“You make me miserable.”
“And that makes me happy.
I stop then, glaring at him, and he matches it. He cocks his head to the side, winks at me. “Aww I’m sorry, did I hurt your precious little feelings? I can go easier on you next time, if you want.”
I step toward him. “I was actually going to say I need a new enemy because you are too easy to beat.”
“Is that so?”
“It is.”
He yawns loudly, making sure I can hear it, and I just glare at him. We’re in each other’s face now, his jaw in front of mine, his face hard and determined. Our bodies feel on fire this close together, and suddenly all I want is to keep insulting and insulting him, because it makes everything feel right in the world again. I breathe slowly in and out, my eyes locked on his, my heart pounding in the best way possible. Cute try, Logan, I think, the resentment rolling off my tongue.
“So are you going to tell me why you’re here?” I fall into place against the side of this building. His arm rests beside mine, so close we’re practically touching, and I convince myself that the whole world will explode if his skin ever comes in contact with mine.
I lock eyes with him, and he gives me an innocent smile. “Can’t a guy just lean against a random building without a reason?”
“Nope. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is always reason.”
“Fine. You caught me. The truth is,” he says in a way that is both sweet and cold at the same time, and I seriously have to commend him on how awesomely intimidating it sounds. He moves his face closer to mine. “I have a crush on you,” he breathes. “Always have.”
I laugh at the ridiculousness of the idea. “Good, because I’ve always thought you were so hot with your nerd glasses and…”--I motion in his general direction, making the disgust clear as day--”whatever shirt you’re wearing.” It is seriously hard to compliment him, I realize, even if I’m just pretending.
He shrugs. “It’s all part of the college boy charm.” He flashes me a crooked smile.
“You’re pathetic,” I say.
“And I hate you with all of my heart.”
“So we finally agree on something.”
“That we do.”
A few students I recognize from my group but don’t know by name pass by us and wave at me, giggling like total idiots, and I just nod at them.
“So that was your best excuse for why you were here, waiting for me?” I say as soon as they leave, and it feels oddly relaxing to stand so close to Logan. I blame it on the contrast between him and Creeper Boy, because otherwise, if I hadn’t been so scared, Logan would disgust me just as much as the guy did.
He would.
I know he would.
“I can do much, much better. But I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I know how fragile you are,” he says, brushing my hair in an attempt to patronize me, so I shove him away. Hard.
“You have no morals. You deserve to rot in hell.”
Logan raises his eyebrow. “Sure, two years after the same fate becomes of you. And what’s so weird about me not telling you why I’m here?” he adds. “I can have secrets too.”
“No you can’t. You’re too”--I make a sweeping motion in front of his face--”…you,” I finally say.” You’re too you for secrets.”
He just looks amused. “I’m too me?”
“You’re too you,” I agree, nodding. But, I mean, it’s Logan for god sakes. The guy who spends his Saturday nights reading textbooks, the guy who critiques TV shows as everyone watches it, the guy who stays late at classes every day just to get on the professor’s good side.
He pushes himself off of the building so that he is facing me now, his body in front of mine, blocking the sunlight streaming down from above. He reaches out to me, and for a second, for one, long second, I think he’s going to touch me. I think he’s going to brush his hand to my arm, his skin to my skin, and I think he’s going to lean in toward me. But then he pulls back and I realize it was just part of my screwed-up imagination, and I wince, because how the hell could I think Logan Waters was going to touch me like… that? God, just the fact that he forces me to think it makes me hate him even more. Like, really really really hate him.
“Cali,” he says after a minute, “I may be a nerd, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have secret problems of my own.” He pauses. “It’s like how sometimes in math when you try to solve an equation and it ends up not working out immediately because there’s more to it than meets eye,” he continues, and I know I’ve triggered another Logan Tangent, “…and so I’m like an equation because you can never tell whether I’m simple or whether there’s a lot more to me you have to figure out and so you’re being stupid by assuming and you have to pay closer attention you asshole and--”
I raise an eyebrow. “Logan?” I say, cutting him off.
He pauses, takes a breath. “Yeah?”
“Please shut up.”
I can see him working not to blush, and I can’t help but let it amuse me. Reason three billion to hate Logan Waters: he rambles. A lot.
“So you’re trying to tell me that you--you--have secrets?” I could seriously laugh.
He nods.
“Like what?”
“If I told you, they wouldn’t be secrets, now would they?” he retorts.
I roll my eyes. This is all just a joke, right? Logan--freaking mega-geek Logan--does not have secrets. There is no way. He’s a pretty badass liar, though, I’ll give him that, because I’m seriously believing him right now. “Fair enough,” I say, purely to amuse myself.
A minute passes. Logan is still in front of me, watching me with those deep blue eyes of his, and I have to bite my lip to keep from insulting him some more. I run my hand through my hair instead, and I’m about to turn away and walk right back to my apartment when I notice that Logan’s eyes are locked on my arm. We’re still so close, and I can feel the tension in his body, the slight arch of his chest, the way his hands are hovering just by my side. “Cali,” Logan says quietly, “I know this is none of my business, but should I be concerned?” It takes me a minute to realize he’s talking about the bruise on my arm that Creeper Boy left. I flinch almost immediately and step back from him, but the genuine concern in Logan’s eyes almost makes me regret it. Almost.
“It’s nothing,” I say, and when he opens his mouth to argue, I just shake my head. He doesn’t press me.
We’re silent for a few minutes after that. I breathe in slowly, doing my best to look away from him, to stop wondering why he of all people seems to care about what happened to me. A breeze whistles past us, ruffling my hair, and I just sigh.
“Do you ever miss him?” I say after a while, eyes on my feet. The question comes out of nowhere, and it rolls off my tongue before I can stop it. But I know what it means and so does he, because I think we’ve both been thinking about it a lot since our rivalry began.
Logan pauses, shifts on his feet. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “I miss him a lot.”
“Me too,” I say. The distant burn of guilt returns, but I try to ignore it. “I wish we could know why it happened.”
Logan flinches as soon as the words leave my mouth. “Maybe, someday, we will,” he says. His voice is quiet and sad, and it almost makes me think he knows more about Ben’s death than he is letting on.
But before I have time to ask anything more, he starts walking away from me, until he turns the corner and disappears out of sight.
~
I DON’T think the confusion leaves me for a second as I make my way up the stairs to my room. Yeah, I’ve had weird conversations with Logan before, but this one takes the cake. We’ve never talked about Ben before, especially not in such a heartfelt way, and it feels inexplicably relieving to have admitted to him just how much I miss Ben. A part of me wonders if Logan feels guilty too, if he blames me as much as I blame him--he sure has reason to--and I wonder if I’ll ever get past what happened. But I don’t even know why it h
appened, and that’s the worst part: that I don’t have closure.
That I won’t ever have closure.
But then I think about what Logan said, and I can’t help but wonder… if he knows something I don’t.
I shake my head, pushing the thought away as I step onto my floor. Of course Logan doesn’t know why it happened. That’s ridiculous to think. No one knows why it happened. But I still wish I could know, wish I could find a way to forgive myself for not doing anything to stop what happened.
Sighing, I reach the door to my room, and the same loud rock music is playing inside. I roll my eyes. Ruby again. The beat has already started pulsing through me, seeping under the doorway and through the walls as I turn the knob. I start to step inside, to act normal and ask how her day was or whatever, when I nearly fall flat on my face.
Because the whole floor is filled with plastic cups.
Hundreds of plastic cups.
All in a line, all filled to the top with lemonade, all right in front of me.
I hold my breath, gasp, and nearly have a heart attack as I look around the room. There is not an inch of actual floor not covered by cups.
And then, immediately, I know who is behind this. My face flushes. Logan.
That bastard is so in for it.
I jerk my gaze around the room, looking for a way to step inside but finding none that doesn’t end in me tripping and falling into a pile of lemonade. Shit. Logan really outdid himself this time. I can’t even step inside my own room.
“Ruby?” I call, because I can still here her music on.
“Yeah?” she says back, calm as ever, like she doesn’t even notice the hundreds of filled lemonade cups covering our room. I peer around and see her lying on her bed.
“Was Logan here?”
She pauses. “Yeah.” Still no emotion.
I strain to get a good look at her face but it doesn’t help. “And you let him… do all this?” She is really not the best protector when it comes to my things.
“Pretty much,” she says like it’s nothing, but I can sense the smile behind her voice. She finds this whole thing funny. Of course she does.
I raise an eyebrow, trying to be angry at her but failing miserably. Unlike Logan, Ruby is difficult to hate. “…Why?” I manage to say.
“I’ve never claimed to have morals. Plus, your little rivalry entertains me.” She pauses and I know it’s to hide the amusement in her voice. “He left you a note in the doorway,” she adds after a minute.
Immediately, I glance down at my feet, and sure enough, I find a small piece of scrap paper lying there. I pick it up, recognizing Logan’s handwriting as soon as I see it. As I read the note, I wish like hell he were still here so I could kick him in the balls. “Just my friendly reminder that I hope you get abducted by witches and boiled into soup. Oh, and I hate you. -L”
I toss the note back to the ground immediately, hating that I find it kind of amusing, and I already start wondering what I’ll do to Logan in return for all of this. It will be bad--it has to be bad. I promise myself I’ll scare the crap out of him, so much that he won’t even know what hit him. But first, for the matter of figuring out how to get inside my own room.
The task is, unfortunately, much more difficult than it looks. If I take a step forward, I’m almost sure to trip on one of the cups and fall face-first into the hundred others and considering they’re filled with lemonade, the only place that will get me is possibly blinded and bathed in stickiness. Theoretically, I could pick each cup up one by one, but I’m really not in the mood for that.
I glance back up at Ruby, even though it’s only her feet I can see. “Any ideas for how I can get in?” I say, trying to make my voice sound as annoyed as possible.
“I’m going to leave this one to you. So basically, you’re screwed,” she says. Then, Ruby pops something into her mouth--popcorn, it sounds like. Ugh. I’m trapped outside of my room and she’s not only failing to help me, but she’s also eating popcorn. That evil, evil girl.
“Does this mean you give me permission to do whatever I want to get into our room?” I call from the doorway.
“Sure,” Ruby says, popping another piece of popcorn into her mouth. “Surprise me.”
I glance around at the legion of cups covering the floor in front of me and I sigh. It’s a good thing I’m not in a problem-solving mood today because I only see one solution to this problem and it’s not going to be pretty.
So with a deep breath, I stare down each and every cup, open and close my eyes, and then I swing my foot forward.
And kick the first ten in front of me to the ground.
Lemonade spills everywhere, flying at the walls, at my face, and soaking the rug as I kick the cups over. A small ring of actual floor forms in front of me where the cups were, and I take a step into it and keep on kicking around me. I kick and kick and cup after cup goes flying, lemonade spewing everywhere, and Ruby just watches me from her bed, eating popcorn like I’m some sort of crappy reality TV show, which, to be fair, I kind of am. I keep kicking my way through until almost the entire room is cleared, until my legs get sore and the walls are covered with lemonade spatter. Finally, after five minutes of cup-kicking, I tunnel my way to my bed. I collapse on the edge of my mattress, totally exhausted.
Freaking Logan.
“Wow,” Ruby says. She stops chewing to look at me. She’s wide-eyed but not angry. No--Ruby looks at me with total admiration. Here we are, our room covered with smashed plastic cups, our rugs and walls soaked with lemonade, and she’s looking at me with admiration.
This is why I like her.
“That was badass,” she continues. “I bet Logan would be totally turned on if he saw that.”
“Oh shut up,” I say. I hate that I almost smile.
I lie down on my bed, panting an embarrassing amount, and I lick the lemonade off of my lips. My shoes are still soaked from the liquid, and I promise myself I will force Ruby to help me clean up the mess as soon as I regain some energy.
Ruby and I just lie there for a while on our separate beds, listening to her rock music and letting all other thoughts disappear. It’s kind of nice, to be here with her, to not have to worry about her judgment. It’s something friends would do, like Ruby is actually… a friend. Of mine. Like I have a real, honest-to-god friend.
I feel a small smile curl across my lips at the thought. Of course, I doubt she really cares about me all that much, but it’s nice to pretend, to imagine, to hope.
“Have you thought about that convention?” Ruby asks after a while, once the silence has dragged on long enough. We’re both looking up at the ceiling still.
“Sort of,” I say.
“And?”
“I don’t really think I want to go.” The distant smell of barbecue smoke wafts into our room. I breathe it in, sighing because it reminds me of those normal-ish times before college when we lived in LA, when my parents and Ben and Logan and I hung out a lot and genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. We used to have family cookouts every Sunday night and invite Logan, because he was pretty much adopted into our family at that point. It was a tradition we had, and we just sat there and laughed and talked and ate and sometimes even danced. It was nice. Fun. Happy.
I miss those carefree times.
“It can’t hurt to go, right? And you love poetry. I know you and I know you need to get out. Just try it! Worst case scenario, you bitch to freakish poetry nerd boys. Best case, you get laid by some hot poetry professor.”
I laugh. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re insanely shallow?” The truth is, though, Ruby is anything but shallow, and I can tell that much. She just pretends not to care, pretends to only judge skin-deep, but I know just from talking to her that she sees so much more. She doesn’t show it for whatever reason, and I guess in a way, that’s like me. We’re both excellent pretenders. We both act like we don’t care, even when we do.
Sometimes I wonder if Ruby realizes I pretend, too.
Ru
by laughs with me, popping another piece of popcorn into her mouth. “What? Do you want me to be like a mom to you then?”
“Oh god please no.”
“Thought so.” There’s a pause. “You’re sure you don’t want to go to the conference?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
She nods. “Well, I won’t force you to go with me if you don’t want to, but maybe you should ask Logan to take you there instead.” She says his name like this is sixth grade and we’re giggling about the cutest boy in school. I narrow my eyes at her. God, Ruby seriously has no shame.
“That is the worst idea in the history of the world,” I say.
“Maybe, but I am so making it happen. You need to be kept on your toes,” she adds.
I make a face but don’t dare elaborate.
After a while the conversation changes to what’s up with her and Jaden, and as it turns out, they have not limited their hooking up to just yesterday. Which is surprising. Because Ruby never stays with a guy for more than a day.
I realize pretty quickly that their relationship may be more than just a means to annoy me.
We talk about food and TV shows and boys for a while longer until Ruby leaves for stat class, which she takes with Logan, promising to return to annoy me as soon as she can. I just roll my eyes. When she’s gone, I pull out my computer--one of those old PCs that no one but me ever uses or even knows exists--and immediately click over to my favorite poetry blog, the one I keep a secret from everyone, even Ruby.
I scroll through a few of the new blog posts from today, take a deep breath, and let the words wash over me. This blog, known simply as Two Roads after the Robert Frost poem, is my me space. It’s where I go when I need to get away, something that has occurred quite often in these last several months. The blog is run by an anonymous user who posts completely original love poems several times a day, and she is already tied with Robert Frost as my favorite poet ever. I don’t know how old this person is, or what she is like, or even whether her poems are fact or fictional, but it doesn’t matter. Whenever I read her poems, I have this weird feeling that I know her or at least that I’m meant to. As she calls herself in her bio in the corner of the blog, she’s a “poetry aficionado”--me--as well as an “undercover introvert”--me--and “words are the only way she can escape”--me. Sometimes I wonder if we are the same person and I’m like one of those freaks in movies who lives a second life but doesn’t remember any of it when I wake up the next morning.
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