In Felsom Hall, I find my seat and uncap my pen. Then I write the date in the corner of the page like I’m going to take notes, and then I sit perfectly still for eighty minutes and stare at the wall.
I do not hear a word of Hayworth’s lecture on research methods.
The midterm is next Thursday. I know this. I have known this for three weeks. I should be writing.
Instead, I am thinking about a boy who wants nothing to do with me.
He has always wanted nothing to do with me. That’s the thing. That’s the part that makes this so embarrassing, even now, even at twenty years old in a lecture hall in a town where nobody knows me. Blue Golding has always wanted nothing to do with me, and I have always wanted everything to do with him. For one stretch of months in our senior year, the universe got confused and gave me what I wanted, and I spent the entire spring of that year walking around in a kind of religious daze.
We weresomething.
That’s the word I have for it.Something. We were never official, because Blue Golding does not do official, and I knew that going in, and I still — God, I still let myself think that maybe I was different. I let myself think it the way you let yourself think anything when you’re seventeen, and a boy with a hockey scholarship is unbuttoning your jeans after a party. I thought I was special. I thought he looked at me differently. I thought the way he held my face after the first time, both hands, his thumbs against my cheekbones, his forehead pressed to mine, and hisbreathing not yet evened out, meantsomething, because what else could it possibly mean.
It meant nothing.
It meant a few months of late texts and locker walks, and one afternoon at his mother’s house when she wasn’t home. Then came graduation. Then a summer of being ignored.
He might be the reason I’m at Camden U. I haven’t admitted that to anyone. Not to Mila. Not to my mother. Definitely not to Chase. But somewhere in the back of my head, in the part of my head I don’t go into if I can help it, I know that when I was filling out my Camden U transfer application at the kitchen table at one in the morning last March, I was thinking about what it might mean to be near him again. I couldn’t help the warmth I felt in my chest at the thought.
I am pathetic.
I pull out my phone to take my mind off him.
Me:My new roommate invited me to a party tonight.
Mila:Isn’t Chase coming tonight?
Me:They told me to bring him.
Mila:Who’s they?
Me:Penelope had a friend over. Her name’s Mara.
Mila:I know Mara. She’s a hoe.
My eyebrows go up so fast they almost leave my face.
Me:How do you know that?
Mila:I had her in a few of my classes, and I’ve seen her at parties.
Me:Will you come with me tonight?
Mila:Are you ditching Chase?
Me:No, of course not. They invited him too.
Mila:Are you sure that’s a good idea?
I huff out a breath through my nose because no. No, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I haven’t been sure about anything involving Chase for months now, and I’m tired of pretending.
Me:I didn’t ask him yet.
Mila:Bet he’s going to say no.
I don’t argue with that, because Mila knows everything about Chase because I tell her every little detail like a menace. She has, on more than one occasion, told me she thinks I deserve better, in the relentless way best friends say things when they mean it.
My phone buzzes, but it’s not her.
