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“Try not to be yourself tonight, idiot,” Ethan said.
Kelly laughed. “Just kidding,” he said. “You like this school?” he asked, looking back and jerking his right thumb at the campus.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“She hates it. We all do,” Ellie said. “All it needs is bars on the windows. Graduation will feel more like parole.”
The boys laughed. Because of his closeness to me, I could smell the whiskey on Kelly’s breath.
“Well, forget about it,” he told Ellie. “We’ll have a great time tonight and make up for the week or weeks or months. Okay, Semantha?”
“Even a great New Year’s Eve couldn’t make up for all of that,” I said. This time, only Ethan laughed.
“Well, the night’s young,” Kelly offered, sounding as if I had wounded his ego. “And you haven’t given me a chance to show you a good time. I don’t get many complaints from the girls I date.”
I gave him a small, courteous smile. Then he began to talk about himself, how he had decided to go into the navy after he graduated from college and how that was driving his father nuts. He said his father had pushed him into going to college. He had told his father he wasn’t going to be a lawyer or a doctor or even go into business with him, but his father had insisted he give college a chance. I quickly understood that he was just barely passing his subjects. I didn’t know much at all about Ethan, but I began to suspect that he wasn’t really best friends with Kelly, and later, at the fraternity house, Ethan confessed that he had asked him to double-date only because Ellie had told him there was no other way she could get out.
“My roommate is practically engaged, so I couldn’t ask him,” he said.
By now, it was pretty clear that Kelly wasn’t having a good time with me. I danced with him, but I wouldn’t drink his liquor or pop any of his Ecstasy. He carried the pills in what was supposedly a pack of gum. His bragging about himself began to bore me, too, and he eventually began drifting off, spending more time with other boys, and even flirting with other girls right in front of me. So far, I wasn’t that impressed with a college fraternity party. I think Ethan saw that more than either Ellie or Kelly did. Whenever Ethan had an opportunity to step away from Ellie and come to me, he did. At the moment, she was with some other girls.
“Sorry about Kelly,” he said. “Ellie was so desperate to get out and made it sound as though you were just doing her a favor and didn’t care who your date was. She made you sound as if . . .”
“What?”
“You don’t have any interest in boys.”
“Did she? I suppose she really believes that, but I’m not what she’s making me out to be.”
He smiled. “I had a feeling she didn’t know what she was talking about, but I can see you’re not a happy camper here, and you’re not the sort of girl who doesn’t care who she’s with as long as she can get out.”
“She wouldn’t take no for an answer, but it’s not important,” I said.
“It is to me. I don’t like doing things like this, especially to someone I can see is quite nice.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He smiled, and when he did, to me it looked as if he tilted his head just slightly, just the way the character in my romance novel said her lover tilted his head.
“I’ll find a way to make it up to you,” he added quickly as Ellie approached.
“What’s going on?” she asked, pulling her lips back tightly and showing her teeth like some snarling alley cat.
“Far as I can see, not much,” Ethan said, nodding toward Kelly, who was practically slobbering over a girl in a tight knit dress. “Or nothing unexpected, I should say. I was just apologizing to Semantha.”
“Well, your party isn’t as exciting as I had hoped,” Ellie muttered. “Maybe we should go somewhere else.”
“Where would we go, Ellie? We’re taking a big enough chance as it is coming here,” I said quickly. “We have to indicate our destination before we leave the campus, and we’ve already lied about that,” I explained to Ethan.
“Oh, brother. Relax, Semantha. I’m sure Mrs. Hathaway didn’t follow us,” Ellie said.
“Why make her feel any more uncomfortable than she is?” Ethan asked.
She looked at him and then at me and shook her head. “You don’t have to feel so sorry for her, Ethan. She’s not a baby or something. She can handle it.”
“You don’t have to be a baby or something to be unhappy with this situation, Ellie.” Again, he nodded in Kelly’s direction.
She glanced at him and shrugged. “Right,” she said. “I guess I’ll just have to make the best of it.”
