Professor Piper wasn’t done grading their unreliable-narrator scenes (which made Nick crabby and paranoid), but the professor wanted them all to get started on their final project, a ten-thousand-word short story. “Don’t save it till the night before,” she said, sitting on her desk and swinging her legs. “It will read like you wrote it the night before. I’m not interested in stream of consciousness.”
Cath wasn’t sure how she was going to keep everything straight in her head. The final project, the weekly writing assignments—on top of all her other classwork, for every other class. All the reading, all the writing. The essays, the justifications, the reports. Plus Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays writing with Nick. Plus Carry On. Plus e-mail and notes and comments …
Cath felt like she was swimming in words. Drowning in them, sometimes.
“Do you ever feel,” she asked Nick Tuesday night, “like you’re a black hole—a reverse black hole.…”
“Something that blows instead of sucks?”
“Something that sucks out,” she tried to explain. She was sitting at their table in the stacks with her head resting on her backpack. She could feel the indoor wind on her neck. “A reverse black hole of words.”
“So the world is sucking you dry,” he said, “of language.”
“Not dry. Not yet. But the words are flying out of me so fast, I don’t know where they’re coming from.”
“And maybe you’ve run through your surplus,” he said gravely, “and now they’re made of bone and blood.”
“Now they’re made of breath,” she said.
Nick looked down at her, his eyebrows pulled together in one thick stripe. His eyes were that color you can’t see in the rainbow. Indigo.
“Nope,” he said. “I never feel like that.”
She laughed and shook her head.
“The words come out of me like Spider-Man’s webbing.” Nick held out his hands and touched his middle fingers to his palms. “Fffffssh.”
Cath tried to laugh, but yawned instead.
“Come on,” he said, “it’s midnight.”
She gathered up her books. Nick always took the notebook. It was his notebook after all, and he worked on the story between library dates. (Or meetings or whatever these were.) When they got outside, it was much colder than Cath was expecting. “See you tomorrow,” Nick said as he walked away. “Maybe Piper’ll have our papers done.”
Cath nodded and got out her phone to call her room.
“Hey,” someone said softly.
She jumped back. It was just Levi—leaning against the lamppost like the archetypical “man leaning against lamppost.”
“You’re always done at midnight.” He smiled. “I thought I’d beat you to the punch. Too cold out here to stand around waiting.”
“Thanks,” she said, walking past him toward the dorms.
Levi was uncharacteristically quiet. “So that’s your study partner?” he asked once they were halfway back to Pound.
“Yeah,” Cath said into her scarf. She felt her breath, wet and freezing in the wool. “Do you know him?”
“Seen him around.”
Cath was quiet. It was too cold to talk, and she was more tired than usual.
“He ever offer to walk you home?”
“I’ve never asked,” Cath said quickly. “I’ve never asked you either.”
“That’s true,” Levi said.
More quiet. More cold.
The air stung Cath’s throat when she finally spoke again. “So maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Levi said. “That wasn’t my point.”
*
The first time she saw Wren that week, at lunch with Courtney, all Cath could think was, So this is what you look like when you’re keeping a giant secret from me—exactly the same as usual.
Cath wondered if Wren was ever planning to talk to her about … what their dad had brought up. She wondered how many other important things Wren wasn’t telling her. And when had this started? When had Wren started filtering what she told Cath?
I can do that, too, Cath thought, I can keep secrets. But Cath didn’t have any secrets, and she didn’t want to keep anything from Wren. Not when it felt so good, so easy, to know that when she was with Wren, she didn’t have to worry about a filter.
She kept waiting for a chance to talk to Wren without Courtney, but Courtney was always around. (And always talking about the most inane things possible. Like her life was an audition for an MTV reality show.) Finally, after a few days, Cath decided to walk to class with Wren after lunch, even though it might make her late.
“What’s up?” Wren asked as soon as Courtney was on her merry way to Economics. It had started snowing—a wet snow.
“You know I went home last weekend…,” Cath said.
“Yeah. How’s Dad?”
“Fine … good, actually. He’s pitching Gravioli.”
“Gravioli? That’s huge.”
“I know. And he seemed into it. And there was nothing else—I mean, everything seemed fine.”