I shivered despite the warm sunlight and felt tears spring to my eyes.