The Girl He Used to Know (Page 15)

He’d slipped me a note in class and asked me to come over that night, and I could hardly contain my excitement because I’d been waiting for him to find some time for us to be alone. For the rest of the day, I didn’t pay attention in class. I daydreamed about our first kiss, and how he’d probably invite me to one of the fraternity’s parties or formal dances. When I returned to my dorm room after my last class, I scribbled my own note for Janice and left it under the Kermit the Frog magnet stuck to the front of our dorm fridge so she’d be sure to see it and wouldn’t worry when she came home and discovered I wasn’t there. With Jake. In his room, it said, and I’d drawn a little heart next to it.

I knocked on the door of the frat house and told the guy who answered it that I was there to see Jake. “Jesus, there’s, like, seven Jakes. Which one?”

“Weller,” I said proudly, and waited for him to say, “Oh, you must be Annika,” because Jake probably talked about me all the time.

“Upstairs. Third door on the left.”

Jake answered my knock, and I smiled when he dropped a quick kiss on my mouth. He’d never done that before, and it made me feel warm all over. “Hey, babe.”

He closed the door and led me over to the bed. There were three other guys in his room, but Jake would ask them to leave now that I’d arrived. A pungent, smoky smell hung in the air, but no one was holding a cigarette.

“You were right,” the one who was sitting at Jake’s desk said. The other two were sitting on the bed across from Jake’s. “She’s hot. What about her body?”

“Don’t know yet,” Jake said. “Can’t see it under those baggy clothes.”

Everyone laughed. I did, too, although I didn’t know why. If Jake didn’t like my clothes, Janice would jump at the chance to help me pick out an outfit he’d like better. I made a mental note to ask her about that.

“I thought we could hang out for a while,” Jake said. “Relax a little.” He held a Bic lighter in his hand, and I will never forget the scraping sound it made when he sparked the little wheel and the flame shot straight up. One of the guys handed him a glass tube with a little bowl on the top, and Jake put the flame down inside it and sucked the smoke into his mouth. He passed it around and one by one, the boys took their turn. The small room filled with smoke, and I stifled a cough.

Jake’s bed was pushed up against the wall, and he’d slung his arm around me when they began smoking, which felt nice. “Now you try,” Jake said, holding the pipe up to my mouth.

I shook my head. “No. I don’t want any.”

He shrugged and put the pipe to his lips, but after he sucked in the smoke, he acted like he was going to kiss me but blew the smoke into my mouth instead. It tasted horrible, and I coughed and sputtered while they laughed. But then Jake kissed me again, and it was the kind of kiss I’d been waiting for all my life, soft and gentle and sweet. Somehow during the kiss we’d ended up almost horizontal on the bed as the pipe made another round. I should have been happy, but something didn’t feel right, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. I wanted Jake to kiss me again, but only after he told his friends to leave. It wasn’t fair that they were keeping us from being alone together. Then Jake took another puff on the pipe and when he blew the smoke in my mouth again I found it harder to struggle even though I still didn’t want it.

Someone knocked on the door and one of Jake’s friends opened it. I felt floaty and odd, and for the life of me, I couldn’t comprehend why Janice would be standing there. “Yeah?” Jake said.

There was a long pause where no one said anything, and then Janice said, “I need Annika to come with me right away.”

“She doesn’t want to go with you.”

He was right. I didn’t want to go with her. Or maybe I did? I was having such a hard time keeping my thoughts organized. The kiss was so nice, but the pot and Jake’s friends were not.

“There’s an emergency at the wildlife clinic. They need Annika to come in right away. She’s on call.”

I didn’t think I was on call. I would never have agreed to go to Jake’s if I had been, but maybe I’d forgotten. A hawk with an injured wing had been brought in the previous week, and I’d taken to it with an enthusiastic zeal, doing whatever I could to nurse the hawk back to health. I was one of the few people it trusted, and when I wasn’t tending to Charlie, the injured opossum, I tried to help with the hawk’s feeding and the care of its wound. I sat up, which was a struggle because my body suddenly felt very heavy. “Is it the hawk?”

“Yes. Yes, it is the hawk and you need to come with me right away because everyone is waiting for you.”

Jake put his hand on my elbow. “Come on, are you sure you need to go?”

“I have to. It’s the hawk.”

Janice crossed the room and grabbed on to my hand, which was good because there was no way I was getting off that bed and upright under my own power. My legs felt wobbly and Janice practically carried me out of the room and down the stairs.

Outside, she pulled on my arm. “Come on. I had to park at the end of the street. It’s not much farther.”

It seemed like we walked for miles before she opened the passenger-side door and poured me inside. She walked around to the driver’s side and got in, but instead of starting the car, she rested her forehead on the steering wheel.

“We have to go,” I said. “They need me at the clinic.” But how could I help the hawk when I could barely walk?

“They don’t need you. I just had to get you out of there. Don’t you understand what was going on?”

I think it was safe to say I didn’t understand anything that was going on.

“What did you think was going on?” I asked her.

“I don’t know for sure. I only know what it looked like,” she said.

“What did it look like?” I cried.

She turned to me, and I knew what the expression on her face meant, because I’d seen it a couple of times before. Once, when she was waiting to hear how she’d done on an important test our freshman year, and the next when her grandmother had gone in for open-heart surgery and they’d given her a twenty-percent chance of living through it. “It looked like he might have told his friends they could watch.”

“Watch us kiss?”

“Annika, I think he was planning to do more than kiss you.”

The fear and shame that washed over me when I finally understood what she was getting at, and how horribly wrong I’d been about the situation, shattered me. I shook and cried and Janice leaned over the gearshift and put her arms around me until I stopped crying. When we got back to the dorm she put me to bed to sleep off the effects.

The next day, when I arrived at class, I took a seat on the other side of the lecture hall. Knowing how scared I was that Jake might seek me out, Janice attended the lecture with me.

That’s the day I discovered what it felt like to have not only a friend, but a best friend.

Now, at Kam’s, in a situation that had already pushed me clear out of my comfort zone, I had the added misery of coming face-to-face with someone I’d hoped never to see again. I must have been staring at Jake while I relived the painful memory, because he raised his glass and crooked his index finger at me, beckoning. He wasn’t smiling this time.

The terror I’d felt that day bubbled up from the place deep down inside where I’d hidden it away, never to be thought of again, and I bolted, fighting my way through the crowd as if I were swimming upstream against a strong current. It was like being in the diner without shoes, but worse because this time, there was nothing preventing me from being there but my own bad memories. On the outside, I looked like everyone else. But on the inside, I remembered that I didn’t belong.

I burst through the door onto the sidewalk, and I kept going.

“Annika! Wait!” Jonathan caught up to me and grabbed my wrist moments before I would have darted in front of an oncoming car. “Jesus,” he said. “You have to stop doing that. Please just stop for a second.” He waited until the street cleared and then interlocked our fingers and led me gently to his truck. “Are you okay? What happened in there?”

“It’s too loud. And I can’t handle the smoke and there was a guy—”

“What guy?”

“Nothing. He was just this guy I used to know. He was sitting at a table with some people.” Tears sprang to my eyes, and I was glad it was dark and that Jonathan couldn’t see them.

“Would you rather go to my place? It’s quiet there.”

I couldn’t help but compare it to what had happened the one time I’d accepted a similar invitation. But I felt safe with Jonathan and knew he wouldn’t hurt me, so I said, “Yes.”

* * *

He lived in a studio apartment on the middle floor of an old three-story house in an area that was technically considered off-campus. It must have been quite a trek on foot and he’d probably had at least a twenty-minute walk ahead of him whenever he’d brought me home after chess club. He parked on the street, and we walked up the path to the front of the house and climbed the stairs, which were on the outside like a rickety wooden fire escape. He jiggled his key in the lock of a small door that had peeling paint, the color of which I wasn’t sure. Tan, or maybe it was just dirty. “It always sticks,” he said.