by Claire Adams
The girl grabbed the food she wanted and broke away from Zack, and I spotted my chance. He was getting out of the line too, moving to grab a drink before he went into the dining area proper. His tray was loaded down and he had to set it on the ledge to fill his cup. No one could accuse me of cutting the line with nothing but a spoon in my hands. I walked over to Zack and called out his name, trying to keep my tone as neutral as possible. Zack looked up and his eyes widened in recognition—but no sign of guilt or shame.
“Hey, what’s up?” I asked him. I couldn’t keep my anger out of my voice and I knew it; I was feeling it too strongly.
“What do you mean, what’s up?” Zack filled his cup and put it on his tray. I took a deep breath as quietly as possible.
“I mean, who’s that? And why was your arm all around her like that?”
Zack shrugged, looking at me as if I was crazy. “It’s just a friend of mine,” he said, starting to look around. I knew we were on the edge of creating a scene, but I didn’t care in the moment.
“Just a friend? Come on, Zack, I’m not an idiot.” I crossed my arms over my chest, gripping the spoon tightly. I swallowed against the lump that was forming in my throat, glancing around quickly. The people closest to us were watching avidly. I heard someone say to a friend that it was another blow up with Zack, and my face burned.
“She’s just a friend, Evie—come on! We have a philosophy class together.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t see why you’re acting like some kind of jealous bitch.”
I inhaled sharply. “Jealous bitch?”
“Jealous girlfriend, do you like that better?”
I clenched my teeth. “What do you mean, you can’t see why I’m acting jealous?”
Zack looked around and a haughty look came over his face.
“I mean, it’s not like there’s anything between us. It was just sex, Evie—no big deal.” The words hit me like ice water. In my mind I heard Zack’s drunken frat brother saying he’d found his piece of ass. I hadn’t exactly sought him out to talk to him about what had happened, but Zack and I had history; it wasn’t like we were strangers who had hooked up. I had dated him for two years before he had gone off to college—I had lost my virginity to him.
“Just sex? Just sex?” I shook my head. My anger was mounting, I felt it getting hotter and hotter inside of me. In spite of how hungry I had been when I first came into the dining hall, my stomach was roiling now—the smell of food all around me made me feel a little nauseated. Zack shrugged. I looked around; we were the subject of intense interest in the serving area, and I caught a few people laughing, some others smiling at the spectacle. My face burned hotter. Without even thinking about it, I grabbed the cup off of Zack’s tray. I threw the contents into his face and let the cup drop back onto the tray before I snatched up a piece of cake he had grabbed from the dessert station, dripping with icing. I threw that in his face too, wanting to scream. Instead I turned on my heel and charged through the entryway into the dining area as everyone in the serving area started to laugh at Zack. I grabbed up my books and didn’t even bother with my tray; I normally tried to be considerate of the people who worked in the dining hall, but I was so angry—so humiliated—that I didn’t care. I got out of the dining hall quickly as I could and didn’t even look back as I walked as fast as my legs would move back to the dorms.
SLAMMED #2
CHAPTER ONE
I told myself that I shouldn’t be surprised. Just because Zack had been my first, real boyfriend, and I had lost my virginity to him, didn’t make him any different from any other guy. I curled up on the dorm room couch, watching TV instead of studying, alternating between wanting to cry and wanting to track Zack down again and scream in his face. I wished—useless as it was—that my mom was around, that I could call her and tell her how awful I felt. The thought of my mom plunged me into a deeper sadness; I missed her. I had thought I was finished grieving for her loss after a year, but every time something big happened in my life—when I graduated, when I moved into the dorms, and now, the situation with Zack—I thought about her, and wondered what she would say.
“Sweetie, some guys are just jerks.”
Mom had told me that more than once when I’d come to her—after Zack and I had broken up and I had started dating other guys; guys who hadn’t been as loveable as Zack had been when we were both in high school. I could hear her voice in my head telling me that; I could feel her weak hand stroking my hair.
“You shouldn’t take any guy too seriously until he’s proven he’s worth your time.”
My eyes stung and burned and I buried my face against a throw pillow, sniffling. I had thought that Zack had proven he was worth my time in high school; I had never thought he’d turn out to be like the other guys I had dated. I tried to think back to what he had been like. When mom had first started getting sick, he’d seemed so supportive—showing up in the middle of the night to comfort me, or grabbing my lunch from the cafeteria so I could spend the whole break studying to make up for what I hadn’t been able to do during mom’s appointments.
It was hard not to think about the last, bad months of my mom’s fight with cancer whenever I tried to think of her advice. It had been horrifying for her, I knew; she had lost her hair and she thought she was hideous. As she wasted away, I had frantically tried to tear myself in two, to do twice the living—rushing through my assignments so I could spend just a few more minutes with her. She had been so strong right up until the end, she had kept giving me advice and love, and I had felt so incredibly helpless as Dad and I watched her not get better but instead get worse. I had missed Zack, but in the face of my mom’s declining health and long descent into death, it seemed not to matter at all. My mom had always been my biggest cheerleader, the person I could turn to with anything—and the biggest problem in my life, that she was dying, gave me no one to talk to about it. I couldn’t tell her how horrible I felt, how much pain it gave me to see her hurting, fighting and struggling against the disease that would claim her life—it wouldn’t be fair to her. She was dealing with so much already.
I knew that she was worried about how I was taking the breakup with Zack, but I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to her about that—it seemed so trivial in comparison. I put a cheerful face on and tried to stay as positive as possible whenever I was in the room with her, telling her about how my English teacher wanted me to try publishing some of the stories I’d written, and how the high school newspaper had featured me in the Superlatives section as Most Likely to Win a Pulitzer. I sneaked her favorite foods into the hospital in spite of the rules against it, even though she had almost no appetite. She managed to eat a few bites here and there, and I would devour the snacks with her more to keep her from feeling guilty for not being able to eat than because I wanted them.
“Sweetheart, you have a kind and loving heart,” she told me once, close to the end. “It’s a good companion for your active brain. Let them work together—don’t ever let one take over completely. Use your sense and use your compassion. I know you’re going to have a good life, and I’ll be watching you always.”
Normally the show on the TV would have completely taken up my attention, but as I lay there on the couch, I found myself thinking more and more about Zack. Had he really changed, or had he always been a jerk? It was hard for me to say. The guys I had dated after Zack and I broke up had made me start to largely distrust men in general; Mom’s advice to me whenever I would come to her depressed or frustrated with someone I was dating had made me think that I just shouldn’t trust any guy I hadn’t already vetted, who I didn’t already have experience with. But I had experience with Zack. He was nothing like Braden, the guy I’d dated a couple of weeks after Zack and I had broken up, who had just been using me to get to my friend Lisa—and who had called me a frigid bitch when I wouldn’t “put out.” He wasn’t anything like Tony either; Tony had been dating a girl at another school the entire time we saw each other, and I didn’t find out until someo
ne told me they had seen him at the other school’s dance.
Zack had been so sweet when we had been together in high school. Even the first time we had had sex, he had been so careful, so gentle, making sure that I was ready for it, making sure that there wasn’t too much pain. I didn’t even bleed—we’d made out and teased each other until I was soaking wet. The fact that the sex itself had been a little disappointing had nothing to do with Zack being a bad guy; I’d kept having sex with him after that not because of any pressure from him, but because I kept hoping that we’d have that magic moment when everything came together and it felt amazing, the way I’d read about in books that I kept hidden from my parents. It didn’t become that way, but at least Zack had never tried to force me; and to the best of my knowledge, he’d never cheated on me.
The sex I’d had with him the other night was totally different. I felt myself burning up from the inside as I remembered it—how good Zack had been at touching me, at getting me off. How good he had felt inside of me. It had been like night and day compared to our high school years, and I had to assume that the reason why he was so much better at sex was that he had been with other women in between. Had he broken up with me purely so he’d be free to sleep around? I wanted to know and dreaded the possibility at the same time. I wavered between wanting to be mad at him again for possibly breaking up with me right before I would have to deal with the most difficult thing in my life—losing my mom—and thinking about how incredibly hot our tryst together had been.
“It was just sex,” I heard him saying in my mind, blowing me off as if we had no history, as if I was just another freshman girl who’d gone to a party and ended up with him in bed. I heard his frat brother in my mind referring to me as Zack’s “piece of ass” for the night.
I writhed and squirmed on the couch, thinking that my reaction had painted me firmly as the naïve freshman girl who thought that sleeping with someone meant something—the insecure, hyper-sensitive girl who was probably a virgin. I wanted to go back to the dining hall and tell everyone who had seen me dumping Zack’s food on him that I wasn’t a virgin—that I wasn’t naïve, or a dumb, freshman girl. That the reason I had thought it meant something was that Zack and I had a history. But that would only make it worse. I buried my face in the throw pillow and groaned, picking my head up and letting it fall over and over again. It was so stupid to think about Zack. I should have just let it go and never thought of him again.
I had no idea if the girl Zack had been talking to was his girlfriend, or some other girl he was sleeping with, or even just a friend as he claimed. He had seemed pretty close to her; he had seemed comfortable with her. It grated on my nerves that Zack could have had sex with me for the first time since we’d broken up and just consider it regular sex while I was completely and totally hung up on him without even knowing if he was really single.
I heard the dorm room door open and close and looked up to see Jess, her face dancing with amusement, her eyes practically sparkling. “Evie! Baby girl! Is it true what I heard?”
I groaned and sat up. “That depends,” I replied, rubbing at my face to get rid of the last traces of tears I had shed over my own stupidity. “What did you hear?”
Jess laughed and sat down. “I heard you humiliated Zack in the dining hall. Someone said you dumped his lunch over his head.”
My cheeks burned and I buried my face in my hands. “Ugh, please tell me that only a handful of people saw that. I feel like such an idiot for doing it.”
Jess shook her head when I looked up. “It’s all over campus. Trust me, no one thinks you were an idiot—there are some girls who want to elect you class president for it!”
I smiled slightly. So it was true then: Zack had been sleeping around since we broke up, as soon as he got to college.
“Yeah, but I’m sure plenty of people are calling me a naïve freshie who thought a one-night stand actually meant something.”
Jess shrugged. “If there are, who cares about them? I’ve told a few people you and Zack had a history, so it’s going around that he’s the kind of stupid asshole who sleeps with an ex and expects it to mean nothing.”
I chuckled. “As long as he’s the one who’s being called an idiot, I guess that’s okay.” I sighed. I wanted a shower—in spite of the fact that I’d already had one that morning. “I thought I had zero feelings for him. Like—I thought I was completely over the breakup, Jess. I didn’t expect to see him at that party, and I didn’t even think of him when we went to that game.”
Jess shrugged, shaking her head. “That’s the thing with exes. You think you’re over them and then boom! You get blindsided by feelings the next time you see them.” She shook her head again. “But I do have to say, if you had to get involved with an ex, Zack isn’t hard on the eyes. And you said you had a good time.”
I blushed. “He was…much better in bed than I remembered. I guess that’s part of why I sort of…let myself think that there was more to it than just sex.”
“Girlie, there is more to it than just sex, even if Zack doesn’t think so. He had to know it when he got you back to his place. I never saw a guy work harder to convince a girl to take a walk with him.”
I rolled my eyes. “That might be because you never make them work very hard if you’re interested in them, and if you’re not interested, you shut them down early.”
Jess laughed. “It works for me. Look, Evie: don’t think about it too much. You ran into an ex, you screwed him; he turned out to be an ass. It happens. Just take delight in the fact that there are plenty of girls who won’t screw him now.”
I chuckled, but in spite of the fact that I was feeling—at least a little bit—better, I couldn’t quite make myself stop thinking about Zack. Had I been totally wrong about him when we’d been dating as teenagers? And why couldn’t I get him out of my mind now?
CHAPTER TWO
A few days later, after I had gotten over my humiliation, I decided that I was being stupid. I would just put Zack out of my mind completely and plunge back into my studies. I’d get a fresh start and forget that anything had ever happened between us. It was a big enough campus; as long as I didn’t go to any more frat parties, my chances of running into him were not that great. I put him out of my mind completely and told myself that there were plenty of other things that I could fill my time with and enjoy more. The biggest thing on my mind was the first meeting of the campus newspaper; I had read up on all of the threads in the group forum the newspaper used, and familiarized myself with the style guide, just like Professor Grant suggested in class. I expected my first assignment would be a softball—something hard to screw up, that would give them a chance to evaluate my ability to do the work. But that didn’t mean I could slack off on it; I should turn in the absolute best work that I could.
I grabbed a coffee before the meeting and hurried down to the student union so I wouldn’t be late. I’d been to the student U a few times in the weeks I’d been at the college so far but never really paid the building that much attention; there were banners for our football team, of course, and all kinds of things covered in the school colors. Just inside the entrance there were benches and couches scattered around for chatting and relaxing, and artwork by students was on display. I could smell coffee—clearly I wasn’t the only one who needed a lift—and the lingering smells of a party given by the Latin American Club a little earlier in the afternoon. It felt homey and comforting, and I started to relax.
I went into the room that the campus newspaper had taken for its own and sat down; there were the same beat-up couches as in the big room, a couple of desks, a projection screen, and a podium. Professor Grant was already there, as were a few of the members of the editorial board. “Ahh, Evelyn, thanks for getting here early.” Dr. Grant said, looking up from his laptop. “Michelle, Lisa, Alex, Nathan, this is Evelyn. She’s one of my most promising freshmen and I thought you’d like to give her a shot.”
The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Lisa, came ov
er and shook my hand. “Good idea to bring coffee,” she said with a grin. She was a bit shorter than me, with auburn hair and creamy skin, dressed in a kind of fashionable-librarian look that I had to kind of admire. “These meetings end up going on for hours sometimes, people arguing about pitches, trying to campaign to keep a piece in contention.”
“Not that different from a regular newspaper then, I guess,” I said, feeling a little nervous. I had no idea of any ideas to pitch.
“Of course, since you’re new, you won’t be pitching for a few weeks. We’ll give you a few assignments to sort of feel out your aptitude. Every newbie gets to do a rotation of the different areas—so even if you start out in say, politics, you probably won’t be there permanently unless you decide you want to be.”
I nodded. Other members of the newspaper started to file in and I took my seat at the back of the room, wanting to just observe. Since I had no articles to pitch, I didn’t really have a dog in the fight. I opened up my laptop and got ready to take notes, just in case there was anything I needed to remember later.
I quickly got to see what Lisa meant; as the meeting came to order, everyone started putting their ideas forward, arguing for their pitches, for a better position in the finished paper—anything and everything a group of journalists could possibly argue about. I drank down my coffee and listened, taking occasional notes about what people were saying about the paper’s layout and other details. I lost track of time, but it had to be a couple of hours—I was glad that the meeting was after all my classes, and that they’d ordered in pizza, because the dining hall would almost definitely be closed by the time it was over.
“Okay!” Lisa said, taking a deep breath as the arguments came to a close. “Now that we’ve gotten all that out of the way, it’s time for assignments. There’s a fencing tournament that needs at least a little coverage—Simon, you can take that one since you’re friends with someone on the fencing club. There’s also a big event by the Feminist Club; Elizabeth, that one’s all you.” Lisa went through a list and I waited my turn, knowing that I would probably not get a very plum assignment. Finally, Lisa came to the last item. “The football season is coming to a close, so we need to cover the last game. Evelyn, it’s kind of a big one—but I think from what Professor Grant said about your writing that you can cover it. I’ll also need you to get an interview with the QB; everyone’s talking about him. Zack’s his name I think? Have you met him?”
