“You could be asking Kinley. She’s smarter than me.”
Cade knew that Ivy wasn’t being self-effacing. Kinley really was smarter than just about everyone. She was probably smarter than Stratford. Her family was known for being brilliant. Her great-grandfather was actually rumored to be one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s key advisers.
But that also didn’t make Kinley a suitable study buddy. Or any other kind of buddy either. Cade ran his hand over Ivy’s bedspread.
“The narc?” he asked. “Really?”
Ivy looked up at the ceiling, exasperated. “What do you want, Cade? Do you want me to tutor you? Do you want to study together? Or, what, do you want to be pals? Do you want to be the first dude to have sex with the recently fallen? Seriously. Just spit it out.” She turned back to her laptop.
Cade spotted her backpack leaning against her bed. It was half open, and notes were sticking out of the top. Her psych notes. They had to be. Ivy definitely wasn’t taking another class.
“I’ll go,” he said. He stood up, slipped the notes out of the backpack, and stuffed them in his shirt.
Ivy turned to him. “Fine.”
Cade paused at her door. “I like you, Ivy McWhellen. But you really should be careful who you’re mean to.”
Ivy smiled very tightly. “I like you, Cade Sano. But honestly? I don’t give a shit.”
Ivy
Friday, June 12
List all of Freud’s psychosexual stages and a three-paragraph description of each.
Ivy bit the eraser on her pencil as she reread the question. It was something she hadn’t done since she was little—the pencil-biting. Something she’d only done when she was stressed. Her mother had hated it. She claimed it was the reason Ivy’s teeth had gone all crooked around fifth grade. And every time Ivy bitched about having her braces tightened, her mother would instantly appear and remind her that it was Her Own Fault, and that if she kept it up she’d just have to get braces again, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing?
Right now, Ivy didn’t care. If there was anything the past few months had taught her, it was that a little metal in her mouth was the least of her life issues.
And right now, she could only think one thing: she wasn’t ready for this test.
In fact, the only thing she was absolutely sure she could get right was her name. And the way she was going, she would probably screw that up too.
Oral, anal, phallic, latent . . . She scrawled the words on her paper. Damn it. There were others, weren’t there? Hadn’t that jerk Tyler gotten all snickery about them last class? Damn it.
If only she hadn’t lost her notes. She knew she’d written this stuff down. And she knew she had been putting them in her backpack and labeling them for every single class. It wasn’t like she didn’t have the time to keep good notes.
But then yesterday, when she finally decided to start studying, they were gone. Just gone. They weren’t in her backpack. They weren’t anywhere in her room. And she’d torn apart the car her parents had bought her for her sixteenth birthday and found nothing (except a peasant-style headband that she was certain Klaire had stolen, like, a year ago).
She bit down harder on the eraser. What were the others? Were they physical? Did latent count as physical?
She cast a furtive look around the room. Stratford sat at the desk, looking happier than she’d ever seen him. One half of his weird face quirked upward, like torturing innocent students with a ridiculous test was how he got his jollies.
The other students looked just as perplexed as Ivy felt. Kip was rubbing his forehead, and even perfect, pretty Kinley—well, she looked exhausted, like she hadn’t slept all weekend. Maybe she was sick. Her braid had fuzzed out around the edges, and she wasn’t even writing—just rolling her pen on her desk, up and back, up and back.
Ivy scanned the questions on the first page, then flipped to the second.
Describe Pavlov and his canine experiments in detail.
Ivy frowned. Her mother would have scolded her for that, too. Frown lines. Did Ivy really want Botox before she turned 20?
Ivy was 100 percent certain that Dr. Stratford had never even mentioned any Pavlov, let alone any dogs. And what had he done to them, anyway? Wasn’t experimenting on animals illegal? Well, maybe it wasn’t in the Deep South.
Or maybe, just maybe, she would have known all of this if she hadn’t lost her notes.
Ivy cast a desperate look at the door, and locked eyes with Mattie, who shrugged. She’d borrowed his notes last night, but they weren’t great. Mattie didn’t keep notes like she did, and he was missing an entire class from the day he was locked out.
Ivy flipped to the third page. Guilt. She remembered this. This was the stuff about the different portions of the psyche—id, ego, superego. She repeated them to herself as she scrawled them down. Maybe she’d actually get one right.
Probably not, though. Stratford was definitely the kind of professor who ruined lives if someone misplaced a comma.