Текст книги "Deeper"

Автор книги: Robin York

Соавторы: Robin York,Robin York
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

“Have you thought about anything at all besides naked pictures since they first popped up … when, early last month?”

“August twenty-fourth.” She tilts her head, considering. “Yes.”

“What else have you been thinking about?”

Caroline peers into the clean mixer. When she puts her finger inside the bowl and traces the curve of it—the curve I polished until it was shiny enough to attract her attention—I don’t tell her to stop, even though I’ll have to clean it again after she goes.

She can touch whatever she wants.

“My constitutional law class. Latin homework. My sister’s wedding coming up. Whether my dad is eating okay now that I’m not at home to nag him. How to cover up the circles under my eyes. Rape. Evil. Whether law school admissions committees routinely Google applicants or just in special circumstances.”

She glances at me. “If I should get the space between my teeth fixed. The usual.”

“Sure you don’t want to pile on a few more things? Global warming, maybe? Declining newspaper circulations?”

She almost smiles. “What do you think about?”

I guess I’m supposed to make a list, too, but fuck that.

I’ve got three years of undergrad before I can start med school, followed by four years to become a doctor, another four or five to become an anesthesiologist, and then years of hard work to build a practice. I’ve got three jobs, Frankie to think about, Mom to take care of.

Maybe what I can have of Caroline is this little slice of space and light in the darkest hours of the night. I can give her permission to not be fine. Let her talk about what’s bugging her. Distract her from her problems.

If she wants to come here, I’ll do all that, but I won’t make her problems into mine, and I’m not going to bare my fucking soul to her.

“My ears, mostly,” I say. “You really think they’re too small?”

I touch them with my flour-covered hands, trying to look self-conscious. It works—she smiles.

That gap between her teeth kills me. I need to measure it with my tongue.

“Are you sure they’re full-grown?” she asks. “Because my dentist told me that it might be a few years before my wisdom teeth finish coming in. Maybe it’s the same with your ears.”

“You’re saying I might hit a growth spurt. Grow some manlier ears.”

“It’s possible.”

“You know what they say, though. Small ears, big equipment.”

“That is so not what they say.”

“No? Maybe it’s only in Oregon they say that.”

She laughs, a husky sound. I don’t like how it slips over me. I don’t like how I can just about feel myself filing it away in the stroke book for later—Caroline laughing as I unhook her bra. Still smiling when I take off those shapeless sweatpants and see what she’s got on underneath. What she looks like naked.

You already know what she looks like naked.

Everybody does.

I shake off the whole train of thought. Doesn’t matter, and it’s not happening between her and me, anyway.

“Here’s my point, though,” I say. “There’s all this other shit you could be worrying about, and you’re wasting too much worry on something you can’t fix.”

“Like what? Worrying over the size of your ears isn’t going to fill much of my time. I’ll still have, like, twenty-three and a half hours a day to worry in.”

“What are you saying, you only care about my ears half an hour’s worth?”

“Maybe not even that. I have to be honest with you.”

“Please. Be honest.”

“Okay. The thing is, if I never have to see another guy’s ears so long as I live? I’ll be a happy girl.”

“Now you’re starting to sound bitter.”

“Maybe I am bitter. Maybe I’ve just seen waaaay too many close-ups of ears lately.”

“Red, swollen ears?”

She leans in, like she’s telling me a big secret. “Veiny, horrible, giant, disgusting, dripping ears.”

That cracks me up.

“What is it with you guys taking pictures of your ears?” She’s all indignant now. “It’s like you’re so proud of them.”

“If you could make stuff shoot out of your ears, you’d be proud, too.”

She’s biting her lip, looking away toward the mixer like it’s going to rescue her from the fact that we just had a conversation about dicks, and she wants to laugh but she won’t let herself. “I think we need a new topic.”

“Something more polite?”

“Yes.” Then she glances up at me from under her eyelashes, and, for one hot second, she’s wicked. “Something a little less lubricated.”

I have to look away from her. Take a breath.

I point at a lump of dough. “Wash your hands, and I’ll let you knead that.”

“Will you, now?”

“I will. I’m going to teach you to make the best sourdough loaf in Putnam County.”

“Is anybody else in Putnam County making sourdough loaves?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

She makes a face at the bread, but she’s pulling her sweatshirt over her head. “All right. I’m game.”

The shirt she’s got on underneath—it’s got to be her pajama shirt. She’s not wearing a bra.

I get four more loaves ready while she’s washing her hands at the sink. It takes two before I’ve managed to push the surprise away.

I do another one with my eyes closed, willing the soft bounce of her breasts from my head.

When she comes back from the sink, her face is serious. “Listen. I’m … I’m just going to say this. I meant what I told you at the library.”

“Which thing you told me?”

She’s picking at her thumb with her fingernail. “I can’t be your friend. Or—or anything else.”

I get it.

Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, a little, to hear it again, but I really do get it.

For all that I had my reasons for not talking to her last year, she’s got her own reasons, too. There was Nate. There was her dad, who hated my guts even before I set about deliberately lighting his fuse. But underneath all that, there was this other thing.

Caroline’s not the kind of girl who gets mixed up with a guy who’s dealing. She’s the type who plays it safe, does what she’s supposed to, follows all the rules.

Maybe if I were who I’m pretending to be when I’m at Putnam, me and Caroline would be possible, but I’m not. We don’t make sense together.

It’s fine.

“Tell you what,” I say. “Tonight I’m going to show you how to make a decent loaf and bake it. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll teach you something else. We don’t need to be friends. We can just do this … you know, this nighttime thing. If you want to.”

“Can we?”

“When Bob’s not here, it’s my bakery. I can do whatever I want as long as I get the bread made.”

“And you won’t …”

When she looks right at me, my hands twitch.

You won’t, West.

You fucking won’t.

“We’ll make bread and be not-friends. You don’t have to come within ten feet of my ears. I don’t want that from you, anyway.”

What’s one more lie on top of all the others?

She pokes experimentally at the dough in front of her. “All right. Show me how you do this thing, then.”

I show her, and then I show her the rest of it. She stays until her loaf comes out of the oven. By then she’s yawning.

I send her home to bed with warm bread tucked under her arm. I make her text me when she’s back at the dorm, safe behind a locked door.

The next night, she comes back.

She keeps coming back, and I keep letting her.

That’s how I get to be not-friends with Caroline Piasecki.

NOVEMBER
Caroline

When I think of the bakery, I think of all of it together.

The crunch of fall leaves piled up on the threshold of the back door where they’d blown down the alley and stuck.

The gleam of the mixing bowls and countertops underneath the banked fluorescents when West finished cleaning and locked up.

The smell of baking bread, the crumbling clay of live yeast between my fingers, West’s voice behind my ear as he leaned over my shoulder and watched me drop it into the bowl, saying, “Just like that. Exactly.”

The way he moved his arm in short, sure strokes when he sliced open the tops of the loaves right before he pushed the rack of trays into the oven.

Winter came late. October turned into November, and I spent a long, crisp autumn of flour-strewn countertops and rising dough, sticky fingers and loud music and West working with his ball cap turned backward, an apron tied around his waist, and that smart-ass grin on his face.

West is the bakery. I can’t imagine the point of it without him in it, and I can’t imagine him—the best version of him, the one he rarely lets people see—without that kitchen as the backdrop for his movements.

West bending down to measure out a scoop of grain.

West nudging the oven door closed with his shoulder, setting the timer.

West kneading with both hands, flour dusted all the way up to his elbows, moving to the easy rhythm of some cheesy club music Krish had picked out.

There, in the bakery, while the rest of the world was sleeping, time buckled and we found something outside it. We became us in that kitchen. Long before he kissed me, I passed a whole lifetime with West, bathed in yellow light, baptized in lukewarm tap water, consecrated at sunrise when we broke a loaf open and looked. Dug our hands into it. Tasted what we’d made.

It wasn’t perfect, what we made. One night I forgot the salt. Another time, the water I put in was too hot, and I killed the yeast. There were nights when West forgot to tell me some vital thing and nights when he decided not to remind me, just to see if I’d remember.

He held himself back, and I wasn’t always brave enough. I didn’t trust myself.

We failed as often as we succeeded, West and me.

But I think about what would have happened if he hadn’t come out to get me.

I think I might have stayed in my car forever. I might have made only right turns.

I might never have learned how to stop being afraid, and those men would have kept chasing me around, always.

I can’t be anything but glad that’s not the way things went.

Instead, West came out, and I went in.

After that, I rarely wanted to be anywhere else.

“You’re buzzing again.”

I’m in my nook, a little area on the bakery floor between the sink and the long table against the wall where West lines up his mixing bowls. I like it here because I can only usually see a slice of him at a time.

I watch his boots, his pant legs from the knees down, his apron.

During this part of the night, when he’s mixing, he’s always moving. Rocking from one foot to the other if he’s feeding and stirring the sourdough starter. Pacing from the sink to the mixer to the refrigerator to the storage room, back to the mixer, back to the sink, over to the counter to pick up a tool he’s forgotten.

The way he moves is almost more than I can take. His lazy grace. His competence.

His arms come into view as he lifts one bowl off the stand and puts the next one on. He bends over, and I see his hat and his neck, his face in profile, his jeans tight over his bent leg, the shape of his calf.

I can handle him in pieces. They’re all nice pieces, but they don’t make me break out in a nervous sweat, like I did last night when it was time to head home and he walked me to the back door, propped his hand up on the jamb, and said something that made him smile down at me and lean in. I don’t know what it was. I couldn’t hear him, because the way he had his arm braced made his shirt sleeve ride up to reveal his whole biceps, a defined curve of taut muscle engaged against the doorframe. I fell into a biceps wormhole, and then I made the grave error of looking at his mouth, the shape of his lips and his cheekbones, his chin and his eyes. I forgot to listen to him.

I forgot to breathe or exist outside of West’s face.

Yeah. That’s a thing that can happen, apparently, and when it happens, it’s really bad. He had to snap his fingers in front of my nose to wake me up. It made me startle, and I stepped backward and nearly fell down. West just smiled kind of indulgently.

“Text me when you get home,” he said, and I said something that sounded like gnugh.

I guess he’s used to me being hopeless around him. We both just pretend I’m not. It sort of works.

West and I are like that. We sort of work.

I’ve been coming to the bakery two or three nights a week—almost every shift he’s on, I’m here. Insomnia has made me her bitch, but it doesn’t matter so much when I can hang out with West and study in my little nook. I nap after class. I’m turning into a creature of the night. It’s all right, though. I guess I’d rather be Bella Swan hanging out at the Cullen place than, you know, school Bella—all pissy and defensive, clomping around Forks High, convinced everyone hates her.

The men in my head are quiet when I’m at the bakery. I think if they called me names, West would glower at them and tell them to shut the fuck up. If they were real, I mean. Which they’re not.

West’s phone is still buzzing, vibrating itself partway off the edge of the tabletop. I poke out a finger and push it back to safety. “Dough boy,” I say, loud, because it’s hard to hear with the mixer going. “Your phone.”

“What?”

“Your phone.”

I point, and he finally understands. He walks over and picks it up off the metal countertop right beside me.

I made the mistake of grabbing it once, thinking I would hand it to him. The look on his face—he has this way of shutting down his whole expression so it looks like there’s no feeling in him at all.

He’s hilariously funny when he wants to be, wickedly smart, open and teasing—and then suddenly I step over some invisible line and he’s a robot. Or too intense, complaining about how something is bullshit, like he did that first night I came here.

He takes his phone into the front of the store, where I won’t be able to hear him talking.

I go back to my Latin, though it’s hard to concentrate, knowing, as I do, that in ten or fifteen minutes someone will show up at the alley door. West will meet him there, positioning his body so I can’t see who he’s talking to, mumbling in this low voice that makes him sound like just another dude, a slacker. His shoulders will slouch. His hands will dip in and out of his pockets, propelled along by his soothing, nonthreatening voice.

I try not to see. It’s better if I stick to the slices. That’s the only way we can be friends—or not-friends, I guess.

And I need to be not-friends with West. He’s the only person in my whole life who doesn’t treat me like nothing happened but who also doesn’t treat me like everything happened. He says, “How’s it going?” when I walk in the door, and I tell him the truth, but afterward that’s that. We’re done talking about it.

Tucked in my nook at the bakery, for a few hours two or three nights a week, I feel like myself.

When he comes back, he hops up on the nearest table opposite me and says, “What’s that, Latin?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a quiz tomorrow.”

“Need help with your verbs?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Are you staying long enough for me to teach you all the finer points of muffin glazing?”

“Probably not. I’ve got to write a response paper for Con Law, and I didn’t bring my laptop.”

“You should’ve. I like it when you write here.”

I do, too. He’s quiet when I need him to be quiet, and when I want a break he’ll teach me some bread thing. If I read him my draft out loud, he’ll suggest some change that sounds small but always ends up making the paper more concise, the argument stronger.

West is smart. Crazy smart. I had no idea—the one time I had a class with him, he didn’t talk.

It is possible he’s actually smarter than I am.

“Next week, then,” he says. “Tuesday you will learn the secrets of the glaze.”

I smile. I think he likes teaching me stuff nearly as much as he liked learning it in the first place. He’s almost insatiably curious. No matter what homework I’m doing, he’ll end up asking me fifty questions about it.

“Sounds good. Are you on at the restaurant this weekend?”

“Yeah. What about you, you got plans?”

I want to hang out with you. Come over Sunday, and we’ll watch bad TV.

Let’s go to the bar.

Let’s go out to dinner in Iowa City.

Sometimes I invent a life in which my being more than not-friends with West is a possibility. A life where we get to hang out somewhere other than a kitchen at midnight.

Then I mentally pinch myself, because, no, I want less scandal, not more.

“Bridget is trying to get me to go to that party tomorrow night.”

“Where’s that?”

“A bunch of the soccer players.”

“Oh, at Bourbon House?”

“Yeah, are you going?”

“I’ll be at work.”

“After you get off?”

He smiles. “Nah. You should go, though.”

When Bridget suggested it, the idea filled me with panic. A crush of bodies, all those faces I would have to study for signs of judgment, pity, disgust. I can’t have fun when I’m so busy monitoring my behavior, choosing the right clothes, plastering a just-so smile on my face and watching, watching, while the men in my head tell me I look like a whore and I should pick somebody already. Take him upstairs and let him suck my tits, because that’s all a slut like me is good for.

Bridget thinks I need to get out more, pick my life back up where I left it. Otherwise, Nate wins.

I see her point. But I can’t make myself want to.

I look at the corrugated soles of West’s boots, swinging a few feet from my face. At the way his knuckles look, folded around the edge of the table. The seam at his elbows.

If West were going to the party, I would want to.

“I might.”

“Do you some good,” he says. “Get shit-faced, dance a little. Maybe you’d even meet somebody worth keeping you busy nights so you’re not hanging around here harassing me all the time.”

He grins when he says it. Just kidding, Caro, that grin says. We both know you’re too fucked in the head to be hooking up with anybody.

Before I’ve even caught my breath, he’s hopped down and moved toward the sink, where he fills a bucket with soapy water so he can wipe down his countertops.

I look at my Latin book, which really is verbs, and I blink away the sting in my eyes.

Video, videre, vidi, visus. To see.

Cognosco, cognoscere, cognovi, cognotus. To understand.

Maneo, manere, mansi, mansurus. To remain.

I see what he’s doing. Every now and then, West throws some half-teasing comment out to remind me I’m not his girlfriend. He smiles as he tells me something that means, You’re not important to me. We’re not friends.

He pulls me closer with one hand and smashes an imaginary fist into my face with the other.

I know why he does it. He doesn’t want me to get close.

I don’t know why.

But I see. I understand.

I remain.

We’re a mess, West and me.

He cleans the tables off, his movements abrupt and jerky. Agitated. When he switches to dishes, he’s slamming the pans around instead of stacking them. He’s so caught up with the noise he’s making that when a figure appears at the back door, West doesn’t notice.

I do, though. I look up and see Josh there. He used to be my friend, before. Now I see him around with Nate. I think he’s going out with Sierra. He’s standing with his wallet in his hand, looking awkward.

“Hey, Caroline,” he says.

“Hey.”

West turns toward me, follows my eyes to the doorway. He frowns deeply and stalks toward the door. Josh lifts the wallet, and West kind of shoves it down and aside as he moves out into the alley, forcing Josh to step back. “Put your fucking money away,” I hear him say as the door swings closed. “Jesus Christ.”

Then the kitchen is empty—just me and the white noise of the mixer, the water running in the sink.

When he comes back in, he’s alone, his hand pushing something down deep in his pocket. “You didn’t see that,” he says.

Which is dumb.

I guess he thinks he’s protecting me. If I can’t see him dealing, I’m not an accessory. I’m the oblivious girl in the corner, unable to put two and two together and get four.

“Yes, I did.”

He levels this look at me. Don’t push it.

I haven’t seen that look since the library. It makes me dump my book on the floor and stand up, and when I’m standing I can feel it more—how my chest is still aching from the hurt of what he said a few minutes ago. How my heart pounds, because he hurt me on purpose, and I’m angry about it.

I’m angry.

He turns his back on me and starts to wash a bowl.

“What kind of profit do you make, anyway?” I ask. “On a sale like that, is it even worth it? Because I looked it up—it’s a felony to sell. You’d do jail time if you got arrested. There’s a mandatory minimum five-year sentence.”

He keeps cleaning the bowl, but his shoulders are tight. The tension in the room is thick as smoke, and I don’t know why I’m baiting him when I’m close to choking on it.

He’s right to try to protect me. My dad would have kittens if he found out I was here, with West dealing out the back door, selling weed with the muffins. He would ask me if I’d lost my mind, and what would I say to him? It’s only weed? I don’t think West even smokes it?

Excuses. My dad hates excuses.

The truth is that I don’t make any excuses for it. I turn myself into an accessory every time I come here and sit on the floor by West, and I don’t care. I really don’t. I used to. Last year I was scandalized by the pot.

Now I’m too busy being fascinated by West.

And then there’s the money. I think about the money. I wonder how much he has. I know his tuition is paid, because he told me, and that he caddies at a golf course in the summer, because I asked why he had such stark tan lines.

I imagine he’s paying his own rent, paying for his food, but as far as I can tell he doesn’t have any hobbies or vices. I can’t figure out why he works so many jobs and deals pot, too, if he doesn’t need all that money just to get by. And he must not, right? He must have more than he needs if he’s buying weed in large quantities and making loans.

“Drop it,” West says.

I can’t drop it. Not tonight. Not when the pain in my chest has turned to this burning, angry insistence. I’m too pissed at him, and at myself. “I’ll have to ask Josh,” I muse. “Or Krish. I bet he would tell me. I bet when people show up at your apartment, you don’t turn your back on Krish and make him sit alone while you deal outside on the fire escape.”

I’ve never been to his apartment. I only know about the fire escape because I drove by.

I’m possibly a little bit stalking him.

West drops the bowl in the sink and rounds on me. “What are you in a snit about? You want me to deal in front of you?”

Do I?

For a moment I’m not sure. I look down at the floor, at the spill of flour by the row of mixing bowls.

I remember the first night I came in here and the first thing that’s happened every night since.

How’s it going, Caroline?

“It’s bullshit,” I say.

His eyes narrow.

“It’s bullshit for you to pretend not to be dealing drugs out the back door, like you’re going to protect me from knowing the truth about you. It’s not fair that I’m supposed to come in here and bare my soul to you, and you don’t even want me to touch your stupid cell phone.”

West crosses his arms. His jaw has gone hard.

“You’re a drug dealer.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud. The first time I’ve ever even mentally put it in those words. “So what? You have some dried-up plants in a plastic bag in your pocket, and you give them to people for money. Whoop-de-do.”

He stares at me. Not for just a moment, which would be normal.

He stares at me for ages.

For the entire span of my life, he looks right in my eyes, and I suck in shallow breaths through my mouth, my chest full of pressure, my ears ringing as the mixer grinds and grinds and grinds around.

Then the corner of his mouth tips up a fraction. “Whoop-de-do?”

“Shut up.” I’m not in the mood to be teased.

“You could’ve at least thrown a fuck in there. Whoop-de-fucking-do.”

“I don’t need your advice on how to swear.”

“You sure? I’m a fuck of a lot better at it than you.”

I turn away and pick up my bag and my Latin book off the floor. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be around him if he’s going to hurt me, bullshit me, and tease me. That’s not what I come here for, and I hate how the pressure from the way he stared at me has built up in my face, prickling behind the bridge of my nose, sticking in my throat.

“Caro,” he says.

“Leave me alone.”

“Caro, I made forty bucks. Okay? That’s what you want me to say?”

I stop packing my bag and just stand there, looking at it.

He made forty bucks.

“How much did you charge?”

“Sixty-five.”

“For how much?”

“An eighth of an ounce.”

I turn around. “Is that a lot?”

“A lot of money, or a lot of weed?”

“Um, either.”

He smiles for real now and shakes his head. “It’s a little more than anybody else is charging, but the weed is better. It’s the smallest amount I’ll bother to sell. Why are we talking about this?”

And that’s when I lose my nerve. I shrug. I look past his left ear.

I don’t want to ask him.

Before this year, I never gave money a lot of thought. My dad is pretty well off. I grew up in a nice house in a safe neighborhood in Ankeny, outside Des Moines, and even though Putnam isn’t cheap, I didn’t have to worry about tuition. I always knew my dad would pay it, whatever it was.

But that was before the pictures, and it was before I figured out that, no matter what I do, I can’t make them go away. Not by myself.

I need fifteen hundred dollars—maybe more—to hire the company that will push my name down in the search rankings and scrub my reputation online. The guy I talked to when I called said that cases like mine can be more involved, which means a higher fee.

I don’t have a job. I had one in high school, but Dad says I’m better off concentrating on my schoolwork now. I have a hundred thousand dollars in a savings account—my share of the life-insurance settlement when my mom died from cancer when I was a baby—but until I’m twenty-one, I can’t touch it.

With no income and no credit history, I can’t get fifteen hundred dollars on a credit card without my dad cosigning on the application. I tried.

“Caroline?” West asks.

“What?”

He steps closer. “What’s this really about?”

And I blurt out the stupidest thing. “You don’t have to protect me.”

Because I’m sick of it. Of being protected. Of needing to be.

“I’m not.”

His eyes, though. When I meet his eyes, they’re blazing with the truth.

He is. He wants to.

“You know what the worst thing is?” I ask. “It’s knowing I was always stupid and sheltered and just … just useless. Everyone telling me I’m smart, like that’s so great and important. Going to a good college—oh, Caroline, how fantastic. But one bad thing happens to me, and I can’t even …”

I trail off, because I think I’m going to cry, and I’m too angry to give in to it.

West takes another step closer, and then he’s rubbing my arm. The flat of his palm lands against the back of my neck, over my hair, and he’s tipping me forward until my forehead rests against his chest.

“You’re not useless.”

“No, seriously, I can’t—I need you to hear this, okay? Because the thing is—”

“Caroline, shut up.”

The way he says it, though—it’s definitely the nicest anyone’s ever shut me up. And his rubbing hand comes around my back and presses me into him, and that’s nice, too. I can feel him breathing. I can smell his skin, feel my hair catching on the stubble underneath his chin.

It’s better here. I like it.

I like it too much. So much that I spend the longest possible span of time I can get away with savoring the heat of him, the weight of his hand on the back of my neck, the way his boot looks stuck between my flats. But then I have to ask. I have to.

“West?”

He makes a noise like hunh.

“Do you have a lot of money?”

I lift my forehead to ask him, which puts me in startlingly close range of his face. I’m close enough to see the frown begin at the downturned tips of his eyebrows and spread across his forehead.

Close enough to see his eyes go baffled. Then angry. Then blank.

His hand drops away from my neck. “Why are you asking me that?”

It’s too late not to say, but the butterflies in my stomach have turned to lead ingots, and I know this is all wrong. I know it is. But I don’t know why or how to get out of it. “I, uh … I need a loan.”

He steps back. “What for?”

“Remember when I told you about that company that can clean up my reputation online?”

“You said it was expensive, so you’d have to tell your dad.”

“Yeah.”

I wait a beat.

“You didn’t tell your dad.”

“I can’t, West. I thought about it, but I … What if he sees?”

It could happen any time. My dad could be sitting at his desk and type my name into a search engine, just because. Or somebody he works with could point him in that direction. A friend. One of my sisters. Anybody.

I close my eyes, because the humiliation of it, the shame of asking West to help me fix this thing—I can’t.

I can’t look at him at all.

“How much do you need?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars. I heard you … I heard sometimes you do that.”

He sighs. “You have any income at all?”

“I get an allowance.”

I open my eyes, but I can’t lift them above my shoes. My black flats are dusted with flour. It’s worked its way down into the buckle, and I doubt I would be able to clean it out, even if I wanted to.

“How long would it take you to pay me back?”

“I could pay you a hundred fifty a month.” If I never buy anything or eat outside the dining hall.

West kicks my toe with his boot. Waits for me to look up. His eyes are still dead.

“I’m charging you interest.”

“I would expect you to.”

“I’ll have it on Tuesday.”

And then there’s nothing left to say. He’s gone, empty, and I’m too full—like there aren’t any edges to me. It’s just pain and disappointment, all the way through.

“Thanks,” I say. “I’m … I’m going to head out. I have to write that paper.”

He just grunts at me and weighs out dough. A thousand miles away.

I don’t see West on Friday, because he’s working at the restaurant, and we’re not friends.

I don’t go to the soccer party. Bridget just about breaks something trying to sell me on the idea, but I can’t. I tell her I have to study, and then I hide in the library and replay my conversation with West over and over again. I should never have asked him for the money. I don’t know who I should have asked, but not him. The look on his face … I can’t stop thinking about it.

I don’t see West on Saturday, because he’s working at the restaurant, and we’re not friends.

The next week is more of the same thing. On Tuesday he gives me the money, and he teaches me how to make lemon glaze for the muffins. Everything’s like normal, but there’s this thin coating of awkwardness ladled over our conversations, and when I’m not around him, it hardens and turns opaque.