“I had to throw it out. Blood all over it. And, no, I didn’t hear them or ask.”
“That sucks. I liked that sweater.” We swipe our cards at the checkout to put the food on our meal plans, and she starts walking toward the closest free table. Looking back at me over her shoulder, she smiles. “Want to know what I heard?”
“What?” I set my tray down on the table a little too hard.
Her smile falters. “You’re upset.”
“No.”
I’m not. I’m just … confused. Something’s going on, and these days when something’s going on, it’s rarely good. And if the something involves West and Nate, I’m very much afraid I don’t want to hear it.
We sit down. I brace myself. “Just tell me, okay?”
“I heard they were fighting about you.”
Crappity crap crap crap.
“Who told you that?”
“Somebody in their class. They’ve got Macro together.”
“Nate and West?”
“Yeah, and Sierra, you know her? She said that after class Nate made some random joke, and West got on his case, and it turned into an argument about you.”
“What did they say?”
There’s a rock in my stomach, dense and hot. I sip my Coke, closing my eyes against the doomed feeling slipping over my shoulders.
“I’m not sure.” Bridget’s tone is cautious. “Sierra didn’t catch all of it, only your name.”
I push at my chicken with my fork, but I can’t even bring myself to cut it. When I put it in my mouth, it will taste like ashes. The burned-up remains of the life I used to have.
People talk about me. Not to my face, but behind my back? All the time. I’d made Bridget promise to tell me whatever she heard, because I need to know. It’s the only way I can be sure they’re forgetting, like I want them to.
I’m nothing special—just a normal-looking college girl. I should be able to fade into the background if I keep my head down. In a year, I’m hoping that barely anyone will remember this. Caroline who?
It’s not what I had planned, exactly. I’d thought I might shoot for student-body president my junior year, senior year at the latest. But I can table that ambition if I have to. I’d rather be anonymous than notorious.
“Sierra said it was kind of romantic,” Bridget offers. “He was defending your honor.”
It’s such a preposterous idea—that I have honor. That West would defend it.
I barely know him. I’ve only talked to him one time.
West and I are not friends.
And for the past few weeks, the only people who have cared about my honor are Bridget and me. None of my old friends can look me in the eye. Nate and I came as a unit, and when they had to pick sides, I guess his side looked like more fun.
“I would never do something like that,” Nate had said, straight-faced, when I confronted him in front of a bunch of those friends in this very dining hall. “How could you think I would?”
And then, after I sputtered and he denied for another few minutes, he’d said, “I guess a lot of those girls just want attention so bad, they’ll do anything to get it.”
I look out the window at the lawn, unable to chew up and swallow the idea of West Leavitt defending my honor. Unable to process it at all.
Last year, when I regained consciousness after fainting by West’s car, the first thing I heard was an angry male voice in the hall. My dad was shouting, which was nothing new. He’s a judge, so he spends most of his professional time being calm and rational, but outside of work he’s the single parent of three young daughters, and he has a tendency to get shouty when he feels threatened. Which is a lot.
You just have to know how to handle him. My oldest sister, Janelle, sucks up. Alison usually cries. I present him with reasoned arguments, appealing to the logical brain until the ranty brain calms down.
Dad must have been all the way down the hall by the stairs, because I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Occasionally a lower, calmer voice broke into his tirade.
West’s voice.
I didn’t sort all this out until later. At the time, my head felt overlarge and tender, and I asked the girl leaning over me, “Who are you?”
“I’m Bridget,” she said. “Are you okay? You fainted. This cute guy carried you up the stairs, and I don’t know what he said to your dad, but your dad is ticked, and is he always that scary? Because, if so, I’m glad you’re here—it’s going to be a lot more pleasant for you—and also …”
She kept going until the door flew open and my dad came back into the room, red-faced and sweaty under the arms of his golf polo. He sat beside me on the bed, so obviously agitated that fume lines might as well have been rising off his head.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay.” This was a lie.
“I’m going to get you moved to one of the girls’ dorms.”
I sat up abruptly. “What? Why?”
“That boy out there—he’s not a good influence. You shouldn’t be living near a kid like that.”
“Like what? What did he do?”
Well. That was the wrong question. For the next several minutes, I learned how entirely alarming it is for a father to leave his youngest daughter for just a few minutes and then rediscover her laid out on the ground underneath an unknown male. Especially when your daughter turns out to be unconscious, the kid has “an attitude,” and you don’t “like the look of him.”
All of this was compounded, according to my dad, by the “drug paraphernalia” in the backseat of the punk’s car. By which I think he meant the aquarium and lights and the bag of dirt, not the Dinty Moore. Although who knows? I was entirely out of my league. I heard the words drug paraphernalia, and I imagined short lengths of thick rubber, bags of heroine, syringes.
My dad was still lecturing when Nate showed up and made everything worse. Dad had invested three years in trying to guarantee that Nate and I were never alone near a horizontal surface, and now here Nate was, sauntering into my bedroom without knocking.
My dad turned a deeper shade of red.
Quickly, I introduced Bridget to Nate and Nate to Bridget and Bridget to my dad. I smiled a lot, making an effort to seem healthier than I felt, because this was the first stage of what would turn out to be an arduous campaign to ensure that when my father left—three days later instead of one, because the campaign was freaking long and hard fought—I’d still be in this dorm, in this room, with Bridget.
I won, but West was the necessary sacrifice. My dad wouldn’t leave until I’d agreed I would have nothing to do with “that boy.”
It was laughable, really, to think I might have. It turned out Dad was right about the drug thing.
West and Krishna’s door was always closed, the curtains pulled shut. They had a steady stream of guests, played loud music, and annoyed me with their late hours and the whiff of sandalwood and sticky-acrid smoke from their room that infested our entire floor.
West set up that aquarium and those lights someplace secret—no one seemed to know where—and grew a bumper crop of weed. This was according to Krishna, who hung out in our doorway a lot, chatting with Bridget and me.
Krishna I can talk to. But West … no. The way he walks—that swagger that isn’t a swagger—it’s like he knows his way around, even if he’s somewhere he’s never been before. His confidence makes him seem older than me, and Bridget is always telling me stuff about him that cements the impression. Apparently he loaned money to this guy in Bridget’s psych class so the guy could buy a plane ticket to see his girlfriend. West charged him interest. It makes me wonder whether he breaks kneecaps if someone doesn’t pay him back.
He’s just more than I could handle, even if I were allowed to talk to him.
I confined my relationship with West to staring from afar—and I wouldn’t have done even that, except I can’t help it. When he’s around, I have to look at him.
He knows it, too. He smirks at me sometimes. One time, when he was coming down the hall in a towel? God. I think I was red for an hour afterward.
I never found out what he said to my dad. I have a feeling that, whatever it was, he wasn’t defending my honor. It’s hard for me to see why he would start now.
Maybe I should be grateful, but I can’t. I don’t need guys like West Leavitt defending me. He’s infamous. Between the drug dealing and that face, that smile … pretty much everyone on campus knows who he is.
He’ll draw attention to me. My primary purpose in life at the moment is to disappear.
When I mentally come back to the table, Bridget is peeling a hard-boiled egg and watching me. She’s gotten used to my long silences. She’s fiercely loyal, endlessly supportive. The best person I could possibly have on my side.
“If people want to know what I think about what West did?” I began.
“Yeah?”
“Tell them it was all a misunderstanding. It had nothing to do with me.”
Her forehead wrinkles. “But I figured it was good. Somebody else on our side, right?”
“I don’t want to be on a side, Bridge,” I say gently. “I want people to get amnesia on this whole issue. Fighting tends to be a thing people remember.”
She bites her lip.
“I don’t need people linking me up with him, okay? I need to keep a low profile.”
“If that’s what you want me to say, that’s what I’ll say,” she assures me. “That’ll be the end of it.”
I try on a smile and push my chicken across the tray, then pull my mint brownie closer and sink my fork through the thick layer of frosting. Dark fudgy black over a green so bright it’s almost neon.
That’ll be the end of it.
I wish I could believe her, but I can’t make assumptions like that anymore. I’ve learned that when evil crawls out of a snake pit, you have to track it down and squash it. Then you have to assume it had babies and go looking for them.
I have a past to erase if I’m going to claim the future I’ve always wanted—a future that requires me to get into a good law school so I can clerk with a great judge and start making the connections my dad says I need if I want to be a judge myself someday. Which I do. I want to go even further. State office. Washington, D.C.
My dad always says the first step to getting what you want is to know what you want and what it takes to get it. There’s no shame in aiming high. For my sixth-grade History Day project, I wrote a book of presidential limericks, one for each president. By ninth grade, I was volunteering to canvass door to door, and I got on the mailing lists for the Putnam College Democrats and the Putnam Republicans before I even received my acceptance letter.
I know what I want, and I know what it takes to get it. It takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice—but it also takes a clean record. No arrests, no scandals, no sex pictures on the Internet.
I don’t need anyone going around beating people up on my behalf. I can’t chance it happening again.
I need to talk to West.
I find him on the fourth floor of the library.
It’s all journals up here, the shelves shoved together in the middle and study desks lining the outside walls, plus a Xerox machine where I spent way too much time copying literary criticism of T. S. Eliot last year.
West is standing by a cart full of books with his back to me, shelving a fat red volume of something. It takes me a minute to realize he’s him. I’d already looked all over the first three floors, and I was starting to panic that he might not be here. I’ve noticed that I often see him with his cart on Thursday afternoons, but that doesn’t mean much.
He’s got earbuds in, and I don’t think he’s seen me, so I take a second to think about what I want to say to him. I feel kind of sweaty and unkempt, even though I took time after lunch to change my shirt and slick on lip gloss.