Then it was silent.
For what felt like three hours.
I couldn’t handle it.
“So my ex-girlfriend really seems to like you,” I said.
“Your ex-girlfriend?” Luke asked, confused. I could feel him looking at me again, but I refused to make eye contact, instead focusing on the collection of the stars above us. Was that Aquila or Cepheus?
I swallowed again. “Nina.”
“Oh…you two dated?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Freshman year.” CCC+NMD, the initials on the sycamore tree read: Charles Christopher Carmichael and Nina Michelle Davies. And no lie, I sort of wanted to laugh. I remembered Nina and I had such trouble making our mark that I’d texted Nick to come and get the job done.
Luke shifted next to me. “Why’d it end?”
I sighed. “Because she didn’t want to hurt Sage.” Which brought up the fact that the entire school thought Sage and I were suffering from one of those we’re actually in love but haven’t totally realized it yet scenarios.
Nina and I were together for about a month before she latched on to that idea. “I just can’t, Charlie,” she’d said. “I really like you, but I love Sage. I can’t do this to her.”
Now I cleared my throat and said, “I love her madly, but not in that way.”
“Well,” Luke murmured, “you might want to tell people that.”
And this time it was me who went silent. I can’t, I wanted to say. I know I should, but I can’t, because I don’t want anything to change. I like the way things are. I need them to be the way they are.
But I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I pointed up at the sky. “Do you see those stars up there? The ones that form sort of a house? That’s Cepheus.”
Chapter 5
Sage
Charlie pounced on me as soon as we met outside Daggett on Monday morning for our run. I’d stayed up late the night before finishing an essay—okay, writing an essay—so I was still half-asleep when he greeted me with: “So the other night, huh?”
But at that, I was suddenly wide awake, his words the equivalent of an ice-cold bucket of water being dumped over my head. “Wait, what?” was my eloquent response.
Charlie gulped some water from his Gatorade bottle and smiled at me after swallowing. “Saturday night.” The smile twisted into a smirk. “What exactly did I need your help with?”
Shit, I inwardly groaned, remembering the lie: “Oh, Charlie needs me for something.” Even though I’d invited him to Thayer, I didn’t think he’d actually show up. He never did.
“Don’t worry,” Charlie said. “I covered for you.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, trying to piece together why he did come. What made this time different?
Charlie stretched his arms above his head. “Tell me, who was it? Paddy? Cody? Jack?” His smirk shifted into his most mischievous grin. “Or might there be a dark horse out there?”
“Oh, please.” I started stretching too, so my hands wouldn’t shake at my side. Dark horse. “Charlie can’t know,” I’d told Nick before we parted on Saturday. “Don’t tell him.”
Nick had chuckled. “Why not? He was at that bonfire too. He saw.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, but couldn’t voice the next part—about how after the game, later when the fire was only crackling coals, Charlie had cornered me. “Hey,” I’d said, noticing the handle of whiskey in his hand. “Where’d that come from?”
He’d shrugged and taken a long pull. “So you kissed him,” he said. “You kissed Nicky.”
“I did.” I smiled, a flutter inside me. “You jealous?” I winked, knowing he wasn’t. Charlie and I’d kissed before, and while it was everything for a first kiss, it was also somehow nothing. We’d been thirteen, at a bar mitzvah. “I love you,” I would never forget him saying, with me saying back, “I love you too.”
Then we silently agreed: Just not in that way.
“I mean, man…” Charlie went on, slugging more whiskey. “You’ve got him hooked now. I know when Knickknack’s hooked.” He waved a frenetic hand toward Nick, who was watching us from across the fire, and then Charlie stepped closer, so drunk his blue eyes were crossed. But his voice was so low and dark that it was like he was staring straight at me. “Don’t hurt him, Sage. Don’t hurt my brother. Don’t touch his heart.”
It’d been a balmy night, but a chill had slowly seeped into my veins. “Oh, relax,” I told him. “It was a game. Just a silly kiss.”
I mean, it hadn’t felt like a silly kiss, but I couldn’t admit that. Because that was the thing about Charlie and me; as best friends, we knew all each other’s secrets. He knew that I didn’t want a serious relationship because of what happened with my parents. “Yeah, I get that,” he’d said after I’d first told him, and then smiled brightly. “We won’t tie the knot until we’re thirty…”
So, of course, he wouldn’t want me to pursue anything with his brother. He didn’t want Nick to just be some guy I hooked up with a few times. There hadn’t been many—nothing compared to Charlie’s line of ladies—but I saw how guys looked at me sometimes, and, hey, I was allowed to have some fun too.
He can’t know, I thought again now, toeing the ground with my sneaker. I didn’t like hiding things from Charlie, but he couldn’t find out. No way.
“Are you ready to go?” Charlie asked.
I couldn’t nod fast enough.
“Let’s go left today,” he suggested as we fell into step beside each other. “To pass Gatsby’s.”
“Why do we need to pass Brooks?”
Charlie’s eyes met mine, but then quickly darted away. “So we can pick up Morrissey…”
“You invited Luke to come?” I asked. It was always just the two of us.
“Um, yes, I did,” he said. “Is that okay?”
“Of course!” I playfully punched him in the arm. “The more, the merrier!”
Okay, Sage, why so enthusiastic? You guys are just running.
“All right, cool.”
As we approached the senior guys’ dorm, I spotted Luke sitting on the stone wall that surrounded the house’s terrace, his legs dangling over the edge. He really is cute, I thought, just as Charlie whispered, “Paddy, Jack, or Cody?”
I tightened my ponytail. “Cut the crap.”
“Ah, dark horse, then.”
All of a sudden there was that coldness again, sinking into me. Don’t hurt my brother. “Okay, listen…” I began.
“You guys are late!” Luke called out, tapping his wrist.
I laughed, relieved that Luke had rescued me, but then my ears pricked up, because something strange happened when Charlie’s confident comeback came. “Oh, Morrissey!” he called back. “Counting the seconds until you see me, are you?”
He wavered.
Charlie never wavered.
* * *
Wednesday afternoon, I was trying to multitask—walk and text at the same time—as I headed for my human anatomy class in the CSC, when I heard: “Need a lift?”
I looked up to see Nick cruising toward me on the most ridiculous bike I’d ever seen. Not Ace, his usual mountain bike, but a tandem bike, whose colors were far from subtle: stop-sign red and school-bus yellow. “Where the hell did you get that thing?” I asked once he’d braked beside me.
Nick grinned and rang the bike’s bell, the dimple in his cheek cute as could be. My heart cartwheeled. “Meet Cherry Bomb,” he said. “Nana and Granddad wanted to declutter their life, so I offered to take this winner off their hands.”
I laughed and climbed onto the back seat. We started pedaling. “It’s so obnoxious!”
“Yeah, I love it too…” he said dreamily as he stretched a hand back to take one of mine.
I tangled our fingers together for a few moments, which felt strangely automatic. I
quickly kissed his knuckles before letting go. Nick needed to focus on the road, since our fellow Bexleyans were everywhere.
Riding Cherry Bomb together was different than riding side by side like we usually did. Nick and I loved racing our mountain bikes back home, deep in the woods behind our neighborhood. “Grinds,” we called those rides. We’d laugh and trash-talk, always trying to one-up each other. The first time Nick tried to jump his bike over a boulder was classic. We were twelve. “Watch this!” he’d shouted, but instead of a clean landing, he’d wrecked the bike and dislocated his shoulder. My doctor dad had popped it back in for him in our driveway.
I liked this leisurely pace too, though. It was natural; it made me smile.
Soon, we slowed to stop in front of his grandfather’s building. “Here we are, miss,” Nick said in a deep voice. “The CSC, erected in 2014…”
“And named after the highly esteemed Carmichael family…” I joked, but trailed off when I noticed two guys several yards ahead of us, walking up Belmont Way toward the Buck Building. Charlie and Luke, I realized, and squinted to see Charlie saying something, with Luke nodding along, his hands in his pockets. But he must’ve made some sarcastic comment, because Charlie then reached out to shove him. And when Luke stumbled over the cobblestones, Charlie grabbed his sleeve to keep him from tripping over. I only looked away when Nick spoke.
“I guess Charlie hasn’t memorized his schedule yet,” he said.
My eyebrows knitted together. “What do you mean?”
Nick gestured at his twin. “I’m pretty sure he has French last period.”
“Oh yeah.” I felt a little jolt go through me, because Charlie did have French next, while Luke had history. And the two buildings, Knowles and Buck, were nowhere near each other. Charlie was going to be late to class, so he could walk Luke to his.
Huh, I thought.
Nick flicked Cherry Bomb’s bell, getting ready to take off. “Do you want me to come pick you up?”
My heart flipped, but I shook my head. “No, that’s okay. Mrs. Collings will probably let us out late.”
“I’ll still come.”
“Only if you want.” I smiled, now walking backward down the CSC’s pathway. “Thanks for the ride, Nicholas.”
He rang the bell again. “Anything for you, Morgan.”
Chapter 6
Charlie
“When’s a good time to work on this?” Luke asked as we trekked to our last stops of the day.
Mr. Magnusson had assigned us a project for English. “I want you to create a map of one of the texts we’ve read so far,” he’d explained, “and then write a brief essay that discusses how your map enlightens that text.” It was a cryptic assignment, but I knew Luke and I would think of something good.
“How about tonight?” I proposed.
“What time?”
“Anytime.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him tuck his hands into his pockets. “Would you want to do dinner?” His throat bobbed. “Pandora’s or something?”
The word dinner rang a bell. “Oh, wait,” I said. “Dinnertime’s a no-go. Dove and I are getting dumplings with some people from the musical.” Humpty Dumplings was the newest restaurant in town.
He nodded. “After, then? Eight?”
I hesitated.
“Okay, you’re the one who suggested tonight…”
“No,” I said quickly. “We can do eight. Sounds good.”
“But you clearly have something going on at eight.”
I sighed. “One of my favorite shows premieres tonight, that’s all.”
Luke glanced at me, an eyebrow raised. What show?
“Survivor.”
He shook his head. “Nope. No way. You do not watch Survivor.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I do. It’s great!”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I reached over to shove him. But when he lost his footing on Belmont Way’s cobblestones, I grabbed his sleeve so he didn’t totally eat it.
We looked at each other, neither of us blinking until Luke spoke. I was suddenly very aware that I hadn’t let go of his arm yet. My chest ached. “I didn’t know that show was still relevant,” he said drily. “When did we time-travel back to 2005?”
I dropped his arm. “How dare you?!”
He shrugged.
“Have you ever even seen it?”
No response.
“Well, that settles it,” I said, the two of us peeling off Belmont and onto the Buck Building’s flagstone pathway. “Please be at Daggett by 7:45 tonight. We’ll watch Survivor, and then chart out our map.”
Luke sighed. “Will there be snacks?”
I smirked. “Do you want snacks?”
“If you’re forcing me to watch reality TV, then yes.”
“Listen, it’s a reality TV competition,” I told him. “Like The Amazing Race, or Top Chef.”
“Which I’m guessing you also watch.”
I smiled. “Amazing Race starts Friday.”
Luke rolled his eyes, and I laughed as I pulled open the building’s front door. We crossed the lobby’s well-worn marble floor and then turned left down the hallway, Dr. Latham’s classroom at the very end. Luke was in his Immigration Theories elective.
“What kind of snacks?” I asked once we were outside the door. “Sweet? Savory?”
“How about,” Luke said, “a nice cheese plate, with some charcuterie”—he thought for a second—“and maybe an assortment of macarons for dessert.”
I nodded. “And sparkling or still water?”
“Still.”
“Okay.”
“With a lemon wedge.”
“Ice?”
“Yes, crushed.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you for being so accommodating.”
“I try.”
Luke smirked and turned to go. “See you later.”
“7:45,” I responded, and after waiting for him to disappear inside the classroom, I retraced my steps down the hall and broke into a sprint once I was back outside.
Because the Buck Building was for history, and I had French.
French was in Knowles Hall.
Eight minutes in the opposite direction.
And class started in three.
* * *
I showered after dinner, since the rumor about Humpty Dumplings turned out to be true; you walked out smelling like you’d bathed in Chinese food.
Luke texted just as I was setting up our spread, saying he was outside. I pulled on a sweatshirt and went downstairs to get him. He sprang up from one of the porch’s Adirondack chairs when I shouldered open the door. “Right on time, Morrissey.”
“Actually, Carmichael,” he said, “I’m early.” He held up his phone. “It’s only 7:39.”
I smirked. “So eager.”
He shrugged. “I was promised a cheese plate.”
I laughed and waved him inside, leading the way back upstairs. Daggett was three floors, and my room was on the second. It wasn’t completely unlike Nick’s room in Mortimer. I had my own flags tacked up, and prefects also got first dibs on rooms, so mine was hands down one of the biggest. Dad and I had lofted my bed up high to make the most of the floor space and then lugged this brown leather chesterfield couch upstairs. Nick had its twin, another present from Nana, who always talked about the furniture she had in storage. So after Nick and I dropped some light hints, we managed to take them off her hands. Across from the chesterfield was my TV.
“Now”—I pushed open the door—“I didn’t exactly have time to jet to France this afternoon, so I hope this will suffice.” I gestured at the coffee table (steamer trunk), where I’d assembled tonight’s snacks: Pandora’s famous chips-salsa-and
-guacamole combo, and something sweet from their treasure trove of desserts. Dove had gone with me to pick everything up after dumplings. “Friends are coming over to watch TV,” I’d explained as I handed over my debit card, and then was treated to what I called an I’m annoyed but I’m not going to tell you why sigh. But I didn’t take the bait; I just let Dove stew, acting like everything was fine.
Luke glanced at the plate of food, then back at me with this confused expression on his face—eyebrows furrowed and lips slightly parted as if he was about to say something. But nothing came out. My heart started to race.
“Oh, right.” I moved across the room, sort of stumbling over my feet. “Drinks.” I pulled open the door of my mini fridge and grabbed two seltzers, offering one to Luke. “It’s not still, but it is lemon-infused.”
He took it from me. “No, this is great,” he said quietly, and then shook his head. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting all this.”
“Well, microwaving popcorn isn’t exactly one of my strengths,” I told him. “I burn it every time.”
Luke smiled. “The trick is—” but he got cut off, thanks to someone pounding on my door.
“Yeah?” I called.
The door opened and Kyle Thompson and Randall Washington, two juniors, entered. I saw them both notice the chips and salsa as they flopped down on the couch. No, I thought.
“Charlie, Thompson needs your help,” Randall said.
“Your prefect wisdom,” Kyle rephrased, dunking a chip in the guacamole.
I half-glanced at Luke. “Okay.” I turned back to the guys. “You have five minutes.” Because I am not missing the opening of the show.
Kyle laughed. “Oh, right… It’s Wednesday.”
Randall caught on. “Outwit, outplay, outlast!”
I nodded. “Talk.”
“Mikayla and Joseph broke up,” Kyle said. “And I sort of want to get in there, but don’t want to be too obvious…”
Randall snorted. “You mean aggressive.”
Kyle flipped him off.
Good, I thought, an easy one. “Set up a mixer with Merriman,” I responded, since Kyle was our house’s social chair. “That way it’ll seem casual, but you’ll still get to lay some groundwork.” I shrugged. “A game of Twister is always fun.” I reached up and ran a hand through my hair. It felt weird talking about this stuff with Luke here.
If We Were Us Page 6
