It was almost everything Lexi had ever wanted. “And then did he ask you out?”
She leaned her seat back as far as it would go. “Not yet. But I have time now, right? My heart was pumping so hard. You don’t even understand. He was even better-looking in person. I am seriously in love.”
“What about Gavin?”
“I really like Gavin. You know that. But if Chase is interested . . .” She didn’t have to finish that sentence. I knew exactly what would happen. Lexi would drop Gavin like a radioactive potato. Which was a shame, because he really was a great guy and seemed perfect for my best friend.
Despite my wanting to beat the morning rush hour on the freeway, I was denied. We were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and I listened as Lexi relived her experience over and over again. How Chase had said her name several times, and how while talking to him she felt like the only person in the whole world who mattered.
I was happy for her. I was. I only wished I could have been part of it. And maybe asked him what he was doing by sending me tweets and DMs.
As if he knew I had just been thinking about him, my phone chirped at me. I had my account set up to notify me whenever he tweeted. And he said,
Was that about me?
Or did he think meeting my best friend was fated?
As I settled into my Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies class, I kept wondering if Chase was interested in Lexi. Because men usually were. I should have expected it. Instead, it was bothering me, and I didn’t really understand why.
This was a required class I had kept putting off and probably should have taken while I was an underclassman. Er, underclasswoman. But I forgot, and when I met with my counselor to go over my graduation requirements, she pointed out that I hadn’t taken it yet. Which made me the only senior in a room composed mostly of rabid, men-hating freshmen. Freshwomen. Who would probably make women’s studies their major. Our section was small, and I often felt bad for the three guys in the class who never, ever spoke. They probably feared for their lives.
The desks were arranged in a circle, as our professor employed the Socratic method. She didn’t believe in lecturing and felt we would learn more through discussion. I wasn’t sure what they paid her for, since she was essentially an academic version of a reality TV competition host—trying to stir up trouble and restate the obvious.
Our current unit focused on “body politics,” and I handed my paper to my professor when she went around collecting them. I felt her come to a stop behind me, flipping pages. Was that my essay she was reading?
After she had gathered all the papers, she sat down at her spot in the circle, something she did so we would all be on equal footing. “I hope she doesn’t mind, but Ms. Miller turned in an essay entitled ‘Feminist Celibacy.’” She put my essay on her desk. “I thought this would be a good starting point for today’s discussion. What did you mean by calling celibacy feminist?”
I was well aware of the fact that some second- and third-wave feminists advocated against celibacy, which I found to be highly hypocritical. “I thought it was interesting that people of our generation have a lower number of sexual partners and are twice as likely to be abstinent as previous generations. Even though we’re being told the only way to be feminist is to sleep around early and often.”
I probably shouldn’t have tacked on the last part. The room nearly exploded with competing voices.
“Celibacy is the patriarchy’s way of exerting control over women!”
“Haven’t you ever heard of owning your sexuality?”
“Why aren’t you sex positive?”
It wasn’t so much a discussion as a dog pile. Professor Gonzalez raised her right hand, signaling she wanted quiet. “One at a time, please.”
“I can answer those questions, if you don’t mind. No one controls me. I’ve made up my own mind.” I turned to the next girl who had spoken. “I own my sexuality more than anybody else I’ve ever met. In that it’s totally mine, and I don’t share it with anyone.” Then to the next woman. “How is celibacy not ‘sex positive’? I’m not slut-shaming or judging anyone else. This is a personal decision that I’ve come to, and I don’t understand why you don’t want anyone telling you what to do with your junk, but for some reason you think it’s okay to tell me what I should or should not do with mine. It is the worst kind of hypocrisy because it’s coming from people who should know better.”
So, that happened. I’d just confessed to my entire class that I was celibate. I probably should have kept it in the abstract, but it was something I felt strongly about, and I spoke before I thought about the consequences.
As I sometimes do when I’m passionate about something.
There was silence as everyone stared at me. Like I’d just said I had a third arm or twelve toes.
One of the Three Stooges spoke up. “This is just to get dudes to do what you want, right? A way to force us to fall in line?”
We finally had one of the guys contributing to the conversation, and that was what he decided to share? “How am I making men do anything? They’re free to date me or not date me. It’s not some reward I’m dangling above them to ensure good behavior. It’s off the table. Which is actually kind of nice, because it weeds out the losers and makes it so you really get to know someone without sex getting in the way.”
A sorority-ish girl in a sweater set leaned forward and said, “I don’t get why you would deliberately place those kinds of restrictions on yourself. Don’t you want to be free to do whatever you want?”
“I feel very free. I’ve never been worried about missing a period. I’ve never worried about contracting a sexually transmitted disease. I’ve never shared something so personal with a man and then had my heart broken when he didn’t call me again.”
She was undeterred. “But don’t you think it’s important as a woman to understand that part of yourself?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “I guess I reject the notion that whether or not I do it is the most important thing about me. That my sense of self and value should be tied up solely in that one act.”
The professor finally took the pressure off me by intervening. “Cultural gendered social messages tell us that women should not only be young and sexually appealing, but also be available to men at any time, any place, for any reason. Can you see where feminists choosing to be celibate might help negate that premise?”
That led the discussion to the topics of advertising and pornography as they related to what Professor Gonzalez had just said, but I was finished speaking up for the day. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed about the choice I’d made. It was that people treated me like I was some kind of alien life form to be studied. Why couldn’t it just be a valid life choice?
My phone buzzed, and I put it in my lap and turned it on. The professor had a no-phones-in-class policy, but I couldn’t help myself. Another tweet from Chase.
My heart did a funny flip when I read that. There were hundreds of replies from fans offering to help him out with his problem. He hadn’t said who he was talking about.
It couldn’t be me. Could it? Maybe it was Lexi. That made more sense. Or I was being completely presumptuous that it had anything to do with either of us. For all I knew, he was falling in love with a costar. Or his dry cleaner.
Realistically, I accepted that it couldn’t be me, which was good. It was one thing to daydream about a movie star, but it was probably totally different to actually date one. I didn’t have any desire to be famous or have my life available for public consumption. It was bad enough telling twenty people that I had chosen to be celibate. I couldn’t imagine it on a larger scale. Having it dissected by entertainment bloggers or being mocked by the public for it.
Which was another reason to stop being so pathetically hopeful. There was no way Chase Covington would be interested in dating someone who would never sleep with him.
There comes a point in your day when you realize you’re no longer going to be productive. Mine happ
ened at 11:52 this morning when Chase liked my tweet.
I was a font of useless information. The only thing that had ever rivaled my Chase obsession was my love of all things trivia. Trivial Pursuit games ended with me drinking the tears of my fellow players and leaving a trail of their bloodied hearts all over the board.
After my grandparents left the Amish in Pennsylvania and moved out to California, one of the first things they bought was a TV. When I lived with them decades later, they still had that same television. The only program they ever watched was Jeopardy!, and I remember sitting on their uncomfortable couch in between them as they missed so many questions. My guess was that my love for weird cultural minutiae came from them. Alex Trebek was kind of my hero.
So I tweeted out random facts. Which was better than having to hear Lexi say, “If you say one more thing about stoplight colors, I will slip arsenic into your orange juice.”
Twitter was a good outlet for my useless knowledge. And now Chase had liked my post. I again wanted to read meaning into it and again felt that pointless, bubbly excitement that someone so well known and so incredibly hot had noticed me.
It was probably what it felt like if you were a nerd in high school and the quarterback started paying attention to you.
A situation I had absolutely no experience with.
“Are you trying to see if telekinesis exists?”
I blinked a couple of times, caught up in my Chase-centered world. I put my phone down and saw Noah standing at the door to the conference room. “What?”
“I’m pretty sure you have to actually use your hands to fold the papers yourself and stuff them into the envelopes.” He sounded amused, and I was glad I wasn’t in trouble for not doing my unpaid internship.
I wanted to work at the Ocean Life Foundation after graduation, so I came in twice a week to do things like fetch coffee and send out letters asking for donations. Which I was supposed to be doing right now but had stopped to stare at the notification that “Chase Covington liked your tweet.”
I smiled at Noah. He had started at the Foundation three months ago as an intern in the accounting department, which is where I hoped to work. The first thing I noticed was that he had the same name as one of Chase’s characters on this dramedy called Noah’s Ark, in which his parents had died and Noah had taken over the family farm and raised his two sets of twin brothers and sisters. It had lasted only one season.
Anyway, the real Noah was awkwardly cute. He had sandy-brown hair and dark eyes and was a little bit taller than I was. I’d had a crush on him since he started. We had flirted. (Well, he flirted. I said stupid things.) He was the kind of guy I usually dated.
The anti-Chase.
“Right. I don’t have that X-Men mutation. I can’t stuff envelopes with my mind.” See? Stupid things.
But Noah just kept smiling at me, ignoring my strangeness. “Are you coming to the meeting?”
“The meeting. Yes. I had totally forgotten about it.”
I walked with him, and he asked, “What do you think this month’s theme will be? Dolphins are awesome? Fish are friends, not food? Meat is murder?”
“I’m going with shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll still land among the stars. Or the starfish.” Our supervisor, Stephanie Wheeler, ran these meetings expecting that she would inspire and rally the troops. We were all here because we already wanted to make a difference. Her telling us there was no I in team didn’t really do much to up our game.
And none of us was as obsessed with saving ocean wildlife as Stephanie. I had googled her once, and I’d found all kinds of pictures of her from protests, her mouth wide open, midscream. She was the kind of person who thought animal lives were more important than human ones. Which struck me as a tad deranged, but I figured her heart was in the right place.
We were sitting in the back of the larger conference room trading clichéd inspirational quotes when Stephanie’s assistant, Miriam, came by and handed me something metallic. I looked at it. It was a key chain with a shiny blue fish.
“Does this remind you of the rainbow fish?” Noah asked, and it took me a second to place it. My brother, Zander, had gone through a phase where that was his favorite story. It was about a beautiful fish that gave away his shiny, multicolored scales to other fish so they could all be the same. It had always seemed kind of communist to me.
Stephanie called the meeting to order. “As you know, we are only a few months away from our biggest annual fund-raiser. Our charity dinner and silent auction always does very well for us. But this year I thought we should aim higher. I thought we should collect some rainbow fish of our own who can share their scales with us. Add some luster to our event.”
I nodded at Noah, acknowledging his excellent guess about the key chain. He winked back at me.
She turned around and wrote the words Kevin Bacon on the whiteboard. “I’m sure most of you are too young to remember, but has anyone heard of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?”
I knew what that was. But I also knew better than to interrupt Stephanie when she was on a roll.
“It was a theory that everyone in the world is six degrees away from one another. That everybody in this room knows someone who knows someone who knows a celebrity. We’ve been trying for years to get some stars to our dinner, and I think if we can pull it off, it will be our biggest year yet. My challenge to you is to talk to everyone you know and find someone famous we can invite to our fund-raiser!”
Stephanie went on about some of the details and deadlines for the event. My first thought was my mom. She had some notoriety. People didn’t usually recognize her, but when I told them what she had done, everybody immediately knew who I was talking about.
But my boss was probably looking for a different kind of celebrity.
Someone like Chase Covington. Who I was about to start working with and could probably talk to.
How lame would that be, though? “Hi, you don’t know me, but want to do a charity event for the place I want to work at someday? Awesome.”
“This year is particularly important,” Stephanie said. Her smile no longer reached her eyes. “We’ve lost a major donor, and it’s beyond vital that we bring in enough from our fund-raiser to keep the Foundation going.”
That didn’t sound good. It worried me, because getting a paying job at a nonprofit was nearly impossible. I had applied for internships at about fifty different charities before I finally landed this one. Even then it was an administrative internship and not the accounting one I had been hoping for. With all the effort and time I’d spent here, I needed there to be a payoff. A real future and career for me, all while making a difference in the world. If I was going to be stuck in the corporate rat race, it was important to me that I work for a company dedicated to making things better.
The meeting finished, and I added the sparkly fish to my key ring. I knew Stephanie took this kind of stuff seriously, and I could earn brownie points for showing her I took it seriously, too.
Even if I thought it was kind of dumb.
On my way out of the room, Stephanie asked Noah and me to stay for a minute. Noah raised both eyebrows at me, as if asking what we’d done. I shrugged. Other than spacing out earlier, I was usually a pretty perfect employee.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Zoe, Noah, I just wanted to let you both know that I’m aware of what a great job you’ve done for us. And that I would love to be able to promise both of you jobs here when you graduate, but given our current financial situation, I think the only way we can do that is if we raise enough money at the dinner. Anything you can do to help us land someone amazing would go a long way to securing your futures with us. We may be able to hire only one intern.”
Jeez. No pressure or anything. I glanced at Noah, wondering how he would take the news that we were basically now competitors.
Stephanie left after that, leaving Noah and me alone. He took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses with a cloth he pulled out of his pock
et. “So we have to land a big fish to get jobs here.” I grimaced at his pun. “Maybe we should strategize over dinner about how to keep ourselves gainfully employed.”
Only two days ago I would have been over the moon with excitement at Noah inviting me to dinner. But Chase and his tweets had turned my attention away from him. My crush didn’t feel as strong as it once had.
Which was dumb. I should still be excited. Because Chase was fantasy, and Noah was reality. He was someone I enjoyed being with, and I had been waiting months for him to ask me out.
I smiled at him, reminding myself to keep both feet on the ground and appreciate what I had right in front of me. “I think that sounds like fun.”
CHAPTER FOUR
That happened about five minutes into my dinner with Noah. He had gone to use the restroom, and I sneaked a quick peek at my phone. Another Chase tweet that again got my heart furiously pounding. That definitely had to be about me. Presumably he had a housekeeper or a personal chef or assistant who could whip up some baked goods for him if he really wanted them. But for some reason, Chase had said he wanted me to make cookies for him. He was using “zo” like in my Twitter username. A tiny voice reminded me that the Z and S keys were close together. It could have been a slip of a finger.
But it didn’t feel that way.
It was all I could think about. I didn’t focus on Noah like I should have.
It didn’t help matters that whatever teasing banter Noah and I shared at the Foundation did not translate to real life. I knew he was a hipster, but the newsboy cap, suspenders, and bow tie were a step too far even for me. I felt a little silly sitting there with him, as if I were underdressed. We talked about Stephanie’s unreasonable request, brainstormed some possible connections to celebrities, and then . . . the conversation died.
Admittedly, it was partly my fault for being distracted by Chase’s tweet. Because half an hour after the first one, he posted this.
#Starstruck Page 3
