True (True Believers #1)(5)
Author: Erin McCarthy

I wondered if it were Jessica. But I realized that it couldn’t be Jessica, because she wouldn’t have called him. She was a texter and she always used an absurd shorthand with acronyms that no one but she understood, like LULB, which she insisted stood for Love You Little Bitch. Or my personal favorite, W? Jessica sometimes meant it as a general question, as in she didn’t understand what was happening, which most people would assume, or sometimes as What Time? though no one but her ever knew which one she intended.

“No. In the kitchen. No,” he said into his phone, more emphatically. “I didn’t take it. The cat probably ate it.”

The woman talking to him was so loud that I could hear her, though the words were garbled.

“Well, stop leaving your shit laying around,” he said, and with a sound of disgust pulled the phone from his ear and dropped it into a dirty change compartment next to the gear shift. “Moms are a complete pain in the ass.”

If I hadn’t been drunk, I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all. I would have just agreed or most likely, just nodded. But my mouth seemed to move faster than my brain. “I don’t remember my mom being a pain in the ass at all. She was always smiling.”

Tyler glanced at me. “Remember? She run out on you or what?”

I wondered what the statistical odds were that someone would assume abandonment over death. “No. She died. Of cancer. When I was eight.” The beer was working overtime. I never told anyone that unless they really pressed me, because the C word immediately brought both sympathy and fear to people’s faces. They felt instantly bad for me, yet at the same time they were momentarily afraid that it would touch their life like it had mine, and they had to whisper the word. Cancer. Like if they spoke it too loudly it would be conjured up in their bodies like a destructive demon straight from hell. People had told me that straight out, that cancer was from the devil, a horrible affliction of otherworldly implications, unstoppable.

Others had told me that the government most likely had a vaccination for cancer but was keeping a lid on it, to drive the medical economy. This seemed unlikely to me for more than a dozen reasons, not the least of which was that it didn’t make sense on a cellular level. It wasn’t a virus but a mutation. Yet I understood people wanted an answer for the randomness of why it struck, why it killed.

I had stopped asking why a long time ago.

Tyler seemed to get that. His response wasn’t an uncomfortable apology. He said, “Well that’s about as f**king unfair as it gets, isn’t it? My mom is a selfish bitch and she’ll probably live to be ninety, and yet yours died.”

It was kind of nice not to get the same pat response of sympathy, the one where everyone was sorry, but at the same time so damn glad it wasn’t them. I appreciated his matter-of-fact attitude. “You don’t get along with your mom?”

“Nope.” Tyler pulled into the driveway that led to my dorm. “She’s not all bad, though. She did give birth to me.” He turned and shot me a grin.

It was so unexpected that, for a second, I blinked, then I let out a startled laugh. The sound was foreign and awkward to my ears, but Tyler didn’t seem to notice. His face changed when he smiled, and his eyes warmed. In the dark, they still looked like deep, black holes, but with his lips upturned and the corners of his eyes crinkling, he wasn’t so intense, so remote.

That was when I realized why I’d always been slightly nervous around Tyler. He was what people always accused me of being—there but not present. Easygoing, but distant. Smiling, but intense. Maybe it was the alcohol, my ears still buzzing, my insides hot, my skin cold and clammy, but for the first time I didn’t feel uncomfortable around him.

“So are you really a virgin?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Or were you just saying that?”

No longer comfortable. It went away faster than you could say Awkward Moment.

Why he thought I would want to talk about that made no sense to me at all. I was drunk, but I wasn’t insane. If I hadn’t even told my roommates until that night, why the hell would I sit in Tyler’s car and spill my guts? I wasn’t the confessional type. I never had been.

So I just looked at him.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.”

I wanted to tell him to mind his own goddamn business. To stop pressing a girl he didn’t know for intimate details about her sexual experience. That it was rude. But I remembered that he had, in fact, saved the very virginity he was questioning, so I didn’t want to be a bitch. I just shrugged. Really, what difference did it make? I was already a collegiate abnormality. Likes to study! Hates to talk! Won’t go tanning! See this freak-show exhibit in her natural dorm habitat . . .

But I actually surprised myself by opening my mouth and saying, “Yes, I am.”

My admission silenced him for a second, but then he drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel as he put the car in Park in front of my dorm, a seventies-built tower of glass and steel. Light from the streetlight was flooding into his car, showing even more clearly how dirty and ancient it was with a slot for a cassette player crammed full of what looked like parking tickets.

“Do you have a purity ring or whatever?”

Now that I was in, and the beer had loosened my lips, I said the first thing that came into my head. “I prefer to call it my hymen.”

Tyler let out a laugh. “No, I mean one of those rings you wear on your finger . . .” He looked at me, understanding dawning. “Oh, wait, you’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

Which made him laugh harder. “Rory, you are an interesting chick.”

Interesting wasn’t exactly a riveting compliment, but he hadn’t called me a freak, which was how I felt sometimes. As if I had been assembled in a different way altogether than everyone around me, and while I liked the end result, everyone else was confused about how to interpret my very existence. They watched me, suspicious, as if I were a Transformer and they were waiting for metal arms to spring out from my chest cavity.

I didn’t think that I’d ever seen him laugh before, or maybe I had just never noticed, my attention focused on Grant, who I had thought was more likely to fall in with my plan of exploring human mating and relationships. But then again, Jessica and Kylie tended to dominate all conversation in a group setting, so maybe their own perfectly affected laughter had drowned out Tyler’s.

But for some stupid reason, I liked to think that he was laughing just for me.