“How was the movie?” she asked. The smell disappeared as she stepped away from me.
“Awesome.” Alec grinned. “How’s David?”
“He’s great.” Cleo refused to be embarrassed, though it may have simply been impossible at this point. I wondered who David was.
Scott was standing stiffly next to me. After a few minutes, he cleared his throat. “I’m going to head back.”
Alec shrugged. Cleo waved. I smiled, unsure, at his retreating back.
“Don’t worry,” Alec murmured in my ear. “He always does this. Some shit with his brother. Explains why he’s so…” He searched for a word that fit the apologetic smile on his face.
“Stupid.” Trust Cleo to put the words in his mouth. “Not like Amie didn’t find out all about his and Nicky’s late-night conversations.” She lifted one eyebrow meaningfully.
I laughed. It was hard to picture Nicky doing anything as unromantic and undignified as phone sex. Then again, it wasn’t exactly something I’d ever been too tempted to think about.
“Hey, desperate times,” Alec said. “A guy’s gotta do…”
“Just stop there,” Cleo told him. He and I looped our arms around her waist as we headed for the drive-in hamburger place on the way back to school and Cleo continued. “You guys will take it however you can get it.”
“Now who’s judging?” Alec teased.
Cleo scooted into me and squealed as he squeezed her side. “You’re buying me fries,” she informed him. “I’m starving.”
I watched them and picked at my fries as Cleo devoured fries and a milkshake and half of Alec’s chicken nuggets. They joked about things I hadn’t been there for and people I had never met. Still, I didn’t tell them that the jealousy forcing its way up my throat was the reason I mostly just drew patterns in the ketchup.
The walk back to school was quiet. Alec left once we were on campus to go find Amie, who had said her event would be over by now, and Cleo and I wandered back to our dorm. Cleo paused at the door to my room. “’M gonna sleep. You wanna get dressed with me later?”
I smiled back. “Sounds good.”
She planted a sloppy kiss on my cheek. I would have been surprised except that it became clear very quickly that being surprised by Cleo was a waste of my time.
I hid a yawn as I opened my door with a push.
* * *
Cleo woke me up, standing in my room with wet hair and her plastic bucket of Herbal Essences shampoo and pineapple body wash.
“Five minutes?” I grabbed a hairbrush and a toothbrush. Two hours of sleep had left me drowsier than before and my mouth tasted fuzzy. After a second, I grabbed a towel and my basket too. Might as well shower now before everyone filled them up.
My ninety-nine-cent flip-flops slapped against the floor. Things grew on the floors and in the corners of our showers, things I did not want on my feet. Steam already hovered over the six stalls when I walked in. Someone was playing really bad pop music and singing along, which almost made up for the shower shoes and growing things.
Cleo handed me a diet energy drink as I walked into her room ten minutes later. It tasted like carbonated melted Popsicle, but by the time we were presentable, it had kicked in. Heavy lethargy had faded and the buzz of caffeine and adrenaline was making me bounce on the balls of my feet. The muscles of my calves flexed in the mirror as I moved up and down onto my toes. Cleo bent over her laptop, IMing half the campus. I twisted back and forth in front of her mirror, fixing my hair and dress with minute adjustments.
“Stop obsessing, you look fine.” Cleo fixed invisible smudges under her eyes. “We’re meeting Dev in front in ten. Boy takes longer to get ready than most girls.” She laughed. “Wonder who he’s trying to impress now.”
I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. Her dark green shirt draped effortlessly the way I somehow could never make my shirts hang, creating shadows in all of the places you needed MapQuest to find on my body.
“Sure it’s not you?” I asked. “You guys seem pretty close.” Besides, I couldn’t see any reason for any guy not to want her.
She shook her head, raising one eyebrow as she looked at me. “We wouldn’t last five minutes. Trust me. I have commitment issues. He’d just get his feelings hurt.” She laughed and reached out for her mascara again. “You’re the one who should be looking out for him.”
I was surprised. Cleo didn’t seem like the type who would lie to make me feel better about myself. “Me? Why me?”
“You guys would be cute.” She fixed her corner lashes with a precision I had never mastered. “But I should warn you, he has history.”
“Yeah, I figured.” The hot ones always did. Besides, I’d heard some excerpts.
“Seriously…” She broke off as something hit the window. We heard someone calling hoarsely from three stories below: Devin. “Guess he was serious when he said five.” She walked over to the window and pushed it up. “Hang on! We’re coming!”
“Together?” a guy I had seen at some of the sophomore assemblies shouted up from the quad. “Can I watch?”
Cleo flipped him off. I blushed. The window closed with a smack. “Boys.” She rolled her eyes, sliding a twenty-dollar bill into her bra. “Ready?”
I made one last unnecessary correction. “Always.”
Tonight, Cleo had assured me, was an exception. Normally, there was nothing going on around this campus other than movies in the dorms (where the guys couldn’t go) or playing pool in the student lounge, if you could somehow get a table. Then there was always hooking up in the bushes, if you didn’t mind the dirt and the occasional stray stick. Fortunately, this weekend was the back to school dance. Lame and chaperoned. Still potentially fun.
By the time we got downstairs, Scott had joined Devin and the four of us went to meet Alec and Amie at her dorm. The track team had gotten back this afternoon, but the crew team was gone until tomorrow.
I hung back, watching Devin and Amie tease Alec about something his mother had said in an unannounced phone call and a mollified Scott talk to Cleo about something that had their heads bent together like twin dark-haired conspirators. For a minute, I worried about looking like the outsider. Physically, at least, I was still on the fringe of the group, but that was still just the fringe. There was none of the easy intimacy between Cleo and Scott and Devin and Amie back here.
“They’re mean.” I looked up from the pavement, startled. Alec was walking next to me, having dropped back from his place with Devin and Amie. Effort, Bizza.
“Depends on what your mom said.” I laughed quietly. “Might be justified.” As I heard my own words, I winced internally, stiffening and waiting for him to walk away. Had I learned nothing freshman year? No one liked a bitch. Bitches got Sunday morning hangover calls.
“Not my fault Devin was in the room,” Alec said. He was pouting, just a little. It was cute.
“What’d she say?” I tried to keep my voice light and sympathetic, to make up for before.
“She was cleaning my room and met the lovely ladies of “Naughty Nannies #9” under my bed.” He looked down at me, grinning at the understanding I’m sure was starting to show on my face. “And she’s angry.”
“That sucks.” I smiled, praying he would take my words for the teasing they were. “Perv.”
“Hey!” He tried to look offended, but the grin on his face and the slightly embarrassed slump of his shoulders ruined it. “They all should not be talking.”
“Meaning...” When keeping up with the Joneses, it is often helpful to know what, exactly, the Joneses are doing.
Alec glanced at Cleo with raised eyebrows. “For example, David. I don’t really know him, except that he has”—he paused meaningfully—“connections.”
My eyes narrowed. “So?”
“Anything you want, he can get you. He basically runs an empire—or the most successful business on campus. One or the other. Got kicked out last year, but for some reason they let him back in.” He looked at Cleo again before throwi
ng an arm around my shoulders and lowering his lips to my ear. “Cleo smokes with him sometimes. Dev has a couple times. Don’t know if any of them have tried anything else, but I know David deals pot, acid, anything prescription.” He let me assume the rest of the extensive list. “Cleo has been hooking up with him too for a while.”
“Oh.” It wasn’t exactly what I’d expected but it wasn’t too far off. The warm weight of his arm across my shoulders was distracting, if only because it shouldn’t be. He had no way of knowing that it was the closest I had gotten to a guy in what felt like forever.
“Everyone around here does Adderall, for finals and SATs.” His continuation saved me from having to find a response. “It helps you focus. Keeps you up.” He pointed at Scott’s oblivious back. “He’d kill me for telling you; he doesn’t want anyone to know. He spent a couple days awake on the shit for finals last year. By day three, he was seriously messed up. It’s the only remotely illegal thing he’s ever done.”
These should be the kinds of things people read newspaper exposés on, not what the guy walking in front of me did last Saturday. For a second, I wondered what would happen to my scores if I popped one before the SATs. I knew that I wouldn’t, not because of morality or a sense of fair play. Just because I was afraid of getting caught. Plus, there was always the lingering fear instilled by two a.m. television of bad reactions and overdoses and permanent brain damage.
But I didn’t tell Alec any of that. I laughed, just like he expected me to. “So what about you?” I smiled. Darkness and caffeine created a giddy recklessness I never usually had. My walk swung my hips and I laughed a little too much, but at least I wasn’t afraid of Alec. Even if his friends still terrified me. “What illegal things are you up to?”
“Nothing?” He laughed.
The easy conversation was broken when I felt Amie’s hand brush against my waist as it wound around Alec from the other side. “Hey you.” Her voice was soft, and I had a feeling she was looking up at her boyfriend, because his head immediately turned in her direction.
“Hey you.” I could hear the smile in the upward lilt of his soft voice. “Finished making fun of me?” His arm slid from my shoulders. The two of them fell back behind me, and I walked a little faster to catch up to Cleo, Scott and Devin. She had arms around the guys, her hands resting familiarly on their hips.
“Where are the deadheads? I don’t smell pot,” Dev was complaining to Cleo, his arm settled across her shoulders.
“It’s a verb, dumbass. To deadhead.” Cleo evidently did not worry about coming across as a bitch. “You cut the roses off in the fall, the flower part and the stalk.”
“Why the hell would you do that?”
“So they’re bigger next summer.”
“Bigger is always better! But that makes no sense.” He laughed and didn’t care. It would have driven me crazy.
“Stop talking before you hurt someone, Dev,” Scott advised from Cleo’s other side.
“And that’s why I love dances. No one needs to talk.” As she threw back her head and laughed, her long hair spilled over Devin’s arm. “But damn teachers.” Her laughter blurred underneath her words. “I don’t want to make room for Jesus.”
Scott laughed. “We’ve noticed.” From the tone of his voice, it wasn’t in a bad way. It never was with Cleo, even when she elbowed him hard, cutting off the laughter.
We were almost at the dance, in the paved mall between the huge auditorium and the smaller buildings where they taught history, English and language classes. The dorms were barely visible over my shoulder in the direction we had come from, and the math and science buildings still shadowed in the dark beyond the mall. Whichever student organization was throwing this dance had lit the mall with multicolored fluorescent lights, and the DJ was operating under a bright light in the auditorium doorway.
There were already a handful of students in short skirts and sagging shorts standing around awkwardly. A few girls were already dancing, only some attracting stares for all the right reasons. A few Mathletes were break dancing in a back corner, surrounded by a few very entertained and very intoxicated guys. Teachers were watching them, arms folded as they prowled the edges of the designated dance floor in jeans that were almost all unflattering.
Cleo immediately saw someone she knew and pulled away from Devin’s arm to go say hi. He only had a second alone before a few of the other sophomores and a red-haired freshman in our drama class pulled him away, looking up at him with adoring eyes.
I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly cold despite the late summer heat. One hand ran up and down my upper arm in a cheap imitation of a hug. Who had I been kidding, with my newfound social skills? Without people I already knew, I was as lost as the day I’d arrived here. So much for independence.
The crowd of dancers was slowly but steadily swelling. I stood on the sidelines hesitantly, watching for a few minutes until I saw a girl from my history class disappear into the middle. When in doubt…
Cleo would have said not to pussy out.
I followed her through the wall of elbows and limbs. Amie and Alec had disappeared off somewhere, and I’d lost track of the other three in the few minutes they’d been gone. Smiling at the girl I vaguely knew from history, I slid into the group of dancers, a solid mass of unevenly lit bodies, until I looked a little like I was inside. My hips started moving within my allotted few inches and one hand slid into my hair nervously. I could barely look at the surrounding faces as I started moving, hoping someone would dance with me.
No one did for a while. I caught occasional glimpses of Cleo in the group of people; she was dancing up on a guy with dark blond hair too long for the uniform cut and shadow that bordered on stubble along his jaw. Amie and Alec appeared and disappeared by turns. Scott was talking to a couple of guys from the football team and Devin was nowhere to be seen. As quickly as the dancers had increased in number, the mood among them changed as the light began to fade. People stopped dancing by themselves or in groups, and more and more of them started dancing one on one. And when I say on, I mean on. The music was loud, bass vibrating through the crowd, in my core down into my pelvis. The bass drum was a second irregular heartbeat knocking against the inside of my ribs.
Surrounded by people, I felt more alone than I had all week. I didn’t know who I was dancing with. When I was grinding it felt awkwardly out of sync, like our bodies weren’t moving to the same beat. I might not have been an expert, but I had a feeling that was probably a sign of something. But like I said, I wouldn’t know. Surrounded by half the student body trying to have sex with their clothes on, it was all I could think about. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to be like everyone else, with their boyfriends and their hookups. So I couldn’t help wondering: what the hell was wrong with me? I had been buzzed a few times and I’d smoked a cigarette once with a friend, in the alley behind my church. That affected me just like everyone else. Maybe, tonight, I wanted to be high on more than just adrenaline. Maybe then I’d be more like Cleo, or the girl standing next to me with her leg up over a LAX bro’s hip.
Someone’s hand settled on my waist again, and I braced myself for the same awkward uncoordinated eurhythmia I’d been trying to fix for an hour. When fingertips traced down my neck, brushing my hair out of the way, I was caught between shock and heart failure, hoping that whoever it was wouldn’t notice the faint sheen of sweat beginning to settle on my skin or the shiver that had just gone through every nerve ending in my body.
Pathetic, I know. Excuse me for having hormones.
“Having fun?” I almost fell off my stilettos at the low voice in my ear.
“Dev, don’t scare me like that!” My voice was breathy, the way I could never get it to sound on purpose.
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. I could feel his breathing on my neck and the side of my face, which didn’t help the reaction of my nervous system. His palms rested on my hips, letting his fingers splay over my stomach. They wrapped a little tighter, grinding my
hips harder against him. My hands ran over his, uncertainly tracing the tendons and joint of his wrists down to the thin bones of his hands. Just like when I’d met him, the bottom of my stomach dropped out. This time, I had no idea where it had gone or where to start looking. “So are you?”
I had completely lost my train of thought. “Mmm?”
“Having fun?” There was something mischievous about the low tone of his voice, and something ungodly intriguing.
“Are you?” There was no way in hell I was answering that question, especially when coherency was not exactly my strong point. I felt his laugh in the vibrations of my chest and the breath against my neck more than I actually heard it.
“Tease.”
I was teasing him? Yeah. Right.
The rhythm of the bass changed with the song and the hands on my waist spun me around so I was looking up into an increasingly familiar face. Our legs slid together and his hands gripped my hips. I couldn’t keep track of how many songs we danced. The muscles in my legs burned, but I was distracted by everything else that had started burning. The bottom of my stomach felt strange, and I couldn’t really focus anywhere but his shoulder and the blue fabric that covered it. It looked almost black in the dark.
Cheesy romance novels I had giggled over and the magazines my mother refused to buy me would have undoubtedly started going on about the “heat of desire.” My mind couldn’t even get that far, stuck between his hands on my sides and the pressure of his body against mine. This was what I had wanted. My five minutes of being like the girls we all publicly criticized and secretly envied.
Busy trying not to focus on the muscles of his back shifting under my hands, I almost missed his body curling around me as he leaned down to whisper in my ear. “Come with me?” It was almost impossible to ignore the double entendre with his breath against my neck and his hips not even near close enough to mine, a flashback to those wonderful pubescent years where everything is an innuendo.
But I just nodded. He pulled away and I almost dragged him back, but he took my hand and led, not forcefully but simply assuming I would follow.
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