The College Obsession Complete Series (Includes BONUS Sequel Novella)

by Daryl Banner

  His eyes pull away suddenly, and I see a flicker of darkness in them. I’ve become so adept at reading the little expressions that play war games across Clayton’s face. The jolt in his eye bothers me.

  “What?” I prompt him, but he doesn’t seem to be paying attention, lost in a thought.

  Kellen and I met during one of the shows my dad was designing in New York. For the first few days that I knew him, I thought he was a member of the chorus. Then I learned he was a lighting intern of sorts, but thought he was shy. When a Friday night rehearsal came to its end and the last stage light was shut off, Kellen kissed me unexpectedly in the dark behind the fold of a curtain where I was sorting props, proving to me how very not shy he was. Then he tried to talk me out of going to the cast party two weeks later where I would then discover how not single he was. It was one of my first lessons in how faithless and fickle city men can be, constantly shopping for the next best thing while gripping their girlfriends so tightly.

  Maybe I have a soured secret or two of my own that I’m not sure I want to expose Clayton to just yet.

  I set my sandwich down, type something into my phone, then give a little wave, drawing his attention back to see the contents of my screen:

  I don’t know why Kellen’s here.

  On Monday I found out that

  Victoria knows who I am

  and now

  I’m afraid between the two of them,

  everyone will find out

  :( :(

  He frowns at the message, then pulls out his own phone and, after cramming the last bite of his first fish fillet, types:

  U’re cute when u’re pissed.

  To that, I glare at him.

  He chuckles, full-mouthed, then puts a reassuring hand on top of mine and gives it a rub. The very next second, he seems to think that the gesture was too much and quickly retracts his hand, swallowing hard before starting on his second sandwich.

  The gesture wasn’t too much. It granted a much-needed warmth to the coldness I’ve felt since leaving the theater.

  But it doesn’t quite ease my uncertainty about our hot-and-cold weekend. I type, then lift my screen:

  Are you going to explain

  Sunday’s silence

  or what?

  His sandwich lowers to the table, a surrender, and his face hardens. He swallows his bite, meets my eyes, then says a couple words too quietly.

  “Louder,” I urge him.

  He leans partway over the table, propped up by his elbows, his arms bulging as he does. “I was a coward,” he murmurs. His lips this much closer to me, I could just lean in as much as he is and kiss him right now. “Been a while since I’ve been with a girl.”

  “Me too,” I mouth.

  His face wrinkles. “You’ve been with a girl?”

  I slap his arm, pushing him away with a laugh. He doesn’t budge, the stone statue that he is.

  “That’s kinda hot,” he teases me.

  “So we’ve both been alone for a while,” I mutter.

  He nods resolutely.

  “And we’re both … kinda scared … of each other?” I suggest, speaking slowly.

  He shrugs, then nods at that, too.

  His shoulders are so big and he looks so delicious in that tight-fitting shirt, the fabric pulling across his chest distractingly. His eyes are alight with interest and his lips … his lips are right fucking there.

  Then he says, “You two dated, didn’t you.”

  It isn’t quite a question, more of an accusation. I press my lips together, unsure if he’s actually asking, or just trying to playfully get a rise out of me again. I smack his arm again, harder than before, and earn a little Clayton-brand smirk of amusement.

  Then I decide, of all things, to torture him. I type into my phone, then shove it right in his face. He has to back away a bit to read it:

  No.

  But he did kiss me.

  I think he wanted to get

  closer to my dad through me.

  I felt used.

  He also had a hot girlfriend

  in the cast

  that I didn’t know about.

  I don’t think very highly of him.

  Clayton’s chest puffs up after reading that, his jaw tightening. An odd look of validation crosses his face. “Thought something was off about him,” he says.

  I smirk. “Yeah? Smelled all the lies and deceit he was drenched in?”

  Clayton takes a sip of his drink, then says, “Truth is, I resent him being …” He swallows, rubs his ear, then finishes, “I resent the fucker being here. I wanted to design the lights for the main stage show. He took that job from me.”

  A shiver of worry reenters my mind as I listen to him. It was first born the moment I recognized Kellen at the theater, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered me so much until just now. My father mentored Kellen like a little lighting-god protégé. Did my father have anything to do with Kellen showing up out of nowhere to design lights for the show?

  And is that connected with “the string” my father pulled in getting me into this Theatre program?

  Am I the reason Clayton’s opportunity was stolen?

  Just like I’m the reason Victoria’s chance at a lead was swiped out from under her ready, able hands?

  Is there anything my arrival here hasn’t ruined?

  “Dessie?”

  I look up, realizing that I’d gone silent. I don’t know if he said anything else, so lost in my own dark hurricane of anxiety that I wasn’t paying attention.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, shaking away my worries. Only time will answer my questions—time and an overdue phone call to my dad. “I resent him, too.”

  A question seems to glimmer in Clayton’s eyes, but he doesn’t ask it, drawing his sandwich back up to his lips to take another mouthful as I watch, a mixture of longing and doubt swimming inside me as I wonder if Clayton’s pieced it together himself. Does he already suspect I have anything to do with Kellen’s arrival?

  He finishes his sandwich and I finish my drink in silence. He smiles at me twice and I return them with a small one of my own, studying my phone and trying to think about the routine I need to have prepared for my voice class in an hour. Something to do with vowels and combining them with different poses and odd stretches. Ugh, I’m going to fail.

  When we leave the food court a moment later, he stops me at the door, the blinding sun silhouetting his face in an otherworldly, beautiful way.

  Away from the noise of the building and entirely unable to see his face or lips, I only hear him as his voice brushes against my ears. “Do you want to hang out tonight?”

  In contrast, he likely sees my face perfectly lit, the sun painting me in the brightest shade of every color it has to offer. “I have rehearsal.”

  “After rehearsal,” the shadow murmurs.

  “Well …” Squinting against the glaring light, I shrug. “I was invited to the Throng to sing, but …”

  “Sing? They want you to sing again?”

  “I went last night and … the musicians basically invited me back tonight,” I explain. “They want me to sing again, but I don’t think I’m going to go,” I finish with a frown and a shake of my head.

  “Why not? You’re amazing.”

  “You don’t know what I sound like! How do you know?” I spit back playfully, peering into the shadow that’s Clayton. “I don’t think—”

  “I’ll bring the guys,” he says, and I hear a smile in his voice. “We can hang out afterwards if you’re up for it. Everyone should hear you.”

  I smile, despite myself. Clayton at the Throng again so I can sing my song to him, my muse who sets my insides aflame? How can I say no to all of that?

  “Sounds good,” I murmur with a nod.

  Clayton leans a bit to my right, eclipsing the sun and giving me the gift of his beautiful face for one fleeting moment.

  “See you then, Dessie,” he murmurs, the sound of my name through his velvety voice s
ending a tremor of excitement down my body, before we part ways.

  I fly through the vocal performance as if it wasn’t ever a vex on my mind. The class even seems to smile back at me, and the whole world spins as if it were the basketball on the end of some guy’s finger. Clayton’s finger. He’s got my whole world and he’s spinning it.

  I don’t even dread going into rehearsal as much, despite how horrible my first day was. I sit next to Eric and pay attention the whole time, no “sickly waiting for Clayton to answer my text” distracting me the whole four hours.

  And I take Eric’s advice and suck. I suck so hard when I recite my lines. I even chuckle at the irony that, despite our requirement of being off-book for act one, we still have to hold our scripts so that we can write down the blocking and directions we’re given. Really, each time I look at the script to jot down a note, I take the chance to suck up my next line with my eyes, then suck as I recite it.

  Suck Town.

  When we break after two hours for a fifteen, Eric puts an arm around me and says, “You’re sucking really well today.”

  “You too,” I note, since Eric got to finally do his first Simon scene. “Your ‘drunk’ is spot-on. I should know; I’ve seen you at the Throng.”

  “Speaking of, are we still on?”

  “Yep. And,” I add, giving him my playful eyes, “a special someone and his two roommates are coming.”

  That stops Eric dead in his green Converse. “No way.”

  “Way,” I state with a grin. “Very, very way.”

  Eric dances into the men’s bathroom with a howl of excitement as I saunter off to the quiet, unoccupied lobby which, at 8:08pm, is somewhat like a very long, dark dorm room, feeling strangely intimate and safe. I stare out of the tall glass windows at the courtyard, watching students pass under streetlamps as the chill of the AC touches my skin, and I pull out my phone.

  I need to make a call and I’m not sure I really want to make it. Yes, of course I could wait until tomorrow, but I also need to get some answers to my questions. I’m walking on uneven ground until I do.

  I press the phone to my ear, my eyes centering on the back of a bench outside where a pair of lovers are holding each other, the tops of their heads glowing under the pale white streetlamp.

  “Dad?”

  “Dessie, sweetie,” he says, his voice nearly singing with happiness. “How’s your life down there, sweetie? Isn’t Klangburg just charming?”

  “It’s really great, Dad. Thanks so much. I’m really having … I’m really having a time down here,” I finish with a doleful sigh.

  “Sweetie?”

  He hears the doubt, even in my sigh. In complete contrast to my oblivious mother, my dad picks up on every little nuance in my voice; he always has.

  “I’m just … curious …” I start, wondering whether I really, truly want to broach this subject right now, “how exactly I came to … enjoy this time here.”

  My dad doesn’t sidestep around any subject. “All I had to do was call up Marv and tell him what a fine, promising young lady you are,” he discloses at once.

  Marv? “And who’s Marv?”

  “Marv, sweetheart! The Director of the School of Theatre. Haven’t you met him yet? He said he’d see you first thing and make sure you’re taken care of.”

  I feel my head spinning. “The Director himself? Doctor Marvin Thwaite?”

  “That’s the one. Is there a problem?”

  I guess I was a bit naïve to not consider who my father’s contact was. Of course it’d be someone at the top. “I didn’t realize you two knew each other.”

  “We went to college together, sweetie. He’s doing really well for himself, being head of the department and all. Pays to have friends in high places, eh?”

  Presuming you don’t stoop to an all-time low with said high-placed friends. “Dad, why is Kellen here?”

  “Oh, so he’s arrived? I wasn’t sure if it was this week or next. With all our focus on Winona’s show in London, I forget what day of the week it is unless Mia puts the schedule right in front of me.”

  I don’t know who Mia is, whether a secretary or a friend or yet another of my father’s countless budding lighting design interns. “He’s arrived,” I state coolly.

  “At least you’ll have a familiar face down there with you,” he says, meaning well.

  No, I didn’t tell the story to my dad about Kellen Wright’s ill-timed advance on me. Being the selfless (read: spineless) individual I was four years ago, I thought that telling my dad that his twenty-nine-year-old golden boy was making a move on his eighteen-year-old daughter would have put an abrupt and horrible end to the man’s career before it even started. For all my dad knows, Kellen is still the angel he pretends to be. And to be fair, even with eleven years on me, Kellen has a youthful face that make him look far more innocent than he is.

  “Dad,” I say, daring to step on his toes, “did you send Kellen down here … for me?”

  My dad seems to find that amusing, breaths of his chuckling dancing through the phone in tiny bursts of static. “Leave the matchmaking to your sister. I’d never deign to commit such an act.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I mumble.

  “I sent him there as a favor to Marv,” my dad carries on. “You know, to drum up a little media for the school. Ticket sales have been low, interest in the program has decreased, you know how it can be.”

  “He … was part of the deal?” I ask, my pulse rising.

  “What deal?”

  “Marv lets me into his program, and you send him one of your lighting designer minions in exchange? Am I … Am I hearing this right?”

  “Sweetheart, you’re twisting it around.”

  “Do you realize that, in doing this, you just took an opportunity from … from someone else who could have designed lights and actually learned something?”

  “It’s only one show, sweetie, and it’s really for the betterment of the whole department. Imagine, when all the shows sell out and Klangburg gets noticed, receiving more funds from benefactors, which can—”

  “So it’s all about money? Is that it?”

  My heart racing, I’m not even listening to him anymore; I just want to pick a fight. I’m furious that I’m—even indirectly—responsible for Clayton having lost his opportunity.

  “The ‘big picture’ is a lot bigger than you realize, Dessie, and you’re standing too close. It’s better for everyone this way. The school. Its future. Your peers. And you’re enjoying your role in Our Town, aren’t you? Isn’t it what you’ve always wanted?”

  I feel like some princess high up in a stony tower and my father’s handed me a porcelain doll. Was this handed to me? All of it? I didn’t earn my way into this school, fighting hard like Clayton did. For all I know, I didn’t even earn the role I’m playing.

  Oh, god. Did he even arrange that? Does he know Nina too, or did Dr. Thwaite convince her to hand me the lead role, just like I was handed everything else?

  I feel sick.

  “Sweetheart?”

  He’s been talking in my ear, but all I feel is rage. I was naïve not to have considered any of this before. It’s strange, how a call to my dad can make me aware of the pair of rose-tinted glasses I never noticed were balanced on the tip of my nose.

  The lovers on the bench, the ones I’m staring at through the windows, they pull apart and I see the tears in their eyes. In the space of seconds, they’re shouting at each other.

  How quickly things can change.

  “We sent you to Italy,” my dad goes on, “but that slipper didn’t fit. Claudio & Rigby’s was a great opportunity for you, but that ended with an unfortunate exit scene and … regrettable consequences. Did you ever consider the backlash, Dessie? We sent you on countless auditions and you even got to audit those acting workshops at NYU. We—”

  “And so you sent me here,” I say, watching the sweet couple tear each other apart through the glass, “but couldn’t bear for me to have a no
rmal experience like I wanted, so you made sure to package it all up nice and pretty, dust it with promises of success and a handshake, and let your daughter believe in the lie.”

  “Dessie …”

  “I have to get back to rehearsal, Dad.” My voice is heavy and broken. “You know, to rehearse that role I don’t really deserve.”

  “You deserve the world, sweetheart.”

  I hang up, clenching the phone as tightly as I am my jaw. The lovers outside walk away, and so do I.

  The rest of the rehearsal is considerably less pleasant, and when Eric asks me what’s wrong, that’s when I engage in my first true bit of acting, putting on a light smile and convincing him that I’m totally fine and can’t wait to sing my heart out. And for the first time in any rehearsal in my life, a person is actually convinced by my performance; Eric grins, squeezes my shoulder, and advises me to “up the sexy-sexy” in my song tonight. “Get Clay-boy all hot and bothered.”

  And until I’m up on that stage and singing, I’ll sit here and hug my knees to my chest, leaning against the wall and waiting patiently for the storm of my father’s words to clear.

  Chapter 19

  Clayton

  I wanted to sit in the back where I usually do, but Brant thought it’d be a better idea to sit up close so we can really see her. Surrounded on all sides by other college dudes makes me nervous. I constantly check over my shoulders to make sure nothing weird is happening.

  Dmitri’s on the other side of the tall table we’re all sitting around and he’s signing to me what he’s saying as he tells Brant about his latest short story, which involves a video game that fulfills any sexual fantasy the player has, and the player in Dmitri’s story turns out to have sick, crazy-extreme interests that basically turns the video game into a murderous monster.

  Meanwhile, I’m having fun negotiating with a fucking barstool. It’s one of those tall seat-like ones where I don’t know whether to sit in it or lean on it.

  Brant hits my shoulder, then points. I turn to find three people coming in through the doors. Eric, who I met last year but never got to know, leads the trio with Chloe at his side, who looks like the scary byproduct of a raven, Death itself, and an extra from some unreleased Tim Burton flick, if I had to guess.