by Daniels, Viv
“I am ‘their own student’,” I pointed out, irritated. “Transfers aren’t second-class citizens, Dad.”
“Sweetie,” my mother pleaded. “Give your father a break. He’s just trying to show you some cons that you may not have thought through entirely.”
My mother could take her peacekeeping efforts and shove them. I was an expert at examining my options, after years of trying to fit every choice in my life into my father’s rules. I’d made a pro and con list back when I’d gotten my scholarship acceptance. The only thing tripping me up at the moment was textbook prices, but I’d have that resolved soon enough. And I resented my father’s insistence that he be involved in the decision when I knew the only thing he’d want was for me to stay far, far away.
I wasn’t asking him for money—in fact, I was asking for no money—so he could just stay out of it. “It’s a little late for that,” I said instead. “I’m here at Canton. Bought and paid for, credits transferred, semester started. It’s too late.”
“Yes,” my father said. “You worked that out very neatly, young lady. You didn’t even tell me. Didn’t even ask for my advice about what was best for your future or what I, who’ve spent so much money on your education, might think about all this.” He stared at me for a moment more, then sighed. “I just can’t believe that after everything I’ve done for you, you’d act this devious. This selfish. And I honestly don’t see why you don’t think State was good enough for you.”
“I don’t know,” I snapped. “Why wasn’t it good enough for Hannah?”
It was as if all the air got sucked out of the room. My mother’s mouth dropped open.
“What did you just say to me?” His voice was nearly a whisper.
“She’s at Canton,” I said as tears began to burn my eyes. “I saw her there. So it’s fine for her to go, but not me?”
He stood up, tall, broad, big, like the Canton U football player he’d once been. His tone was still low, still dangerous. “Did you talk to her?”
“Of course not!” My voice caught on a sob as the tears began to roll down my cheeks. “I know the rules.” And I did. I’d always known them. But staying away from the Swifts shouldn’t mean staying away from everything else I wanted in my life.
I needed Canton. Hannah didn’t need anything.
He said nothing, but I felt his eyes on me. Abruptly, he turned. “We’ll finish this conversation later.” He headed for the door, and my mom followed after him, down the narrow halls of our apartment.
I just sat there and gulped down big breaths, wiping the tears off my face. Saying her name had been a mistake. If he was unhappy about me going to Canton before, letting him know that I hadn’t been there a week before I’d run into his real daughter was not going to help the situation.
My mom only came back down the hall as I was getting up to go into my room. “Oh, Tess,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “Why do you insist on making everything so hard on yourself?”
I paused at the door. “Trust me, Mom. It was pretty hard already.”
In my room, I booted up my computer, still fuming. How dare he tell me where I could go to school if he wasn’t paying for it? How dare he call me selfish for wanting the best out of my education, for wanting to get out from under his control for good?
There was a new email, sent to my shiny new Canton address, from Dylan.
Tess,
I kind of lost my nerve back there at my door, but apparently I’m better over email.
All other unfortunate history aside, you and I both know we did awesome work on that project at Cornell. You’re new here, but I can tell you right now that there’s no one else in our Bio-E class that you want to do a term project with. And I know the only person I’d partner with again is you. I think you mentioned you have a few ideas. I do too, and together, I think we can rock the symposium.
What do you say? For science?
Dylan
I pressed reply.
Absolutely. For science.
-Tess
SEVEN
I was reviewing my notes before Biotransport when a shadow fell across my desk. I looked up to see a female student I recognized from our first class staring down at me. “Tess McMann, right? I’m Elaine Sun.”
“Nice to meet you.” I shook the girl’s hand, and she slid into the seat beside me. Dylan’s seat, I thought to myself for a split second before I banished the notion from my brain for all time. Nothing here was Dylan’s.
“It’s good to see the proportion of women in this department increasing,” Elaine said. Her dark hair was twisted into a messy bun, and strands of magenta reached back from each temple. “Even one makes a huge difference around here.”
“Well,” I said with a sheepish shrug, “I’m glad to help in any way I can.”
“What are your plans for the symposium?” she asked abruptly.
I blinked. “I’m—not quite sure yet. I think Dylan Kingsley—”
“Dylan Kingsley?” she sneered. “Figures. You’ve been here for a day, and he’s already got his claws in the fresh meat.”
“Pardon me?” I asked.
“There aren’t enough girls here as is,” she said. “We should really stick together.”
I wanted to hear more of what she was saying about Dylan. He’d sounded genuine enough in his email. But I hadn’t seen the guy in two years, while Elaine had presumably been in several classes with him. Who knew what he was like these days better than she? And what did she mean by “fresh meat”?
“Nothing’s set in stone yet,” I tried. “I just told him I’d be happy to talk about potential—”
“And I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “You won’t win unless you do biomed. Not at Canton.”
“I’m not doing biomed,” I said. “With or without Dylan. I’ve got an environmental concentration.”
She snorted now, so hard I was surprised snot didn’t spatter my textbook. “Well then, aren’t you two a perfect match.”
“A perfect match for what?” Dylan’s voice hovered above us. He was standing there, his stance casual, his smile not quite reaching his eyes. “Poaching my partner, Elaine?”
She rolled her eyes, swiped her things off the table, and stalked away. Dylan slid smoothly into the spot she’d vacated.
Nothing here is Dylan’s, I repeated to myself.
“What was that all about?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Elaine’s a sore loser. I beat her in the freshman year final project, and she’s never forgiven me.”
I pressed my lips together. Maybe I’d rushed into things last night, letting my anger at my dad fuel my response to Dylan. I shouldn’t commit to partnering with him. Not until I heard more about his ideas or got to know some of the other people in the class.
Not until I could be sure I was capable of working alongside him.
“She said you always preyed on fresh meat.” I eyed him carefully. “What does she mean by that?”
He looked amused. “She did? I have no idea what she means by ‘always,’ but she’s smart. She probably figures that if I snatched you up this quickly, I have secret info about how good you are.” He leaned in and dropped his voice to a whisper. “And of course, she’s right. I do have secret info about how good you are.”
I swallowed. Why did he have to say it like that?
“Because we worked together before, Tess. Geez, what did you think I meant?” He grinned, and I prayed my face wasn’t as flushed as it felt. He nudged me with his elbow. “Come on, lighten up. Either we’re going to joke about this or we’re going to be awkward and horrible.”
My body told me awkward and horrible would rule the day, no matter how many jokes might come out of my mouth. But I wanted to get over it, the way Dylan so obviously had. I wanted to work with him, because he was right, we had worked so well. I wanted to be all grown-up and professional.
“Besides,” Dylan coaxed. “You don’t want to work with Elaine. She’s biomed all the way. She won’
t touch algae with a ten-foot pole.”
“I told her I was enviro.”
“See?” Dylan said with a flourish of his hands. “Elaine was right about one thing. We are a perfect match.”
Stop saying it like that. Just stop.
“Like I told you last night,” he went on, “you can ask around if you want. I’m certainly not going to pressure you into anything. But I think with the two of us working together, we can really wow them, knock them on their biomedical asses.”
I chuckled. He beamed. Somewhere across the room, Elaine Sun was scowling.
And I could do this. I knew I could. Two years ago, I’d had enough willpower to keep my hands off Dylan the entire time we were working together. Two years ago, I’d had enough willpower to walk away from a relationship with him because I knew it would be bad for my future. I certainly had just as much willpower now. Besides, all that was back when Dylan had actually wanted me.
This time, he had a girlfriend, and even if he didn’t—well, I’d screwed him over. Broken his heart. Dumped him. And though he didn’t seem bitter about it at all, he also didn’t seem interested. I was ancient history, water under the bridge, whatever other thing meant he could laugh and tease and introduce me to his girlfriend like he’d never once told her the name of the first person he’d ever slept with.
Wait—he hadn’t, right? I thought about my ex-boyfriend Jason, who’d definitely told me about both of his prior girlfriends. Just as I’d told Jason about Dylan. Didn’t everyone do that? But if Dylan had told Hannah, then wouldn’t she have been a little more interested in me when he’d introduced us the other day?
Just like that, my mind was filled with images of Dylan in bed with my sister, having pillow talk with her about the time he lost his virginity…to me. Oh, God.
“Ms. McMann?” Dr. Yue’s voice broke into my waking nightmare. “Care to give us your thoughts on cell surface plasmon resonance?”
“Yes!” I said, relieved to be flipping through notes tangled with chemical equations rather than my even more tangled thoughts. “When you’re dealing with a dissociation constant higher than the expected value of K-delta…”
Even when I was done answering the professor, I kept all my focus on the rest of the lecture. I might have written down every word spoken in that classroom for the next fifty minutes.
It was nice for my brain to have something to do other than worry about what Dylan may have told Hannah, or wonder if I could be the disinterested scientist I longed to, or process the aggravatingly delicious scent of the guy sitting way too close.
***
That afternoon, I did something that I’d somehow managed to avoid doing for my entire life. I looked up Hannah Swift on Facebook.
There wasn’t much there. Her profile pic was one of those candid shots that had clearly had other people in it originally. I saw the corner of someone else’s arm near her shoulder—maybe even Dad’s. It listed her schools: the high school that served the nice part of town, Canton U. She was “in a relationship” with Dylan, and there were a bunch of pictures of him there, too. Her wall was filled with posts from friends, pretty girls with pouting selfie profile pics, sending her exclamations points and Xs and Os and clippings of news items about her favorite TV shows and movies.
Hannah liked horror films. That was unexpected. She read a lot of books—or at least, she wanted everyone on Facebook to think she had. I tried to imagine Hannah in my father’s house, nose stuck in a book. It didn’t jibe with the image I had of her. Or maybe the image I wanted to have. Hannah, the beautiful rich girl, living in my dad’s house, spending his money, smiling out from a silver frame on his desk at work. I wanted to know who this girl was who had attracted Dylan. He wasn’t into Ladies Who Lunch, that much I knew. So what did he see in her? Maybe he liked the girl who listed One Hundred Years of Solitude as her favorite novel. I’d never read it, but I’d heard of it. Maybe he liked the girl who didn’t squeal when the murderer ripped the co-ed’s guts out in the slasher flick. Maybe he liked her tennis serve.
I didn’t know anything about that girl. She was my sister, and I didn’t know. I glanced at her friends list—other Canton kids, other kids from high school. Did she have exes in this list? Her senior prom date, her first kiss, the guy she’d lost her virginity to? God, I hoped it wasn’t Dylan. It wouldn’t be though, would it? Not if they’d only been together for six months.
No way, Tess. She’s twenty years old. Probably hadn’t even waited as long as Dylan and I had to start having sex. Hannah was too outgoing, too pretty, too popular, too Swift.
But that wasn’t the info anyone ever put on Facebook.
***
That evening at Verde, I helped Sylvia with prep work and gave her the latest scoop. She chopped lemons, threaded olives and pearl onions onto toothpicks, and listened patiently until I was through.
“You know, Tess,” she said at last, “for someone who isn’t interested in dating Dylan, you sure care an awful lot about what he told his new girlfriend about you.”
I chose not to dignify that with a response. Besides, I didn’t care because of Dylan. I cared because of Hannah. “But if he did tell her that we’d slept together, don’t you think she’d have been a bit more interested when she met me? I mean, wouldn’t you be?”
“Yeah,” Sylvia agreed. “So then he probably didn’t tell her.”
I shook my head. He would have told her. Dylan—frank, honest, open Dylan—would have given her the names of the girls he’d slept with. Then again, that was teenaged Dylan. And since then, he said he’d slept with lots of people. Maybe that list was just a tad too long to trot it out these days.
But number one—I mean, that was worth a mention, right? I was worth a mention. What we’d done had meant a lot to me, even if I hadn’t called him again. I’d always thought that since Dylan had wanted to keep the relationship going, it had meant a lot to him, too.
Oh God, was I bad in bed? Maybe it hadn’t been those other guys’ fault.
“And anyway, who cares?” Sylvia asked, breaking me out of my spiral of neuroses. “Are you worried that if she knows, she’ll freak about about you two working together?”
“Yes.” This, at least, was most of the truth. Added scrutiny from Hannah Swift was bad on any level, and there’d be enough chances of us running into each other if I worked with Dylan. If she was suspicious of me because Dylan had told her our past history…well, that was definitely against Dad’s rules.
“You know what you can do, of course.”
I waited, hopeful.
Sylvia blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and started in on the trays of nuts. “You can ask him.”
“Excuse me?”
“‘Hey, Dylan,’” she quoted in a falsely casual tone, “‘before we commit to this science fair thing, can you tell me how much your girlfriend knows about the nature of our former relationship, and, if she does know, if she’s cool about us working together now? Because I don’t want a beaker of acid in my face.’” She shrugged. “Like that.”
“A beaker of acid?” I asked dryly. “Seriously?”
“You’re right,” she replied. “A Lady Who Lunches wouldn’t be smart enough to blind you with science. She’d just key your car or something.”
“That’s okay then,” I said. “The paint job’s so bad, I wouldn’t know if my car had been keyed.”
Syliva laughed at that, and we finished our prep work. Tonight, Sylvia had me on bar training, and soon my head was filled with formulas for various cocktails, the difference between sweet and dry vermouth, how many seconds of pouring equaled one or two or one-half of a jigger, according to the recipe booklet behind the bar. Sylvia, the more experienced bartender, would be making most of the drinks tonight, but I had been assigned the role of barback, pouring beers and wines and helping her out when things started getting rushed.
“This should be easy for you,” Sylvia said as people started showing up. “Just pretend you’re in a lab.”
<
br /> “Labs are quieter,” I said. “And not full of guys looking to flirt with you.”
“Really? Isn’t that how you met Dylan?”
“Good point.” And that was pretty much the end of all conversation that wasn’t “two draft beers and a pinot grigio” or “pass the lime juice” for the rest of my evening.
After my shift had ended, I drove home, yawning and wondering how much coffee I’d need to consume to be able to finish my homework that night. What I didn’t expect was to find my mom waiting up for me. She was seated at our kitchen table, reading a magazine and having a cup of tea.
“I know, I know,” she said, giving me a dismissive wave. “You’re all grown up. But somehow, now that you’re living here, it’s harder to keep up this fantasy that you’ve been home in bed at 8:00 p.m. every night for the last two years.”
I smiled. “Is there any coffee?”
“At midnight?” She clucked her tongue. “Tess, you can’t keep this up. You’re going to burn out.”
“It’s my only option if I want to stay at Canton. Dad won’t help.”
She pursed her lips and looked down at her magazine. I knew that look. It was the one where she cast Dad’s latest edict in the most positive light possible. “He’ll come around eventually. I think the other night he was mostly just mad you went behind his back. You’re his daughter, Tess. He wants to talk over big decisions like that with you.”
More like he wanted to make big decisions like that for me.
“It’s hard to feel like his daughter when just mentioning my sister’s existence gets him angry.”
She gave me a long, thoughtful look. “It’s hard for him too, Tess. He’s so proud of you—of all your accomplishments. He’d love to boast about you to everyone.”
Hard. For him.
“You don’t know. There were lots of times, when you were younger, where he’d wonder what he could do to get…her…to act more responsibly, be a little more focused on her schoolwork and her goals.”
