Finding Dell (21 page)

As we walked through the parking lot to his car, I chatted breezily, hoping to distract from his somber mood. When he turned left, instead of right to the Student Union, I playfully nudged his shoulder.

“Taking the scenic route?”

“Taking you home. I’m not in the mood for lunch.”

“I can pay for it if that’s why you don’t want to go,” I said quietly. Instantly, I knew it was the wrong thing to say.

Cam didn’t respond and we didn’t kiss goodbye when he dropped me off in front of Paso Fino. As I walked up the stairs, I realized there was a new nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach: the realization that told me I didn’t care if Cam broke up with me—that I’d never come close to loving him, after all.

After Cam dropped me off, I barged into Ruby’s room through the bathroom and sat down on her extra bed.

“I think I made a mistake with Cam. He doesn’t seem to like me anymore, let alone care about me the way a boyfriend should.”

Ruby didn’t look up from her desk. “He’s probably just busy with the start of the semester. He’s crazy about you. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“No, something’s off. He’s different. We’re different.”

She turned, her strawberry blond hair glinting in the cold winter sunlight that filtered through the large window.

“Do you think it’s because you slept together?” she asked plainly. “Sex changes everything, Dell.”

“I know. I know that. I . . . the sex was really bad. It was terrible.”

I leaned forward and felt my shoulders slump forward in defeat. Ruby’s eyes widened and she waited for me to continue.

“The first night, with Gus in the room, was awful. Since then, it’s not my imagination that he’s pulling away from me. And now I know that telling him I love him isn’t going to solve anything.”

“But you and Will never slept together, and you had feelings for him for a long time.”

I stood and began to pace the spacious room, picking up one of Ruby’s pillows to flex and fluff.

“I think that’s part of the problem, though. I still have feelings for Will. They never went away.” I tossed the pillow back onto her bed and stopped in the middle of the room, palms out. “I think I might . . . I might love Will, despite everything. Even though we haven’t seen each other since the lights parade, and even though I’m with Cam, and even though that girl was sitting on his lap at Dean’s party.”

Ruby picked up a pen from her desk and pointed it at me. “Dell, you do this every time things go south with a guy. Sometimes you even do it before there’s a chance for things to go wrong—like when you ran to Will the moment you got back from the winter formal, when you needed help with Natalie. You paint Will as the love of your life in your head.”

“But what if he is? Maybe that’s why I can’t let it go. I know I loved him because I don’t hate him, even though he broke my heart.”

Ruby looked into my eyes for a beat and sighed, turning her
head to the window and dropping the pen on her desk.

“Why didn’t you and Will sleep together last spring?”

I moved closer to Ruby, taking a seat on her bed. I replayed the warm, blissful nights that I spent cuddled with Will in his bed. We always slept in his room, his fan whirling and ruffling my hair. In my mind I could still hear Will:
“I want it to mean something, not just happen because we’re bored.”

“I wanted to, but we were waiting. I think we were waiting to say ‘I love you,’ but we never said it in so many words. The last night before we left for summer break, Will said he was ready to sleep together.” I looked down at my hands in my lap and smiled sadly at the memory. “But I got my period earlier in the day so I said we should wait till we got back in the fall.”

Ruby pursed her lips. “Timing is everything.”

What I wanted to tell her, but couldn’t find the words to say, was that it was the way he looked at me that I couldn’t get out of my head. How everyone else looked
at
me, and he looked
in
me. How he made me feel naked, but not in a vulnerable way. Unguarded and real, without explanation, that was how he looked at me. Maybe it wasn’t that I didn’t have the words, but that I wanted to keep them to myself to savor when I needed to know that one person got inside me without ever having sex.

“I’m not ready to give up on Will. And I think Cam is giving up on me.”

I stopped short of telling Ruby my revelation that I didn’t care if my relationship with Cam failed. A loyalty toward Cam kept me from telling her about the tense conversation at the financial aid office. If she found out, I didn’t want her to think I was uninterested in Cam because of his money problems.

I sighed and flopped back on the bed. “Hey, did you decide to join any organizations?”

“I joined student council. I’m going to see how much of a
time commitment that is before I join anything else. You should join one of the art societies, Dell.”

I rolled onto my side. “Maybe next year,” I said noncommittally as I rolled onto my side.

“It was surprising to see that Alex is one of the chairs of the political science honor society. This is going to sound bad, but I didn’t know he was interested in anything related to academics, and I definitely didn’t know he was smart enough to chair an honor society. He keeps surprising me, in a good way.”

“I miss hanging out with him,” I said wistfully. “Everything was so easy with him. He’s always in a good mood, and I never second-guess myself around him. Not like Cam lately.”

Ruby turned her attention back to her computer screen and I watched her shoulders hunch as she typed on the keyboard.

“Do you ever miss Nicholas?”

She lifted her fingers from the keyboard and her shoulders stopped twitching, but she stayed hunched and didn’t turn around.

“No.”

“You never have a little pang, a pang that makes you miss him, if even for a moment? Like when you see something he would have liked, or hear something that would have made him laugh. Those little reminders,” I said. “You and Dean aren’t officially dating yet. Do you ever wish you stayed with Nicholas a little longer if you knew you’d be single waiting for Dean?”

She turned swiveled in her chair but didn’t turn to meet my eyes. Instead, she stared at the curtain bunched in the corner of the window, shaking lightly as the radiator blew hot air on it.

“I don’t like the person I was when I was with Nicholas. He was the center of everything for me. I was only in orbit around him.”

Her words hit me. As much as Natalie suggested that my
selfishness was my downfall, I couldn’t remember the last time that I didn’t place myself in orbit around a man. I couldn’t remember the last time I was at the center of my world, even if I still managed to be self-absorbed, as she said.

“Honestly, the anticipation of seeing Dean is better than being
that
Ruby,” she said. “I don’t miss Nicholas because I don’t miss who I was with him.”

We fell into silence, both transfixed by the rippling curtain. I wondered if I might be a happier Dell if I stopped orbiting and looked forward to something for myself.

CHAPTER 23

PROFESSOR DULCETTE FLICKED
through images of eighteenth-century artists and their work in the dark lecture room in Potter Hall. Beside me, a long-legged boy bent his elbow to prop up his head. Between erratic notes, I scribbled in the margins and waited for the lights to go up and signal the end of class.

“. . . Rococo is the graceful answer to the symmetry of the Baroque.”

Professor Dulcette had a large forehead and dark, shoulder-length hair parted messily down the middle. Now, he ran a hand through his hair as he turned up the lights in the lecture hall. He was young for a professor, but I could imagine him dating a much older woman in his native France.

The lights startled the boy next to me and he pushed a folded copy of the daily campus newspaper off his desk with a surprised brush of his elbow. I bent to pick it up for him and paused to examine a darkly shaded announcement.

I pointed to the paper. “I didn’t know The City Skies were in town this weekend!”

His blank stare told me I could take the newspaper with me. I shoved it into my backpack and wrapped my red scarf tightly around my neck as I headed out of Potter Hall to see Cam.

My feet dangled from Cam’s lofted bed and I kicked them back and forth as I waved the folded newspaper over his head.

Cam was fixing his bicycle on the floor, surrounded by combination wrenches, cable cutters, and hex keys, the sleeves of his sweatshirt rolled up to reveal his hairless forearms. He examined a suspension fork carefully and ignored the fluttering paper above his head.

“Cam, I don’t think you understand. The City Skies rarely tour, and of the few shows they have a year, they’re playing here. In the middle of nowhere, Kentucky,” I said. “We have to go.”

Gus took a noisy bite of an apple and watched Cam from his perch in front of his computer.

“Why are you fixing your bike here? The shop must have so many more tools,” Gus said.

I fanned myself with the paper while I eyed Gus with exasperation. The paper crinkled urgently in my hand, but both boys ignored me.

Cam frowned. “My boss closed up for the weekend. Said he’s using the holiday to visit his brother in Nashville.” He knit his eyebrows together and swiveled on the tile floor as he searched for a tool. “He let me take home some tools, but it’s not ideal.”

I aimed the folded paper like a Frisbee and flung it into Cam’s lap. He swatted the paper from his pants and flashed me an impatient glare like as if I were a misbehaving child.

“You’re ignoring me,” I whined.

“You’re frustrating me,” he replied quickly.

Stunned, I slid from my perch on the bed and grabbed my coat and backpack.

“If I’m such an aggravation to you, I’ll just leave.”

I stormed from the room and when I heard Cam start to say something, I stopped in the doorway, expectant of an apology.

“I think I’m going to need a carbon fork for my bike,” he said to Gus.

On my walk home, I stopped by the lake before entering Wild Mare Point.

Canadian geese perched on the frozen banks. The ice thinned as it crept deeper, and in the center of the lake a weak ripple lapped at the edges of the ice.

I told myself I was outside in the cold to clear my head, but a dangerous idea had been floating in my head since leaving Cam’s room. Now I fed it with nostalgia, like a fire lapping up oxygen.

With a gloved hand, I punched the keys on my phone, and as it rang I knew I was inviting drama into the afternoon.

“Remember when we had the field assignment in our biology lab, and Dr. Richter was so impressed with you he kept telling you that he could see you as a professional herpetologist?”

A rich laugh echoed through the tinny speaker of the phone. The geese flapped their wings loudly, unsettling the plants.

“What can I say,” said Alex, “I’m great at identifying amphibians. It’s an impressive skill.”

I smiled at the sound of his laugh.

“Did you call to talk about biology?” he prodded.

“I called to talk about things that reminded me of you,” I said, a flirtatious, teasing tone entering my voice. “Biology, the lake.” I paused. “Concerts.”

Alex was quiet as he waited for me to continue.

“There’s a concert at the Brass House Theater tomorrow night. Do you want to go with me?”

There it was. The invitation puffed into the cold air.

“Absolutely.”

His single word answer was so finite, so decisive, that I had already made it back to Paso Fino before I realized he didn’t even ask who was playing. That made me smile even more.

The Brass House Theater was remodeled, but it still had ornate gilded crown molding framing the stage. The Roman pillars were wrapped in twinkling strands of lights and tiny candles glowed on each table.

When Alex sneezed, he wiped his nose on his plaid shirt and sniffed loudly.

“I don’t want to get you sick,” Alex said, his drawl muddled by his stuffy nose. “But I didn’t want to miss a concert with you. We had so much fun at that one in Chicago last year.”

“This is a very different crowd from the one at that show,” I said as I looked around the room.

Portraits of jazz musicians lined the walls and older patrons sipped tumblers of brandy and whiskey at the bar. Alex and I sipped glasses of watery Coke filled with rattling ice. The band was setting up on stage now. Road techs adjusted mic stands and every few minutes someone would hit a cymbal with a drumstick to test the sound.

“It’s nice to get away from campus for a night,” Alex said. “Did you know that there’s an abandoned button factory across the street?”

I laughed. “That’s an urban legend! Last week someone told me it was a mitten factory.”

The Brass House Theater was located in the old warehouse district of New Cabell, a neighboring town to Bridlemeade. Alex and I had hiked a mile down Massey Avenue to reach the concert venue.

The lights in the room dimmed and the crowd started to clap. The candle flicked across Alex’s face. His eyes were bloodshot from his cold, but his gray eyes still had a spark in them.

“I called for a cab while you were in the bathroom.”

Alex held my elbow as he led me out of the Brass House Theater onto the street slick with ice. The concert ended and the owner had unceremoniously ushered everyone out of the bar. I yanked my hood over my head to shield myself from the blinding sleet and huddled closer to Alex.

“We can have the cab drop you off at the dorm first if you’d like.” He hesitated. “Or we could watch a movie at my apartment until it clears up.”

I looked up at him. His cheeks were red and his nose was running. Droplets of water clung to his short hair and I noticed it curled up at the ends near his temple; he needed a haircut.

“Maybe just until it clears up,” I said.

The taxi arrived ten minutes later. As we approached it, I stopped abruptly and grabbed Alex’s forearm to keep from falling in the slick street.

“Look!” I breathed. I pointed to the sewer grate. A small cluster of brightly colored buttons gleamed on the dark street.