She hustles after me into the kitchen when I retrieve my coat. “Why would you do that?” she demands. “Are you trying to be the queen of terrible dinners?”
“Maybe I’m trying to be a grown up,” I counter, swapping my flats for rain boots. The weather has finally eased up a few degrees, the snow rapidly transforming into slushy puddles and soggy grass. “If you can’t fake a relationship with Kellan for a few hours three weeks from now, why don’t you just call it off?”
“It’s not a fake relationship!”
“It’s incredibly fake. If he was the one dating Celestia, you wouldn’t bat an eye.”
She makes a face. “He would never date her.”
“Yeah, because he learned her name.”
“What?”
I shake my head. “Never mind. Take notes while you’re in Mexico—you’re going to need to stuff a turkey soon.”
She rolls her eyes and huffs as I leave, meeting Crosbie up front and calling goodbye to Nate before heading outside. The morning’s rain has let up, though the clouds are still gray and heavy overhead, making three o’clock in the afternoon look and feel much later.
“Ready for your chem lab tomorrow?” I ask Crosbie, stepping over an especially large puddle. He’d walked over straight from class so he doesn’t have his car.
“A couple more hours should do it.”
“Seriously? That much?”
He shrugs. “I want to do well.” He’d been studying at Beans for the past three hours while I worked, getting Nate, Marcela and I to quiz him on each section he reviewed.
“You’ll do fine,” I assure him. “I feel like even I know everything there is to know about cell division by now.”
“Yes,” he says, elbowing me. “But you’re a nerd.”
“Better than being the girl who lost her scholarship and had to return home to work at a gas station for the rest of her life.”
“There’s no way you were that bad.”
“It wasn’t good.”
“Tell me.”
I exhale. “I guess it’s a matter of perspective. For me, pretty bad.” I think of the moment the flashlight beam cut across my bare knees while I squatted naked behind the compost bin. The moment of unbearable shame as I slowly lifted my eyes to face the cop who had found me.
“What’s bad, though?” he presses. “B minus? Because I’d take that, any day.”
“Ha.” I scoff. “B minus was something to aspire to. I skipped a lot of classes, drank too much, did stupid stuff.”
“Yeah?” He looks intrigued. “Like what?”
I try to hide my flinch. We were at the same parties.
“Just…” I don’t want to talk about frat parties. I don’t want to talk about the mistakes I made there, one in particular. “I got arrested,” I blurt out. If I sound guilty he’ll think it’s because I’m embarrassed about the arrest—which I am. But I’m only telling him this to throw him off the trail of the real source of my guilty conscience.
Crosbie stops in his tracks. “Come again?”
I scrub a mittened hand over my chin. “You heard me.”
“Nora Kincaid got arrested? For what? Wait.” He holds up a hand when I start to reply. “I want to guess. Hmm. Shoplifting?”
“No.”
We resume walking as he ponders. “Vandalism?”
“Nope.”
“Dognapping.”
“Is this really what you think of me?”
“I’ll be honest, Nora. I don’t care what you did—the thought of you in an orange jumpsuit is totally turning me on.”
I laugh in spite of myself. “Shut up.”
“Fine. What’d you do?”
I sigh and hold up two fingers.
He gasps. “You got arrested twice?”
“Once. Two charges.”
He covers his face. “Nora!” He’s practically squealing with joy.
“Don’t tell Kellan,” I say sternly. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who knows?”
“My parents. The Dean. The probation officer who monitored my community service.”
“This keeps getting better.”
“One night in May…” I try not to laugh at Crosbie’s enthusiasm. As many times as I’ve replayed that dreadful night, I’ve never once found it funny. But now I suppose I can sort of see it from where he’s standing. I clear my throat. “It was the morning I learned I’d failed two of my five classes and was borderline failing the other three. To cheer me up Marcela suggested we go to this party she’d heard about. The point, of course, wasn’t the party, but the free booze. We drank everything we could get our hands on, danced around, and acted like idiots.”
“Or college students.”
I smile ruefully. My parents certainly hadn’t seen it that way. “Anyway, we decided we simply had to have donuts and left the party to go to Beans. Marcela had keys and we knew Nate would have already locked up, so we walked into town. Then we realized Main Street was completely deserted. It wasn’t quite eleven, but the street was empty. So we decided to go streaking.”
Crosbie’s mouth falls open. “Naked?”
“Yeah. We dropped all our clothes right there—” I point behind us to the barber shop on the corner, “and sprinted as fast as we could toward the other end.”