Текст книги "Fangirl"

Автор книги: Rainbow Rowell

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“Who was that?” he asked.

“My roommate.”

“She sounds like Kathleen Turner.”

“Yeah. She’s something.” Cath pulled her shirt down and turned away.

“Taco truck?” he asked. “For dinner?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you change—you can ride with me.”

“Sure.”

SPRING SEMESTER, 2012

Fried tomatoes at breakfast. Every lump in his bed. Being able to do magic without worrying whether anyone was watching. Agatha, of course. And Penelope. Getting to see the Mage—not often, but still. Simon’s uniform. His school tie. The football pitch, even when it was muddy. Fencing. Raisin scones every Sunday with real clotted cream …

What didn’t Simon miss about Watford?

—from chapter 1, Simon Snow and the Selkies Four, copyright © 2007 by Gemma T. Leslie

TWENTY-TWO

“There are already four light fixtures in here,” Reagan said. “What are we supposed to do with a lamp?”

The lamp was black and shaped like the Eiffel Tower.

“Just leave it in the hall,” Cath said. “Maybe somebody’ll take it.”

“She’ll just ask where it is the next time she’s here.… She’s insane.” Reagan shoved the lamp into the back of her closet and kicked it. “What brand of crazy is your mom?”

Cath’s gut pitched reliably. “I don’t know. She left when I was eight.”

“Fuck,” Reagan said, “that is crazy. Are you hungry?”

“Yeah,” Cath said.

“They’re doing a back-to-school luau downstairs. They roast a pig on a spit. It’s disgusting.”

Cath grabbed her ID and followed Reagan to the dining hall.

*   *   *

In the end, Cath hadn’t decided to come back.

She’d just decided to pack up her laptop.

And then she’d decided to ride along with Wren and her dad to Lincoln.

And then, after they dropped Wren off outside Schramm Hall, her dad asked if Cath wanted to go to her own dorm, and Cath decided that she did. If nothing else, she could get her stuff.

And then they just sat there in the fire lane, and Cath felt wave after wave of anxiety pound against her. If she stayed, she’d see Levi again. She’d have to deal with the Psych final she’d missed. She’d have to register for classes, and who even knew what would still be available. And she’d see Levi again. And everything about that that would feel good—his smiling face, his long lines—would also feel like getting shot in the stomach.

Cath didn’t really decide to get out of the car.

She just looked over at her dad in the driver’s seat, tapping his two middle fingers on the steering wheel; and as scared as she was to leave him, Cath couldn’t bear to think about letting him down.

“One more semester,” she said. She was crying; that’s how bad it felt to say this.

His chin jerked up. “Yeah?”

“I’ll try.”

“Me, too,” he said.

“Promise?”

“Yeah. Cath, yeah. I promise.… Do you want me to come up with you?”

“No. That’ll just make it worse.”

He laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just flashed back to your first day of kindergarten. You cried. And your mom cried. It felt like we were never gonna see you guys again.”

“Where was Wren?”

“God, I don’t know, probably anointing her first boyfriend.”

“Mom cried?”

Her dad looked sad again and smiled ruefully. “Yeah…”

“I really hate her,” Cath said, shaking her head, trying to imagine what kind of mother cried on the first day of kindergarten, then walked out in the middle of third grade.

Her dad nodded. “Yeah…”

“Answer your phone,” Cath said.

“I will.”

*   *   *

“Somebody else got Ugg boots for Christmas,” Reagan said, watching the dinner line empty into the dining room. “If we had whiskey, this is when we’d take a shot.”

“I find Ugg boots really comforting,” Cath said.

“Why? Because they’re warm?”

“No. Because they remind me that we live in a place where you can still get away with, even get excited about, Ugg boots. In fashionable places, you have to pretend that you’re over them, or that you’ve always hated them. But in Nebraska, you can still be happy about new Ugg boots. That’s nice. There’s no end of the innocence.”

“You’re such a weirdo…,” Reagan said. “I kinda missed you.”

“I just don’t want to,” Simon said.

“Don’t want to what?” Baz asked. He was sitting on his desk, eating an apple. He left the apple in his teeth and started tying his green and purple school tie. Simon still had to use a mirror for that. Even after seven years.

“Anything,” Simon said, pressing his head back into his pillow. “I don’t want to do anything. I don’t even want to start this day because then I’ll just be expected to finish it.”

Baz finished his half-Windsor and took a bite out of the apple. “Now, now, Snow, that doesn’t sound like ‘the most powerful magician in a hundred ages’ talking.”

“That’s such crap,” Simon said. “Who even started calling me that?”

“Probably the Mage. He won’t shut up about you. ‘The one who was prophesied,’ ‘the hero we’ve been waiting for,’ et cetera.”

“I don’t want to be a hero.”

“Liar.” Baz’s eyes were cool grey and serious.

“Today,” Simon said, chastened. “I don’t want to be a hero today.”

Baz looked at his apple core, then tossed it onto Simon’s desk. “Are you trying to talk me into skipping Politickal Science?”

“Yes.”

“Done,” Baz said. “Now, get up.”

Simon grinned and leapt out of bed.

—from Carry On, Simon, posted January 2012 by FanFixx.net author Magicath

TWENTY-THREE

“What does ‘inc’ mean?” Cath asked.

Reagan looked up from her bed. She was making flash cards (Reagan liked flash cards), and there was a cigarette hanging from her mouth, unlit. She was trying to quit smoking. “Ask that question again so it makes sense.”

“I-n-c,” Cath said. “I got my grades back, but instead of an A or a B, it says, ‘inc.’”

“Incomplete,” Reagan said. “It means they’re holding your grade.”

“Who is?”

“I don’t know, your professor.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s usually, like, a special thing, like when you get extra time to make something up.”

Cath stared at her grade report. She’d made up her Psychology final the first week back, so she was expecting to see the A there. (Her grade was so high in Psychology, she practically didn’t need to take the final.) But Fiction-Writing was a different story. Without turning in a final project, the best that Cath had expected was a C—and a D was far more likely.

Cath was okay with that, she’d made peace with that D. It was the price she’d decided to pay for last semester. For Nick. And Levi. For plagiarism. It was the price for learning that she didn’t want to write books about decline and desolation in rural America, or about anything else.

Cath was ready to take her D and move on.

Inc.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked Reagan.

“Fuck, Cath. I don’t know. Talk to your professor. You’re giving me lung cancer.”

*   *   *

This was Cath’s third time back in Andrews Hall since she got her grades back.

The first two times, she’d walked in one end of the building and walked straight through to the door on the other side.

This time was already better. This time, she’d stopped to use the bathroom.

She’d walked into the building just as four o’clock classes were getting out, a flash flood of girls with cool hair and boys who looked like Nick. Cath ducked into the bathroom, and now she was sitting in a wooden stall, waiting for the coast to clear. Somebody had taken the time to carve most of “Stairway to Heaven” into the stall door; it was a serious amount of carving. English majors.

Cath didn’t have any English classes this semester, and she was thinking about changing her major. Or maybe she’d just change her concentration from Creative Writing to Renaissance Lit; that would be useful in the real world, a head full of sonnets and Christ imagery. If you study something that nobody cares about, does that mean everyone will leave you alone?

She opened the stall door slowly, flushing the toilet for appearances, then ran water in one of the sinks (hot in one faucet, cold in the other) and rinsed her face. She could do this. She just had to find the department office, then ask where Professor Piper’s personal office was. Professor Piper probably wouldn’t even be there.

The hallway was nearly empty now. Cath found the stairs and followed the signs pointing to the main office. Down the hall, around the corner. Maybe if she just walked by the main office, that would be enough progress for the day. She walked slowly, touching each wooden door.

“Cath?”

Even though it was a woman’s voice, Cath’s first panicky thought was Nick.

“Cath!”

She turned toward the voice—and saw Professor Piper in the office across the hall, standing up behind her desk. The professor motioned for Cath to come forward. Cath did.

“I’ve been wondering about you,” Professor Piper said, smiling warmly. “You just disappeared. Come in, come talk to me.”

She motioned for Cath to sit down, so Cath did. (Apparently, Professor Piper could control Cath with simple hand gestures. Like the Dog Whisperer.)

The professor came around to the front of her desk and hopped onto it. Her signature move. “What happened to you? Where did you go?”

“I … didn’t go anywhere,” Cath said. She was thinking about going right now. This was too much progress; she hadn’t planned for this eventuality—for actually accomplishing what she came here to do.

“But you never turned in your story,” Professor Piper said. “Did something happen?”

Cath took a deepish breath and tried to sound steady. “Sort of. My dad was in the hospital. But that’s not really why—I’d already decided not to write it.”

The professor looked surprised. She held on to the lip of her desk and leaned forward. “But, Cath, why? I was so eager to see what you’d do.”

“I just…,” Cath started again: “I realized that I’m not cut out for fiction-writing.”

Professor Piper blinked and pulled her head back. “What are you talking about? You’re exactly cut out for it. You’re a Butterick pattern, Cath—this is what you were meant to do.”

It was Cath’s turn to blink. “No. I … I kept trying. To start the story. I … look, I know how you feel about fanfiction, but that’s what I want to write. That’s where my passion is. And I’m really good at it.”

“I’m sure you are,” Professor Piper said. “You’re a natural storyteller. But that doesn’t explain why you didn’t finish your final project.”

“Once I realized that it wasn’t right for me, I couldn’t bring myself to do it anymore. I just wanted to move on.”

Professor Piper regarded Cath thoughtfully, tapping the edge of the desk. This is what it looks like when a sane person taps her fingers.

“Why do you keep saying that it wasn’t right for you?” the professor asked. “Your work last semester was excellent. It was all right. You’re one of my most promising students.”

“But I don’t want to write my own fiction,” Cath said, as emphatically as she could. “I don’t want to write my own characters or my own worlds—I don’t care about them.” She clenched her fists in her lap. “I care about Simon Snow. And I know he’s not mine, but that doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather pour myself into a world I love and understand than try to make something up out of nothing.”

The professor leaned forward. “But there’s nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.” Her lovely face turned fierce. “Think about it, Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.”

Cath hadn’t expected Professor Piper to be happy about her decision, but she hadn’t expected this either. She didn’t think the professor would push back.

“It just feels like nothing to me,” Cath said.

“You’d rather take—or borrow—someone else’s creation?”

“I know Simon and Baz. I know how they think, what they feel. When I’m writing them, I get lost in them completely, and I’m happy. When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.”

“Yes,” the professor said, reaching out and grasping the air in front of Cath, like she was catching a fly. “That’s how it’s supposed to feel.”

Cath shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. “Well, I hate it.”

“Do you hate it? Or are you just afraid.”

Cath sighed and decided to wipe her eyes on her sweater. Another type of adult would hand her a box of Kleenex about now. Professor Piper just kept pushing.

“You got special permission to be in my class. You must have wanted to write. And your work was delightful—didn’t you enjoy it?”

“Nothing I wrote compared to Simon.”

“Good gracious, Cath, are you really comparing yourself to the most successful author of the modern age?”

“Yes,” Cath said. “Because, when I’m writing Gemma T. Leslie’s characters, sometimes, in some ways, I am better than her. I know how crazy that sounds—but I also know that it’s true. I’m not a god. I could never create the World of Mages; but I’m really, really good at manipulating that world. I can do more with her characters than I could ever do with my own. My characters are just … sketches compared to hers.”

“But you can’t do anything with fanfiction. It’s stillborn.”

“I can let people read it. Lots of people do read it.”

“You can’t make a living that way. You can’t make a career.”

“How many people make a career out of writing anyway?” Cath snapped. She felt like everything inside her was snapping. Her nerves. Her temper. Her esophagus. “I’ll write because I love it, the way other people knit or … or scrapbook. And I’ll find some other way to make money.”

Professor Piper leaned back again and folded her arms. “I’m not going to talk to you any more about the fanfiction.”

“Good.”

“But I’m not done talking to you.”

Cath took another deep breath.

“I’m afraid,” Professor Piper said, “afraid that you’re never going to discover what you’re truly capable of. That you won’t get to see—that I won’t get to see—any of the wonder that’s inside of you. You’re right, nothing you turned in last semester compared to Simon Snow and the Mage’s Heir. But there was so much potential. Your characters quiver, Cath, like they’re trying to evolve right off the page.”

Cath rolled her eyes and wiped her nose on her shoulder.

“Can I ask you something?” the professor asked.

“I’m pretty sure you will anyway.”

The older woman smiled. “Did you help Nick Manter on his final project?”

Cath looked up at the corner of the ceiling and quickly licked her bottom lip. She felt a new wave of tears rushing through her head. Damn. She’d had a solid month now of no crying.

She nodded.

“I thought so,” the professor said gently. “I could hear you. In some of the best parts.”

Cath held every muscle still.

“Nick’s my teaching assistant, he was just here, actually, and he’s in my Advanced Fiction-Writing class. His style has … shifted quite a bit.”

Cath looked at the door.

“Cath,” the professor pressed.

“Yes?” Cath still couldn’t look at her.

“What if I made you a deal?”

Cath waited.

“I haven’t turned in your grade yet; I was hoping you’d come see me. And I don’t have to turn it in—I could give you the rest of this semester to finish your short story. You were headed toward a solid A in my class, maybe even an A-plus.”

Cath thought about her grade point average. And her scholarship. And the fact that she was going to have to get perfect grades this semester if she wanted to keep it. She didn’t have any room for error. “You could do that?”

“I can do whatever I want with my students’ grades. I’m the god of this small thing.”

Cath felt her fingernails in her palms. “Can I think about it?”

“Sure.” Professor Piper’s tone was air-light. “If you decide to do this, I’d like you to meet with me regularly, throughout the semester, just to talk about your progress. It will be like independent study.”

“Okay. I’ll think about it. I’ll, um—thank you.”

Cath picked up her bag and stood up. She was immediately standing too close to the professor, so she looked down and moved quickly toward the door. She didn’t look up again until she was back in her dormitory, stepping out of the elevator.

*   *   *

“This is Art.”

“That’s how you answer the phone?”

“Hey, Cath.”

“No hello?”

“I don’t like hello. It makes me sound like I have dementia, like I’ve never heard a phone ring before and I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next. Hello?”

“How are you feeling, Dad?”

“Good.”

“How good?”

“I’m leaving work every day at five. I’m eating dinner with Grandma. Just this morning, Kelly told me that I seemed ‘impressively grounded.’”

“That is impressive.”

“He’d just told me that we couldn’t use Frankenstein in our Frankenbeans pitch, because nobody cares about Frankenstein anymore. Kids want zombies.”

“But they’re not called Zombiebeans.”

“They will be if fucking Kelly has his way. We’re pitching ‘Zombeanie Weenies.’”

“Wow, how did you stay grounded through all that?”

“I was fantasizing about eating his brain.”

“I’m still impressed, Dad. Hey—I think I’m gonna come home next weekend.”

“If you want … I don’t want you to worry about me, Cath. I do better when I know you’re happy.”

“Well, I’m happy when I’m not worried about you. We have a symbiotic relationship.”

“Speaking of … how’s your sister?”

*   *   *

Her dad was wrong about worrying. Cath liked to worry. It made her feel proactive, even when she was totally helpless.

Like with Levi.

Cath couldn’t control whether she saw Levi on campus. But she could worry about it, and as long as she was worrying about it, it probably wasn’t going to happen. Like some sort of anxiety vaccine. Like watching a pot to make sure it never boiled.

She wore comforting grooves in her head, worrying about seeing Levi, then telling herself all the reasons it wasn’t going to happen:

First, because Reagan had promised to keep him away.

And second, because Levi didn’t have any business on City Campus. Cath told herself that Levi spent all his time either studying buffalo on East Campus, or working at Starbucks, or making out in his kitchen with pretty girls. There was no reason for their paths ever to cross.

Still … she froze every time she saw blond hair and a green Carhartt jacket—or every time she wished she did.

She froze now.

Because there he was, right where he wasn’t supposed to be, sitting outside her door. Proof positive that she hadn’t been worrying enough.

Levi saw Cath, too, and sprang to his feet. He wasn’t smiling. (Thank God. She wasn’t up for any of his smiles.)

Cath stepped warily forward. “Reagan’s in class,” she said when she was still a few doors away.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Cath shook her head. It could have meant “no” or it could have meant “I don’t understand”—both were true. She stopped walking. Her stomach hurt so bad, she wanted to bend over.

“I just need to tell you something,” Levi said quickly.

“I really don’t want you to come in,” she said.

“That’s fine. I can tell you out here.”

Cath crossed her arms over her stomach and nodded.

Levi nodded back. He pushed his hands into his coat pockets.

“I was wrong,” he said.

She nodded. Because duh. And because she didn’t know what he wanted from her.

He pushed his hands deeper into his coat. “Cath,” he said earnestly, “it wasn’t just a kiss.”

“Okay.” Cath looked past him to her door. She took a step closer then, toward the door, holding her key up like they were done here.

Levi stepped out of her way. Confused, but still polite.

Cath put her key in the door, then held on to the handle, hanging her head forward. She could hear him breathing and fidgeting behind her. Levi.

“Which one?” she asked.

“What?”

“Which kiss?” Her voice was weak and thin. Wet paper.

“The first one,” Levi said after a few seconds.

“But the second one was? It was just a kiss?”

Levi’s voice got closer: “I don’t want to talk about the second one.”

“Too bad.”

“Then yes,” he said. “It was just a—it was nothing.”

“What about the third one?”

“Is that a trick question?”

Cath shrugged.

“Cath … I’m trying to tell you something here.”

She turned around and immediately regretted it. Levi’s hair was tousled, most of it pushed back, bits of it falling over his forehead. And he wasn’t smiling, so his blue eyes were taking over his whole long face.

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“That it wasn’t just a kiss, Cather. There was no just.”

“No just?”

“No.”

“So?” Her voice sounded much cooler than she felt. Inside, her internal organs were grinding themselves into nervous pulp. Her intestines were gone. Her kidneys were disintegrating. Her stomach was wringing itself out, yanking on her trachea.

“So … aahhggch,” Levi said, frustrated, running both hands through his hair. “So I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that at the hospital. I mean, I know why I said it, but I was wrong. Really wrong. And I wish I could go back to that morning, when I woke up here, and have a stern talk with myself, so that the rest of this crap wouldn’t have happened.”

“I wonder…,” she said, “if there was such a thing as time machines, would anyone ever use them to go to the future?”

“Cather.”

“What.”

“What are you thinking?”

What was she thinking? She wasn’t thinking. She was wondering if she could live without her kidneys. She was holding herself up on two feet. “I still don’t know what all this means,” she said.

“It means … I really like you.” His hand was in his hair again. Just the one. Holding it back. “Like, really like you. And I want that kiss to have been the start of something. Not the end.”

Cath looked at Levi’s face. His eyebrows were pulled down in the middle, bunching up the skin above his nose. His cheeks, for once, were absolutely smooth. And his lips were at their most doll-like, not even a quirk of a smile.

“It felt like the start of something,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets and swayed forward a little bit. Like he wanted to bump into her. Cath backed up flat against the door.

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” She turned around and unlocked the door. “You can come in. I’m not sure yet about all the other stuff.”

“Okay,” Levi said. She heard the very beginning of a smile in his voice—a fetal smile—and it very nearly killed her.

“I don’t trust you,” Simon said, grasping Basil’s forearm.

“Well, I don’t trust you,” Basil spat at him. Actually spat at him, bits of wet landing on Simon’s cheeks.

“Why do you need to trust me?” Simon asked. “I’m the one hanging off a cliff!”

Basil looked down at him distastefully, his arm shaking from Simon’s weight. He swung his other arm down and Simon grabbed at it.

“Douglas J. Henning,” Basil cursed breathlessly, his body inching forward. “Knowing you, you’ll bring the both of us down just to spite me.”

—from Carry On, Simon, posted November 2010 by FanFixx.net author Magicath