Moving in Reverse (7 page)

“
Hey,” I whispered,
sitting down next to him.

Unlike Darby, Blake actually looked
happy to see me.

“
How was the
show?”

I perched on the bed him. “Good,” I
said quietly. “Madison came. And then I tried to go to some stupid
party with Darby, but she’d already passed out in our room. Kind of
a nightmare, actually.”

Blake wrapped an arm around my waist.
“Sounds like it,” he mumbled. “Wait, Casey. . . Why are you dressed
for Antarctica?”

I gasped. “Oh no — this guy lent me
his jacket,” I sighed with exhaustion, and added ‘Drop Off Jeff’s
Jacket’ to my to do list for tomorrow.

Blake chuckled. “Should I be jealous?”
I felt his hand move up my back, peeling the jacket off and tossing
it over the back of the bed.

“
Probably,” I played
along, shivering as Blake’s hand touched my bare skin. He pulled me
down into the bed next to him and I finally exhaled, feeling the
stress of the night start to fade away.

“
I didn’t get any work
done,” I whispered.

Blake kissed me, slowly and
deliberately, wrapping one arm around my back and pulling my body
into his.

“
Your roommate is ten feet
away.”

He ignored me, running his fingers
through my hair.

“
Oh, and this awful guy
stole my cell phone, and when I finally got it back—”

“
Shhh,” he whispered into
my ear, and then bent his head to kiss my neck. I turned my face
towards him, smiling mischievously as I kissed him back.

“
If I’d known you didn’t
care about privacy,” I teased, “we probably could have had a
lot
more fun this summer
on the tour bus.”

“
Fine, you want privacy?”
Blake’s mouth was against my cheek, his breath warm on my skin. He
pulled the covers over both of us, surrounding us in an enclave of
fabric.

“
Oh, gee,” I laughed.
“That’s much better. He’ll have no idea what we’re doing
now.”

Blake’s fingers darted underneath my
sweater, and for a moment, I thought wistfully of all the nights
we’d spent together in hotel rooms, in Blake’s beautiful house in
Santa Monica, anywhere but in this cramped dorm room with an
eighteen year old gamer ten feet away, probably recording us with a
webcam.

Not that Ethan would do that. But you
never know what’s going to end up on YouTube these days.

I sighed, squirming away from Blake
reluctantly. I wasn’t ready to lose my virginity on a random
Tuesday with some other guy in the room. Not even to Blake
Parker.

Ever since school had started, we’d
hardly been alone at all. You would have thought it would be better
than the tour bus — but with both of us in freshman housing with
roommates, it ended up being about the same.

Which kept everything strictly
PG-13.

If that.

When I’d told Madison about it, she’d
snorted beer through her nose. This is Blake Parker we’re talking
about, she’d reminded me. Couldn’t he just get a suite at the Plaza
if he’d really wanted a night alone?

And yeah. He could.

Only he hadn’t.

I was trying not to read too much into
it. I’d been grateful all summer that Blake hadn’t pressed me for
sex, but now that we’d been together for a few months, I couldn’t
figure out what was holding him up.

Blake rested his hand on my hip, and I
snuggled in closer to him, putting my head on his shoulder and
feeling his chest rise and fall evenly.

I hadn’t wanted to sleep with him this
summer because everything had felt too temporary, knowing that we’d
have to split up once the summer was over.

Which seemed like the only reason I
could come up with for him wanting to wait now. That he still
thought the same thing — he didn’t want to hurt me more if it
turned out that this was all just fleeting.

The rational part of me told me that I
was being crazy. But there was another part of me — not a small
part — that still couldn’t figure out what Blake was doing with me
in the first place. What he was doing here, at Columbia, at
all.

And that part of me wasn’t so
sure.

“
Sweet dreams,” he
whispered into my hair, and I closed my eyes, trying to force
myself to feel tired.

After classes the next day, I trudged
my way back to where the frat party had been, surprised to find the
hallway pretty much cleaned up from the night before already.
Either Columbia had the best janitorial staff on the planet, or the
pledges had been up a lot later than I had.

“
Hey — Casey,
right?”

I recognized one of the pledges that
we’d been talking to the night before, but didn’t remember his
name. Mark? Mike?

“
Hey,” I said. “Matt?” I
guessed.

“
Yeah. Is your roommate
okay?”

I smiled. “Totally fine. Fell asleep
in her shoes, but other than that.”

“
Who hasn’t?”

“
Is this your
room?”

“
Yeah,” he grinned
sheepishly. “I’m looking forward to destroying next year’s pledges’
living space all fall.”

“
Doesn’t look too bad this
morning.”

“
And yet someone puked in
our shower last night. It was pink.”

“
Yikes,” I laughed. “Glad
I steered clear of the punch, I guess.”

He smiled. “You don’t seem like much
of the puke-in-public type.”

I shifted awkwardly on one foot. Was
he flirting? Or did I just seem like the puke-in-private
type?

“
Well. . . thanks for
hosting,” I filled the silence, forgetting for a moment about what
I’d come here to do. I held the jacket out to him with one hand.
“Jeff, um, lent this to me last night, and I forgot to give it
back. Can you make sure he gets it?”

A flicker of surprise darted across
the guy’s face.

“
Don’t you want to give it
to him yourself?”

I looked at him, confused. “No, um, if
it’s okay, I was hoping you could just pass it on.”

He looked at me with a conspiratorial
expression. “Sure, not a problem,” he winked at me.

I hoisted my bag over one shoulder.
“Thanks,” I said, turning for the door. “See you round, I
guess.”

“
Oh, Casey?” Matt called
to me, and I turned back from the hallway to look at him, an amused
expression covering his face. “I’m glad you had fun last night.
Everyone was hoping you would.”

“
Thanks,” I said,
confused, and then kept walking down the hall.

Chapter Nine

Friday was the day we got
our bids, which meant that Darby kept me up most of the night on
Thursday worrying about it. Every time I’d start to nod off,
there’d be a deep sigh from the other side of the room, and then
I’d hear, “It’ll all be ok. Do you know what a loser you’d have to
be to get dinged as a
legacy
?”

I assured Darby each time that no, she
was not that much of a loser. By 2 a.m., though, I was starting to
wonder.

We’d narrowed our choices down to two
sororities, the same ones, so both of us would hear at the same
time. Darby didn’t have Friday morning classes, so she was waiting
in our room for the envelopes that would tell us which sororities
wanted us to join.

She’d promised to text me right after
calling her mom, so I figured I’d hear whether I’d gotten into
Kappa sometime about four or five hours after the envelopes were
delivered.

My Friday morning class was modern
literature and, for once, I actually got to the lecture with a few
minutes to spare. We’d finished Thomas Pynchon and moved onto the
Handmaid’s Tale, which I had a feeling I would really like, if only
I could get around to starting it. Once Rush was over, I promised
myself, I’d catch up on all the reading I’d fallen behind on this
week.

I walked into our classroom and was
surprised to see Blake’s usual chair empty. Scanning the room
quickly, I realized that, for once, I’d beaten him to
class.

“
Let’s get started,” the
professor cleared his throat in a way that was so completely
professorial that I figured throat-clearing must be part of the
Ph.D. requirements.

I sat down next to the empty chair,
looking at it nervously. It wasn’t like Blake to miss the beginning
of class.

“
Before we begin, I want
to hand back your response papers from last week. As you know, your
next one is due today at 5 p.m., but I know a number of you have
submitted yours already,” he looked around the room, “which is
understandable, since you must all be eager to devote your full
weekend to Ulysses, the next book on our syllabus.”

The room laughed nervously. I felt my
eyes widen.

In all the insanity of this week, I’d
completely forgotten that we had weekly response papers due on each
novel we read. Not only had I not even started the paper, I hadn’t
even started the book.

The professor passed a stack of papers
to his left, and each student rifled through it to pull out his or
her essay. When it came to me, I took mine and Blake’s, just to be
safe.

The professor started the discussion,
and I flipped to the last page of my paper, where the grade was
handwritten in red ink.

4/10. See me after class.

I felt my stomach clench.

I had failed?

Casey Snow had never failed anything
in her life.

She’d also never referred to herself
in the third person, so this was a major problem.

Just then, Blake pushed open the
classroom door, giving an apologetic smile as he slid into the seat
next to me. The professor didn’t bat an eye, and I slid Blake’s
paper across the table to him, still trying to catch my
breath.

He didn’t even look at it, just folded
the paper in half and stuffed it into the spine of his book. He
gave me a distracted smile and then faced forward to listen to the
lecture.

I convinced Blake not to wait for me
as I hung behind after class, waiting for the professor to finish
answering questions for some eager-beaver junior probably gunning
for a law school recommendation. The girl finally paused for a
breath and I broke in.

“
You… wanted to talk to
me?”

“
Ah,” he said.
“Casey.”

The girl he’d been talking to shot me
a sympathetic glance and left the room.

Apparently everybody was pretty clear
on the fact that ‘you wanted to see me’ usually wasn’t good
news.

“
I just wanted to check
in,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “Your first two papers
were fine, but this one — it didn’t seem like you’d really put much
of an effort into it.” He looked down at the page I was still
holding. “It was submitted after the deadline, and I couldn’t help
but notice that you misspelled the name of the main character in
the book.”

I felt my mouth fall open, looking
down at the paper. I’d flipped straight to the grade without even
reading the comments he’d made in the margins. Sure enough, I’d run
the spell check too quickly before turning the paper in, and Oedipa
Maas, the main character of Lot 49, had become Oedipal Mass in
every single place I’d used it.

“
I was, um, trying to be
ironic?” I floundered, hoping he’d think it was funny. He didn’t
laugh.

“
Casey, there’s a more
serious problem. You don’t participate in the discussion. Your
assignment, in addition to being sloppy, was late. I’m not sure I
would have expected any better this week if I didn’t raise it with
you.” He looked at me seriously. “I just want to make sure you
really want to be in this class. If you’re just taking it to sit
next to your boyfriend...”

He trailed off, not needing to finish
the sentence.

I stared at him, shocked, blinking
rapidly as I felt tears start to form in my eyes. I wasn’t sure if
I should scream at him or apologize and promise to do
better.

“
I don’t mean to be
harsh,” he continued.

It was kind of like
saying,
those jeans make you look morbidly
obese. But no offense
.

“
And I know there’s an
adjustment period when you start college. But Casey, your freshman
grades still matter.”

I nodded, biting down hard on the
inside of my lip.

“
I know you’re a smart
girl,” he continued. “You wouldn’t be here if you
weren’t.”

I bit down harder. I’d never had
anyone be so condescending to me in my life. I’d won the English
prize at Prospect Academy last spring, and gotten a 5 on the AP Lit
test. I’d gotten an 800 on the verbal section of the SATs, and I
hadn’t even batted an eye.

“
I take improvement into
consideration when I assign final grades,” he shuffled the last of
his papers together and placed them inside a tattered leather
briefcase. “So this grade doesn’t have to determine anything,
unless you let it.”