We spent so long in the stacks that we’re late in arriving and the boys have their huge plates of greasy breakfast food already. Jessa tucks herself into a chair beside Jeremy White. I hug my bag and perch restlessly on the seat next to Chad, who smiles at me, his mouth tiled with impossibly square white teeth, his lightly freckled nose scrunching. “What’s up, Imogene?” he says in his deep voice, gravel-low.
A sophomore at BU, Chad Price is pure blond, white blond, with long, nearly white eyelashes and pale green eyes. You’d think he’d be a ghost with hair like that, but his face is winter tanned from ranging the Marple Slopes, where he works part-time as a ski instructor when he’s not studying organic chemistry and preparing to take the MCATs next year. Once I asked Chad why he wanted to be a doctor. He shrugged and said he likes working with his hands, which are blond-furred and big-knuckled and generally divine. We’ve played countless games of Super Smash Bros. on the WiiU in the Prices’ basement, and sometimes when he knocks my Kirby off into space, he cackles gloatingly, reaches over, and shakes me by the back of the neck. After which I’m so flushed, I’m easily punted out of bounds the moment I’m reborn. Does this make me pathetic? Très. It gets worse, because then I walk home and spend the night cultivating a case of longing so vigorous, I’m almost proud of it.
So I have a crush. A crush is not a contract. I am obligated to do nothing more than feel all my feelings and then close them up and put them back on the shelf, to be taken out and revisited like any familiar story that feels safe precisely because the ending never changes.
“Im doesn’t want to talk to you, Chadwick,” Jessa scolds. “She’s, like, preoccupied.”
He lifts an eyebrow paler than his skin. “On a Saturday night?”
“And she’s sleeping over, so don’t bother us.”
“Sleepover?” Jeremy snakes an arm around Jessa’s waist. “But I didn’t bring my toothbrush.”
Chad reaches over to smack Jeremy, who karate-blocks Chad to protect his ’do: a stiff black faux-hawk like the bone ridge on a dinosaur’s skull.
They’re Best Friends for Life, or whatever the boy equivalent is. I’ve never understood it. Chad records every episode of How It’s Made and will describe the creation of a crayon in the same reverent tone you’d use to talk about the miracle of flight; Jeremy watches YouTube compilations of the world’s worst car crashes. But buddies they are, and if Chad objects to Jeremy dating his sister, it’s never stopped them. Not since Jessa was a bright, shiny sophomore and Jeremy the senior soccer captain. Jessa can never decide if she loves or hates Jeremy. At this nanosecond in time they’re broken up, have been since Jeremy went on a two-week Caribbean Christmas cruise with his family and didn’t bother telling Jessa, and only brought her back a puka-shell bracelet from the airport newsstand. Jessa and Jeremy fight easily and often. But by the moony look in her eyes as she plucks a potato wedge from his plate, I’m fairly certain she’s cycling around to love. They’ll be back together by June, just in time for the holy of holies (Sugarbrook High’s prom, which I’m pretty set on not attending).
What do I know about it, anyway? A two-month relationship with Lee Jung was my longest to date. He made me three retro-romantic mix CDs of love songs last Valentine’s Day, and I hyperventilated in my car for half an hour, then ended things with a text. The only other Valentine I got was from Dad—he bought me SweeTarts, his favorite candy, and I bought him a Kalev bitter dark chocolate bar, my favorite, only so we could make a show of hiding them from each other. To see who could find and steal the other’s bounty first, you know? Dad won, excavating his SweeTarts from my glove box. While it was locked. While my also-locked Civic sat in the Sugarbrook High student lot. Dad’s a writer; he’s researched lots of stuff, including ways to break into anything, and afterward he taught me. This Valentine’s Day . . . maybe a stone heart counts as a Valentine after all.
Busy fiddling with the straps on my satchel, I don’t realize Jessa’s talking to me until she leans across the table and sticks a wedge in my face. “Hello? I said relax. We’ll work on that project tonight, okay?”
I grab it and take a small, reluctant bite.
“What project?” Chad asks.
“Math, nosy. We’re trying to figure out how many morons it takes to order two smoking-hot teenage girls some dinner.” She smiles into Jeremy’s ear.
“Not hungry,” I say.
Chad slides his plate over to me, still half-filled with his massive omelet. “Want to share? I can’t even finish it. I’ll roll down the slopes tomorrow.” He leans back and pats his stomach, which makes a sound like slapping the hard, tight skin of a drum.
I smooth back my ponytail anxiously. If Jessa knows my dad’s MIA, I wonder if Chad knows. Searching his clear green eyes just long enough to look for pity, I find none. Good. I would hate for him to find out.