“I know,” she says, then nods her head for the back door. “Come on, I made pie.”* * *When I get home that night, I go straight for the pile of graded quizzes in a neat stack on my kitchen table. I flip through them.
I find Thalia’s and pull it from the stack.
I spent dessert holding Thomas with one hand and eating pie with the other, since I offered to hold him while Charlie ate, and he promptly fell asleep on me.
Then I spent the entire drive back thinking about what my mom said, about owning your actions. About choosing the wrong course of action with open eyes.
And I think about what I said to her, something that I hadn’t even thought about yet: I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it again.
Open eyes.
I grab a red pen and, before I can change my mind, write on Thalia’s quiz in neat block letters.
Then I put it back into the stack and go to bed.Chapter Twenty-NineThaliaSunday morning, I wake up at seven a.m. and I’m at the library by eight, leaving my apartment before any of my roommates get up and make eye contact with me.
It’s the coward’s way out, but I’m fine with it. I’ll be a coward all day long if it means I get to skip confronting what happened last night, or, more accurately, confronting the fact that my roommates know what happened last night.
If I hide out in the library, I’m free to pretend they don’t know. I can pretend that they’re never going to confront me, never going to ask me what the fuck I think I’m doing and whether I know it’s wrong and whether I shouldn’t report Caleb for being a dirty old pervert and whether he’s a terrible, terrible person for wanting me.
I don’t think he is. Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe I’m stupid for thinking that I’m special. Maybe he’s got a revolving door of young, easily duped students who he seduces for a semester and then discards.
But I doubt it.
I’m at the library all day. Every time my phone buzzes, I scramble to look at it, thinking that it’s either my friends or Caleb, but none of them texts me at all. The only person who does is Bastien, asking me if I have any idea where my high school copy of Moby Dick might have wound up.
I do not.
Meanwhile, I work on graduate school applications with the fire of a thousand suns. I ruthlessly edit my personal statement. I format my resume. I email psych departments up and down the east coast to double-check that VSU has, in fact, sent them my official transcript.
To hear my applications tell it, I was born with a passion for neuroscience. I was reading psych journals while I was still in diapers and asking my kindergarten teacher about the latest in experimental PTSD therapy.
It’s not all that far from the truth. I’m a Navy brat, and while I think my own father is one of the lucky ones who escaped that kind of psychological damage, I was surrounded by it.
And then, of course, there was Javier. I write and delete and re-write and re-delete a paragraph about him over and over again, because I don’t know what I should say and I don’t know whether I should say it in a graduate school application.
I grapple with that. I look at my planner and wonder when I’m supposed to do everything that I’m supposed to be doing. I stare at the wall in the Absolute Quiet room and my mind floats back to last night, and before I know it I’m having dirty fantasies in the library.
When I finally go home that night, Margaret and Harper are both there, and they each give me a look but thankfully, they don’t say anything.* * *PLEASE SEE ME AFTER CLASS.
I don’t like those words. I’ve never once read them and thought, yay! I get to talk to a teacher after class! I’m sure they have some positive news for me!
Admittedly, I don’t see them a lot. Teachers rarely ask to see straight-A students after class.
I glance over at Caleb, his back to me as he hands back the last few quizzes, and I think for at least the thousandth time about his mouth on mine in the dark, the way he groaned when I touched him.
I’m yours to plunder.
I uncross and re-cross my legs under my desk, desperately trying to quell the heat there and focus on the matter at hand.
It makes for a very, very long fifty minutes, but finally, it’s over. I took four pages of notes but to be honest, I have no idea what today’s lecture was about. For all I know he told us about his favorite Disney Princesses for an hour, though I seem to have written down lots of numbers, so it was probably math.