One & Only (Canton) (17 page)

Melanie lobbed a pea at her. “Fair enough. Tess, don’t listen to this bitch. I hear she went crazy last week and stole some poor people’s lab space.”

“I apologized!” Elaine cried. “What do you want me to do, commit seppuku?”

“Maybe you should just buy Tess lunch?” Melanie suggested.

I laughed. These two and their way of talking reminded me of Sylvia and Annabel. They teased and ribbed each other, but there was clearly love behind it all. And yet, unlike the Warrens, Melanie and Elaine weren’t sisters. They’d only met when they’d been assigned to live together freshman year.

I wondered how Hannah was doing, and then, just as quickly, pushed the thought from my mind. Hannah and I would never be roommates, would never be sisters. We were nothing.

Perhaps I’d missed out on too much, always living alone, off-campus—first at State and now here at the apartment where I’d grown up. Being with Cristina that summer at Cornell had been fun, and we still emailed and texted a lot. She’d hated her actual freshman-year roommate, but she’d moved in with a friend off campus by sophomore year and, according to all reports, they were still having a blast.

“Have any plans for the weekend?” Melanie was asking now.

“I usually work weekends,” I explained. “I’m a waitress at Verde.”

“Weird, I must have totally seen you there. I go there all the time.”

Well, folks never noticed their waitress.

“Are you working tonight?”

“No.” I glanced meaningfully at Elaine. “I’m supposed to be in the lab tonight.”

“I’m never going to live this down, am I?” she asked.

“No,” said Melanie. “And you deserve it. But in this case, it all worked out. If you were waiting tables tonight, you couldn’t come with us to a party.”

“Oh,” I said. “I can’t go to a party—”

“Yes you can,” said Elaine. “Nothing is really going to start until ten.”

“Do you have a test on Friday?” Melanie asked.

“No.”

“A hot date?”

I felt my face heat. “No.”

“Some kind of religious or moral objection to people having fun?” Elaine suggested.

“No. I just…” I shrugged. “A Canton party? That kind of takes me back to high school. We used to try to crash them, you know.”

“Spoken like a true townie,” said Melanie with a laugh.

“You’re not crashing this time,” Elaine added. “And please do come. It can be part of my apology. I always say the girls in Bio-E need to stick together and I’ve pretty much been doing the opposite of that.”

I turned to her. “You do know I think you’re trying to get info about Dylan and my project off me?”

“Of course I am,” she replied and took a sip of her drink, “but we can still have fun.”

***

After my last class of the day, I drove home to eat dinner and get a head start on homework. Mom was out at a gallery show for a friend of hers, but the crisper was full of vegetables. As I waited for my pasta to boil, I texted Dylan.

We’re still on for lab work tonight?

His answer came back right away.

Yes. I’d love your notes from this morning if you have them. Took H to doctor’s office.

Yeah, Dylan, I’d figured.

I also figured that I wouldn’t return home between lab and the party, so I might as well get dressed now. After dinner I took a quick shower, then blow-dried my hair with a round brush so it fell in full, bouncy brown waves around my shoulders. My memories of Canton parties were that they were slightly more fashionable occasions than the occasional kegger I’d attended at State, so I chose a pair of skinny jeans and a gray knit top shot through with threads of silver that sparkled when they caught the light. I snatched a pair of high-heeled boots from my mom’s closet that I figured I’d probably regret by the end of my lab session, but they gave me an extra two inches and looked really nice with my pants. As I was doing my makeup, the phone buzzed on the counter. I checked the screen: Cristina. A pang of guilt coursed through me—I hadn’t kept my friend abreast of anything that had happened since I’d transferred.

I turned on the speakerphone so I could finish my eyeliner. “Hey, stranger!”

“Hi!” came the voice of my old friend. “I realized I haven’t called you to ask how Canton is going, so I’m doing that now.”

“It’s crazy busy here, too,” I replied. “I’m working insane hours just to make ends meet, but I’m also entering this symposium next month with a five-thousand-dollar prize, so…wish me luck.”

“Awesome! What’s your project?”

I told her, taking care to leave out the part where I was doing the project with Dylan.

“That sounds a bit like that thing you did with Dylan up here a few years ago.”

“Mmm.” I lined my lips a rosy red.

“Did you tell him?”

“I didn’t have to,” I replied sheepishly. “He’s my partner.”

Silence reigned on the other end of the phone. After a second, Cristina’s screams bounced off the walls of my bathroom. “What the hell, McMann?” she asked. “How could you not tell me you two had hooked up again?”

“Because we hadn’t?” I said. “We were just partners.”

“
Were
just partners?” She pounced. “Spill. What’s going on? What happened? What does he look like these days? Are his pants still too short?”

I hesitated, my lip pencil dangling in the air above my mouth. “He looks really good,” I said at last. That was neutral, right? “And his pants are perfect.”

But Cristina wasn’t about to let me get away with it. “Are you
in
his pants?”

I sighed, then admitted, “Not all the way in.”

She squealed again. “Oh my God, I knew it. The second you told me you were going to Canton, I was like, Dylan and Tess, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s—”

“He…has a girlfriend,” I said, interrupting her annoying little song.

“You man-stealing slut,” she joked. “That is awesome.”

I bit my freshly painted lip and looked in the mirror. “Please don’t call me that.”

“Oh, Tess—you know I don’t mean ‘slut’ in a bad way,” she said, sounding contrite. “I totally think women should own their personal sexuality and have as much sex as they want to…”

I let Cristina go on her Women’s Studies-induced rant about taking back ownership of the word
slut
without saying anything else. Because, honestly, it hadn’t even registered. The part that bothered me had been
man-stealing
. I didn’t want to be a man-stealing anything—not slut, not bitch, and certainly not sister. Dylan swore to me that it wasn’t about me, that it was about
him
, and I wanted to believe him.

But it would all be so much easier if he hadn’t been dating her when we’d met again, if he hadn’t been dating her when he’d lifted me up on his countertop and stuck his tongue down my throat.

“Tess?” Cristina’s voice crackled out of my speakerphone, bouncing tinnily around the bathroom. “You’re not mad, are you?”

“No,” I said, and finished applying my lipstick. Not at Cristina, anyway.

Just myself.

***

Dylan was already in the lab when I arrived, going over our notes and setting up our workspace. He seemed tired, with noticeable lines under his blue eyes and hair that looked like he’d run his fingers through it a few too many times. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. His Tess glasses. I swallowed. Maybe this was all a mistake.

Ugh, that’s idiotic, Tess. Don’t read too much into a pair of freaking glasses.

“I’ve got great news,” I said as brightly as I could. “I talked to Elaine this afternoon, and she said we can split the lab times Monday through Wednesday.”

“You’re kidding! How’d you work that miracle?”

I started unbuttoning my coat. “I did nothing. Apparently she had some kind of…stressed-out nervous episode the other week, and she deeply regrets her behavior and said we can have our lab slots back if we want.”

“That’s…great. So you actually had a civil conversation with her? That’s possible?”

I chuckled. “You two should learn to bury the hatchet. She’s not so bad. I even went to lunch with her and her roommate.”

There was a pregnant pause. “Melanie?”

“Yeah.” So at least he remembered her name. “And I have to say, Dylan, I was super surprised when I saw her. She doesn’t strike me as your type.” I slipped my coat from my shoulders and went to hang it up on the rack by the door. When I turned back, it was to see Dylan staring at me, open-mouthed.

“What?” I asked nervously, smoothing my hands down over my shimmery top.

“I...um...that outfit’s really nice.”

“Thanks.”

He turned away. “Make sure to put on your lab coat so you don’t get anything on it.”

I rolled my eyes at him, then went to get one of the white jackets lining the wall. We started in on the evening’s work, but a few minutes into it, as I was studying some cells in the microscope, Dylan spoke again.

“You’re talking about the hair and the piercings and stuff, right? On Melanie?”

“Mmm?” I adjusted the magnification.

“She didn’t look like that when I knew her,” he went on quietly. “She was a little more conservative freshman year. Still figuring her style and stuff out, I guess. No piercings, no tattoos. Her hair was long…and…brown. Like yours.”

I looked up at him. “Oh.”

He gave me a gentle smile. “A lot like yours.”

“Oh.”

Dylan fell silent, and I wondered how many of the people he had dated resembled me. And then I thought of Hannah, and her eyes, and the genetics we shared, and the air in the room felt hot and impossible to breathe.

“Did you like her?” he asked now. “Melanie?”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved to be back on safer ground. “She’s nice. And Elaine spent the whole lunch apologizing, so maybe I’m going to give her another chance, too.”

Dylan made a sound like a snort. “Then you’re a better person than she is. She won’t let go of something that happened freshman year, and I didn’t even do anything to her deliberately.”

“Well,” I said, “they invited me to lunch, and to this party tonight, and it’s not like I’ve made very many friends since coming here, so I’m willing to give it a chance.”

“I’m sorry about that.” When I looked at him this time, guilt had twisted his features into a frown. “I should be introducing you to more people. I did want you to come to the football game with me that time.”

“And when I didn’t, you brought your tailgate to my place of employment,” I said wryly. “I remember. But my loner status isn’t your fault, believe me. I’ve never had a lot of friends.”

“I don’t remember that about you from Cornell. You and Cristina were always really tight.”

I smiled. “I talked to her tonight, actually. She says hi.”

His eyes widened. “Did you tell her about…things?”

I put my hand on my hip and my tone became mock-scolding. “I thought you were all about telling people the truth.”

“I am.” He grinned. “I just want to know if anything incriminating is about to pop up on my Facebook page.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Cristina is the soul of discretion.” That was also the truth. I didn’t have to worry about her posting something squealy on his wall while he was still “in a relationship.”

Especially since right now we were the very definition of “it’s complicated.”

“So…,” he said after we worked for a few minutes more. “Party?”

“Yeah. My first official Canton party.” Should I invite him? Would that be weird, what with Melanie and Elaine and all the backstory with them? Not to mention how he and I should probably spend as little social time with each other as possible.

“Where’s it at?”

“Beta house?”

He laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, a huge grin splitting his face. “That’s just the frat your friend Todd is in.”

Oh crap. Well, it was a party. The chances I’d run into Todd were slim, right? “What are you doing tonight?”

“Homework,” he replied. “I’ve fallen a bit behind the last few days.”

I nodded and looked down at my notes. “How was the appointment this morning?”

He shrugged. “Fine, I guess. The actual biopsy was fine. We’re just waiting for results now. Hannah and her mom have gone up to Manhattan for the weekend. She wants to take her mind off it or something, I guess. Shows, shopping, whatever they do.”

I knew what they did. And I knew that when they did it, my dad usually spirited my mom away for a weekend somewhere, too.

“So you’re alone,” I blurted without thinking. I raised my eyes. He was looking at me, too, and there might as well have been a big red warning sign flashing across his forehead. “I mean—it’s nice Hannah is out of town.”

“I know what you mean.”

“No—I really am glad that she’s getting her mind off things. Not just because—” My cheeks heated. Not just because I’d prefer she get her comfort from someone other than her boyfriend. I’d never been to Manhattan or seen a Broadway show, though once when I was young, Mom took Dad to see
The Lion King
on Broadway and they brought me back a beautiful mask from the theater gift shop. If you were trying to get your mind off things, that had to be a good way to do it, right?

“You know,” he said now, “it’s funny we’re talking about your social life. Hannah asked me about it when she came by the apartment the other day.”

The day I’d hidden in his bathroom.

“She mentioned seeing you at the coffee shop and said we should hang out sometime. She wanted to know if you had a boyfriend, if there was anyone she could set you up with.”

I raised my eyebrows at Dylan. Didn’t he know what that meant in girlspeak? She was fishing for information. I remember what her friend at the coffee shop had said.
Oh, honey, watch out
. Hannah was trying to figure out if Dylan was safe around me.

And he so wasn’t. Hannah Swift didn’t know the first thing about me, literally. And though he claimed to love me, Dylan didn’t either.
How could he love me?
I thought suddenly. How could he love me when he didn’t even know me?

FIFTEEN

At nine thirty, I left the lab. Dylan stayed behind, telling me he’d clean up and transcribe the rest of the notes. I have to admit, I was relieved—there’d be no awkward goodbyes or long, silent elevator rides down to the exit. Elevators were particularly dangerous for us.