She knew she’d have to see him again. He was still Reagan’s best friend, the two of them still studied together.…
Reagan would probably keep him away completely if Cath wanted that, but Cath didn’t want Levi to ask questions. So Cath stayed away instead. She started going to the library after dinner and hanging out in Nick’s stacks. Nick generally wasn’t there; nobody was. Cath brought her laptop and tried to work on her final project, her ten-thousand-word short story, for Fiction-Writing. She’d started it—she’d started it half a dozen times—but she still didn’t have anything she wanted to finish.
Usually she ended up working on Carry On, Simon. Cath was on a streak, posting long chapters almost every night. Switching from her Fiction-Writing homework to Simon and Baz was like realizing she’d been driving in the wrong gear. She could actually feel the muscles in her forearms loosen. Her typing got faster; her breathing got easier. She’d catch herself nodding her head as she wrote, almost like she was keeping time with the words as they rushed out of her.
When the library closed, Cath would dial 911 on her phone, then run back to the dorm as fast as she could with her finger on Call.
It was more than a week before she saw Levi again. She came home from class late one afternoon, and he was sitting on Reagan’s bed while Reagan typed.
“Cather,” he said, grinning, pulling his earphones out of his head. He was listening to a lecture; she knew that now. Reagan said he listened to them all the time, and that he even saved the ones he really liked.
“Hey,” he said. “I owe you a beverage. Your choice, hot or fermented. I rocked that Outsiders quiz. Did Reagan tell you? I got an A.”
“That’s great,” Cath said, trying not to let her face show how much she wanted to kiss and kill him.
She’d thought Reagan had to work tonight. That was the only reason Cath had come home. But she didn’t have to stay here. She was going to meet Nick at the library later anyway.…
Cath pretended to get something she needed out of her desk. A pack of gum.
“Okay,” she said, “I’m taking off.”
“But you just got here,” Levi said. “Don’t you want to stay and talk about the symbolism of Johnny’s relationship with Ponyboy? And the struggle between Sodapop and Darry? Hey, do you think there’s such a thing as Outsiders fanfiction?”
“I’ve gotta go,” Cath said, trying to say it to Reagan. “Meeting somebody.”
“Who are you meeting?” Levi asked.
“Nick. My writing partner.”
“Oh. Right. Do you want me to walk you home later?”
“Nick’ll probably walk me home,” she said.
“Oh.” Levi brought his eyebrows together, but still smiled. “Cool. Later.”
She couldn’t get away from him fast enough. She got to the library and wrote a thousand words of Carry On before Nick showed up.
*
“Shut that thing down,” Nick said. “You’re corrupting my creative centers with static.”
“That’s what she said,” Cath said, closing her laptop.
Nick looked dubious.
“It was sort of a metaphysical ‘that’s what she said.’”
“Ah.” He set down his backpack and pulled out their notebook. “You working on your final project?”
“Indirectly,” Cath said.
“What does that mean?”
“Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object?”
“No.” He sat down.
“Well, I’m writing everything that isn’t my final project, so that when I actually sit down to write it, that’s all that will be left in my mind.”
“Clever girl,” he said, pushing the open notebook toward her. She flipped through it. Nick had filled five pages, front and back, since they’d last met.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I might turn in a story I worked on this summer.”
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“I don’t think so. It’s more like being really ahead of schedule.… All I can think about right now is this story.” He nudged the notebook toward Cath again. “I want you to read what I did.”
This story. Their story. Nick kept trying to call it an anti-love story. “But it’s not anti-love,” she’d argued.
“It’s anti-everything you usually find in a love story. Gooey eyes and ‘you complete me.’”
“‘You complete me’ is a great line,” Cath said. “You wish you came up with ‘you complete me.’”
Cath didn’t tell him that she’d been writing love stories—rewriting the same love story—every day for the last five years. That she’d written love stories with and without the goo, love-at-first-sight stories, love-before-first-sight stories, love-to-hate-you stories.…