Page 98 of You + Me – Against the World

“I don’t care. I have a life too,” she says with a shrug. “Besides, I have a new guy.”

“What? Who? How? Do I know him?!”

“Oh, now suddenly you’re interested in your old friend Clémentine, huh?” She tries to look mysterious, but has a hard time hiding her smile.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vadim says. “Not that I’m not interested, but… actually, yes, that’s exactly it!”

“That’s right, get lost, Arcadi! Go find your friends. Oh, shoot, you don’t have any, what a shame…”

Clem puts on a mock-sad pout that amuses me.

“Clémentine D’Aragon, you are a ‘trou du cou,’” he says in French, very proud of himself.

Lily’s doing, of course.

My best friend snorts. “If you want to call me an asshole, it’s trou du cul. Cou means neck, you trou du cul!”

Vadim turns on his heel and stalks across the classroom, before leaning on the wall and taking out his cell phone to text I-don’t-know-who.

Cheyenne? Maybe.

Paranoid? Probably.

I keep pushing, try to bargain with, then bribe Clémentine, but I can’t manage to get the name of her new flame out of her. Either she’s making me pay for going to Paris without her, or she’s a bit embarrassed about who it is. Andrew Clark, her snacking accomplice? Or is Cassius Banks, the basketball player, back on the scene? Perhaps it’s Aaron Goldberg, the valedictorian’s older brother she dreamed of marrying? Or another student, one I’ve never met? All I know is that she spent the holidays going to campus parties and doesn’t always remember how she got home. Conclusion: anything is possible.

Even after a full week of classes, I still haven’t gotten her to talk. And I know Clem inside and out; she isn’t the type to keep a secret for this long. It’s usually beyond her capabilities. But my best friend has changed. She spends almost all her evenings with him, barely answers my texts, and sometimes arrives in class with dark circles under her eyes and a goofy smile on her lips.

Vadim, meanwhile, is kept busy with his community service group—and his “interesting” new friend. When he recounts snippets of their conversations to me, I pretend to find them trivial and dull. He tells me that he doesn’t see her outside of the community service work and doesn’t particularly want to, and I promise him I won’t become the kind of easily freaked-out, jealous, suspicious girlfriend that can’t handle a simple boy-girl friendship.

But it’s still weird, community service that ends so late in the day, right? And on top of everything, Clem isn’t even around to dream up crazy scenarios with me.

So I spend a lot of my evenings at Abrams’s place. He’s satisfied with the footage I shot in Paris, impressed by my work—which he says is heading in the right direction—and a little bitter whenever the discussion turns to Vadim Arcadi. Caleb is often around, a little more relaxed with me than before, but still as harsh and critical toward his father. It’s actually kind of entertaining to witness this sociological spectacle: hearing him speak in a way I would never dare speak to my own father—not even in my dreams—and seeing my professor, so uncompromising with his students, back down in front of his twenty-year-old son, just to avoid breaking the fragile bond they have recently started to rebuild.

“You spend quite a bit of time here, don’t you?” Cal asks me one evening as I’m getting ready to leave.

“Yes. I’ve got a film project to finish. Your father agreed to help me.”

“Yeah, right! He’s only doing it for the company—and because he knows I like you and it’ll make me come round more often.”

“Then everyone’s happy, right?”

“But that doesn’t explain why you come here. Don’t you have better things to do? What does your boyfriend say about it?”

“Nothing. He’s not the possessive type.”

“And you?”

“Me… I give him his freedom, he gives me mine; it works for us.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a terrible liar, Alma? The truth is, you don’t really know what he does with his evenings. You’re dying to hound him with questions, but you don’t want to smother him, so you come here to kill time and think about something else. And maybe to make him a little jealous…”

“Okay, let me ask you the same thing: you’re supposed to see your dad every other weekend, but right now it’s more like two nights out of three. So, what’s your excuse?”

“You.”

The silence that settles in weighs a ton.

The elephant in the room.