The Next Forever Page 2

  But why did I care?

  “I w-was just trying to get back into the dorm,” I said, my voice stuttering, the sound of someone making an excuse.

  “There’s the door,” Trevor said, inviting me to walk past him. His hair fell forward, and he pushed it back.

  Did I want to walk past him, or did I want to be the old Amy? I had hours to spare and, considering Joe’s question and the fact I couldn’t even answer it, it was obvious I was wondering.

  “I used to smoke,” I said, hating that I’d said it as soon as I did. Wishing I could inhale the words back. Joe hated my smoking, was the main reason I’d quit. If he’d thought I was starting to backslide before, wait until he smelled cigarette smoke on my clothes.

  “Oh, you’re one of those.” Trevor nodded in that way someone does when really he is looking you up and down. It was like his eyes were tacks, sticking me flat against the cement and sky.

  “Those?” I asked, my mouth barely making words, because his eyes were on it.

  “The girls in high school who think smoking makes them bad,” he said, exhaling, “until they realize there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.”

  I looked behind me, seriously wondering if there was some kind of thought bubble back there telling him about my past. I was either totally obvious or he was psychic. I decided to go with psychic.

  “I know exactly what it takes,” I said. There was an edge to my voice I didn’t expect. This boy might have thought I was some Girl Scout, but he had no idea. I watched him. His eyes seemed to hit mine like a dog’s nose nuzzles up when it wants a pet.

  “You’re still standing here,” he said. “That’s a start.” He put out his cigarette and stuck it in his pocket, “What’s your name, bad girl?”

  “Amy,” I said. Luckily it was an easy question to answer.

  “Amy,” he repeated, and I couldn’t help thinking about the way Joe said it—not like it was just my name, but like it was me.

  Trevor lit a second cigarette, taking out another wooden match and lighting it, this time just shaking out the match and putting it behind his ear.

  “You’re not going to lick that one?” I asked. I had hoped to sound sarcastic.

  “You want me to?” he said, and I realized this guy was not about to fall for any of my usual bullshit.

  “Where’s your hat?” I asked, wanting to level the ground between us somehow. So you know I find you attractive and like watching you lick things? Well, I know you wear a paper hat that makes you look like an ass-clown.

  “I thought you had a boyfriend,” Trevor said, letting me know he was in complete control of the situation and still not falling for any of my bullshit. Maybe if I told him I’d caught him with his friends the seagulls, it would have finally rendered him speechless, but considering I had a parrot of my own that I’d left at home, a parrot that may have known more about me than most humans and that I missed more than most humans, I kind of liked that he cared enough to feed some feral birds.

  “I do,” I said. This was good and bad. He knew I had a boyfriend because he had been watching me as well, but he also knew I had a boyfriend. I couldn’t stop looking at his hands. They were calloused and dirty, but I needed to avoid his eyes.

  “Then why are you talking to me?” he asked.

  “You were standing here,” I said, but even as I did I looked around.

  He squared his chest. “If you were my girlfriend, I wouldn’t let you talk to anyone.”

  I stared at the glass door beyond him, dirty with fingerprints, covered with the name of our dorm in colored construction paper. I should have just opened it and walked inside, but I was light-headed from the way Trevor was talking to me, like his words were his hands.

  “So you play guitar,” I said. In my desperation to say something, anything, I’d said the dumbest thing, the most obvious thing. I waited for him to say, No, I just carry it around. I waited for him to say, You would never be my girlfriend.

  Instead he nodded, and I got dumber.

  “Cool,” I said, realizing that maybe part of the reason I liked Joe so much was because he didn’t make me feel like a total idiot. He made me feel normal, comfortable. When he would hold me I completely forgot about the uncertainty I battled in most of the rest of my life. His arms so strong, so tight around me, it was like he was certain and confident enough for both of us.

  Joe.

  I stepped back.

  “Something wrong?” Trevor asked.

  He was very observant. So aware of what I was doing that he made me feel naked, which made me think about him naked, which made me step back even farther.

  “One more and you’re off the porch,” Trevor said, tipping his chin so I would look behind me.

  He was right. I was dangerously close to the edge. The metaphor was not lost on me.

  I heard his phone beep. He stuck his cigarette in his mouth and looked at it.

  “You have to go?” I asked, half of me thankful to be saved, the other half wanting to take his phone and throw it.

  “Just a party,” he said, his eyes thin like thread. I could tell he was watching my face.

  I looked down, up, trying so hard not to give anything away, but I knew it was useless. He was so there, like he was more awake than I was, more alive, even.

  “Does your boyfriend care if you go to a party?” he asked.

  That was it. I needed to go inside and lock my door and put bars up on my windows and chain myself to the bed. I could not go to a party with Trevor. I didn’t want to think about what I might do if I did.

  But yet, I still couldn’t move. I was stuck to the pavement, growing out of it like a statue. “Are you inviting me to a party?”

  “No.” He smirked. “I’m telling you about a party.”

  “You haven’t told me about it yet,” I said, still clinging to the illusion that I was in control.

  He held out his hand. “Your phone,” he said, wiggling his fingers.

  I reached into my pocket and handed it to him. It was so easy to fall back into letting someone else make my decision for me.

  Especially when it was the wrong one.

  He typed into it, his cigarette in his mouth the whole time, and then handed it back. “I sent myself a text,” he said. “You want to come to the party, respond to it.”

  I watched as he put out his cigarette, picked up his guitar case, and walked inside.

  I looked at my phone. The text he’d sent said, Ur it.

  It.

  You’re doing it again, Joe had said.

  Maybe Trevor was psychic.

  …

  JOE

  I walked into the frat house behind Red and Light Blue. Maybe with them I would blend in. Maybe it would even look like I’d walked over with them. Without a legacy—aka a father—their body shield was about all I had going for me.

  I followed them over to the table with name tags lying on it. I found mine and slapped it on, sticking my hand back in my pocket quickly. Neither one of them turned around to talk to me once we were inside.

  Why would they?

  They didn’t need anything from me anymore. I was their competition. It was okay—I was used to it. I’d felt like I was in competition for most of my life. Having less money than most of the people you are friends with will do that. My mother and I might have lived in a nice house, but it was because my father had bought it and when he left, my mother had to continue to pay for it, which meant we didn’t have much for anything else.

  The other guys grabbed a drink, but I didn’t because I was afraid I would spill it all over myself. Even with the beer on the porch hissing through my system, my hands had started shaking so hard I was worried someone might think I had a rabbit in each pocket.

  I thought about Amy, how she would take my hands and stroke them like she was putting them to sleep. It was silly, impossible, but I wished she were here now. When she was with me, the things that usually bothered me seemed not to bother me at all.

&nbs
p; I hoped that having spent so much time with Amy didn’t mean I had forgotten how to just hang out with guys. But as I stood alone in a corner of the room waiting for someone to talk to me, it was all I could think. It was a weird feeling, considering in high school I had been the one who went up and talked to people. I never waited. Perhaps each life change forced you to start over. You had to prove once again to all these new people that you deserved their attention.

  Lucky for me, I decided to start over at one of the most selective frats on campus.

  “Hey man, you enjoying yourself?”

  I turned to face the biggest set of teeth I’d ever seen, like someone had put a magnifying glass over only his mouth. My guess was I wasn’t the first guy he’d asked, but I was thankful just the same. I looked at his name tag. It read STEVE.

  “Sure,” I said, keeping my hands deep in my pockets. I could only hope he would introduce himself without a handshake if he hung around long enough to introduce himself at all.

  “What interests you in TKE?” he asked.

  And when I heard that, I realized he wasn’t necessarily talking to me, he was just making his way around the room. I pictured him at a meeting an hour earlier, some guys given the job of handing out drinks, some given the job of cleaning up puke, and some given the job of talking to us.

  I was curious which of the guys complained the most.

  I thought about my practiced introduction. If he wasn’t really talking to me, I shouldn’t really need to talk to him. But I did have to.

  “Well, I’m pre-law,” I said, smiling, too, but not nearly as large as he was.

  He nodded. I could tell he was unimpressed. I thought about that song from when I was a kid about the spider swallowing the fly and the frog swallowing the spider and so on. His smile definitely would have swallowed mine.

  He watched me, waiting for a better answer.

  “I heard you guys throw killer parties, like, legendary ones. And,” I continued, “you’d have to be an ass-bag not to want to join.”

  “That’s more like it,” Steve said, his green polo shirt so much cleaner and less wrinkled and more polo-ponied than mine.

  Mine didn’t have a pony on it. I got mine in a pack of four from Target and each time I wore one of them and stood across from someone wearing one with a pony on it, I pictured having been in a joust with him and losing. If it had a crocodile on it, I had been eaten whole.

  Just like the spider that swallowed the fly.

  There was also the other reason I was here, the one that I would not admit. I didn’t have anyone leading the way for me when I graduated. My mother was fine. On good days, even nice, but she didn’t have any connections. She had no way to get me a job at a leading law firm. With my father’s exit when I was six, this frat was all I had.

  That is, if I got accepted.

  “You seem cool, Joe,” Steve said, flicking my name tag. “Follow me.”

  He led me through a cherry-wood-floored hallway and past a cherry-wood stairwell flanked by a library with so many books lining the shelves that if all the characters popped out suddenly it would have burst the walls. We went all the way to the back of the house and entered a kitchen with metal sinks as big as bathtubs filled with dirty dishes.

  He pointed at a closed door in between the sinks. “Welcome to the real party.” Steve laughed and his teeth seemed even bigger.

  I felt like I had taken drugs, even though I hadn’t drunk anything but that beer I had opened myself on the porch. If he’d slipped me something, it had happened when he flicked my name tag, and I was pretty sure that kind of drug didn’t exist yet.

  I didn’t know much about frats, but I did know that it was way too early in the game for hazing to occur. I convinced myself of that as he opened the door and my heart started to knock against my chest.

  If I ended up in my boxers on the quad, how would I explain that to Amy?

  We walked down a set of cement stairs. There was a strobe light flashing, making it hard for me to find the next step, and the next. I held the railing. I smelled smoke, heard music—thumping, loud enough that the rest of my body was shaking along with my hands.

  When we reached ground level I saw boobs everywhere, all sizes of boobs, all colors of boobs. There had to be ten girls in wet white T-shirts and underwear dancing in that slow motion way where they kind of look like zombies.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “This is why you’re here, Joe, right?” Steve asked, slapping my back.

  My hands were still in my pockets, but they went completely still as I watched the girls writhe in front of me like fleshy seaweed.

  “Best part of being a frat brother: the girls,” Steve said, making the thumbs-up sign.

  I hadn’t even thought about the fact that there would be girls here—hot, half-naked girls.

  My mouth was dry. I opened it, wishing in the little, dirty part of my brain that held all the porn I’d seen in my life that I could suck the water from each girl’s wet shirt one at a time.

  If only life were a dream and Amy wasn’t in the picture.

  Amy.

  She would definitely not be okay with me being down here, with me even being in this house, with me even talking to Steve. This was not what committed boyfriends who had just asked their girlfriends to move in with them did.

  I looked at the stairs. I could walk back up and out and pretend I’d never been here, but then a girl caught my eye.

  She was thin, with legs that seemed to start at her chin, and she was pulling her blond hair over her chest each time it fell free and exposed her lemon-size breasts. It was obvious she was trying to cover herself, and her attempt at modesty against this backdrop of debauchery made my chest hurt.

  A girl with curves like a guy had built her on a pottery-wheel nudged the thin girl with her hip and pointed at me. I saw the skinny blond-haired girl shake her head. I saw her look down. Then I saw her finger-beckon me over.

  Crap. I definitely should have gone to the library.

  Chapter Three

  AMY

  I sat in my dorm room, my covers over my head like a hood. I stared at the face of my phone, trying to decide what to do. It was nine p.m., early, but I could just fall asleep. I should just fall asleep.

  I was too keyed up from Trevor. From freedom. From boredom. From Joe’s question echoing in my head and the way my stomach had constricted when I heard it. My thumb was hovering over the letters, ready to respond to Trevor’s text, but not knowing what to do.

  I knew what my answer should be. But that didn’t make it any easier. His question was even harder to answer than Joe’s.

  Joe and I had a good thing. I thought about his eyes, the way they would turn bright green when they were in just the right light—like rare emeralds that were mined from being in my presence. How could I even consider going to the party?

  I needed advice, but I had no one to ask. Considering what had happened between my friends Lila, Cassie, and me in Collinsville after we got arrested on prom night for marijuana possession that wasn’t even ours, I wasn’t really big on friends or their advice. They usually only gave you guidance that was in their best interest or wanted to tell you about a time they went through what you were going through. It was never about you.

  I was just about to put my phone back on the nightstand and burrow under my covers when I heard it ding—probably Joe texting, sending a funny picture from the library. Once he found someone sleeping on his open book, a long line of drool oozing from his mouth like a worm—I think he fell asleep looking up the definition of obvious. Once it was two people in the stacks doing it—wish you were here. I should have just gone to the library with him. Maybe someone else’s boyfriend could have sent his girlfriend a picture of us doing it in the stacks.

  I looked at my phone.

  It wasn’t Joe.

  It was a response to the text Trevor had sent himself earlier: Leaving in twenty. I’m not wearing my hat.

  I wondered how much
thought he’d put into the text. It exuded cool. I could tell Trevor was one of those guys who had so much confidence, the kind that covered him like hardened shellac so he could say and do whatever he wanted and didn’t care what people thought.

  I knew a lot better than to get mixed up with a guy like that, but I still stood, looked in the mirror, and combed at my brown hair. It was matted from being under my covers, so I put it up in a high bun.

  I guess moving in with Joe was something I had to test if I really wanted. Being with him had been an easy decision, but being in an apartment with him next year was something else. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be, but I felt like I’d gone from the shadow of Lila and Cassie to the shadow of Joe. Not that Joe ever made me feel like I was in his shadow.

  He made me feel like the sun.

  But I was still measuring my significance because he was in my orbit. If I said yes to him, would I ever stand on my own?

  That was worth a few hours with Trevor and his friends.

  I touched up my smoky gray eyeliner and tried to make that thought stick. Unfortunately, watching the pencil move back and forth like a head shaking no wasn’t helping to convince me, so I went to putting on blush, the brush going up and down from my chin to my cheekbone—a head nodding up and down, yes, yes, yes. I moved on to mascara, up and down from the base of my lashes to the top, yes, sure, I can go. I’ll be back in plenty of time to sit on my bed and wait for Joe. He won’t even know I was gone.

  I pulled a tight black T-shirt over my head, careful to avoid the fresh makeup.

  I won’t even drink or smoke or do any drugs, I thought, knowing how that more than anything was what would have upset Joe. I mean, going to the party wasn’t even about Trevor; I was testing myself. Wasn’t that what college was all about?

  A series of tests.

  It isn’t even about Trevor, I told myself again as I struggled to keep my bullshit meter from going off. I texted Trevor back that I’d meet him out front. If things got weird, I could always leave. I could always surprise Joe at the library with a roll in the stacks.