Love Story(16)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“My break is over and I’m already in trouble for getting here late.” Scooting my mug from the table, I hurried away, weaving among the now crowded tables filled with a second wave of late-night coffee addicts. My boss glowered at me with his fists on his hips. I could only hope Hunter, the future president of a multimillion-dollar equine enterprise and the heir to a fortune, understood where I was coming from as a girl alone and struggling financially. I hoped he would cut me some slack about the stable boy.

As if.

NEW YORK IS THE CITY THAT never sleeps, but it does get tired. Its eyelids grow heavy and it wants to veg in front of the television. When my boss let me off work at eleven, all the other shops were closed. Traffic was sparse. Only a few pedestrians passed me on the street. The lights were no less bright, but the night had formed a dome over them, as if I were walking through a movie set made to look like the city rather than the real thing, and I would never see very far down the dark side streets even when dawn broke.

I felt like the only person in the world awake and walking by the time I reached the honors dorm. But every window on the front was still lit, even mine, dimly, with light filtering through the doorway from Summer and Jřrdis’s outer room. I might even encounter Hunter in the stairwell. This should have been the last thing I wanted, but it wasn’t. I lingered over my mailbox in the lobby, sifting through endless pamphlets for campus events scheduled when I would be at work and tossing each one in the recycling bin.

Finally I shuffled up one flight of stairs and opened the door to my room. The first thing I saw was Summer and Jřrdis sitting cross-legged on Jřrdis’s bed, cutting out pictures. The second thing I saw was my green-sequined belly-dancing outfit hanging on the back of my door. When I’d first brought it home from the thrift store, I’d planned to keep it in the closet I shared with Summer, but Jřrdis asked me to hang it in full view of the room because she liked the glitter. She was an art major.

Maybe this was how Hunter had known I was taking belly dancing. Growing warm, I wondered when in the past week he’d been in my room.

Summer looked up from her scissors and grinned at me. “Well? Did the stable boy make it to your assignation?”

I glared at her, then looked pointedly at Jřrdis. Summer and I really, really needed to work on our silent language.

Summer dismissed Jřrdis with a flourish of her scissors. “Jřrdis knows all about it. Brian stopped by. He said he and Manohar and Hunter went out and got wasted, and Hunter told them he was the stable boy.”

Usually I was very careful with my belongings because they would need to last me a long time. My book bag was a large leather designer bag I’d seldom used back home. I needed it to take me through college and beyond, because I’d never be able to afford another one like it. And I dropped it to the floor with a thud, unable to hold up the weight of my books and “Almost a Lady” for another moment.

Jřrdis produced a third pair of scissors—her supply of sharp instruments was limitless—and held it out to me. “While we are discussing this, come and cut for me. It will help you with your aggression.”

Jřrdis was Danish and no nonsense, softened only by the silk scarves she dyed herself and tied around her hair to keep it out of her paint. She seemed like a nice enough person and she hadn’t yet complained about me tromping back and forth across her room at strange hours to get to mine when I worked late. She only seemed distant because of her harsh Scandinavian accent, her flattened affect, and the fact that she was always either gone, with her bed made tightly, or sitting carefully on her bed so as not to muss it, holding scissors. When she and Summer and I first met, she had told us right away how her name was spelled, that the o in her name contained a slash. Summer and I had called her “Jřrdis with a slash” behind her back for several days until we decided she wasn’t so bad.

One thing she was very good at, surprisingly, was making friends. She’d already decided her project for her college gallery show at the end of the semester would be a series of huge collages composed of tiny cut-out faces. This meant that whenever Summer or I had a spare moment, Jřrdis shoved a pair of scissors in our hands and dumped a pile of old magazines or photographs in our laps. She also recruited people she met in the lobby or the hallway to come back to the room and cut out faces with her.

Tired as I was, I didn’t think handling a sharp instrument was a good idea. But I knew from experience that there was no arguing with Jřrdis. I slunk to her bed and accepted a pair of scissors and a ten-year-old copy of Rolling Stone. “Hunter promised not to say anything to Gabe,” I murmured, “but since he got drunk with Manohar and Brian and told them, I’m screwed already. They’ll spread it everywhere because I’m the honors program joke.”

“Brian didn’t make it sound that way at all.” Summer placed a neatly clipped face on the pile in front of Jřrdis and turned the page of her copy of Tiger Beat. “Hunter was shocked and flattered by your story, and he got drunk with Manohar and Brian because they were discussing whether you have a thing for him.”

For a long, delicious moment, I believed Summer. Then my memory of my conversation with Hunter kicked in. “Did Brian tell you that’s what went on,” I asked her, “or is this your interpretation of the events?”

“It’s my inter—”

“Right,” I butted in. “Do me a favor and stop interpreting. Hunter could not care less whether I have a thing for him, because he doesn’t have a thing for me.”

“I’m not so sure.” Jřrdis bit her lip and carefully cut around someone’s ear for an achingly long moment before she continued, “I caught your Hunter outside in the hall several days ago, reading our names on the door. I made him come in and cut for me.”

Wow. I nodded toward the door to my private room. “Did he ask you whose belly-dancing costume that was?”

“He did,” she said. Mystery solved.

“Did he peek into my room?” It was tiny, only the width of the bay window that took up one whole wall, and exactly large enough for a single bed and a miniature dresser and desk. Every room on the front of the honors dorm housed two roommates in the outer chamber and one in this alcove. I’d heard around the dorm that students killed for these bay window rooms, and the older students called dibs. But Jřrdis said the tiny room made her claustrophobic and reminded her of her summer in Japan, where she had been made to sleep in a tube. Then Summer didn’t jump at it, so I did. I loved the smallness, the closeness, and the door that I could close. It was all very Virginia Woolf—until you remembered that she committed suicide, which took some of the fun out of it.

No, I loved my little room, but I had to store most of my stuff in Summer’s closet in this larger room. There wouldn’t have been much for Hunter to see inside my room. I still wanted to know whether he’d seen it.