by Alyssa Cole
“Look, I’m not a fan of a guy whose first instinct is to make out with you instead of asking you how you survived and whether you’re okay, but maybe that’s just my superior intellect and years of experience talking.” Edwin took a piece of candy out of his pocket and unwrapped it. The scent of butterscotch wafted over, and I wondered what it would’ve tasted like on his tongue if Edwin had kissed me instead of Devon.
“I don’t know about the last part, but I hadn’t even thought of that.” I started to get mad all over again. Devon likely would have pulled me toward his crappy dorm bed if I hadn’t stopped and made small talk. And given how caught up in the moment I’d been, I might have let him. I sent out a thank-you to the universe for not letting that happen. I wanted to get rid of my v-card, but not at the expense of my dignity. That would have been just as bad as what I was trying to avoid.
“Yeah, he seems like a little shit, but maybe he has a good explanation.” Edwin stretched, displaying how the muscles of his chest and abs worked beneath his shirt, and heat tingled at the back of my neck. I looked away. Maybe there was something in the venison that was making me so aware of every move he made, which might explain my parents’ sudden amorousness. Edwin kept talking, and I made sure to keep my gaze on his face. “Maybe, you could, you know, give him a chance to explain. If he was just a dick for no reason, then we kill him. If he has a good excuse, then maybe you can still be friends. Either way, talking to him is better than ducking and dodging him all year because you feel ashamed every time you see him.”
I stared at him, overwhelmed by a feeling of solidarity that surpassed the crush I’d nursed on him. He wasn’t just comforting me. He was sharing something of himself, something unpleasant.
“Have you ever lied to a woman you cared about?” I asked. “Is that why you think he deserves a chance?”
“No.” His mouth twitched, its corners tugged down by an unhappy memory. “I wish lying was the worst thing I’d done. I didn’t protect her. Because I thought that some stupid oath of fraternity I’d taken was more important than my own conscience. I told you, I’ve done things I’m not proud of.” He hopped to his feet in one fluid, undulating motion. “Anyway, it’s not about giving him a chance. It’s about giving yourself one, to not have a cloud hovering over your head from day one here.”
He ruffled my hair again and walked toward the door. His hand lingered a bit longer than it had before, and his index finger slid over the exposed shell of my ear. Something in me tightened; no one had ever touched me there before, not like that. I had no idea it could feel so good, could send a battalion of tingles charging toward every outpost of my body.
I reminded myself that he didn’t feel any tingles. Not for me. “Did she forgive you?” I asked.
“No. And I don’t want her to.”
With that, he swung the door open and slipped out.
For so long, I’d been angry with Edwin for not thinking of me as more than the littlest Seong. But as I picked up my guitar and began strumming the song I’d just written, I realized that he’d been little more than a hot cardboard cutout to me. The real Edwin Hernandez had a story and now that I was learning it, I wondered if I knew anything about him at all.
Chapter Eight
The next morning I was awoken at an ungodly hour by the sounds of people banging around and yelling back and forth like the hallways weren’t echo chambers funneling sound into each dorm room. Well, by that cacophony and my screaming bladder. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom since the day before, and thanks to the soda I’d chugged before bed, I was dangerously close to reliving my short but humiliating bed-wetting period.
I stumbled out of bed and fumbled with the unfamiliar lock on my door, dodging a guy carrying a stack of boxes and jumping over a milk crate filled with books. I was still half asleep and probably looked like a horror show, but my only thought was finding the familiar white ceramic bowl before I became known as “that girl who peed in the hallway.” No one wanted to be that girl.
I pushed my way into the bathroom and into an open stall, painfully aware I wasn’t wearing shoes and hoping it was early enough in the semester that I wouldn’t catch some kind of infectious disease. I’d just begun the most transcendent piss of my life—I couldn’t imagine sex being better than that sweet relief—when the door swung open and I remembered I’d be sharing the bathroom with complete strangers. Whoever was out there probably thought a racehorse had broken into the building, and there was no end to my stream in sight.
Why are they being so quiet? Am I trapped in here with some weirdo who gets off on hearing people go to the bathroom?
“Maggie?”
Devon? No. Why?!
“I recognize those Dora the Explorer pajama bottoms from our video chats.” He spoke calmly and casually, as if he hadn’t introduced chaos into my emotional life yesterday.
“Number one, these are Dora and Friends pajama bottoms. Number two, we are not on good enough terms for you to be speaking to me while I’m using the bathroom. What is wrong with you?”
The door opened and closed as I finally finished my record-setting pee, and then I cracked the stall door and peered around. There was no Devon in sight, so it was safe to step out. I was not excited to spend the rest of the year like this. Maybe Edwin had been right.
I washed my hands, then wet one of the small cloth towels stacked by the sink and scrubbed my face. Washable cloths seemed fancy, but at this point, they were easier to deal with than paper towels, which still weren’t being produced on a large scale. Toilet paper trumped paper towels in the grand bathroom hierarchy.
The door opened again and Devon strolled back in, dropping a pair of much-too-large flip-flops at my feet. Seeing him raised all kinds of thoughts—the kiss in his room, and how the night before our last video chat years before he’d told me he was learning to play a song called “I Think I Love You.” I’d had to look up the song, and the tune had been stuck in my head the entire next day. All that day, I’d looked forward to asking him if he’d meant anything special by that. I’d fantasized all of the different ways he would explain, “Yes, it means I love you,” and how I would reply, “I love you too.” But I’d never had that opportunity. That night, I’d video called him. He’d picked up and said “Maggie” in a way no one had ever said my name before. And then everything had gone dark.
And now, here he was, bending over to slip my feet into his flip-flops as I stood staring at him. He looked up and smiled. “Can’t have you getting some mutant strain of athlete’s foot.”
“Why?” The word came out hard, probably a reaction to the weird sensations his hand cupping my foot was creating in me. Warmth raced up from where my sole connected with his palm, arrowed straight up between my thighs and throbbed there, perhaps hoping his hand would follow like a homing beacon.
“You want athlete’s foot?” He was still smiling, and it was still tugging at the memories, pulling them to the forefront. I considered kneeing him in the face to make it stop, but instead I slipped my feet into the too-large sandals and gave him my best withering stare.
“Why did you lie to me? I don’t want an apology, because I’m not going to forgive you. I just need to know how sociopaths operate so I can avoid them in the future.” I bit my lip because it served two tasks: it made me look angry and stopped it from trembling.
He stood and crossed his arms across his chest. “Not exactly what I wanted to hear, but I’ll take that opening. I’d love a chance to explain. Doing it in the bathroom? Not so much.”
Not so much. My throat tightened at that. It was funny, the things that hit you below the belt. The three words comprised one of those throwaway lines he’d said all the time, probably as much as I’d once said “duh,” but suddenly they seemed like something painfully intimate, even more than his hands on me had been. I hadn’t felt homesick for my family yet, but that phrase made
me wish for my life all those years ago, before I knew Devon had been deceiving me.
The door swung open, and two women a bit younger than me, at least in appearance, walked in. One wore her hair in multicolored braids that hung down to her waist, and the other had frizzy strawberry-blond hair. Their gazes slid from me and then to Devon before connecting with each other. Both smiled as they scented the drama in the air.
“All right. You can walk me to my room.” I wanted to be “the girl having an emotional moment in the bathroom” even less than I wanted the title of hallway pisser.
He caught the door with the tips of his fingers and ushered me out. “Thank you,” he said as we dodged more incoming students. “I know you don’t have to give me a chance to explain, and I appreciate it.”
He followed me into my room, and I closed the door after him, leaving it cracked so he didn’t think anything too exciting would happen after he spilled the beans. I sat on my bed and he sat beside me.
Less than twenty-four hours at school, and I’ve already had two dudes on my bed. Arden would be proud.
I thought of how Edwin had sprawled comfortably last night, legs spread, body relaxed. Devon was tight, pulled in on himself, and I was surprised to find myself feeling a little bad for him just below the anger. It wasn’t even exactly anger anymore, just a kind of numbness that stole through my body and kept all the other feelings away. I hummed a few bars from my song, the fact that he didn’t know what the cutesy tune represented making it like a secret weapon I was wielding against him.
His leg jumped up and down, transmitting his nervousness through the bed, and I was forced to bounce along with him. “I was living in Florida when I first talked to you on that music forum,” he began. “I was spending the summer with my aunt and uncle because my parents were traveling outside of the country for my dad’s job. Diplomat stuff.”
Well, that explained who’d pulled his strings for him. “Why weren’t you with them?”
“I was tired of traveling. Tired of not having any friends. My aunt and uncle said I could come stay with them for high school, so I’d have a steady life. A normal life. That summer was supposed to be a test run. I get along great with my parents, but I just wanted to be normal.” He scratched his elbow nervously and stopped when something on the ground near his foot caught his eye. I’d crumpled the picture of him up, but not well enough. I reached down, picked it up and tossed it in the plastic trash can across the room, all while holding his gaze.
“That doesn’t explain the whole living-in-New-York thing,” I said tartly.
“Oh. My dad got cancer, so he was pulled from his assignment and came back to New York for treatment.”
I winced. “Sorry.”
“No need. He’s fine. He’s lucky, even. If they’d found it any later, he wouldn’t have completed his chemo before the Flare.” He paused then, and not in a reflecting-on-my-parents’-mortality kind of way. Whatever he had to say next was going to piss me off.
“So...?”
“So, my dad was receiving treatments at SUNY Upstate—”
“That’s where my brother was doing his residency. You were that close and you never said a word. You let me prattle on like an idiot about visiting you in Florida.” Shame heated my face and, again, I missed the built-in coverage my long hair had provided. “You didn’t even tell me your dad had cancer. I told you everything.”
He looked down at the ground, shoulders humped like a dog waiting to be kicked. “I was scared, Maggie. Everything in my life was changing. I’d just lost my chance at a typical teenage life. My dad was fighting something that kills lots of people and my mom was beyond stressed.”
“And you didn’t think enough of me to share any of that?”
He straightened and almost reached a hand toward me, but thought better of it. “You were my safe harbor. You have to believe me, I wanted to say something, but what we had online together, it was so perfect. I just kept thinking about what would happen if we met in real life. Maybe you’d think the way I chewed was weird, or that I smelled funny. Maybe I’d do something to piss you off and you’d dump me. Our video chats were the only stable thing I had in my life. I didn’t want to lose that.”
“Well, shit.” I jumped off the bed. “How am I supposed to be mad at you when you phrase it like that?”
“I was still wrong. But it wasn’t because I was trying to deceive you or because I thought you were unimportant. You don’t have to forgive me, just know what we had was real to me.” His face was so damn earnest.
“You have to go. Now.” I pointed at the door but dropped my hand when I saw how it shook. I was too close to crying or, worse, hugging him and telling him it was okay when it was definitely not okay. I needed some space to process everything he’d told me, but I didn’t think I could explain all that without my voice breaking. I flicked my head in the direction of the door to urge him along.
His hands flexed on his knees before he nodded and rose. “Thanks for letting me tell my side.” He took a few steps. “I still talked to you, you know. Even after the Flare. We got taken to some government facility, but I had a picture of you taped to the wall. I talked to you every night because I hoped it meant you were still alive. Even if we’re not friends, or anything else, I’m glad you survived.”
And then he was gone, leaving me to sort through the mountain of emotions—more like a trash heap of emotions, as there were years and years of layers there. I could understand, in a way, but lying was lying. I thought back to how much being separated from him had affected me, back to that terrible night I’d drunk too much and hurt Arden more than I’d ever hurt anyone, in part because I missed him so much. And he’d been lying to me the whole time.
I decided then and there to never talk to him again. Then again, Arden had forgiven me for the ugly things I’d said to her. More than forgiven me—she’d showered me with love. Did this mean I should forgive Devon, that the past was the past? I didn’t know. The only thing I was sure of at this point was that I needed to brush my teeth and get some coffee in me.
I was still standing in the middle of my room a few minutes later when Danielle pushed the door open. She wore faded black jeans and a black turtleneck topped with her panda bear hat. On her feet were white spats that were miraculously clean and shiny. Her makeup was still perfect, but much more understated. “Hey! Did you go get your work study assignment yet?”
“I haven’t even showered,” I said. I noticed she hadn’t knocked and wondered if she’d done so to avoid being ignored again.
“Good. I was hoping we could have breakfast and then walk over together. If you want.”
I was tempted to brush her off, but that would have been petty. She’d been nothing but nice to me, even when I’d bitten her head off. There was no reason not to give her a chance. Wasn’t that what we all wanted out of this new experience? For people to look at us and see not a dumb kid, but someone who might be worth caring about?
I remembered how when John was feeling down, before Mykhail and Burnell had come around, he’d sometimes push my hair aside and ask me to smile. He said I was selective enough in bestowing it that it could make the difference between a good day and a bad day for him. The way Danielle was looking at me, like she was already bracing for dismissal... I took a deep breath and smiled.
“Give me ten minutes? Is that cool?”
She let out a low sigh of relief and nodded. “Of course. I’ll wait in my room.”
I dug into a pile of clothes for my towel and grabbed the small plastic caddy filled with my toiletries.
It seemed I had two friends. Three if I could ever forgive Devon.
Not a bad start to coed life.
Chapter Nine
The dining hall food was good. I’d had doubts, wondering if it would be like the disgusting unidentifiable meals we’d had back in hig
h school, but in this brave new world, mass production of processed food wasn’t king. Most of our meal was locally sourced—a lot of it came from the huge converted greenhouse on the agricultural campus, where student workers grew what they’d later eat for dinner.
“Maybe I can work at the farm. I did a lot of gardening work with my family,” I said to Danielle as we walked toward the Registrar’s Office, which also served as a work allocation center. One side effect of the Flare was that money, which had after all mostly been an idea, didn’t have a stabilized value yet. While the remaining economists figured out the best way to start from scratch—and my dad and brothers argued over the ideas of dudes named Keynes and Picketty as if the government advisers were listening in—many people and places had fallen back on an older institution. Bartering.
At universities, the idea was particularly easy to implement. Academic and other non-teaching staff both received housing, food and protection as payment. For students, the work study program had been retooled so students worked more hours per week and in jobs that had often been handled by professionals before, but their entire education was paid for. Things would change as the world regained more and more technology and the information that had been lost with it, but the Oswego program was big enough to have plenty of student laborers and small enough for the bartering system to work. In theory, at least.
“That sounds fun! I’m terrible with plants, though. They always end up...you know.” Danielle gave a sad little laugh, and I understood. “Dead” was Voldemortian now, a word people didn’t like saying anymore, as if uttering it could give it power. Or perhaps it just raised the specter of memories that many people couldn’t bear. I wondered about Danielle and what memories the word raised for her, but we weren’t quite friendly enough for me to ask yet. One thing I’d learned at my GED program was that what one person thought was a simple inquiry or conversation starter could be hugely triggering to someone else. When most of the world’s population was struggling with PTSD and assorted other mental trauma, curiosity took a backseat. If she ever trusted me enough, she would share her past with me.
