Undeclared (Burnham College #2)

by Julianna Keyes

  “You’re buying them?”

  “You know I got that safety warning from the fire department about using ovens. Why are you so fixated on this? Are you hungry?”

  “Let me help you,” I blurt out. I really don’t want to think about why I’m saying this. How Kellan 2.0 is supposed to be looking forward but all I can think about is our past.

  She frowns. “With what?”

  “Baking the cookies. I know how to cook. Plus I have a kitchen I don’t share with forty people.”

  “Why—”

  “And in exchange, you can tell me what that movie was about. And the title. And do we have any assignments due?” There. That’s a good cover story.

  Andi sighs. “Kellan, if you’re not going to pay attention, you should just drop—”

  I gasp. “You fell asleep, too!”

  She tries to keep a straight face. “I watched the first half.”

  A group of guys from the track team call out my name as they pass, jostling each other in an effort to vie for prime placement in the pack. I say hi and instinctively reach for Andi to make sure she doesn’t run away.

  She jumps as my fingers brush her arm. “What are you doing?”

  “Ah...” We’ve obviously touched before, though outside of that last summer, we hadn’t made a lot of physical contact that didn’t involve trying to kill each other. “That was an accident.”

  “Okay. Whatever.” She stops near the entrance to one of Burnham’s multiple food courts, the smell of fast food and coffee wafting out. “I’m going to get a falafel before practice.”

  “What about tomorrow? Are you coming over to make cookies?”

  She squints at me and I hope I don’t seem desperate. Normally I don’t have to try too hard to get a date, and this isn’t even a date, it’s baking. But it’s Andi, and that makes everything harder.

  “Yeah,” she says finally. “I’ll come.”

  chapter five

  I wake up early the next morning to get in some exercise before Andi shows up. When she knocks on the door at 10:02, I’m freshly showered and wearing sweats and a San Francisco Giants T-shirt, ready to bake.

  “Hey,” I say, stepping back to let her in.

  “Hey.” She unzips a yellow hoodie to reveal she’s paired her sweatpants with her much beloved Oakland A’s T-shirt. We are dressed almost the same.

  She takes in my shirt and gives me a dirty look, as she always does when she sees the Giants logo. I’d like to say nothing has changed, but we might have been wearing these same shirts the night everything changed. I’m still desperate to know what happened at that game, but I’m afraid to ask and shatter whatever tentative thing we’ve got going here. When it comes to feelings, our unspoken policy has always been to leave everything unspoken, and that part is still very much the same.

  “Come on up,” I say, leading the way. I hear her socked feet following on the steps and think of how many times we’d done this before, hanging out in secret as children so no one would know I was friends with a girl; hanging out in groups because Andi refused to be left out; following her quietly up the steps to her bedroom the first time we had sex. I clear my throat when we stop at the top of the stairs, desperately trying to hop off that train of thought. “This is it,” I tell her, pointing at the rooms as I name them. “Kitchen, bedroom, office, bathroom, living room, dining room. The home of Kellan McVey. No flash photography, please.”

  “This isn’t a dining room.” She raps her knuckles on top of the tiny table at the top of the stairs. “It’s just a table in a weird spot.”

  “I’m so glad you came, Andi.”

  “I’ll bet.” She’s about to say something else when she squints at the DVD sitting on the coffee table. It’s Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, the film we slept through yesterday. “You found the movie?”

  “I borrowed it from the library.”

  “You found the library?”

  “Ha ha. I thought we could play it in the background while we make the cookies. Maybe we’ll absorb something by osmosis.”

  I start the movie and Andi trails me into the tiny kitchen. There’s a fridge on one end, stove and sink along the wall, and a countertop that overlooks the living room on the third. It’s small enough that if you have the oven and the fridge doors open there’s nowhere to stand. Even now Andi’s close enough that I can smell whatever soap she uses, something plain and no-nonsense that smells like soap and girl. Not that I notice. I will not notice.

  “Are you auditioning for that sports job?” she asks casually, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “The one with Ivanka Ling?”

  The mention of Ivanka makes me feel squeamish and guilty, even though I did nothing wrong. “I hadn’t really thought about it,” I lie. “Are you?”

  “Yeah. Probably. I mean, I don’t think I’m quite what they’re looking for, but...”

  “What’s that? Smart? Into sports?”

  “Glamorous.”

  I think about how polished and, well, glamorous Ivanka was. “You don’t have to be glamorous,” I say. “Maybe they can add that after. With special effects.”

  Andi snorts. “Thanks.”

  “You should send in an application.”

  “If you’re applying, there’s no point. You win everything.”

  “You never know if you don’t try.” She’s probably waiting for me to add more, but guilt urges me to change the subject. “I thought we could make peanut butter sandwich cookies,” I say, passing her an apron. “They’re easy enough and I already had most of the stuff.”

  “Okay, sure.” She fiddles with the apron as she puts it on, then says, “I wanted to ask you something.”

  I look at her, waiting for her to ask how long Ivanka has been visiting my home. My conscience is ready to spill everything, but as she continues to stall, pulling out her hair elastic and refastening the bun, I start to think this might not be about me after all. As I wait for her to continue I watch the fine muscles in her arms shift, the way her torso lengthens. I look away.

  “What is it?” I feel a strange tightness in my chest, something that might be hope. Maybe she had reasons for agreeing to come here that had nothing to do with cookies.

  “I need to know how to flirt better. How to flirt at all, really.” Her cheeks are so red they’re almost glowing and she’s not making eye contact. I know this because my mouth is hanging open as I gawk at her, but I can’t speak. I can’t even think coherently right now. Andi, flirting? With whom? I’m not conceited enough to think she’s asking for advice on how to flirt with me, which means her reasons for coming here had nothing to do with cookies...and not much to do with me, either. The tightness in my chest increases.

  I’m not aware of Andi having had any boyfriends before our summer together. She wasn’t my first kiss, but I always kind of thought I might be hers, though she’d never confirmed it. She was the first good kiss, though. The first one that felt like I might be doing something right.

  “You...I...When...How...” I can’t settle on a question. I have so many.

  “Never mind,” she says hastily, starting to untie the apron she just put on. “I can’t believe I—”

  “Who?” I blurt out. “Who is it?”

  “No one. Forget it.”

  I grab her hand. “Don’t,” I say, tying the strings back together like that’ll keep her here. “I’ll teach you whatever you want. Don’t go.” I have absolutely no idea what I might teach her and I really don’t want to, but more than that I want her to stay.

  Her shoulders are stiff and her jaw is tight, cheeks and neck flushed with embarrassment. Andi never asks for help with anything.

  She studies her toes. “When you came to Burnham you started ‘living,’” she says, every word sounding like it’s killing her to utter it. “And I don’t want to ‘live’ quite as much as you, but I do want to...live.”

  “Live with who?” Obviously I know she means, well, fuck, but I can’t picture myself saying the word. Not to Andi.
About this.

  She mumbles a name.

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Kind of. What if he’s a douche?”

  She rolls her eyes. “He’s not a douche. He’s on the basketball team and I met him when I showed up early for practice one day, and we played for a bit and he’s pretty hot but I didn’t know what to say and he’s probably going to come to the bake sale...”

  My heart stops. Choo. It’s Choo. Oh no. He’s not a douche at all. I should be happy for her, but I’m not. “Did he, um...try to sell you tiki torches?”

  She frowns. “What? No.”

  So probably not Choo. “What’s his name?”

  “Julian Crick.” She mutters it like I’ve just waterboarded her for six hours and she’s ashamed of caving.

  Instead of relief she’s not interested in one of my friends, I feel oddly bereft that if she’s interested in someone else—and asking me for help—it’s because whatever feelings she’d harbored for me are gone. I know it’s selfish, but knowing that Andi cared about me all those years, even if those feelings went unacknowledged, was its own kind of comfort. An unspoken backup plan.

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Why does that matter? I just need to know what to say. What to do.”

  “You shouldn’t say or do anything you would typically do,” I tell her. “Act a hundred percent different.” I’m stalling. I know to flirt and what kind of things I like, but I don’t know that I want to help Andi seduce someone else. I’m not a masochist.

  “Let me write that down.”

  I turn on the oven then drop sticks of softened butter and peanut butter into two mixing bowls. I figured since we were quadrupling the recipe we’d just double it twice, each handling a batch. Now I’m grateful for the extra work, pretending I’m preoccupied with my task instead of dreaming up ways to sabotage her flirtatious plan. “A cup of white sugar, a cup of brown,” I say, passing her a measuring cup and watching as she scoops. “As for Crick, I mean, if he liked you playing basketball, he probably thinks you’re fine just the way you are.”

  “That’s the problem,” she says, stirring the butter and sugar together a little too vigorously. “Just the way I am means just friends. When the other girls showed up I could tell he... I don’t know.”

  Okay, I’m definitely selfish. If Andi has this fear, I contributed to it. All those years I took hidden pleasure in her unrequited feelings, and all those years she tried to keep them secret, watching me flirt with other girls, never saying a word.

  “If he can’t appreciate you—” I begin.

  “I just want to let him know he can...appreciate me,” she interrupts. “That I’m interested in something.”

  “How much something?”

  She squints at her bowl. “I don’t know. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot.”

  The vise that’s gripped my chest tightens its fist. I don’t know what the fuck is happening. Maybe I’m having an allergic reaction.

  “Um...” I hustle over to the windows to make sure they’re open. They are. The sun is tucked behind the clouds and cool air wafts in, but it’s not helping matters.

  “You don’t have to help me,” Andi says when I return and crack eggs into each of our bowls, not trusting her with the task. “It’s stupid. I’ll ask someone else. I’ll ask a girl. I thought maybe you’d know what guys like.”

  “Guys like me aren’t the right guys to try to impress.” The words come out before I’ve even thought them through. “We’re not looking for someone like you—someone real,” I add, before she can punch me. “We’re looking for something quick and easy. You’re definitely not easy.”

  “He’s not like you. Just tell me what to say when I see him. If I’m at the bake sale, selling my wares, and he comes up to the table, what do I do? And don’t lie to me, either. I’ll know if you’re setting me up.”

  I glance at her. She looks deadly serious. And somehow, despite the jut of her jaw and the flat line of her brows, she looks vulnerable, too.

  I sigh, feeling guilty for a brand new reason. “Okay, first of all, don’t say ‘selling your wares.’ Second, assuming he’s not a douche...just smile at him.” Uttering the words feels like chewing on glass.

  Andi appears oblivious to my torment. “Okay. Then what?”

  “Say hi. And say something to remind him that you met before and you remember it, but not in a creepy way. Don’t be like, Hello Julian Crick, we met on September thirteenth at four-twenty p.m. Do you remember me too?”

  She laughs. “I guess I can do that.”

  I see the chipped tooth and think about her smiling at Crick, him smiling back. Buying cookies I helped bake. I’m stirring the batter a little too roughly and make myself stop. “Then you can, uh...” I add vanilla to the mixture, then swap out our bowls so we can mix the dry ingredients.

  “Why are you taking my bowl?”

  “You mix wet and dry separately,” I say. “Put three cups of flour in each.”

  She starts scooping. “Okay. Then I can what?”

  “Um...” I try to imagine the scenario, but I just see Andi smiling at me, saying we met before, offering me a cookie. She offered me a sandwich cookie once in third grade, but she’d put a worm in it. “He’s playing in the exhibition game?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ask him about the game. About himself. Ask if he’s excited. Tell him you’re looking forward to watching him play.”

  “That’s not creepy?”

  “Well, don’t say it in a creepy way and it won’t be.”

  “All right.”

  We get the dry ingredients combined and carefully fold them into the wet mixture. When the batter is ready I pull out two trays and arrange them on the counter, taking a spoon for myself and giving one to Andi. She bites her lower lip as she works, a strand of hair flopping into her eye. I reach over to tuck it behind her ear and she looks at me. For a long moment I can’t turn away. This whole setting feels very domestic, very...normal. All the things I’m pretty sure I don’t want.

  “Don’t get hair in the food,” I say, ruining whatever moment that was.

  She frowns. “I wasn’t.”

  “Good.”

  We fill the trays, a dozen cookies each, and I stick them in the oven and set the timer for twelve minutes. I bought two more trays for today, so we fill those with neat rows of cookies—well, mine are neat, Andi’s looks like a kindergartener did it—then we wait. Silently. And, if I’m not mistaken, a little awkwardly.

  “Sorry,” Andi says.

  I look at her. She’s not really much for apologizing. And I’m surprised she’s aware that asking me to help her flirt with Crick is bothering—

  “I haven’t paid any attention to the movie,” she confesses. “I’m not going to be able to tell you anything about it. I didn’t even understand the part I watched yesterday.”

  I don’t know why I feel disappointed. It’s not like I really thought we’d absorb the story by osmosis. “Don’t worry about it. It’s the first movie of the year. It’s probably not important.”

  “Why are you even in that class?” she asks. “I thought you were a sociology major.”

  That’s been my story for the past two years, and now that I’m supposed to deliver the lie—again—I’m realizing that I don’t know why I started it in the first place. And I don’t want to lie to Andi. “I’m undeclared. I’m taking general curriculum courses that could be applied to the sociology degree, but I haven’t actually decided on anything.”

  “In your third year?”

  “Yeah. I just kind of wanted to figure things out, see what felt right. So far, nothing has.”

  “And you thought film theory was a good bet?”

  “My course advisor did. I’d applied for a course I didn’t have the pre-requisites for, so he chose for me. I don’t know why he picked it.” I try to recall what Bertrand said on the walk to class yesterday, but it’s already a distant memory. �
�What about you? What are you doing in there?”

  “I’m doing a kinesiology degree,” Andi says, “and my other four courses are pretty demanding. Someone said I should take an easy class just to get the credits, and since I need an Arts credit anyway, I picked this one.” She scoops out a leftover bit of batter from the bowl and licks it off her thumb. “I thought maybe you were there because your girlfriend was there.”

  “I don’t have a—Marcela is not my girlfriend, no matter what scheme she comes up with.”

  “What really happened at Chrisgiving? Besides the good gravy.”

  “It was great gravy, and basically some truths came out. Marcela and I were pretending to date so she could make her coworker jealous, and he came to the dinner with his girlfriend, and by the end of the meal they were fighting.”

  “What started it?”

  “Um...” I start rinsing bowls and spoons and arranging them in the dishwasher. “I had kind of done something the year before and forgotten about it...and that came up.” I don’t know what Andi thinks about our summer together, but for me it was the best sex I’d ever had—well, it was the only sex at that point—but to date it’s still the best. I don’t want to admit to her that I barely remember the sex I’ve had since, and that I fucked my best friend’s future girlfriend in a closet at a party and didn’t remember it, even when she became my roommate.

  Andi peers at me suspiciously. “Did you rob a bank?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Kill somebody?”

  “Andi.”

  “How about accidentally?”

  I sigh. “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Let’s start making this filling. I thought raspberry would be good.”

  She doesn’t budge. “You’re really not going to tell me?”

  I study the label on the jar of jam. “I had sex with Nora—Crosbie’s girlfriend—at a party the year before and forgot about it. He learned about it at Chrisgiving and it kind of broke his heart.”

  For a long second she just stares at me. “Wow.”

  “Also, just in case you hear about this later, I had to go through those names on the bathroom wall to try to find out who I’d gotten the...thing...from and I didn’t remember a lot of them, either. At least, not their names. It was a shitty thing to do, and I’m not proud of it.” I’m gripping the jam like it’s a lifeline, my knuckles turning white.