by Kitty Parker
Unluckily for me, said blonde guy gave a wolf-whistle and decided to stick around to chat.
"Heeeey," he greeted me, attempting to sound like The Fonz (and failing). "Need any help keeping that skirt down?"
I raised an eyebrow at him. "No, I think I can handle it myself, thanks."
He smirked, giving me a wink. "All evidence to the contrary, babe."
"Sorry, but I don't let guys I don't know call me 'babe.'"
He used this as an gateway to further flirtation. "Well then, allow me to introduce myself: Lars van Acker, at your service." He gave a mock bow.
"…Okay, hi," I replied skeptically.
"Do you have a name, then?" he prompted. "Or do you just go by 'Gorgeous'?"
Beside me, Tully snorted. He seemed both amused at the idiot standing before us and annoyed that said idiot was wasting his time. "She goes by Evie, and she's going to be late to class, so why don't you go play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself?"
Or maybe hide-and-go-improve-your-flirtation-skills-because-they-really-suck…
"Down, boy," Lars chuckled before turning his attention back to me. "Evie…I'll remember that. Let me just check something…" He reached around behind my neck and started fiddling with the tag of my shirt.
"What are you doing?" I demanded, shoving him off.
He grinned. "Yup, just as I suspected. Made in Heaven."
I suddenly had the urge to vomit into the nearest bush…or onto Lars's shoes. That would've worked fine as well.
Tully shook his head. "That was just sad, man."
Lars, however, was not deterred. "Well then, how about this one: Do you have a map? Cause I keep getting lost in your amazing blue eyes."
I just gave him a blank look.
"Are you a thief? You must be pretty damn good, since you stole my heart from across the room."
I raised an eyebrow.
"Your lips look lonely. Would they like to meet mine?"
I raised the other one.
Lars sidled up to me and looked me very seriously in the eye. "Bond. James Bond."
I couldn't help it - I cracked up at that one.
"Well, at least that's something," he noted brightly.
Tully rolled his eyes.
"That sort of thing doesn't really work with me," I chuckled. "I give you props for trying, though."
"And I give you props for not spraying me with mace!" Lars replied.
"Yeah, so do I," Tully grumbled so that only I could hear him. Lars really appeared to be getting on his nerves. I couldn't really blame him for that, though.
I decided to break up the little powwow before Tully did something that he would later regret. He'd always been slightly impulsive, and now was not the time to test him. "Alright, I really do have to get to class."
"We'll be in touch, Evie," Lars called as he began to walk backwards in the direction Tully and I had come from. "I'll have my people facebook your people."
"And I'll have my people google your sex offender status," Tully whispered jokingly into my ear.
I struggled to keep a straight face, giving Lars a polite wave before continuing on my way. "That was…interesting."
"What a nut," Tully commented.
I made a noise of assent. "You can say that again."
"What a nut," he repeated, grinning.
I smacked him upside the head.
"Ow!" he yelped. "Are you and Elizabeth trying to give me brain damage or something?"
"There's not much up there to damage," I teased.
He pouted.
"You walked into that one," I pointed out as we reached White Hall, where the Department of Government was housed.
Now came the awkward bit of how to say goodbye. Although our banter had been friendly (or at least friendlier than it had been a couple of days beforehand), I still felt that hugging him would be weird. To avoid physical contact, I started up the stairs to the stone building, raising my hand in a parting gesture.
"So, um…see you later!"
Tully shuffled his feet awkwardly, but waved back. "Yeah…have a good class!" With that, he ambled off toward the Olin Library at the other end of the quad.
I paused to watch him go, smiling slightly to myself. Things might still have been weird, but they were getting better, slowly but surely. I could only hope that this progress would continue. Backward steps were simply too painful.
As though he could feel my gaze upon him, Tully turned around to look once more in my direction. Catching me watching him, he waved once more, the lopsided grin back on his face.
Blushing heavily, I darted inside. That grin was going to be the death of me someday.
Chapter 3: Male PMS is an Infectious Disease
It was approximately 3:00 PM on March tenth, 2004 when I walked into my house and found the large envelope sitting innocently on the floor along with the rest of that day's mail. Cautiously, I crouched down and picked it up. When I saw the school seal adorning its front, my heart began to thump wildly in my chest.
This was it. This was the decision I'd been waiting months to hear.
With shaking fingers, I ripped open the seal and pulled out the envelope's contents. There, sitting on top of everything else, was the letter.
"Dear Ms. Kaiser," I read out loud, my voice unnaturally high. "On behalf of the Academy, I am pleased to inform you that you have earned a place in the class of 2008!"
That was all I needed to read.
"WOOHOO!" I cried, leaping into the air with glee and doing a little victory dance.
Tully. I had to tell Tully. He was going to be so proud of me! He'd always told me to go after my dreams, and now he'd see that it paid off!
Acceptance letter in hand, I skipped blissfully over to the house next door and rang the doorbell.
"Oh, hey Evie!" my best friend greeted me enthusiastically as he stepped outside to join me on the front porch.
Foregoing conventional greetings, I leapt into his arms, squeezing him for all I was worth. If I were braver than I was, I would have kissed him. I'd liked him for three years, after all.
"Whoa!" he chuckled, wrapping his arms around me. "It's nice to see you, too."
"I got in!" I exclaimed. "I'm really going! Oh, Tully, I'm so excited!"
He stiffened. "What?" he whispered, setting me back down.
"I got in," I repeated, handing him the letter.
He furrowed his brow at the paper in his hands. As he read, the color slowly drained from his face.
"Well?" I demanded. "Isn't that exciting?"
When he finally looked up at me, his green eyes were filled with emotions that I never thought I'd see in them: hurt, anger, resentment, and even hatred. "No," he hissed.
Frightened, I took a step back. "Tully?" I ventured timidly. "What's wrong?"
He just stood there, my acceptance letter beginning to shake in his hands.
"Tully?"
All of a sudden, he went off like a volcano, the molten lava of his vicious words flying out in all directions and burning me.
"No!" he roared. "It's not fucking exciting! It's horrible! It's terrible! It's the worst fucking thing that could've possibly happened! Some friendyou are, ditching me to go off to some fancy-ass prep school."
"I'm not ditching you," I meekly attempted to defend myself.
He glared at me. "YES YOU ARE! None of this is good enough for you anymore, is it, Evangeline Kaiser? Your friends aren't good enough for you, Gloucester's not good enough for you, I'm not good enough for you, right?"
"That's not true!" I cried, tears beginning to roll down my cheeks.
"God, Evie! I can't believe I actually cared about you! Fuck!" In his anger, he aimed a kick at a potted plant, knocking it off the porch and causing the earthen clay to shatter on the ground.
"Tully…" I whispered.
"Don't fucking talk to me," he snapped. "Go hang out with your new prep-school friends, you fucking snob."
My heart broke at that moment. I could feel its shards cutting
into my soul and I wanted nothing more than to run away as far as I could and never look back.
Tully wasn't through, though. "You want to know what I think of your precious school, Evangeline?"
I trembled. Tully never used my full name and hearing it coming from his lips with such disdain was like a knife in my already shattered heart.
"This!" he thundered, furiously ripping my letter apart as fast as he could.
My eyes grew wide. I felt my own temper starting to boil.
He pointed triumphantly at the fragments of paper scattered on the wooden planks of his porch. "There! That's what I think! And you want to know what I think of you?"
"What?" I hissed, narrowing my eyes at my former best friend. "What do you think of me, Tully McFadden?"
"I think that you're a back-stabbing, overachieving, condescending, pretentious BITCH!"
SMACK!
Stunned, Tully brought a hand to where my palm had made contact with his cheek.
"I never want to see you or speak to you again," I seethed, whirling around on my heel and stomping down the porch steps, pausing only to pick up a large fragment of the broken clay pot and hurl it at Tully's head. It hit him on the temple.
"Fuck you!" he bellowed, rubbing his bleeding forehead and storming into his house, slamming the door behind him.
As soon as he was gone, I lost my composure and ran back to my own house and up the stairs to my room, tears streaming down my face…
"Evie! EVIE!"
I felt someone violently shaking me and sat bolt upright, surprised to find myself not in my own house in Gloucester, but in my dorm room at Cornell.
"Are you okay?" Elena inquired, brown eyes wide. "You were screaming in your sleep."
In my sleep…the dream…Tully.
I could feel the tell-tale prickle of gathering tears at the corners of my eyes.
Elena gently placed a hand on my shoulder. "What's wrong?"
My own voice echoed back to me in my head: Tully? What's wrong? Tully?
"Oh my God…Evie…" Elena sat down next to me on my bed and pulled me into her arms as I started to sob. "Shh, it's okay," she whispered. "Whatever it was, it's gone now. It was only a dream. It wasn't real."
I rested my head on her shoulder. Oh, how I wished she were right. How I wished that what had happened between Tully and I were nothing more than a bad dream. To me, though, it was all too real.
* * *
"Hey, Evie! Wait up!"
I froze as the familiar voice - the voice that had haunted my dreams - reached my ears.
"You going to bio now?" Tully asked when he'd caught up to me.
I nodded, keeping my gaze on the ground and starting to walk again.
"You know I'm in your lab section, right?"
I nodded again, fully aware that Tully and I were in the same microbiology course.
"Can you believe we have to walk all the way to Wing Hall?"
"Yeah…it's pretty far," I mumbled.
I nearly went into panic mode as I felt his hand cup my chin and lift it until I was looking at him. His green eyes were filled with concern, yet I couldn't help but remember the emotions they'd conveyed in my dream. My gaze quickly flicked up to the small, nearly imperceptible scar on his left temple - the everlasting reminder of what I'd done to him, what we'd done to each other.
"Are you feeling okay?" he asked.
"I'm fine," I squeaked. "Just, um…tired. That's all."
He clearly didn't buy my excuse, but he let it go. "You want me to get you a coffee after class?" he offered. "You know, to wake you up?"
"Um…that's alright. I think I'm going to just…take a nap." I mentally kicked myself, realizing that I had just given myself away. Anyone who knew me knew that I'd never ever turn down a free coffee. After the countless times Tully had used Starbucks to bribe me throughout our early teenage years, he was sure to know that I was lying.
"Oh, okay," he replied, his voice laced with disappointment.
…None of this is good enough for you anymore, is it, Evangeline Kaiser?…I'm not good enough for you, right?…
I shook my head to clear it of the sounds of my past.
Tully exhaled loudly, visibly squirming in the awkward silence. "Nice day, isn't it?" he ventured.
"Yeah…nice day…"
…Go hang out with your new prep-school friends, you fucking snob…
I shuddered involuntarily.
"You cold?" he asked, his tone so different than that of the Tully in my mind.
I couldn't very well say yes, since it was only August twenty-ninth and therefore rather warm. Besides, Tully knew that I almost never got cold. He just knew me far too well in general…
"No, I'm alright," I replied. "Just…you know, one of those random shivers. They happen sometimes."
He gave me a rather skeptical look. "Uh-huh."
I tried to smile reassuringly, but it might have come out as more of a grimace. As we approached our destination, I could only thank God that I'd have a reason not to continue my painful conversation with Tully. I reached for the handle on the front door of Wing Hall, but he grabbed my other arm before I could get inside.
"Evie," he asked seriously. "What's wrong?"
I decided to play dumb. "What do you mean?"
"I'm not stupid. I can see that something's bothering you and I have a sneaking suspicion that it has to do with me." His face visibly fell with that last statement, probably because he'd thought we'd made a lot of progress the day before. "Why are you acting so weird today?"
I studied his face for a moment before deciding to give him a watered-down version of the truth. "I just…had a bad dream, that's all. It sort of threw me off."
Correction: I gave him an extremely watered-down version of the truth.
"Oh." He seemed almost relieved. "Do you want to talk about it?"
I shook my head, then pulled my arm out of his grasp and slipped into the building. He followed after a moment or two. When I reached the correct lab room and ambled inside, my heart sunk. Though the class hadn't started yet, Tully and I were apparently the last people to arrive, meaning that there were only two seats left. Said seats happened to be at the same lab table.
Great. Just great.
Sighing, I trudged over and sat down on one of the free stools next to a tall boy with messy hair that was as dark as mine.
"Hey," he greeted me, sticking a hand out politely. "I am Mischa Ivanov."
I shook it, noting the slight accent coloring my companion's voice. "Evie Kaiser. Nice to meet you."
"Likewise," he replied, giving me a bright smile. His eyes were a bright, piercing blue, I noted. They were darker than mine, but incredibly vivid, like the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri. He was relatively attractive, but I didn't think much about it since I didn't really have the urge to spontaneously jump his bones or anything like that.
Tully slid onto a stool on the opposite side of the table. "Hi. Tully McFadden."
Mischa shook his outstretched hand. "Mischa Ivanov. Nice to meet you."
Tully smiled at him, even though it seemed somewhat pained to me. I felt a twinge of guilt in my stomach as it occurred to me that my unsavory attitude was probably the cause of his moodiness.
"Where are you from?" I asked Mischa, attempting to distract myself.
He grinned. "Is my accent really that noticeable?"
"Very slightly," I replied.
"I am from St. Petersburg," he chuckled. "In Russia."
I was intrigued. "Wow, that's really interesting. What made you decide to come here?"
He shrugged. "Educational opportunity."
"Not on the run from the KGB?" I teased.
"Probably in the KGB…" Tully muttered.
Not hearing the rude comment, Mischa chuckled. "No, no, of course not. Russia is not like that anymore."
I raised an eyebrow. "And that's why forty percent of your country's GDP comes from the black market?"
Tully snorted.
&n
bsp; Mischa seemed unfazed. "Sorry, I am a biology major. Could you tell me what GDP means?"
"Gross Domestic Product," I clarified. "It's basically your country's income."
"Oh," he replied, a twinkle in his eyes. "Yes, well, you cannot stop the mafia. That is the only downside of life in Russia."
"And Vladimir Putin appointing himself Prime Minister and using Dmitri Medvedev as a puppet doesn't bother you at all?" Tully inquired (rather rudely, I thought).
Mischa seemed slightly taken aback but responded in as friendly a manner as could be expected of him. "Putin is not that bad. Russia is better off than it was under Yeltsin, anyway."
"Oh, I'm sure Putin's a great guy to sit down and have a cup of polonium-laced tea with," Tully scoffed. "But I'm not sure if I'd trust him with running my country, that's all."
I felt like banging my head against the lab table. Tully was never this rude, especially to people he'd barely even met, and I knew that his attitude was my fault. I'd put him in a foul mood with my anti-social behavior and now he was making enemies for himself.
Fortunately, Mischa's temper did not seem to be easily roused. "You should worry about your own country, my American friend," he pointed out with a smile. "You have an election coming up in November. We Russians can take care of ourselves for the time being."
Tully paused a moment, sizing up the dark-haired male sitting across from him. "Touché," he reluctantly grumbled.
The awkward tension building around the table was blessedly broken as our professor entered the room and began the customary first-day speech about the course and all the random stuff in the lab that we'd be using during the semester. I paid as much attention to her as I could, but my mind was admittedly elsewhere…
…I think that you're a back-stabbing, overachieving, condescending, pretentious BITCH!…
I snuck a glance at Tully. He was listening and had been taking notes but his attention span seemed to have reached its end, judging by the glazed-over look in his eyes. Of course, that could also have been because the professor had resorted to detailing the many amazing features of E. coli, the bacterium that was to serve as the test subject in our first experiment the following Monday.
Fascinating stuff, E. coli. Absolutely riveting.
