“Then he’s an asshole and I’ll be delighted to kick his ass like nobody ever did before,” she replies seriously, not missing a beat.
I laugh and shake my head. This girl is really crazy sometimes, and it’s refreshing. Really refreshing in the darkness that leaves me no breathing room. I close the book, put it aside on the bed and I fish my phone from my pocket. Even if I didn’t want to call the president of the frat, I programmed his number in my phone. Just in case.
“I’ll do it, but I need to be alone.”
She nods and opens the door. “I have a class. If you need me, text me and I’ll be right back.”
I wave at her, faking a smile just for her benefit. She’s afraid to leave me alone now that she knows all of the truth and how I’m suffering from this thing with Duke. It’s hard. She waves back and walks away.
The silence in the room is unnerving. I stand up and turn on the radio. I hate it when it’s so quiet; it’s like I can’t breathe. With my phone still in my hand, I take a deep breath and begin to pace as the phone is ringing. I want him to answer and yet I’m dreading it at the same time. It’s exhausting to feel so out of my depth. My hand is shaking. I tighten my grip on the phone in order to calm myself, but it’s useless. I’m a wreck and I have to accept this.
On the third ring he answers. “Hi?” He sounds breathless but serious. There are loud noises of people speaking around him. I’m bracing myself to not hang up.
“Hi. Are you Derek Williamson?” My voice sounds so tiny, accentuating the breathy like thing going on whenever I talk.
“Hmm, yeah. And you are?” Now he sounds cautious. Gosh, maybe he’s used to having weird girls calling his phone since his number is available everywhere because of the frat.
“We don’t know each other, but I need to talk to you about one of your frat guys,” I say talking a mile a minute. I’m glad he can’t see me because I’m blushing furiously.
I’m still pacing from the door to the window and back again, not really paying attention to my surroundings.
“O-kay.” Then he clears his throat. Maybe he doesn’t care or doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. “I suppose you don’t want to do this over the phone so do you want us to meet somewhere?”
The only place I see myself talking about Sean is here in my room. I don’t want to fall apart in front of a bunch of people. “Can you come to my dorm? In a couple of hours?”
“Uh, sure. Where do you live?”
I play with my long sleeves and give him the address. Now I really can’t backtrack. I’m a breath away from hyperventilating, but I grit my teeth and I hang up and exhale. I’m dizzy. I thought it’d be over the phone and not face to face. God, and what if someone from the frat sees him coming here and tells Sean? I throw myself on my bed and cringe a little. My stomach is still a little painful but it’s already getting better. I want to stand up for myself, but it is so hard. I have to go through this for me but also for my parents and Kate. They count on me. And Duke, too.
* * *
A knock at the thin wooden door makes me jump. It’s not like I wasn’t looking at the clock beside my bed and almost counting the seconds in my head while waiting for this Derek guy, but now that I know he’s here it’s different. I shake my head and open the door.
Standing in front of me is a guy who’s not very tall but quite stocky. He must work out a lot to compensate for his lack of height. “You’re Derek?”
He nods, smiles and frowns a little at the same time. “You are?”
I fidget and walk back inside to sit on my bed. “I’m Skye.” I wave at Kate’s bed for him to take a seat. He complies but keeps on his dark brown coat.
“You’re Sean’s ex-girlfriend, right?” he says, breaking the silence in the worse way that I expected.
He saw me just once with Sean. How come he remembers who I am? I frown and nod again. “I’m surprised you know who I am.”
He shrugs and looks at the empty bag of M&Ms on Kate’s desk. His dark brown hair, cut in a buzz, gives him a seriousness that I don’t associate with a frat. His brown eyes with drops of green look soft and he’s not looking at me like I am annoying him. He just seems curious. And cautious.
“Sean talked about you.”
“I guess it wasn’t very flattering,” I reply somberly, my hands tightening on my knees. My nails are hurting me through the light blue denim of my jeans but I don’t care. “I can’t say I’m that surprised.”
He cocks his head on one side, like he’s assessing me or something. Maybe he was expecting me to be crazy. I can’t even think about how Sean has described me. It probably wasn’t very pretty. I’m better off not knowing even if curiosity is gnawing at me.
“Hard break up?”
I laugh bitterly. “More a long time coming kind of break up.”
He nods and looks at my desk in perfect order with my papers on the right corner, my textbooks on the left one and my turned off laptop in the middle. The guy is not at all what I expected. He’s not cocky, he’s not distancing himself from me and he’s patient. He also looks like a contemplative kind of person.
“I don’t want to rush you, and I won’t judge anything you want to tell me about one of the guys. I know some of them are giving you a hard time and I had a talk with them. If they’re still after you, you can tell me.”
“How do you know about that?” I ask him, startled to know he heard about the lame jokes and references from the Star Wars movies. And now that I think about it, they haven’t come after me for quite some time.
“We have a friend in common. Duke?”
I can’t believe it. Duke helped me without telling me. Even now he’s haunting me. “It’s not about that, but yes, they leave me alone. Thanks, I guess.”
“Good,” he says with a little smile, obviously glad his little talk had an effect on the guys.
I clear my throat, trying to ease the lump that has formed. I’m stalling because I don’t want to fall apart and show my weaknesses in front of this guy who is mastering stoicism. It’s so hard to tell someone you don’t even know about something so personal. You can’t just start with, “Hey, you know Sean? Well, he’s beating me.” It’s too weird.
“It’s about Sean.”
“I’m listening,” he replies immediately, his palms on his strong thighs, his eyes on my face and his attention solely on me. It’s intimidating, but knowing he is attentive convinces me to tell him everything.
I take a deep breath and tell him that Sean began to beat me in high school and is still trying to have a few minutes alone with me to resume his punches. I tell him about how Sean was in my room last weekend and what he did. When it’s over, I don’t look down. I keep my chin up, my gaze locked on his and wait. Silent tears fall but I stay put. I have to remember it’s not as hard as it was with my parents.
Derek finally blinks and sighs. He runs a hand over his freshly buzzed hair and bites his full lower lip. “Shit,” he mumbles. “I’m really sorry, Skye. I don’t know right now what I can do to help, but you can be sure that I’ll do what I can to fire him from the frat. I don’t want such a son of a bitch in my frat. I already hated him before, but now ... God, I’d love to use a good uppercut on him.”
“Uh?”
“I’m a boxer,” he clarifies and clenches his fists. He’s not the same calm and collected guy from earlier. He looks like a real boxer about to go for a first round, and it frightens me a little.
“Thank you, Derek. I appreciate that you believe me.”
His head snaps back to me. “Of course I believe you. You’re not the kind to lie like that and Duke told me to keep an eye on Sean. Now I know why he asked me that.”
I feel myself blush because it’s cute of Duke to try to protect me, but it’s also quite debilitating to have someone taking charge like that behind my back. I guess it doesn’t really matter from now on, though.
“Well, thank you for your time. You have my cell phone number if there’s any trouble?”
“Yeah, I got it. I’ll let you know what happens. If you need to talk, feel free.”
He sounds so earnest that I feel myself nod as I stand up and walk him outside of my room after I quickly dried my tears. I look at him leaving, nodding at several guys in the hall. For once seeing these people laughing and just enjoying their life clears my head. It was hard, but not as much as I thought. I’m not crying anymore, I don’t feel the need to hide either. I’m beginning to realize that the people who know about it don’t judge me, but they do judge Sean.
“I didn’t know you knew Derek,” a deep voice comes from next to me, startling me and sending comforting shivers down my spine. I hear his heavy black boots on the ground, stopping beside me.
“I just met him for the first time,” I reply weakly, shaken to be talking with Duke when I thought he’d never even look at me again. He’s distant, yes, but he’s talking to me. He’s the one walking to me. I look from where he’s coming and see a girl glaring at me. Her mussed hair, flushed cheeks, and wrinkled clothes let me know more than I want to. It hurts. It’s like a punch straight in my stomach.
“Is it because you had a date with him that you weren’t in class today?” he asks me in a clipped voice that sounds too foreign coming from him.
I still don’t turn to face him. We’re shoulder to shoulder and apparently it’s easier for us to talk. It keeps some kind of a wall between us and right now I need it. I need distance or else I know I’d say something about this girl still looking at us, with her thin arms crossed over her generous chest. “You know I don’t date. Unlike you,” I answer with more than a hint of sarcasm. “I told him about Sean since he’s the president of the frat.”
His intake of breath is audible even with the raucous in the hall. In the corner of my eyes I see Duke turning toward me with a blank face, but it’s his eyes that give him away. They are sparkling and I think it’s because he’s surprised. It makes me proud in a way.
“You told him?” he asks for confirmation, his voice barely above a whisper like he doesn’t want to frighten me.
“And I told my parents the other night at the restaurant,” I add smugly, a dark part of me delighted to prove him wrong. Maybe that’s why I told my parents and Derek, maybe it’s because it hurts me to know how Duke really saw me all along. Somewhere, maybe on a subconscious level, I wanted to prove him wrong even if he never knew about it. I’m that complicated.
“That’s amazing,” he says with a softer voice, a guilty tone underlying his words.
I face him with a frown, but it hurts even more to look at him. His clothes are wrinkled and his lips are swollen. I feel the hole between us, I see the distance in his eyes, and it’s painful. I remember the things I threw at his face, but I have to ignore this pain so I shrug and with fast and efficient movements I put my long frizzy hair in a bun. I still don’t give a second thought about my appearance and I’m not sure it’ll ever change.
“I suppose I’m back on track.” God, everything sounds so hollow, so ridiculous. I really made a mess of everything.
“But you should be careful. Sean is—”
“I know who he is, Duke. Thank you very much,” I cut him off with a harsh voice that hardens his face.
“Yeah, well, I guess you don’t need me,” he says, taking a couple of steps away from me, but still facing me. “Next time, Skye, don’t skip class.”
“You’re a TA, not the actual teacher,” I retort with ill-placed anger. When I think that I wanted to have him back in my life, yet all I’m able to do is yell at him and be a real bitch, and it’s partly because I’m hurt by his little sexcapade.
“Nice.” He turns around and walks away at a fast pace, like he’s not walking fast enough to escape my presence. My eyes stay on his broad back, on his tensed muscular shoulders and on his dark hair. Why am I unable to keep him in my life? He’s the first one to really help me, to break my shell. When Duke disappears into the stairwell, I walk back in my room with a forlorn soul. Maybe Duke was just the kind of person you don’t keep in your life, but the kind of person that changes your life forever, staying in your heart to never leave completely. In the end, I’m the only one to blame to not have him as a friend again and I hate myself for this. I really hate myself.
Chapter Ten
I thought telling my parents and warning Derek about Sean would make things better, but no. Everything is harder, like leaving my bed in the morning to go to class or just focusing on anything other than my dorm room ceiling. I know without even counting how many cracks there are above my head and it should be enough of a warning how low I feel, but nothing can reach me.
When my parents call me—which is everyday—I summon all my strength and act like the perfectly normal daughter only to go hide under my covers as soon as I hang up. When Kate tries to talk to me, tries to make me realize how this breakdown is winning I brush it off and tell her that I just need time to adjust. And I try to believe what I tell her even if deep down I know it’s all just bullshit.
The thing is, after fighting every day for three years, I don’t want to fight anymore and I don’t really see why I should. I don’t have anything more to hide. I’m just an empty shell now.
“Are you asleep, Skye?” Kate asks me in a whisper when she walks into our dark room. She was out—it is Friday night after all—and I wasn’t expecting her back so early. The bright red numbers on my alarm clock by my head on the bedside table show it’s barely midnight.