“Hey, I live here.” Jenny grinned and retracted her hockey stick. She glanced around her but no one was approaching. First she’d been talking to Julian in a broom closet, now behind a bush. It was kind of fun—where would he pop up next? And
why
was he here again? “What’s your excuse? Are you looking for your—what was it? Your
lighter
—again?” “Funny girl.” He shrugged his shoulders, and a ray of setting sunlight burst through the elegantly sculpted bush he was standing behind, lighting up his features from behind. “But, no. I was just, you know, passing by.” The dramatic lighting made the shapes of his face stand out even more than they normally did, and Jenny noticed for the first time how strong the planes of his cheekbones were, how deep-set his dark eyes were, how crooked his nose was. It was the kind of face that would look great in marble, she thought. It took her a moment to realize it was her turn to speak again—so much for her brilliant Shakespearean repartee. “So, uh, what am I thinking?” she asked, hoping her face was a cute rosy-cheeked red, and not an are-you-having-a-heart-attack red.
Julian smiled at her but looked kind of confused, like he’d lost the trail of conversation. “Uh, what?” He leaned forward.
“Your shirt.” Jenny pointed toward it and raised her eyebrows. “You’ve probably been getting that all day.” Julian glanced down at his chest as understanding washed over his face. “Actually, I had my Sea World T-shirt on today.” He tilted his head and shrugged his shoulders, which made him look kind of like a little kid. “I just changed.” The dimple near his lips deepened.
A giggle burst from Jenny’s lips. Something about Julian was just so friendly and open—it was nice to flirt with him. It took her mind off other tall, handsome boys. “I know this is going to sound totally crazy, but would you be at all interested in being a model for my art class project?” She really hoped he wouldn’t think she was flirting with him—because she wasn’t. Not really. “I think you’d make a great subject.” He looked completely taken aback and glanced around him. Yikes! She hoped he wasn’t going to take it the wrong way. “Uh, right now? Behind the bushes?” “No!” Jenny pushed an unruly lock of hair behind her ear. She couldn’t believe she was standing here talking to a totally cute guy when she was in desperate need of a shower. At least he probably couldn’t smell her from where he was hiding. “I didn’t mean right now. Maybe tomorrow?” “I don’t know if I’ve ever been a piece of art before.” His fingers played with a branch of the bush he was stuck next to. “Sounds kinda cool.” “Sweet.” Jenny tapped her hockey stick against the brick wall. “I’ll e-mail you about a time.” She smiled coyly. “That is, if I don’t see you in the broom closet before then.” She walked inside to the sound of his laughter. As she climbed the stairs to room 303, she realized that there would definitely be other cute boys on campus to distract her from Easy. Maybe Callie could find someone to distract her from the unforgettable Easy Walsh, too. Everything was finally working out just the way it was supposed to.
Instant Message Inbox
TinsleyCarmichael:
It’s been more than thirty seconds.
TinsleyCarmichael:
Are you still coming over?
18TinsleyCarmichael:
Julian?
W
hat am I doing? What am I doing?
Callie paused at the edge of the path to the boathouse, right at the spot where Easy had instructed her to turn off, the sky just beginning to glow orange. Her stomach rumbled a little, reminding her that she was skipping dinner. But she was too nervous and keyed up to eat anything anyway. After practice, she’d raced to shower off the sweat and grime their long practice had left her covered in, then dressed carefully. She had no idea what constituted appropriate clothing for a modeling session in the woods with her ex-boyfriend, and after deliberating for about twenty minutes she’d had to force herself to just get dressed already. Easy had asked to paint her, after all, and so he must want her to show up looking like herself. If that meant wearing expensive, slightly inappropriate clothing, so be it.
And so here she was, in her tight-fitting black Theory trousers, high-heeled pointy-toed boots, and black Vince scoop-neck sweater with a neckline just high enough not to be inappropriate. Her still-damp hair was curling slightly at the ends and making her feel even colder. She zipped her red quilted down vest up to her chin, the rabbit-fur lining making her nose twitch, and stepped off the path, the heels of her boots sinking slightly into the mossy undergrowth. She reminded herself of her resolution with Jenny and how she’d just lied to her, saying she was in a rush to get to the library. She was not going to let this thing with Easy go beyond a friendship. In fact, for that reason, she’d purposely not shaved her legs in the shower—leg stubble always made her feel so unsexy, and she felt like she might need to harness that unsexy feeling when spending time alone with Easy in the woods.
She made her way through the woods, stepping carefully over branches and enjoying the way the dry leaves crumpled beneath her feet. Callie inhaled the fresh, leafy air and wished she were a more outdoorsy person—it might be kind of fun, as long as it didn’t mean she had to wear ugly hiking boots or wear that awful all-natural deodorant crap. She came up to the small clearing that she’d guessed was Easy’s secret spot, and sure enough, there he was, crouched down in front of a bunch of tubes of paint scattered on the grass. She just stood there for a moment, staring at him, taking in the scene. He looked so natural out here, and even from how far away she was, she could read in his movements a relaxed happiness that she only really got to see when he was around Credo.
Then he looked up and saw her, and his face dissolved into a huge crooked grin. “Hey,” he said, standing up and brushing off his hands on his already dusty dark jeans. “What do you think?” He held his arms out to indicate the clearing.
Callie approached slowly, aware that even the sight of Easy doing something so simple as holding his arms out was making all of her old feelings for him come back. Fuck. This was definitely going to be harder than she thought, unshaved legs or no. “It’s nice,” she commented politely. “Where are the flowers?” “Well, it
is
October.” “What, there are no flowers in fall?” she asked petulantly, already feeling herself slide into the slightly contrary attitude that Easy had always gotten off on. She didn’t mean to—it just felt so …
natural
. “That’s stupid.” Easy laughed. His dark blue eyes crinkled up at the edges, and Callie could tell from his expression that he wanted to kiss her, the way he had done a thousand times—which broke her heart. Yes, she’d been hoping with every ounce of her being that he would realize how stupid he had been and come running back to her, throwing himself at her feet and begging for forgiveness. She missed him. She missed his deep laugh that came from somewhere down in his belly, the way he raised one eyebrow slightly when he thought she was bullshitting him about something. “Whatever. The leaves will make a pretty cool background, especially once the sun starts to set,” he said.
Callie felt Easy’s gaze wash over her. Did he look at
all
of his models this way? A few weeks ago, Tinsley had insinuated that Easy had been out in this very painting spot with Jenny. That hurt. No way was she going to let him hurt her again, not like that. Callie shook her head disdainfully. “So, what do you want me to do here? Stand in front of the leaves?” Easy scratched his neck and narrowed his eyes, focusing intently on her face. Callie felt her stomach flop but tried not to let her face betray her feelings. “I want to do some sketches first to sort of get some ideas out.” He picked up an enormous sketch pad and pulled a stubby pencil from behind his ear. “So maybe just sort of sit on the rock for now?” Callie eyed the rock. She’d sort of thought modeling would mean stretching out on a luxurious, velvet chaise lounge, maybe just wearing some silky robe casually thrown about her. Something
Titanic
-like, the heart of the ocean around her neck. Not perching on a dirty, uncomfortable rock in the middle of October when it was freezing out and she had to wear her puffy red vest with the fur-trimmed hood. If Easy wanted to paint an Eskimo, he could’ve looked one up in the library. Well, whatever.
He
was the artist. She eased herself down on top of the rock, hooking her stacked heels on a small ledge. “How’s this?” “You look like you’re pissed to be sitting on a rock,” Easy said with a knowing smile. “Or being forced this close to nature.” She knew Easy kind of got off on the fact that she was a bit of a sheltered princess. “Fine.” Callie pivoted on the rock and leaned over, throwing her arms around it in a giant bear hug. “Oh, rock, I love you so much and I am so excited to be sitting on you, even though you are cold and dirty and uncomfortable.” She tried to put the most lovesick look on her face that she could manage and blew kisses at it. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Easy bent over with laughter.
Callie got really into it, striking a series of exaggerated poses around the rock, then getting up and pouncing on the birch trees. “O trees, o nature,” she said throatily, wrapping her arms around a skinny white birch tree and fake-kissing it, bringing her lips as close to the peeling white bark as she could bear without thinking too much about the bugs that lived in it. She tossed her hair like a real spotlight-loving prima donna and watched as Easy’s pencil flew across the page.
But when she tried to pull away from the tree, she felt a sharp tug on her scalp. “Ow!” she cried, reaching up toward her head. Her hair was stuck on a branch. Fucking nature.
“Are you okay?” Easy was at her side in seconds, his sketch pad and pencil abandoned on the ground. “Don’t pull.” As he reached over her to try and untangle her hair from the branch, she caught the familiar smell of his Ivory soap mingled with musty, stable-y smells. She glanced up at him, tenderly working on her hair, trying not to pull against her scalp, and she felt her hazel eyes fill up with fat tears.
“There.” Easy pushed the branch away from her head. “You’re free.” And then he saw her face. “Did I hurt you?”
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry,
she chastised herself, but that just made the tears spill over. She covered her face with her hands. “Yes,” she said softly, meaning it. Not her hair though, her heart. She tried to turn away from him, but he was too quick. His strong arms pulled her to his chest before she could protest, and once her body was against his, she just melted into the scratchy wool of his sweater.
Easy
.
She felt his cheek resting again her head. “I know. I’m so sorry, but I swear I will never, ever hurt you again,” he whispered as he kissed the spot where her hair had gotten snagged by the tree. She had to close her eyes. “I love you, Callie. I really do.” And before she could stop to think about it any more, she kissed him. His cheek first, then his eyebrows, his nose, and finally, his soft, warm, waiting mouth.
Brett glanced down at her calculus homework, unable to concentrate on the lines of letters and numbers. She’d come over to Kara’s for some study time, but so far hadn’t been able to focus. She bit the end of her pen.
“What did you get for number twelve? It’s n
2
+ 2n, right?” Kara asked from her perch in her red butterfly chair, her calculus textbook balanced on her thighs. She pressed the eraser end of her pencil to her forehead, right between her eyes. “Because if it’s not, I’m going to take this book over to Dr. Goldstein’s house right now and set it on fire on her front lawn, right next to her freaky little gnomes.” Dr. Goldstein lived in one of the small white clapboard faculty houses at the edge of campus, and her lawn was peppered with brightly colored ceramic gnomes that would probably have been stolen by frustrated calculus students if not for Spike, Dr. Goldstein’s Rottweiler, which patrolled her yard, drooling and growling.
“Good thing you’re right, because they say Spike can smell pissed-off student blood a hundred yards away.” Brett giggled. “A man-eating dog and garden gnomes—what is Dr. Goldstein’s
deal,
anyway?” Kara leaned forward conspiratorially, slamming her heavy textbook closed. “Didn’t you hear that, like, two years ago, she started hooking up with some genius graduate student from Caltech who was interviewing her for his senior thesis?” Kara’s eyes widened and she drummed her bitten-down fingernails against her notebook. “Apparently, he lives in the city now and comes up every weekend to, you know,
interview
her.” Brett gasped. Dr. Goldstein’s shirts were always buttoned wrong and she wore mismatched socks. Brett had taken it as a sign of her absentminded brilliance—but maybe it was because she was up late the night before, getting some from her hunky young grad student? “Isn’t she, like, a thousand? I definitely would not have guessed that she was—you know—having wild, passionate sex every weekend.” Kara let her pencil fly across the room so that it landed right in Brett’s lap. “I say more power to her.” “Whatever. I’ve been with younger guys and older guys, and I think they’re all the same breed of idiot.” Brett picked up Kara’s yellow number 2 pencil and examined it. No teeth marks. Brett’s pencils were all chewed up at the ends, no matter how gross she knew the habit was. Someone had told her once—probably Heath—that chewing on pencils was a sign that you were sexually repressed.
“That sounds so pessimistic,” Kara said wistfully, dropping her calc book onto the floor and standing up to stretch, her gray American Apparel T-shirt rising to reveal a thin sliver of pale stomach above her black drawstring lounge pants. “I’m sure there are some good guys out there. Like, one or two.” “Right.” Brett ran her hand across Kara’s bright-blue-and-red Batgirl bedspread, smoothing out the wrinkles she’d made by sprawling out across it for the past hour. God, how much easier would life be if she had a single? No more nutjob Tinsley to have to tiptoe around, worrying about when her next eruption was due. And Kara’s room was just so …
nice
. It was so neat and clean, and smelled like new books and incense. She even had a leafy green plant dangling from her curtain rod. “They just happen to live in, like, outer Mongolia or something.” Kara spun the dial on her stereo, turning up the volume on the new Aimee Mann CD. She did a few dance steps on the hardwood floor, looking kind of silly but totally unselfconscious. Brett envied her that. “And they probably don’t have Internet there, do they?” Brett smiled as she watched Kara prance around her room. Until last weekend, Kara had hung out by herself—but after the lockdown party, she had sort of unquestioningly been taken in by the Waverly elite. Brett had noticed both Alison Quentin and Sage Francis wearing clothes from Kara’s closet this week, and Heath and some other guys had been seen hanging out with her at various times. And yet she still sat with Yvonne Stidder and some of the other loners at dinner. To Brett, that was just so unimaginably cool. “Are you saying you wouldn’t date someone who lived in outer Mongolia and didn’t have Internet access?” Brett teased. “That’s discrimination.” Kara nodded with a wicked grin. “Sure am—no cybersex, no deal!” Brett laughed loudly. It felt good to laugh, to forget about Jeremiah and how he had lied to her, and Mr. Dalton and how he had lied to her too. Forgetting guys was totally blissful.