Love Story(17)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“He did not peek,” Jřrdis said, “but he pumped me for information about my roommates, especially you, until I asked him whether he knew you.”

Summer leaned forward expectantly and dropped magazine and scissors. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Not really.’”

Summer turned to me. “See? He’s confused by your swift exit from Kentucky. Jřrdis asks him whether he knows you and he wistfully says, ‘Not really,’ like he wants to reconnect with you but doesn’t know how.”

I sliced through the center of the picture I was trimming. I was too tired to argue with Summer, but I wished she would quit picking up the broken pieces of my life and trying to build something romantic out of them. That’s what I’d tried to do in “Almost a Lady,” and that’s what had gotten me in this mess.

I pointed at Summer with my scissors. “Hunter said he would ask Manohar and Brian not to tell Gabe or anyone else about the stable boy, but he couldn’t promise anything. That’s where you come in. You’re friends with Brian. Ask him to keep quiet about this as a favor to you. Make friends with Manohar and do the same thing.”

“Whoa!” She held up Tiger Beat as a shield. “I already defended your story. Haven’t I done enough?”

“Five words.” I counted them on my fingers for her, the scissors hanging from my thumb. “Can. I. Have. Erin’s. Vote?”

Summer cackled. “I can’t imagine asking a favor from Manohar. You heard him in class. He hates me.”

“Then you’re going to have to do a one-eighty and stop antagonizing him in class,” I said. “If he wants to tell me that romance novels aren’t fit to wipe his ass, you just go ahead and let him say that. My internship is more important than my pride.” I wasn’t sure this was true. My pride was pretty damned important. But I was tired, cutting with only one eye open now. If I had that internship, I wouldn’t need to work for six hours on top of attending class and studying for twelve.

Summer winced. “My father specifically warned me not to get all citified at college and bring home a white boy.”

I exchanged a brief glance with Jřrdis. I was more fluent in my silent language with her than with Summer. Jřrdis and I were wondering how Summer had made the leap from not antagonizing Manohar to taking Manohar home to Mississippi.

I went with it. “Manohar isn’t white.”

“He’s worse,” Summer said without looking up from her magazine page. “To my father.”

“I’m not asking you to enter into a serious relationship with Manohar and take him home to meet your racist daddy.”

Summer’s lips pressed into a hard line. She looked forward to showing her daddy who was in charge of her life. I had her already.

I continued, “I’m asking you to flirt with Manohar and get some info out of him. And if you break his heart—well, that’s romance novel fodder, and only what he deserves, right?”

“Right,” she said with fake reluctance. Suddenly she seemed absorbed in carefully clipping a new face. She was determined not to look up and let us read in her expression what we’d already guessed: that she was crushing hard on Manohar and was thrilled to have this excuse to go after him.

Jřrdis sat back against the wall and smiled at me in admiration. The silent message was so obvious I would have been concerned that Summer would read it, too, except that Summer was clueless. Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.

If only I could read stable boys.

5

After a few more minutes of cutting out faces and silently laughing with Jřrdis about Summer’s utter lack of subtlety, I said good night, closed myself in my own room, and studied. I sat there for three days. At least, that’s what it felt like.

I did leave during these three days. I went to class, and I spent long hours at the coffee shop. But the New York experience I’d longed for was slipping away from me, not because of my lack of cash, but because I was so overwhelmed with the homework I couldn’t get done while I was busy making coffee.

And I did love my tiny room. True, there was hardly any space for storage, but I hadn’t brought a lot of stuff with me from Kentucky anyway, and I didn’t have the money to buy the cute wall organizers I’d seen in other girls’ rooms on other floors. My walls were tacked with colorful abstract oils I’d borrowed from Jřrdis. And of course most of the space was filled with the bay window: a wide wall of glass on the front of the building, and a narrow one diagonally on either side. I could open the shades and watch people approach on the sidewalk, pass the building, and continue down the sidewalk until they disappeared into the endless rows of nineteenth-century town houses. I could imagine the many students before me who had drifted off from their calculus homework watching the foot traffic. I could picture the young men and women in their finery who had stood at this very window when it was part of their family’s parlor. They had looked out into the dusty street, their bellies fluttering with butterflies, waiting for the carriage drawn by spirited matched bays that would take them to the ball.

My one small shelf over the desk was piled with my textbooks. I didn’t junk up my shelf with New York trinkets like Summer did. I needed to focus not on being here but on staying here, studying hard, writing well, getting that internship. The one folly I allowed myself was the New York City magnet I’d brought with me from Kentucky—the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty stacked together and reproduced in the finest painted plastic. I’d had it for years. I’d stared at it as a kid, longing to come here someday. And now it stuck to the metal filing cabinet that doubled as my bedside table, reminding me I’d better not throw it all away.

The music cranked up several floors above me, signaling a party. I’d overheard Manohar and Brian talking about it in creative-writing class a few days earlier. I’d felt the obligatory blush flood my face, and the obligatory drive to glance at Hunter at the end of the table, where he chuckled with Isabelle. If our dorm was throwing a party, surely he would be there.

But the farther I stayed away from Hunter, the better for both of us. I even smiled at Manohar during class when he shot a few barbs at me about the romantic elements of Isabelle’s awful story. After class, as I was walking out with Summer, I thought I heard Manohar whinny at me. I ignored him.

Now that the bass line of the rock song shook my bay windows, I turned the page in my history textbook. And wished for my music player after all.

I’d almost regained my concentration, focusing on the words rather than the beat, when the door burst open and banged against my desk. “We’re going to a beach party!” Summer announced, already bouncing away. “Put on your bathing suit!”

I peeked around the door frame into the larger room, where she was pulling a bright yellow bikini out of her dresser. “The coffee shop takes up so much of my time,” I said. “I need to study while I ca—”