“Did you seriously not separate the red clothes?”
“I always forget. I’m terrible at this stuff. Anyway, you’ve been in college for what, two months? It’s not like you have loads of laundry experience yourself.”
“I’ve been doing laundry since I was ten.”
My face goes hot. Shit. Her mom. I forgot. “I’m so sorry. I forgot about your mom.”
“It’s okay. I’m pretty sure I’d have been doing laundry even with both parents around. Your parents never made you do laundry at home?”
I shrug. “We had a maid.”
Hannah sputters out a disbelieving laugh. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never known anyone who had a maid before. I guess that investment stuff your dad does pays pretty well.”
I grimace. “It did for him.”
“Lucky you. So how’s your day going, rich boy?”
“I’m not rich.” Then again, I do have that trust fund. In Hannah’s eyes, that probably makes me rich, even though I don’t have any control over it. “My day is fine, I guess. Just…”
Her eyebrows furrow and she straightens up. “Is something wrong?”
“No, not wrong. I don’t know yet.” I push my glasses back up my nose. “One of my professors wants me to apply to the master’s program.”
“Wow, that’s great!” She touches my arm, and I feel it in my stomach. My gaze flies to hers, but she’s smiling, hand still on my forearm, oblivious. Did she feel it, too? Her face is so calm; it’s hard to say. “I mean, that’s great, right?” she presses.
“I…don’t know.”
Hannah laughs and runs her hand down to my wrist, squeezing gently. My pulse races, and the room goes hot. Does she realize what she’s doing? She must. I should pull away, but… It feels kind of nice.
“Ben, it’s like you were made for this.” She smiles. “What is there to decide?”
This is so easy for her, a freshman with years ahead of her to figure it all out. I stare out the storefront, watching pedestrians walk past, enjoying the weather.
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “I’m supposed to go to law school. Actually, my dad really wants me to work in finance like him and my brother, but he gave up on that dream ages ago. Law school is an acceptable second choice, though.”
She bursts out laughing. My stomach sinks. Yeah, I don’t think I’m a natural for law school, either, but nobody’s ever laughed at the idea of it before.
“I’m sorry, law school?” She struggles to catch her breath. “You?”
“You think I can’t do it?”
“Ben, you’re brilliant. I know you can do it. I don’t think you want to do it.”
And that makes Hannah the only person to figure it out. My family certainly never cared that my heart isn’t in it, and whenever I talk about law school with Alex, she just gets excited and starts chattering non-stop about all the programs I should look into. Still, as right as Hannah is, people don’t always get what they want. I sure don’t.
“My dad’s got a point, though. Maybe it’s stupid to spend all these years in college just reading books and shit.” I shove the pile I’m currently working on off to the side. Books. My whole damn life is about books, and for what? “Maybe I should think about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. At least law pays well.”
“Who cares about money?” she asks quietly. “You’d be an amazing teacher, Ben. I know you would.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure—”
“This is just like Sam.”
I frown. “Who?”
“Sammy Clay, in the book.”
Oh. She’s talking about Kavalier and Clay. “In what way?”
“Him and Tracy,” she says, referencing Sam’s closeted relationship with Tracy, the Hollywood actor. Seriously?
“I told you I’m not gay.”
She laughs again. “I know. I meant the way Sam is denying himself and who he really is. How long do you think he can manage that? I haven’t finished the book yet, but you have, and I’m betting that part of the story doesn’t work out well.”
No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t work out well for Sam or anybody around him. “It’s complicated.” That’s kind of a cop-out, but I can’t figure this out today. “And what about you, anyway?”
“Me?”
I give her a pointed look. “You’ve been having mixed feelings about your major, too. What are you going to do about it?”
Hannah looks away, fidgeting with the zipper on her jacket. “I’ve been working on it. I’m sure I’ll do much better on the next test. It was just first semester jitters, like you said.”
“Sounded like more than that to me.”
“I told you, this is about so much more than a major. It’s about my mom, too.”
“I know, but Hannah, you can’t do something you hate just for her sake. You know that, right?”
“It’s—”
“Complicated. Yeah, I know.”
She sighs and rolls her eyes. “Look, let’s forget all this stuff. I just came by to see if you wanted to go get some hot chocolate with me. Want to?”
Alex isn’t working today—I already checked—but… “Yeah, sure. Why not?” I turn toward the shelves. “Hey, Adele? I’m going out for a minute.”
“Okay,” her voice answers faintly from the back. “Hi, Hannah!”
“Hi, Adele!” she calls back.
We head out and cross the street to Coffee Oasis.
“This weather…” Hannah closes her eyes and tips her face to the sky. Her light brown hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes explode with gold when the sun hits them. She’s almost glittering; it’s startling, the way it transforms her. She’s beautiful. “I’m going to miss it when the snow starts.”
I clear my throat and force myself to look away. “Me, too.”
Alex isn’t working, but Marc is, and I know him a little. Oasis is quiet, so he chats us up as he makes our hot chocolates.
“So what are you guys up to today?”
“Oh, I’m working at Prometheus. Hannah just stopped in to visit.”
“You go to Arlington State, Hannah?”
“Yeah, this is my first year. You?”
“Now and then.” Marc smirks. He’s been a part-time student for nearly a decade—if you can call auditing one class a year part-time. The rest of the time he scrapes by working at the Oasis and selling weed. The girls seem to find him charming. I don’t get it. “Whipped cream on these?”
“Umm…” Hannah hesitates. “I’m not sure.”
Marc grins at her over his shoulder. “Oh, come on. Indulge a little.” I scowl at him— He’s looking at her like she’s the whipped cream. What an asshole.
But I need to relax. Hannah isn’t my girlfriend, and this isn’t a date.
She laughs and nods. “Okay, sure. Whipped cream.”
“Thatta girl.” He piles it on thick, like his bullshit. I’m glaring at his back, but the fucker is oblivious. I mean, come on, Hannah’s cute, but she’s also way too young and sweet for a washed-up burnout like Marc.
“Okay, two hot chocolates. Six fifty.”
“I got this.” I pull out my wallet without thinking. It feels like one-upping Marc, somehow, but I doubt anyone notices.
“Thanks.” Hannah sips hers and looks at me over the rim of the cup. Her eyelashes are so long they cast little feathery shadows across the tops of her cheekbones. I take a long sip of my hot chocolate before I say something inexplicably stupid.
Mistake. It’s piping hot and burns my tongue. While I’m breathing in and out, trying to cool the burn, Hannah chuckles.
“You have whipped cream on your lip.”
I swipe at my upper lip, the obvious culprit, but she shakes her head.
“No, here.” She reaches out and slides her thumb against the corner of my mouth. Her finger is soft and warm on my lips, then on my cheek as she drags her hand away. My skin tingles long after she stops touching me.
�
�Got it,” she murmurs, and then she slips her thumb, slicked with whipped cream, into her mouth. Something flips over in my stomach as her pink lips curve around her finger. I’ve just wandered into someplace dangerous.
“I should get back to the store.”
“Oh. Sure,” Hannah says. “I have class in half an hour. I better get going. I’ll call you later, once I know if Joe comes back.”
“Joe?”
Hannah rolls her eyes. “The book, silly.”
Right. The book. I almost forgot.
Chapter Eight
Hannah
“Adele, this book— It just killed me.”
“I knew it would.” Adele laughs. “In a good way.”
I clutch my chest. “Good, yes. But I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.”
“A good book will do that to you.”
Last week, after I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Adele got frustrated when Ben took too long to decide on the next book I should read. So she shoved The Poisonwood Bible into my hands and sent me out the door.
She was so right. Talk about a shift in perspective. Even better, Ben had never read it, so we went through it together this week and talked for ages on the phone every night. He loved the book, but I don’t think he was moved the way I was. Maybe he’s just seen more of the world than I have.
“So, Africa,” I say to Adele. “I feel like I could spend the rest of my life just reading about Africa.”
“There are other books,” Ben protests from behind the counter. “I have some ideas about your next read.”
“Of course you do, sweetie.” Adele pats his hand consolingly. “But Hannah’s got to get her feelings out about this one first.”
Ben frowns and Adele laughs.
“Let the girl like her book, Ben.” That girl, Alex, from the coffee shop across the street is spending her break in the store. She’s leaning on the counter, flipping through a magazine, and occasionally contributing to the conversation happening around her.
Ben frowns but he doesn’t say anything.
“There is no place on earth like Africa,” Adele says. “I was there, you know.”
“You were?”
She nods, and her eyes fill with tears. “In seventy-one, with the Peace Corps. We were in Zambia, not the Congo, like they were in the book. But the people… Oh, they laughed at us at first. And we did plenty to earn that laughter. But once they understood we really wanted to help, and once we understood there are lots of ways to help outside of training stipulations, they treated us like family. We did a lot of good. It broke my heart to leave. I felt like I was leaving part of myself behind.”
“Why don’t you go back?” I ask.
“I loved it, but it wasn’t easy. And I’m too old now. That’s a young person’s life. That’s an adventure for someone like you.”
I blink. “Me? Oh, no, I could never do something like that.”
Adele draws herself up and fixes me with her steady stare. “Why not? I wasn’t much older than you when I went.”
“I just never—I’m not…” How do I explain I’m not that girl? I’m the girl who can carefully monitor chemical compounds in a sterile lab, or track complex data across multiple spreadsheets. I’m not the girl who hikes into the African wilderness, joins a village, and changes the world.
Unless… Maybe I could be? I’d never even thought about it. I mean, I should have been amazing at chemistry, so who knows? Maybe the reverse is true, too. I might be great at things I should suck at.
“You can do anything you set your mind to, Hannah,” Adele says. “Here, give this one a try next.”
She passes me a book also set in Africa called Things Fall Apart.
“Thanks, Adele.”
“But I already picked out your book for this week,” Ben protests.
“Hold that thought, Ben.” Adele smiles and hands me yet another book. “And if you want to see a little more about Africa, take a look at this book about the Bang Bang Club.”
“The what club?”
“It was a group of photojournalists working in South Africa during Apartheid.”
“Ooh, I saw a movie about them,” Alex chimes in. “Lots of cute guys.”
There aren’t any cute guys in this book, but I spend twenty minutes lost in it just the same. It’s another world, like nothing I’ve ever experienced. All I know of the world outside of Ohio is what I see on the nightly news, and it’s nowhere near enough. There are people and worlds out there I’ve never even glimpsed.
But I want to be a chemist, like my dad. I want to work in a lab, creating medicines that save lives, like my mom’s. That’s making a difference. That’s changing the world. And yet, looking at these photographs of Africa in the nineties… Maybe there are a million ways to make a difference and a million differences that need to be made.
Could I make a difference outside of a lab? It’s a question I’ve never asked myself.
“These are amazing,” I murmur. “Chilling, but amazing.”
“If you like photojournalism, you should look at this one, too.” Adele deposits another book in my lap.
I didn’t know I was into photojournalism, but before I know it, I’m caught up in it. Civil wars in Bosnia, famine in Africa, floods in New Orleans, oppression in North Korea— The litany of human suffering and need goes on and on. Formulating drugs in a laboratory might be a noble calling, but what if it’s not my calling? What would that mean for me? For my dad?
“Have I lost you to Adele’s social causes forever?” Ben stands next to us with a wry smile, hands shoved in his back pockets.
“No, it’s just…these pictures.”
“Let her expand her mind if she wants to,” Adele says.
“She’s been reading my books for weeks. I think that’s pretty mind-expanding.”
I touch Ben’s arm to get his attention. “I’m not throwing over reading. I just got caught up in these pictures. I can’t stop thinking about them. And I can’t stop thinking about The Poisonwood Bible. And The Book Thief. And Owen. And Joe and Sam. What have you done to me?”
Ben smiles, and my heart thuds helplessly in my chest. “Whatever it is, I hope it’s just the start. So I know Adele just gave you a book, but how would you feel about reading something just because it’s funny?”
“That sounds great. What do you have in mind?”
“Something really good, but you have to read this one with me.”
“We read all of them together. I call you almost every night.”
“Oh, no, I think this requires pizza and reading out loud,” he says with a chuckle. “You busy tonight?”
Something flutters in my stomach, and my pulse races. I think I might have just died and gone to heaven because unless I’m totally misreading this, Ben wants to hang out tonight. Together. Like a date. This is a date, right? I have to fight to keep my smile to normal human levels. “I guess I’m busy now.”
“Hey, Alex, you want to come?” he asks, and something inside me curls up and dies. I’d forgotten Alex was here, but Ben didn’t. Why is he inviting her? Is this not a date? She glances up, surprised, and shakes her head.
“Oh, no thanks. I have a thing. You guys go and have fun. Sounds like Ben has something good picked out, Hannah.”
And she’s so damn nice about it that I can’t even be annoyed. She’s all but winking at me, telling me to go for it. And if I were a little bit braver, I just might.
We’re in my dorm room, we split a pizza an hour ago, and I’m lying back on my bed, propped up by pillows. Ben was lying across the foot of my bed, head and shoulders against the concrete block wall, but now he’s pacing the tiny open space between my bed and Jasmine’s, reading out loud from A Confederacy of Dunces.
“What is this book, Ben?” I’m laughing so hard that my sides hurt and I can barely breathe. Ben’s laughing, too, but desperately trying to get it under control so he can keep reading.
“This is A Confederacy of Dunces. Show
some respect. It won a fucking Pulitzer Prize.”
The best part—the very best part—of reading this book together is that Ben keeps snatching it out of my hands so he can read his favorite parts out loud to me. And he doesn’t just read; he acts them out, with a crazy voice for Ignatius and everything. I’m dying. It’s the most I’ve laughed in forever.
“Come on, Hannah,” he scolds. “Pull it together. God.” He gives an exaggerated eye roll and holds the book up with a flourish. “Listen to this. ‘I am, at the moment, writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.’ Can’t you just feel Ignatius’s soul cry out?”
I double over laughing, and finally Ben gives in, too, falling across my bed and laughing until his eyes tear up. Gasping for air, I pull myself upright and reach for the book, but my hand lands on his hand instead. My fingers curl loosely around his wrist, and I trace the sculptural bones just like I’ve imagined so many times. He’s still lying across my bed, just shy of my feet. He’s so close. I could lean down and—
Our eyes meet, and my whole body flushes with awareness. The air around us is charged, like if we kiss, it’ll spark. I want to find out. His eyes are wide behind his glasses, wary and surprised. And maybe something else. I can’t be the only one feeling this.
Then, quick as a flash, his gaze drops to my mouth and back up to my eyes. I’m not the only one feeling whatever this is. I can’t be. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to make a move, but he could so easily. All he has to do is lean forward. I’ll even meet him halfway. I start leaning slightly, just a hint for him to take—
Jasmine blows into our room with Sean in tow. Sean is enormous, and our tiny dorm room looks like a doll’s house with him standing in the middle of it.
“Oh!” she gasps, her eyes flickering between Ben and me. “I didn’t know you were home. Or had a guest.”
Ben scrambles off my bed so fast you’d think it was on fire. “That’s okay. I was just about to go.” He glances at me, not quite meeting my eyes. “I have to open the store in the morning, so…”
This Book Will Change Your Life Page 5
