Sophomoric (15 page)

“He’s an asshole,” I continued. “A stupid, selfish, horny jerk-off. He just wanted to get some and I was stupid enough to give it to him. Not my problem he has to find someone new to screw around with.” Maybe her. But I didn’t say that.

She waited out my rant. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before.

“I’m sure he can find some stupid freshman.” My voice refused to be muffled by the sweatshirt I threw over my head. “They all throw themselves at him anyway.”

“They’re freshmen.” She dismissed them with a senior’s status and security. That made me jealous too: sophomores weren’t quite old enough to start lording over the little people. “And he’s always been an idiot.” She was right. Damn her. “I just thought you might want to know that he couldn’t stop talking about how the sight of you and I-80 made him sick.”

Even as the sound of Ryan’s ridiculous nickname made me roll my eyes in self-disgust, it was impossible to pretend that her words didn’t make me lean toward that fluttering optimistic butterfly that usually just gets squashed. Hope is usually a disappointment, especially with guys who had always, really, been far out of my league. But while recognition may be the first sign of impending recovery, I found myself unable to wrench myself away from the addictive high of an imaginary happily ever after.

“Like anything serious would ever happen with me and Ryan.” I pulled the clip out of my teased-up hair.

“I don’t think he cared.” Cleo laughed. “If you ask me, he was jealous.”

My laugh expressed much more humor than hers. At this point, I was either laughing or crying. “He doesn’t give a damn. That was definitely cleared up for me.”

Cleo’s hair swung around her face as she shook her head. “He’s a dumbass, Bizza, but he’s not a bad guy.”

I made a face. “Yeah, and that made sense.”

“You know what I mean.” She shrugged, turning away from me to take off her makeup. “I’m just saying you guys should talk. This shit is getting a little ridiculous.”

Biting my lip, I tried to remember how many times I’d bitched about Dev to her in the last few days. The fact that I couldn’t count was probably a bad sign. “Sorry.”

She dismissed my apology. “Just talk to him.”

That was not high on my list of things to do at the moment. Higher on the list was to find a decent rebound to make him jealous. Dev Kennedy was coming to me, if it was the last thing I did.

The best laid plans of mice and men usually get seriously screwed up and mine were no exception. The grand master plan of avoiding Dev backfired miserably when I started seeing him everywhere. My commitment to make him come to me was being severely undermined by a growing desire to corner him against the nearest surface or, worse, to go back to our days of curling up to watch a movie. And that rebound?

Yeah. Since Mr. I-80, it was nowhere to be found.

Trying to have a casual conversation with him was impossible. Ignoring him was equally impossible. Not thinking about him was the most impossible impossibility of all. I was that girl I had sworn I would never be, thoroughly tied up with a guy who didn’t want her. And though I hated every damn minute of it, I couldn’t stop.

Tuesday night, my footsteps fell heavily on the sidewalk, wet from the never-ending rain that now hung in the air, refusing to go, on my way back from the library. Couple after couple passed me on the sidewalk, hands held and arms wrapped around each other. Conveniently and completely coincidentally (I swear) I had an epiphany as I was passing the lit windows of Dev’s dorm: particularly with the addition of Mr. I-80, it was impossible for things to get any worse.

It was the window third from the end on the second floor, next to the big tree. I had thrown more woodchips at that window when Dev was running late than I cared to remember, and had more shouted conversations from window to ground than his neighbors might have liked. The woodchip was smooth between my fingers when I picked it up, flipping it back and forth between my fingers. My aim was true, the result of by days of practice hitting that same window, bouncing off the bottom corner of the bottom pane. With a quiet noise of impact, it fell straight to the ground. The childish urge to turn and run, like playing ding-dong-ditch at my grandmother’s with Erin in the hot summers, was awfully tempting. My heavy bag slid from my shoulders to the ground, removing the impediment to my impending flight. But then the window slid open the same way it always had, and a familiar head poked out. They’d taken the screen out at the beginning of the year, so he leaned all the way out, hands holding the sill, hair faded into the darkness.

“Bizza?”

I winced at the incredulity in his voice. This was a really dumb decision.”Hey.” I bit my lip in a cultivated nervous habit. “Can we talk?” Those three words are the most loaded words ever, surpassing “I love you” by a large margin.

“Sure.” His voice, unlike mine, was calm, casual, confident. Damn him. “Be right down.”

I didn’t have to stand alone with the inquisitive glances (or the couple suspiciously wrapped in a blanket on a nearby bench) for long. He must have thrown clothes on in a hurry, and my eyes drifted down along the metal tracks of his half-undone sweatshirt zipper before I could stop them. His cologne floated in the night air, easily crossing the gap between us, but he kept his body a carefully measured distance from mine. From the charge suddenly humming in the air, making the back of my neck prickle and my muscles lock, it was probably shock avoidance. Or maybe it was just me, creating things I wanted to see. I hoped it wasn’t.

Either way, I was glad I didn’t have to be the one to bend the silence. “You okay?” His hands shoved deeper in the pockets of his uniform pants and he didn’t look at me.

“Yeah, fine.” My gaze too, slipped to the cement beneath the ratty seams and salt stains of my Uggs. “I just…I mean, we…Cleo said…” The words were awkward and unwieldy in my mouth, refusing to fit together into neat, clean, anesthetized sentences. “She’s stuck in the middle…I’ll stop, with the…the freshmen. Can you stop with, like, Ryan and everything? ’S not fair to her.” The words fell heavily from my mouth and plummeted to the ground between us, landing with the thud of silence. Tonight would be the night I forgot how to speak English.

“She can handle it.” He sounded almost angry. “We’re friends.”

“I’ve noticed.” The words came out more bitter, more jealous than I could help. Mirror, mirror on the wall. I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

He rolled his eyes. “Will you get over it? I’m not screwing around with Cleo.”

“I don’t care.”

Yes I did.

“Yes you do, you bring it up every five minutes.” His hand raked through his hair, either irritated or typical nervous Dev. “And you’re hooking up with I-80 so don’t give me that…”

“We barely did anything!” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Besides, you were with the freshmen.”

“Talking to freshmen.” He spread his arms, the classic gesture of innocence. I wanted to believe it was genuine, I really did. “What do you want me to say, Bizza?” Despite the tense lines of his posture, his voice was quiet, almost apologetic.

Say April Fool’s, you were kidding at Cleo’s. “I don’t know.” There was something lump-like forming in my throat, again. I swallowed, hard. There was no way I was going to even come close to crying in front of Dev. No freaking way. Not again. His hands were back in his pockets, standing just barely an arm’s length away. If I reached out, I could touch him.

“Look, I really want us to be able to stay friends.”

It hurt to hear his voice so impersonal.

He would use the most overused, unhelpful, cliché line ever, the one guaranteed to hit the brakes on happily ever after.

“Yeah.” The scuffed toe of my Uggs played with a woodchip at my feet. “Me too.” The lumpish thing was getting bigger. I really hated crying in public.

“Hey.” Before I knew it, he had crossed that carefully maintained gap between us and wrapped his arms around me. “It’s okay.”

Why does everyone always say it’s okay when it’s so clearly not? And yet, it’s still perversely comforting. Like I needed proof I was screwed up. At least I wasn’t as scared of him anymore.

It was habit when my hands slid into his sweatshirt pocket, habit when my head buried itself in his warm sweatshirt. Just like it must have been habit when one of his hands moved up to my hair, holding my head to his chest. I couldn’t blame it on habit anymore when my head tilted up toward his at the same moment his was leaning down toward mine. It wasn’t that I kissed him or that he leaned down to close the gap. It was just, all of a sudden, we were kissing. To be fair, this was not part of my plan.

Even so, when he moved to pull away, I couldn’t help rising up on my toes to follow him up. The kiss hit me from the top down, sinking down through the bottoms of my feet. My legs were shaking. Kissing him was the best thing that had happened to me all week, which was just pathetic. But as much as it may have been the unacknowledged forgone conclusion, we shouldn’t have done it. From the twist to his mouth and his careful study of the woodchips and gravel dancing away from where my toe was scraping the ground, he completely agreed. “Bizza, I’m so…”

“Forget it.” I ducked my head.

“Yeah.” There was an awkward pause. “I should go.”

“Me too.” My hands were still in his pockets. And there was a part of me that just wanted to hold him closer, like if I pulled him closer, held him tighter, he wouldn’t walk away. Like if I pressed myself into the curve where his neck met his shoulders, just like I had a million times, he wouldn’t pull away. “I miss you” didn’t even begin to cover it.

It sucked, the irrationality of it all. But I could control my body, if nothing else. The woodchips crunched softly under my feet as I picked up my bag and began to walk away from him, fighting the urge to grab him as I brushed past.

I made it to the sidewalk. “Hey, Bizza?” He hesitated, his voice quieter than it had been all night. The apology, the anger, were gone. “I miss you.”

My shaky sigh seemed to echo in the too-quiet space between buildings. I had known this was going to happen. “I miss you too.” Honestly, saying it just once couldn’t hurt more than knowing it already did.

It was a few days before I talked to him. I didn’t actively avoid him, but I didn’t go out of my way to talk to him. On runs I waved, which was at least an improvement over bobbing and weaving. In drama, I stayed across the stage from him, hiding with my now-familiar techies and backdrops.

When I did, inevitably, run into him, it was less awkward, less scripted, than that first meeting under his window. Of course, karma still had to be a bitch. Covered in sweat after my three-mile run was not exactly the way I wanted to impress him. For once, though, running into him didn’t drain my endorphin rush.

The next time I saw him, he asked me to go to dinner with him. Six o’clock couldn’t come fast enough.

It was a different dinner. We didn’t tease under the table and we didn’t eat off each other’s plates. The only place we went was the dining hall; there were no back corner detours with our bodies convulsed around each other in laughter. But it was just the two of us and, walking back, I could appreciate baby steps. With the sundown, the campus had cooled to the point where I regretted leaving both coat and sweatshirt in my dorm. Before I could say anything, Dev shrugged off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders. It was the first more-than-friendly gesture he’d made that night.

The original plan was for me to go straight back into my dorm, but so far this week we hadn’t exactly been adhering to plans. I don’t know how long we were standing and talking, or how many people walked past us flushed with new gossip. With any excuse, his hand would brush my waist or my shoulder or smooth hair behind my ear. The smell of his cologne clung to his jacket and I couldn’t help inhaling a little deeper. It brought back memories of other times I had inhaled his cologne, times that weren’t really conducive to a friendly, platonic conversation. Trying to squash the memories down only kind of worked.

Despite the lack of Facebook commentary, this was most certainly complicated. But I could, I would, be resigned to happiness with our slightly-more-than-friendly-but-not-quite-friendly-enough friendship. I could be like Cleo. Maybe this was what it was always like for her.

There was that charge again tonight, the kind that made the bottom of my stomach twist and my heartbeat pound double overtime in my ears and almost painfully against my ribs. It felt like edging your hand over on the armrest on middle school dates and the seconds before pressing an unfamiliar doorbell. The silence faltered but hung around uninvited, the way that one group of relatives always does.

I didn’t want to ask myself if I ever learned. I didn’t want to know.

Seven-thirty passed and we still stood on the front step of my dorm. I was bouncing on the soles of my feet, wondering if he wanted to go, if I should go, ending the conversation before the “ifs” became awkward and silent. When I moved to slide his jacket off, his hand held it on my shoulders. Soft lips pressed against my forehead as my eyes shut. If I didn’t look at him, maybe I could stay just friendly.

I was really pathetic. But at least I admitted it.

“I should go.” I didn’t expect him to reply. He always did have a tendency to surprise me.

“Don’t.” And that qualified.

Eyes wide, I looked up at him, trying to read his face for something—I have no idea what. Either I wanted an excuse to slap him or one to jump him. Or both. The likelihood that either would have been productive was slim to none. Whatever the hell went on in his head was always confusing and I always hated it. This took it to a whole new level.

Stupid boys. Stupid penises.

“Dev, I can’t do this again.”

“I really miss you, Bizza.” His hand cupped my cheek, fingers lightly tracing down my jawbone until it settled in the curve of his hand.

I really wanted to believe him. But I couldn’t be that girl, the one who is the last to know and stays anyway. If people were going to laugh at me, I at least wanted to know when and why.