Page 181

A few days later, I have successfully occupied myself with tennis, studying, hanging with the girls, and maybe a small amount of looking at photos of Cal online.

I’m in the middle of studying when I hear the knock.

Sydney answers it.

“She’s upstairs. I’m not going to stop you. But I want it on record that I think you’ve got some nerve, boy.”

I close the textbook. I don’t go down. I sit at my desk and listen to him come up the stairs. He’s taking them slowly. Cal usually takes stairs two at a time.

He knocks softly. I don’t turn around.

“These are terrible,” he says from the doorway. “I’m aware. I came straight from the airport, and this was the best I could do.”

I look at him in the black of my laptop screen. Gas-station flowers, still in their cellophane, orange sticker half-peeled. My heart leaps at the sight of him.

“So you heard the song,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Bea, let me explain. Five minutes. Then you can throw me out, and I’ll go, I swear to God.”

Here is the thing I should do. I should turn around. He came straight from the airport with the worst flowers in Colorado, and he is standing in my doorway waiting to be let in, and every part of me that isn’t a coward wants to let him.

A pause. “Okay.”

He doesn’t move for a second. “Can I leave these?”

“Leave them on the side.”

He comes in far enough to put them on the desk, where they will shed pollen on my notes, and he doesn’t touch me, which my body cries out for, and he doesn’t say anything else until he’s back at the door.

“I pushed forward the meeting to negotiate with our potential new label,” he says. “I needed the money, and they’d offered a better advance if they heard some of our new stuff. I let them hear the song, but I swear I don’t know how it got out.”

I turn around then. “Money for what?”

He looks at his hands. “I can’t tell you that part.”

“Right.” I laugh. “So you just write a song about me—very obviously about me, by the way—and in it you—” say you love me. “—say personal things about us. When I told you I didn’t want to be part of it. And now, you can’t even tell me why you showed it to someone in the first place?”

His face crumples and his expression looks pained. “It isn’t mine to tell. I promised someone, and I’m not breaking it just so you’ll forgive me faster.”

“Then I’d get going, if I were you,” I say, and I turn back to the desk. “And give me some space, please.”

I don’t look at the flowers for two days. But I put them in water anyway.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Bea

The MCAT is in twelve days.

I am eating in my bedroom while I get ready because my alarm didn’t go off this morning, so I’m running late, and through the wall, from Sydney’s room, the song comes on.

It’s been four days. She plays it every morning now, and I’ve decided not to ask her to stop, because asking her to stop would mean admitting how much I listen for it.

I know the sounds of Sydney’s morning by memory—shower, hairdryer, the playlist, the playlist getting louder, a thud that is historically a dropped straightener followed by a “OW! You bitch!”

This morning the song cuts off halfway through the second line.