Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4 (6 page)

On Thursday, Rafi went to his first Spanish class.

He’d been glad to add that one to his schedule, figuring he had a natural advantage. His Spanish wasn’t brilliant, but he could get by, and that had to give him a leg up on an A, right?

It hadn’t taken more than the first fifteen minutes, during which they had to go around the class and introduce themselves by saying three things about themselves in Spanish, for Rafi to realize that wasn’t going to be the case.

Between the nitpicking corrections of the professor, who squinted at him suspiciously through tiny pink-framed eyeglasses, and the pitying looks of the students around him, Rafi knew he was screwed.

“Your Spanish isn’t very good, is it?” The TA, who the professor had said would be running the conversational sessions they were required to attend, stood by Rafi’s chair. A medium-size white guy who ironed his khakis and buttoned his shirt all the way up to the collar. “I was surprised, because of your name. Did your parents not speak Spanish in the home growing up?”

Rafi clenched his teeth together but kept his mouth shut. He tried to pull the corners of his mouth back to approximate a grin. Was pretty sure it looked like he was growling.

My Spanish’s good enough to kick your ass, ain’t it?

Being cranky brought out the brawler in him.

After a minute, the TA moved on, saying they could work on a plan to correct Rafi’s accent in language lab.

“Man, that guy’s a total prick. If I get stuck in his session for lab, I’m dropping this class and switching to French next semester. I can only deal with assholes in one language.” The muttered complaints of the girl next to him made Rafi laugh. She jerked her head around until she spotted him, long bleached-blond hair, like his youngest sister had tried once, flying around her.

“Sorry. Hope he’s not your best friend or something,” the girl apologized, but didn’t sound like she gave much of a damn. Pretty feisty for someone who barely came up to his armpit.

“Not hardly.” He shot the finger at the door out of which the TA had exited.

“Cool. Let’s be partners for everything. We can bitch about him under our breaths the whole time.” She held up a hand for a high five.

He smacked it, but at half speed because she was so tiny next to him he felt like he might knock her over if he wasn’t careful. “I’m Rafael Castro.”

“Brianna Vergara. Call me Bree.”

“Brianna Vergara?” Strange combo.

“My dad’s Filipino, my mom’s a Texas beauty queen.”

That was different. But he’d found himself scanning rooms when he entered them, looking for anyone who wasn’t yet another white kid, and getting a moment of relief in every class when it turned out that there were always POCs in his class. Or visibly gay kids—like, rainbow flag T-shirt gay. Or disabled students. Anytime he spotted someone other, the tight band around his rib cage eased. “Cool.”

“So, is your Spanish not up to par or something? Sounded like the TA’s to me.” She threaded her arms through her backpack strap, looking like she was waiting for him to catch up.

“Nah. He’s speaking Castilian. Spanish Spanish. I got island Spanish. More like Boricua. Puerto Rican Spanish,” he explained, unsure which phrase she might recognize. And then he added, although it annoyed him to admit it, “Plus, he’s right. I didn’t speak it much at home growing up.”

“Do your parents speak Spanish?”

“My mom does, sure, but I haven’t lived with her since I was little. She went back to the DR not too long after she brought me to the US.”

And then he was telling Bree the entire story while they walked over to the campus bookstore, because they both wanted to see if they could find used copies of the textbook instead of paying full price for the online download. Bree was easy to talk to. She didn’t offer any opinion about his mom’s decision to go back home after getting all of her kids into the United States, and she was cranky but chatty in a way that made him smile, even though his neck got sore looking down at her while they walked. And he’d thought Austin was short. This girl’s boobs were at his belly button.

At the bookstore, they found plenty of copies of
Español Para Todo
in the used section. Digital textbooks were clearly taking over the world, and Rafi couldn’t blame anyone for opting out of carrying this brick of a text around. They made a game of finding the absolute worst, most battered edition in the pile of cover-peeling rejects, and Bree even managed to bargain for an extra 10 percent off when they checked out at the register.

“Wholesaler’s daughter. Never take the list price,” she told him and winked.

Ten percent off a hundred-buck book was lunch. He bought her a sandwich at the campus center, blowing off lunch in the dining hall in a rush of extravagance he’d probably regret later. But if he was going to be stuck with that prick twice a week for conversation in his not very good Spanish, then he wanted allies and he wanted them fast.

“I can tell that asshole’s gonna give me a hard time as soon as I open my mouth in front of him,” Bree groused, picking at the french fries on her plate. “I have a drawl. I’m from Texas. I drawl when I speak English and I drawl when I speak French.” She shifted to a high-pitched voice that he recognized from the French recordings he’d listened to in middle school, when he’d thought learning French and being trilingual-ish might be cool. “News al-on a la pee-scene oh-zhoord-we?”

He choked on his Gatorade. If he’d ever wondered what a French Texan would sound like, mystery solved. “Holy shit. You’re right. That is one hell of a drawl.”

“Right? And I think I sound like a schmuck when I try to fake a French accent instead,” she complained miserably. “I thought Spanish might be better, but that jerk doesn’t exactly leave me raging with confidence.”

They made fun of the TA for the rest of their lunch, before splitting up to head off to afternoon classes on the opposite ends of campus. He made sure to get her number in his phone, and gave her his in exchange. This was a friendship, maybe, that didn’t depend on Denny or rowing, and Rafi had a feeling he was going to value that pretty damn highly when all was said and done.

Chapter Three

Getting to his first rowing practice was proving to be more of a challenge than Rafi had anticipated.

According to Denny and his roommates, their coach was a ballbuster. But Coach Lawson had come down with some kind of projectile vomiting illness and was out for the week, opting not to have her assistant coaches start official practice without her. They’d wait to get the boats on the water until the second week of school.

The delay at meeting his entire team and seeing who he’d be spending much of the next three years with kept Rafi’s nerves on edge. So much so that when his suitemates weren’t available for him to accompany to their first practice, he had to bite his tongue to keep from snapping at them.

He knew Denny would go with him in a heartbeat. That boy had dogged his ass—
captain’s orders,
he said—the whole first week of school. Rafi told himself he hated it.

Not even Rafi believed that.

But after being attached at the hip from Monday to Friday, Denny had backed off over the weekend.

Let me know if you want to hang out this weekend
, he’d texted Rafi on Friday afternoon. And Rafi had sent back a
Cool, will do.
But he hadn’t texted. He hadn’t done much of anything all weekend. The quiet of his room was his recharging station after a week full of new and exhausting experiences.

By Sunday night, though, Rafi was feeling ready to face the Monday morning practice-class-study grind again. But first, he needed to override his paranoia that he was going to show up late for his first practice. After a week of walking into classes and meetings five minutes after they started—because somehow everything on campus took longer to get to than it looked like it would on the map—Rafi was implementing coping strategies and backup plans.

If he had to enter one more room and have every head turn to see who the jerk was who hadn’t made it on time, he was going to drown himself in one of the two campus lakes.

He didn’t plan on leaving it to chance. Specific arrangements as to who he could tag along with to practice would be made. He had three roommates on the team, so Rafi wasn’t worried.

But Bob spent most of his nights sleeping in his girlfriend’s room and left from there, because she was not into “hanging out with a bunch of dudebros, even the gay ones. No offense,” Bob had explained with a shrug. “At least until the 5:00 a.m. alarm gets on her nerves and she kicks me back here for a break.”

Mildly worried, but not really, Rafi had asked Austin on Sunday afternoon if he could head down to the boathouse with him and Vinnie the next morning for his first practice at Carlisle. Austin had been leaving for the library to catch up on the work he’d blown off for parties during their first weekend on campus. Rafi had used his weekend retreat from the world to stay on top of his reading. Because holy crap, there was a lot of reading.

He’d seen the crew team meme of a triangle with Rowing, Grades and Social Life written on the three points, and Pick Two written in the middle. Only he’d thought it was a joke.

“Sure, dude. We head out at about four thirty and get in an easy six first,” Austin said.

It had taken a few moments for the sentence to parse into meaningful words in Rafi’s brain.

“Six?” Miles? Those two put in a six-mile run before a 5:30 a.m. practice?

Holy shit.

“Yeah.” Austin shrugged. “Vinnie gets cranky if he can’t cross the run off his to-do list first thing, and I don’t like running when it’s hot, so… It’s early, I know.”

Hella fucking early. Especially when Rafi had signed up for an eight to midnight shift at the dorm’s reception desk, after managing to get on the work-study roster with the head residents. “Shit. Does everyone run first?”

“Nah. Lots of people do it after, or whenever. Coach doesn’t care, as long as you’re logging the miles. And trust me, she can tell in a heartbeat if you’ve been blowing off runs. She’ll put you through erg sprints until you wanna die to make up for it too.”

“Great,” he muttered, trying to make the sleep math work and not feeling it. Three and a half hours of sleep were not going to cut it. “I don’t think I can make it that early.”

“Then we’ll meet you there, okay?” Austin didn’t even look up as he shoved his laptop and some books into his backpack.

Rafi nodded, throat tight. “Sure.”

He knew it wasn’t rational, his stress about not making it to practice on time. He was a grownup. He could read a fucking map. All he had to do was leave extra early, to make up for having to guess at how long it would take him to get to the boathouse. And there was really almost no way to get lost between campus and the boathouse on the river, as far as he could tell.

As far as I can tell.

Because nothing in Massachusetts was laid out on a grid. The lack of straightness in the roads was driving him around the bend. Seriously. He had no idea which way was north, south, what-the-fuck-ever direction. And sometimes even when he could see where he wanted to go, because hills were good for something after all, he couldn’t figure out why none of the streets he took wanted to go there.

When he’d bitched about it to his roommates, they’d told him some joke about going to Boston, where the streets where laid out following the cow paths of settler farmers. Which was obviously something they said to mess with the Midwestern boy, because who the hell would do that?

Why the fuck didn’t you go find it this morning, or yesterday? Or any other time in the past week? Then you could fucking relax.

But there had been a million things to do. And everywhere he went, the fucking ground itself felt weird. And everything was green. Grass everywhere, so many trees that his sisters were bitching about the pictures he texted them of the campus, saying they couldn’t see anything except a forest and the hills.

Rafi had only been in Massachusetts for a week and he was already developing a love-hate relationship with the fucking hills.

At first, it had been kind of cool to feel the stretch in his thighs as he walked with shortened strides up the hill on which the library sat. To break out into a slow jog when he was on a downhill slope, letting his momentum speed him up until he almost laughed with little-kid enthusiasm.

Then he’d tried to go for a bike ride.

He couldn’t get off campus.

The Midwest prairie hadn’t prepared him for the challenge of dealing with hills, even in low gear. He’d ended up circling the campus boundaries and feeling like an idiot. Then he’d somehow angled off onto the wrong street at a curve in the road and had ended up in the middle of a residential neighborhood of two-story houses with wraparound front porches and shutters on all the windows. By the time he finally made it back to his dorm, he was tired and cranky and in desperate need of a cool shower.

Maybe the “getting lost on the way to practice” paranoia wasn’t entirely ridiculous, okay?

So even though it stung, that he’d barely made it through forty-eight hours before needing Denny’s help again, he pulled out his cell phone at the dorm reception desk that night and texted him.
Can I head down to practice with…

Delete. Delete. Delete. Sounded like begging.

Head down to practice together?

More deleting.
Together
had a weird vibration in his head when used in communication with Denny.

Pick me up on your way to practice?

Swinging by Rafi’s dorm on the way to the river was a little bit out of Denny’s way as far as Rafi could tell by staring at the campus map, but he didn’t think Denny would mind. Denny hadn’t lost his cheerfulness the entire week, even when Rafi had been cranky and no fun to be around.

The answering text from Denny pinged back in less than a minute.

Cool. See you right around 5.

No fuss, no muss. Maybe this would be okay. For some reason, he always expected drama from Denny—maybe because of that kiss, that “I turned eighteen and now I’m leaving town, so kiss me or lose your chance forever” kiss—but it never came. Even when Denny was pissed, like he had been that first day, he always kept his cool.

It was kind of irritating, actually.

Rafi was used to being the one who held it together. Who was never flustered no matter how strange the situation he found himself in. But Carlisle College was four hundred and thirty-seven times more peculiar than any situation he’d ever found himself in back home in Chicago. He was off-balance and he didn’t like it. The feeling wasn’t bringing out the best of his personality either, he was pretty sure.

He would try to be less of a prick. He could start by being ready to head out the door before Denny arrived to pick him up the next morning.

The pounding noise beat on and on, thumping beneath the bass beat in the club. The flashing, multicolored strobes made Rafi’s eyeballs ache and he couldn’t get the beat, somehow, dancing too slow, arms and legs heavy like he was trying to slide them through honey.

“Dude!”

He turned his back on whoever was shouting at him on the dance floor. God, why did there always have to be one asshole in the club?

“Rafi! Wake up, man. We’re gonna be late.”

Rafi’s eyes snapped open in the dark, the sudden shock of adrenaline flooding his system so fast his toes ached.

“Shit.” He lurched out of bed, heading to where Denny must have been rapping steadily on the suite door the entire time his dream self had been bitching about assholes in the dance club.

He yanked the door open to find Denny in the hall in loose shorts and a T-shirt, backpack over his shoulders. Denny stared at Rafi in his sleep pants and said, “Dude. What the hell? I texted. I called.”

“Sorry. I didn’t get to bed until…” He didn’t remember. The person who was supposed to cover the desk after him hadn’t showed for their shift, and it had taken him a while to figure out whether or not to wake up the HRs. Yes, he’d finally decided, and by the time that whole transition was worked out, it was almost one o’clock and he’d set his alarm clock with a wish and a prayer. “Late. Fuck.”

He shucked off his sleep pants and pulled on the skintight workout trunks he wore under his cutoff sweats. He assumed the same forgiveness for shitty workout clothes during practice—as opposed to regattas—applied at Carlisle as at the club back home. The lights were off, but he kept his eyes averted, not wanting to see if Denny was looking at him. His dick ended up twisted to the wrong side, so he shoved a hand down the front of the Lycra shorts and readjusted himself.

A throat cleared loudly in the predawn quiet.

Pretty damn sure Denny was watching now.

Stop playing with yourself and find your shoes.

“Here.” Denny handed him his running shoes, no sign on his face that he’d been busted watching Rafi resettle his dick in his shorts.

Wondering whether or not Denny was staring at his dick was way more appealing than stressing out over whether or not he was about to make a terrible impression on his new coach by showing up late to the first practice of the year.

But Denny had brought his bike, so they could both ride, and the road down the river was mostly downhill. Getting back to campus would be irritating for sure, but biking got them there way faster than jogging, and the other members of the team were still milling around outside the boathouse, chest bumping and one-arm hugging teammates they hadn’t seen since last year. He wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been able to go on the pre-semester rowing team trip, obviously. Thank God.

One less way he’d stand out as the new guy among the crowd.

“You know, you’re not the only new guy here.” It was almost annoying how easily Denny picked up on his thoughts. “Looks like we got freshman rowers coming out the wazoo this year,” he continued, lifting his chin at a clump of guys standing together, that fresh-out-of-high-school glow still on them.

Nice try. Doesn’t help, but A plus for effort.
Freshmen were supposed to be confused and awkward. Being a transfer student carried a different vibe for Rafi. Like, he might not know how things worked at Carlisle, specifically, but he was expected to have figured out college life in general already, right? Taking part-time classes at the city colleges back home hadn’t prepared him for shit, though.

“Is there anything we’re supposed to be doing right now?” he finally caved and asked Austin. Not knowing what was expected of him was Rafi’s least favorite headspace to be in.

“Nah, not until Coach gets here. She likes to make a speech on the first morning.”

When she arrived, Couch Lawson’s straw-blond hair pulled back in a rough ponytail and her weathered tan face made her a near twin for his rowing coach back home.

Rafi laughed under his breath. Denny turned a curious look on him.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. It was surprisingly comforting to recognize a woman who’d spent most of her life on the water.

Which didn’t explain anything, but Denny smiled and bumped him with his shoulder anyway, waving over a couple of the guys standing closest to them.

They chatted until their coach put her gear bag away in the boathouse and came back outside.

Coach Lawson gathered their attention with a look. Rafi wasn’t sure how she did it. All he knew was that one moment, he was shooting the shit with a couple of guys Denny had introduced him to—casually, and not like Rafi was some kind of special diversity token, which he should have known Denny wouldn’t do, but he hadn’t been able to banish the fear—and the next moment, everyone was silent and facing the river.

“Some of you already know how I work. Some of you are new.” Rafi told himself she didn’t stare at him longer than any of the other newbies, who were all in random workout gear instead of the Carlisle kit most of the returning crew wore. “I’m here to win. We will have fun, we will conduct ourselves at all times with absolute good sportsmanship. But I’m here to win. I don’t give a shit about seniority. Or excuses. If you’re one of the eight strongest rowers, you’ll sit in the varsity boat. Everyone else can fight it out for second best. If that means I have eight first years from Tuscaloosa—” She turned to eye a tall, lanky white kid with a goofy grin on his face. “—or Chicago, so be it.”