Page 25 of The Boyfriend Experience

She’s frowning because…

“This is Bucked Up,” I say.

She nods. Slowly. Silently.

“She stole your beer recipe and has been passing it off as hers?”

Another nod from Oaklee. Then she whispers, “She stole my recipe. And this isn’t the only one, Law. This is why I need you.”

CHAPTER SEVEN - OAKLEE

Everything after that becomes a blur. We stay for a while. A long while. And I get drunk. Because what else can I do at this point? What?

Hanna Harlow was my freshman dorm roommate up at Colorado State. We were both seventeen because our birthdays are in October. We were both microbiology majors—me for the beer, of course. Her for the good of mankind. The CDC is in Fort Collins. On the western campus of CSU, in fact. And that’s where she wanted to work. Her dream, before she met me, was to eradicate malaria worldwide.

At least that’s what she said.

We were inseparable that first year of college. In fact, we were so tight, so engrained in each other’s lives, when we were allowed to move out of the dorm in sophomore year we got a house together.

Of course together really meant my dad paid for it because Hanna said she had no family. Like none. She told me she was on scholarship. A social worker had helped her navigate her way through system while she was in foster care as a kid. Nurtured her. Hounded her when necessary. But that social worker had died just a week before she started school and so poor, poor Hanna was all alone now. All she had was me.

I want to gag just thinking back on it. How stupid I was. How trusting and naive I was. And all the ways she would fuck me over by the time we graduated.

She started stealing my notes first. She struggled in school. In almost every class and especially calculus and microbiology.

I caught her stealing my Calc III notes in senior year. And you might say, What’s the big deal? They’re just notes, right?

But my notes aren’t just notes. I am meticulous. I am methodical. I am an expert notetaker. I had dozens of people in Calc II begging to buy a copy of my notes in junior year and I always said no.

I gave them copies for free.

Because I am generous, and trusting, and stupid.

So again. What’s the big deal if Hanna took them? I would’ve given them to her anyway, right?

But isn’t that the point? Isn’t it? That she felt the need to go behind my back? She went into my room, rifled through my backpack, and took them like they belonged to her.

And they didn’t. They were mine.

It was a red flag I should’ve heeded. A big, fat, flashing neon sign telling me to take a second look at this Hanna girl. And her stupid story of having no family. Which, by the way, wasn’t true. But I didn’t find that out until senior year when her family—all six of them—showed up for graduation.

I found out later that her parents were farmers out near Sterling. Not huge ones, mind you. Not the kind who make several million dollars a season. But still. They were well off enough to pay her tuition because, yes, that’s right. She lied about the scholarship too.

She was no rags-to-riches story. She was no bootstrapper. She came from an upper-middle-class farm family that looked very proud, and very nice, when I finally met them and realized she was a sociopath.

By that time I’d been done with her for a while. We had separate apartments before junior year was over. She was rooming with four other girls in a house on the west side of Shields Street and I was in a condo over the downtown tattoo shop. And boy, did she rub that condo in my face every chance she got.

“Must be nice to have your daddy pay for everything,” she sneered when I threw a party and she invited herself over with the new group of friends I’d made since our falling out.

As if.

But I didn’t know it then. I didn’t realize how much she had lied until school was over. And by that time who could I tell? Everyone was on their way out of town. Back to their homes or striking out on their own.

I went home to Denver that same night. My dad showed up with a bunch of guys from the brewery. They packed me up while I was receiving my diploma, and moved me back to Bronco Brews.

I wrote her off as an unfortunate associate that I’d probably never see again, started working on my masters degree at the CU Health Science Center, and for three blissful years she was nothing but a bad memory.

Then my dad died and she came back.