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Chapter 8
Tuesday morning, Eric and I both woke up around five a.m., blearily greeting each other in the kitchenette as the sun was just starting to peek through the blinds.
"Morning," Eric said as he rubbed a pale hand over his half-asleep face.
He turned to the counter to begin his daily regime of coffee. In a kitchen that was otherwise quite bare, Eric had the full setup: a special countertop kettle that heated water to the exact temperature that was supposedly ideal for making coffee, a glass pour-over device that looked more fitting to a nineteenth century laboratory than a twenty-first century kitchen, and a selection of local coffee beans that had all been roasted within the week.
"Morning," I said as I set my very regular kettle on the stove to boil the old-fashioned way.
I rummaged around a cupboard and pulled out my favorite travel mug and a box of cheap Irish Breakfast tea.
We had both turned in early the night before, after Eric had come home from a date of some sort (if you could even call his rendezvouses dates. I had yet to hear a single one referred to by name). He wore a pair of jogging pants and a white T-shirt: comfortable, casual wear for the several hours we would be spending at a test prep facility. I had pulled on something equally lazy: my favorite old jeans and a T-shirt that said "I'll be Bach" across the front. Eric looked at it and snorted. Yeah, okay, so I was a music nerd.
"I hate this," I griped for the fifth time in the last twenty-four hours.
Eric, too tired to formulate a full sentence, just grunted in agreement.
We were both up at the crack of dawn because Sterling Grove, Eric's new firm (which also happened to belong to Brandon), and Kiefer Knightly paid for their new associates to attend the same bar prep class. This was Eric's second day on this schedule; I had missed our morning class yesterday to go to Kiefer Knightly.
It was supposedly the best prep program in Massachusetts, and its attendees had an over ninety-percent pass rate. The bad news was, it was in Andover, a town about twenty-five miles north of Boston. That would have been a half-hour commute by car, but, like most recent students who lived within Boston city limits, neither Eric nor I had a car. That meant that we were looking at an hour commute each way, not including wait and walk time, for a class that started right at eight a.m. each morning.
Like zombies, we moved around the kitchen in tandem, sipping on our caffeinated beverages while we packed snacks and cleaned up. Then we grabbed our book bags, threadbare from three years of hard use at Harvard, and left to be students for the last time.
~
The test prep center was in an unassuming office park about a mile from the Andover train station. We arrived about fifteen minutes before class, with Eric in a dark mood after realizing just how hot it was going to be schlepping between the station and the classroom every day in the heat of summer.
"This is bullshit," he said again as he wiped the sweat off his brow. Like me, Eric turned bright red when he exerted himself. "I look like I just ran a marathon. I'm going to have to bring a change of clothes every day on top of all the other crap."
I look on with amusement. But he also had a point––in another month, Boston would feel like a sauna pretty much any time of day, and this walk was going to get seriously uncomfortable.
We walked into the thankfully air-conditioned building and up the stairs to where our assigned classroom was. It was a relatively big class, with somewhere around fifty other recent law grads clustered in groups around large gray desks.
"Hey, Skylar!"
I looked to my left to see another friendly face, one that made my stomach drop. Jared Rounsaville was a classmate of Eric's and mine at Harvard. He was a nice, polite, WASPish-looking guy, with straight, light brown hair and brown eyes that crinkled a little at the corners when he smiled. He was starting a job at his grandfather's tax firm this year, although considering that his father was a sitting Congressman, it was also likely that he was planning a future in politics as well.
He was also someone I'd dated briefly and promptly blown off when I'd met Brandon. Running into Jared and his family at the symphony with Brandon at my side last February hadn't been my proudest moment, and I'd gone out of my way to avoid him on campus until we'd graduated.
"Hi, Jared," I said, leaning to accept a quick hug and kiss on the cheek.
Eric watched the two of us with curious, raised brows, but his face quickly dropped into a neutral expression when Jared turned to slap his hand.
"How's it going, man?" Jared asked. "Are you guys..." He looked knowingly between me and Eric.
"No. No," I said emphatically when I realized what Jared was suggesting.
Eric's widened and he shook his head effusively. "Um, no. Just roommates."
Jared nodded, although he looked between us as if he was trying to figure out whether or not we were lying. Eric and I were basically making twin faces of disgust, so Jared relaxed.
"Huh," he said. "Well, that's wild, you two as roommates. You're at Sterling Grove, aren't you, man?" he asked Eric, who nodded. Jared turned to me. "Are you working there now too, Skylar?"
His big brown eyes blinked innocently, but we both knew it was a loaded question. If I had taken a job at Sterling Grove, the real question would be whether I had been hired by my boyfriend.
I cleared my throat. "Um, no. I took a job at Kiefer Knightly."
"Oh, cool. They handled my sister's divorce," Jared said. "Your boyfriend must have been disappointed though."
