by Caisey Quinn
“It’s B8, dumbfuck,” Michael argues with Dean, who swears it’s C8 we’re supposed to be looking for.
“Oh shit, I forgot about this,” Skylar says, tearing a flyer off the nearest kiosk. “You know we have to decorate a team float for Homecoming? Coach said the shit is mandatory.”
“No way,” Michael says, snatching the flyer to look it over. “Ah, there’s free pizza at least.”
“Wow, fatass. Way to find the silver lining,” Austin says, smacking Mike in the arm. The two wrestle around for a few minutes but I keep walking. Homecoming. Of all the time I spent with Layla Flaherty, Homecoming was the most fucked up night of all. Either that or Thanksgiving, but I’m pretty sure Homecoming wins.
If I’d known what she’d been through, known that she’d witnessed her parents being gunned down in a random mugging as a kid and was plagued by seizure-inducing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I would’ve ripped Brent Becker’s arms from his body before I let him punch that door. But I didn’t know. Not all the details anyways. Before I could blink, she was convulsing on the floor and I was screaming for someone to call 911. Freaky Flaherty, they called her. When I saw what caused them to nickname her this, I wanted to burn the gym down Carrie-style. Small town bastards.
But when I wrapped my arms around her and her seizing stopped, I felt like King of the damn world. Because I was stupid enough to think maybe someone needed me.
I lose sight of the girl with hair like Layla’s once we enter the stadium. It’s barely controlled chaos in here. We find the seats marked Soccer and sit while some official looking people in suits set up a podium and fool around with sound equipment.
Testing the limits of my neck, I glance up into the stands, hoping to find that girl again, and kind of hoping not to. Part of the deal is that I don’t make myself obvious. Scrolling through messages on my phone, I see a text from my mom. She just recently learned to text, and boy does she make use of this knowledge.
The cheerleaders are lining up next to our seats, and several guys lean around me to stare. Jesus. It’s like they’ve never seen women in skirts before or something. But yeah, I do a quick once-over just for the hell of it. And so no one calls me a fag. Not that I don’t love the Colonel’s favorite nickname for me, but after I left Georgia and moved back to Colorado, I took a lot of shit. Because I didn’t hook up with Danni—or anyone for that matter. Because I couldn’t get a blonde from Georgia out of my head. Or my heart.
And every time someone called me that, it reminded me of that piece of shit Becker and him calling me that just before he caused Layla’s seizure. And then I see her face, looking horrified in that hospital bed. Embarrassed, ashamed, and mostly like she can’t stand the sight of me. I’m terrified of seeing that look on her face again. Maybe she and the Colonel could start a club.
“Dude, you look like you’re thinking about murdering someone. Care to share?” Skylar asks, finally peeling his eyes from a busty brunette with pompoms standing next to us.
“Nah, I’m fine.” It’s a lie I’m used to telling.
They announce the football team first. Cocky pricks.
Skylar and Austin are arguing back and forth about who’s going to bang which cheerleader and punching each other over me when they disagree. I almost miss it when they call my name.
Standing quickly, I offer a small wave at the crowd and sit back down. But my neck is hot and I feel someone watching me, even after they move on to introducing the Lacrosse team. And Crew. And even the cheerleaders. Leaning back in my metal folding chair, I glance all around, scanning the stands for whoever’s stare is burning a hole into my back.
Random faces blur together and I’m unable to distinguish any one person concentrating on me specifically. Maybe I’m just tired. Or paranoid. It’s been a long damn week.
After all the athletes have been introduced, a few more people yammer on about what an exciting time this is, how the university is part of our family now, and they’re here for us if we need anything. Unless we get caught with booze or drugs. Then we’re the fuck outta here and they wash their hands of us. Yeah, sounds about like the concept of family I’m familiar with.
They’re wrapping up the speeches and we stand to sing the lame-ass alma mater. Like any of us know the words. A gentle vibration in my pocket tells me I have a new message and I pull out my phone.
Party tonite @ Blackburn’s. Bring beer. And girls.
It’s from Lucas Taite, and I glance around to see Skylar, Austin, and a few other guys glancing at their phones. First night—impressive. The ink’s probably still wet on the Collegiate Athlete Code of Conduct I signed in Coach’s office this morning.
Good thing I brought my fake I.D. The girls might be a little harder to obtain, but I’m sure Skylar will be on top of that. Literally, I bet.
I turn to tell him he’s on chick duty when that feeling of being watched pummels me again. It’s so intense that I can tell which direction it’s coming from. Up and to my right. The marching band is filing out, but in between the tubas and drums I see her. The girl staring at me like she’s seen a ghost. And not one she’s particularly fond of.
She looks slightly different than the girl in my memory. Her skin is a darker shade of golden and her hair is a little lighter, like she’s been at the beach. But it’s her. I can feel it with everything I am. I want to call out, ask her to wait for me while I climb the bleachers like a maniac to get to her. But the horrified expression she wears keeps me still and silent for a full minute. She’s done waiting for me. She said everything she had to say with her last text message nearly nine months ago. Goodbye Landen.
“Can we go?” I say to Corin, standing abruptly, because I’m getting out of here whether she comes or not. I can barely hear my own voice over the drums, or maybe that’s the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. I know in my head I’m here, in college, not in Hope Springs. But the memory is so vivid I might as well be right back in Georgia, watching my world fall apart at a Christmas parade.
“Landen!” the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl squeals as she throws herself into his arms.
“Huh?” Corin asks, having just started to get up to sing the alma mater with the rest of the stadium.
“I need to go, now .” The stadium spins around me and staying upright is a struggle. Focus, Layla. Don’t do this here. Let it go. But my mind isn’t cooperating.
The dark-haired girl kisses him, right on the mouth, right in front of me. But that didn’t hurt as much as the words that came after.
“Your mom said you guys were moving back to Colorado. So we came to help you pack.”
All through the parade, I’d been tingling with anticipation. It was the night I was going to tell Landen I was ready—ready to be more than friends. I was going to kiss him, let him be my very first kiss, my first boyfriend, my first everything. And he was hiding a secret girlfriend back in Colorado the whole time. One he was about to move back to in a matter of days, a fact he hadn’t even bothered to mention to me.
“Danni,” he informed me with a panicked smile. “Friend of mine from Colorado.” Apparently, in Colorado, friends kiss each other on the mouth.
Corin lifts her designer knock-off bag and the bright purple Welcome to SoCal bags we’ve been given from the floor and slings them over her shoulder.
“Sure, let’s go. You all right?”
“I’m fine. Just not feeling so well.” Because my past has just caught up with me. He’s here. It’s really him. I saw him when we first sat down but only from the side and I was sure I was imagining things. Maybe that guy just looks like him, sits like him, runs his hands through his hair like him. There wasn’t a roster in the programs we were given so I had to wait until they called his name. Number thirteen, striker, Landen O’Brien from Colorado Springs, Colorado. He’s not from anywhere, I thought to myself before my brain had ti
me to catch up with my heart.
This was supposed to be the beginning of a new life. My new life. The one where I start over, where no one knows that broken girl from Hope Springs, Georgia, or what she’s been through. And he’s here. At my dream school. Sending all my painful high school memories flooding back, threatening to drown me. He wouldn’t have even applied to SoCal if it weren’t for me. I knew he probably wouldn’t go to UGA after everything that happened. But why here ? I’ve seen him with my own two eyes and it’s still not real.
“Um, Layla, was that fine piece of soccer hotness just calling your name?” Corin asks as we exit the stadium. Was he? Oh God. He saw me too then.
“Huh? No, I doubt it.” But I pick up the pace and she side-eyes me so hard I’m breaking down under the intensity. “Maybe.”
“And you’re running like your panties just caught fire because…?”
“Because,” I say, trying my darnedest to swallow even though my mouth is the Sahara. “Because I do not want to see him.”
Or do I? Dang it! I do not want to want to see him.
“Listen, speedy, you’re gonna have to slow down a little. These boots ain’t made for sprintin’,” my roommate informs me.
I sigh in frustration and slow the slightest bit. “I kind of know him, or I used to, a long time ago.”
“Uh huh. Looked like he was pretty interested in a reunion.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not,” I snap. My teeth clench, and immediately I regret pulling this bitch-move on Corin because she seems nice enough. And let’s face it, I’m not exactly in a position to turn down a friend. And we have to live together for at least a year. But every thought associated with him hurts. What we were, what we never got the chance to be. How much I missed him. Still miss him. The image of that girl, Danni, he called her, leaping into his arms and kissing him when I was supposed to be the one doing that. Just before he told me he was leaving, finishing out his senior year back in Colorado because his mom was leaving his dad and needed him to go with her. He forced his way into my life just to leave when I already had more than enough abandonment issues to send a therapist’s triplets to college. Ivy league.
Fricking Landen O’Brien and his uncanny ability to interrupt my regularly scheduled life.
Corin doesn’t say anything else when we get back to the dorm, but when I collapse on my bed, she sits across from me on hers. She’s completely still and her probing hazel eyes are wide as she waits for me to carve out my heart and show it to her. I fidget with my plum-colored comforter, tracing the random pattern with a finger. I figure I’ll just wait her out. But moments later, when I look up, she’s still there. Still waiting. And it’s not like she has anywhere to be or like I can get away from her. This roommate thing is going to take some getting used to. At least Aunt Kate had a demanding job to deal with.
“He was just a friend,” I breathe out, relenting and making a mental note to suggest she major in criminal justice so she can make good use of her impressive interrogation skills. Just the look on her face has me wanting to spill my guts.
“But…”
“But it had the potential to be more. A lot more. And then he moved away.” I shrug. There. Easy peasy. Doesn’t sound so bad. “And now he’s here.”
She leans forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “Layla, I have eyes. You were trembling with…rage or fear or something. Did he hurt you?”
It takes me a second to realize she means like in a sexual assault kind of way. “No,” I shake my head, but my heart is cussing me for a liar. Demanding that I not reduce what it went through. “Not like you mean, but yeah. Um, I thought it was more than it was…more than friendship. Turns out he had a girlfriend in Colorado, where he was from. And he went back to her and that was that.”
And I deleted every text and voicemail he left afterwards because I couldn’t stand the pain.
“What a dick,” Corin proclaims, and with three words she’s the best friend I’ve ever had.
I can’t help but laugh at the outrage on her face. “There’s maybe a little more to it than that. But I don’t even know all the details for certain, and it’s exhausting to think about. I just can’t believe he’s here.”
“Oh shit. Do you think he might be stalking you or something?” Her eyes widen almost impossibly. “Should we tell someone?”
Sighing, I glance up at the ceiling. “Um no, I don’t think so. I think he might have failed to apply to any other schools besides this one and UGA, where we were supposed to go together so…”
“So here you are, both of you.” She grins, an impish little smirk sneaking across her face, and I don’t like where this is going. “It’s like fate or something.”
“No.” I cut her off with a shake of my head. “Not fate.” Or maybe it is. Fate and I have never been friends.
“Fine. I don’t really believe in any of that anyway. But at the very least maybe you guys could talk, and he could explain why he went back with that other girl—”
“No.”
“Okay, well, it’s kind of a small campus and—”
“Corin.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, holding her hands up in submission. “But can I ask one more question?”
Huffing out a breath, I lean back into the white and silver pillows on my bed. “If you must.”
“Did he, I mean…is he the one?”
“The one what?”
“You know, the one. The one who took your v-card.”
“Oh my God, no. I’m still carrying that particular card, thank you very much.” I roll my eyes up to the ceiling, wondering if that would still be true if Landen had stayed. If I’d never met Danni.
She mercifully ignores the fact that I’m probably the only virgin on campus. “Well, was he like your first kiss or something? Cause I gotta tell you, the way you ran out of there…”
She doesn’t say anything else and neither do I. The silence stretches out long and awkward between us.
Corin is from New York. She’s got tattoos all up her back. I saw them when she was changing for bed last night. And I saw the economy-sized box of condoms she had in her dresser when we unpacked. Now there’s a girl who’s lived. She is most likely not a virgin. And I’m about to tell her I’ve never even been kissed. She’s kind of high-strung—I’m almost worried she’ll die of shock and that I should keep this to myself for her safety.
“Layla?” My eyes are closed, and I’m wondering if I can pretend I’ve dozed off. I feel drained enough to make it a reality. “Layla Flaherty, roommate of mine, at the very least you are going to give me some juicy details about making out with that beautiful hunk of man meat.”
I swallow hard and give my head a small shake. “Can’t.”
“You guys never even kissed? Seriously?” I don’t have to look over to know her thin, perfectly arched eyebrows are ascending into her hairline about now. “Wow. But he looked so—”
“I’ve never been kissed. By him or anyone.” There you go—commence freak out.
Corin doesn’t disappoint. She jumps up, slamming her head into a shelf above her bed, knocking several pictures down. I glance over to see her rubbing her head and glaring at the shelf like it attacked her. And then she’s looking at me like I just told her I was raised by little green one-eyed men on planet Cyclops. “You’re like a…”
Loser?
“Unicorn,” Corin finishes, catching me off guard.
“What?”
“Layla, holy hell. You’re eighteen, gorgeous, and no guy has ever kissed you? It’s not even…I mean, it doesn’t even make logical sense. Especially since classes haven’t even started and a ridiculously hot guy looked more than ready to climb over an entire marching band to get to you.”
Her words force my mind to picture him. He’s even more beautiful than I
remembered. And Good Lord. That look he had in those hypnotic green eyes of his. Hungry. Determined. It sends me crashing back down to reality, and I kind of want to disappear into my bed or grab my laptop and get online to find out if it’s too late to transfer to UGA.
I must look as close to losing it as I actually am out because Corin sighs and stands up. “I am going to leave you be—for now. But tonight, there will be parties. We will be at these parties. You will be getting kissed at said parties if it’s the last thing I do.” With that announcement, she turns to head out into the common room but I stop her.
“Hey, um, thanks for leaving with me. I know I was kind of intense.” And intensely bitchy.
She offers me a sympathetic smile. “No problem. That’s what friends do,” she says easily just before she slides the door closed so I can have some privacy. Good thing, because I’m pulled down into a painful memory I can’t escape even if I want to.
“That’s what friends do,” he said, holding me in his arms after I told him what had happened to my parents. “They tell each other stuff. They keep each other still when no one else can. They show up at the hospital with flowers.”
“Friends.” I choke back a sob.
“Always,” he promises with a squeeze. My heart slows in my chest, because for the first time in my seventeen years, I want more. I want Landen to be so much more than just my friend.
I doze off drowning in memories.
“I’m all done in the bathroom if you want to shower,” Corin tells me when I emerge bleary-eyed from our room hours later.
I stumble into the tiny common area that barely holds a flat screen television, the futon Aunt Kate bought us, and a desk that was here when we moved in. “Is that a hint?” My clothes are rumpled and my makeup is probably smeared all over my face.
“Um, actually it’s a direct order, but I thought I should phrase it nicely since we’ve only been living together a short time.”
