The dark hair, the eyes, his height. Good body, too. If I was a different kind of girl, I might have pulled his shirt up just to see what was under there, stomach-wise. I wasn’t that kind of girl.
Zan twitched in his sleep, his face creasing as if he was concerned about something. He breathed deeply and his face relaxed again.
Okay, so he was good-looking. Handsome, even. In kind of an old-fashioned Mr. Darcy kind of way.
I shook my head to snap myself out of the little hallucination I’d just indulged in. I was clearly suffering from sleep loss.
I took one last glance around the room. He had lots of photographs pinned (against dorm policy) to the wall. All of them were in black and white, but I didn’t gaze long enough to see details. I wondered if he’d taken them. I twitched the curtain aside and saw that the sun would be up soon. I had to sneak back to bed before anyone saw me.
“This never happened,” I said to Zan. “Got it?” I was met by the sound of his quiet breathing. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Chapter Twenty
Zan
Someone had apparently been hacking into my brain with a chainsaw as I’d slept. Or at least that was what it felt like when I woke up the next morning. Correction, it was the next afternoon when I glanced at the clock on my desk.
Fuck.
I looked down and found I was still in my clothes from yesterday, but someone had removed my shoes. I had a fuzzy memory from the night before, but I must have imagined it.
There was a half-full glass of water on my desk that I grabbed and chugged, if only to get the nasty taste out of my mouth.
I had no idea what happened to Tate. The last thing I could remember clearly was the two of us crashing a party at the local apartment complex and drinking a lot and him snorting some of the pills. I couldn’t remember snorting any, but that didn’t mean anything.
I pulled my shirt off and found some bruises on my arms and torso from who knew what. I got myself into a sitting position and called Tate.
It went straight to voicemail, so I left him a message.
I seriously had to pee, so I swung my sock-clad feet onto the floor and stood up. Bad idea.
It took me two more tries before I could get up. My foot slipped on something, and it took me about an hour to lean over to pick it up.
A key card, but it wasn’t mine.
It was Charlotte’s.
I read her name and stared at her smiling face for a few seconds longer just to be sure. Her gorgeous face grinned at me from the plastic card. I searched the room for any other evidence of her.
I didn’t remember how or why she’d been in my room, but she’d been in my room. I was still alive, so she hadn’t had nefarious motives. Reaching back into the static that my brain had made of last night, I pulled a few moments forward.
I told Tate where her room was after he’d begged me. He’d wanted to see if she was hot, and in my state I was determined to prove she was.
Her voice echoed through the fuzz, but I couldn’t remember what she said, or what I said back, if anything.
My head started pounding again, so I went to find some aspirin, all the while flipping Charlotte’s card over in my hand.
She was going to need this back.
I had two options. Be a gentleman and bring it to her, or wait for her to come to me. Both options had pros and cons.
Being a gentleman won out.
First though, I needed to make sure I was sobered up. I couldn’t face her like this. Again.
It took another hour and a half, a long-ass shower and three more glasses of water before I was able to think about going up to her room and facing her.
I didn’t know her schedule, and there was a chance she wouldn’t even be there, but I walked up the steps anyway and slowly made my way to her door, checking to see if there was any light under it, or any sounds. It reminded me of when we’d listened at Zack’s door.
I heard movement in the room, so I took my chances and knocked. Footsteps sounded as whoever it was walked to the door to look through the peephole. I crossed my fingers and prayed it wasn’t Katie. I didn’t think I could deal with her in this condition.
The door swung open and I met Charlotte’s lovely blue eyes. They were puffy and had dark smudges under them, which made me feel even more like shit.
“What do you want, Zan?” Her voice was hoarse, as if she’d been yelling. For all I remembered, she’d been screaming at me.
I liked the sound of my name coming from her mouth.
“I came to return this.”
Her eyes went wide as I held up her keycard.
“Where did you get that?”
“You left it on my floor when you poured my drunk and stoned ass in bed last night. Or this morning.”
She opened and closed her mouth a few times before snatching it from my hand and shoving it in her back pocket and then mumbled something about a lanyard.
“Thank you. For whatever you did last night. I sort of remember showing up at your door, but the rest isn’t all that clear.”
She looked up.
“You don’t remember anything?”
“Not really.”
“Well, I’m not going to give you a recap, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to pretend last night didn’t happen.”
“Why?”
She took a deep breath, as if she was preparing to jump off a diving board into the deep end of the pool.
“Because I don’t like the fact that I did something nice for you. I hate you, and I’d like to keep it that way. I’d like to keep imagining you being maimed and crushed and destroyed in very painful ways. Being nice to you feels like betraying Lexie, and that is the last thing I will ever do. I know you did a nice thing by looking after Katie, but it doesn’t erase everything else. Please, just leave me alone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You say that a lot.”
“I seem to have a lot to be sorry for.”
“Can you just go?” Her voice shook a little, and I knew she wouldn’t want me to see her cry, so I turned around.
“You mentioned Boo Radley,” she said as I walked toward the stairs. I faced her again.
“Boo Radley?” She looked down at her card, turning it over in her hand.
“Yeah. And some poem about mirrors.”
“Huh.” A glimmer of a smile crossed her face, but was gone as quick as a blink.
“Thank you again,” I said.
She nodded and closed the door.
Tate didn’t message me back until late that night, and he didn’t have any more insight into what we had done than I did.
I didn’t tell him about Charlotte rescuing me. That was something I was going to keep to myself, and not just because Charlotte asked me to.
My day of indulging in my old life might not have been such a bad idea after all, except for Miss Carole. The next time I talked to her she was going to find out about this. She always did, somehow. She always told me it was because she raised two boys and had eyes and ears everywhere.
Sometimes, I believed her.
After I’d gotten myself detoxed from whatever I’d consumed, I checked on Zack via text message. He sent one back saying he had class and then was going to the gym. Zack tended to keep it together better when he was working out. It gave him focus. Gave him somewhere to put his restless energy. Better working out than mindless sex with Katie or anyone else.
I also had a lot of messages from Stryker. His sister must have told him about everything, or at least Charlotte’s version of things. He said that he didn’t care, that he wanted to hear my side, that he didn’t judge people.
I wanted to believe him, but I’d heard it before. The only reason Tate and I were friends was because he didn’t give a shit about anything, least of all something like that.
Maybe Charlotte’s moment of kindness or whatever it was had rubbed off on me, because I messaged him back, asking if I could come over and explain. He said he had to work, but I could drop by at nine.
I spent the time waiting to go see Stryker doing the homework I should have done the night before when I went out with Tate. I emailed my professors and gave my excuses. Most of my classes were so large that my teachers wouldn’t know me from a hole in the ground, but still. I wasn’t taking any chances.
The hours went by slowly as I ploughed through my work.
I had to keep filling Charlotte thought balloons again so I could focus and wondering if this meant that she didn’t hate me as much as she said she did. Normally you didn’t bring people you hated back to their rooms and put them in bed. She should have called Campus Security and had me hauled in. I would have been out of her life as quick as you could say ‘juvenile delinquent’.
But she hadn’t.
Lottie
Boo Radley.
What the hell did Boo Radley have to do with anything?
I’d been turning that over in my mind the entire day.
“What is up with you, Lot?” Will said when I didn’t answer him at dinner. “You’re being weird again.”
“Nothing. I just have a test I’m freaking out about.”
“The only time you speak in less than one sentence is when you’re trying to deflect. I’m your twin. I don’t need my twindar to tell me that.”
“Nosey, you are.”
“Hiding something, you are.” I decided to go with something that was bothering me, but wasn’t the biggest thing that was bothering me. Will turned away from his new crew, Nick, JT, Brad and Seth (who were busy discussing what the Boston Red Sox’ chances were of making the World Series the next year) and focused on me.
I couldn’t hide from the eyes that I knew better than my own. Zan had said something about mirrors. Will was mine.
“I’m worried about Katie. I just have this vision in my head of her getting into a bad situation with Zack. Something even worse than Lexie.”
“Lot, you gotta stop worrying about other people. Katie is an adult, she can make her own decisions.”
“But—”
“Lottie. You can’t save the world.”
“I’m not trying to save the world. Just my roommate from getting hurt. Thanks so much for your concern.”
“Aw, you know I don’t mean it like that.” I knew he didn’t. If there was anyone who would stick up for another person, it was Will. He’d done it over and over with Simon after he came out. If he wasn’t so well-liked by the entire high school (including the administration), he might not have gotten away with getting into so many altercations.
“I just wish I could put one of those trackers like they use for pedophiles on him,” I said.
“Have you talked to Katie?”
I shook my head. “She won’t listen to me. She went right back to him after he gave her an ‘I’m sorry I screwed up’ necklace.”
“That worked? Hmm,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Do you think that would be super creepy to get for Audrey?”
I grabbed onto the topic change like a drowning person to a life raft.
That was another thing I’d yet to deal with. The awkward Will/Audrey situation. She hadn’t mentioned it, and I had kept my mouth uncharacteristically shut about it.
***
“So I wanted to officially apologize for the whole Will thing. I didn’t mean to throw him at you like that,” I said during our study date that night.