Birthday Girl (The Student Union Series Book 1) (10 page)

When Zach turned the corner just past the administration building, I took off across the quad, pressed myself against the side of the building, and peered around the corner. He stepped into the parking lot, and looked around, his gaze finally alighting on a brown Toyota with its dome light on. There was a blonde woman in the driver’s seat, and when she stepped out of the car, I saw that my hunch was right. Tara Radford. She hugged Zach, and I heard her say, “You ready?” Zach nodded and got into the car, and they drove off into the night.

I grabbed the strap of my swim bag and slammed it against the ground. The grass was soggy, and mud splashed onto my ankles. Good. I’d let myself get involved with another asshole, and now I looked as shitty as I felt.

“Okay, I’m here,” said Sierra, out of breath. “What’s the emergency?”

I was lying flat on my back on the floor of my room, staring up at the cracks on the ceiling. “It’s Zach, he went off with the professor and Ashley said he got clawed by a cougar and...” My nose was dripping. “They’re probably doing it right now. It’s my fault. I told him I wouldn’t fuck him yet, and he couldn’t wait, and she was right there, and—”

“Whoa, slow down.” Sierra grabbed a handful of tissues and held them out to me. I grabbed them and wiped my face. She lay down next to me on the floor. “This is
not
comfortable. Now, what happened? The way you sounded on the phone, I thought someone died. Possibly you.”

“Someone did die,” I said. “My heart.”

“Oh my fucking god.” Sierra held a tissue to my nose. “Blow.”

I blew. “I think I snotted on your hand.”

“Gross. Now we’re even for that time I threw up on you sophomore year.”

“Not even close,” I said. After the night she puked on me, Sierra bought me a new dress and swore off drinking for a whole week.

“Now, do you have any actual evidence that he’s cheating on you?” I told her what I saw, then started to cry again, but Sierra cut me off. “Speaking as someone who’s watched even more
Law & Order
than you, your case would be laughed out of court.”

I sat up. “Yeah, but then they’d dig up more evidence and prove they were right all along. He’s obviously sleeping with her. I guess it’s good I found out now, before things got more serious with him.” I opened my mini-fridge. “I was going to offer you a beer, but apparently all I have is Diet Coke.”

“Hit me,” said Sierra. She popped open the can. “You need to talk to him. Give him a chance to explain.”

“What if he just lies?”

“Then you can dump his ass.” She looked at her watch. “Hey, come on, we’re missing dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“An empty stomach and a broken heart are a shitty combination.” Sierra took a big swig of Coke. “Fuck the dining hall, let’s go get McDonald’s.”

Sierra was right. After eating Quarter Pounders in her Chevy, I felt a little better. “We should head back,” I said, wiping my mouth. “I have study group.”

“With Zach?”

“Maybe.”

I was ten minutes late to the library, but when I got there, only Brian was in the study room. “Where’s everybody?” I asked.

“No idea.” He put his textbook on the table but didn’t open it. “Hey, can I ask your advice on something? And you won’t tell Jillian?”

“That sounds interesting. Sure.”

“I think I need to break up with her, but I don’t know how to tell her. I’m afraid it’ll really hurt her, and I do like her, it’s just—I don’t think we have anything in common.” He rolled up the sleeves of his denim shirt, then let them slide back down. “Do you think I should wait until the end of the semester?”

I started laughing. When I saw Brian’s stricken face, I tried to pull myself together. “Sorry,” I said. “The thing is—”

At that moment, however, the door opened and Jillian walked in. She looked at me. “What’s so funny?”

I stood up. “Study group is off. You two need to talk.” It was a handy excuse, because I needed to get out of there. If Zach showed, there was no way I was going to be able to play it cool.

Last year, at room draw, I’d been thrilled to get a single (the privileges of being a senior!) but bummed when I ended up with an east-facing room. Since sun is scarce in the foothills most of the school year, everyone wanted to soak up as much as possible through south- or west-facing windows.

But Cascade sunrises, it turns, are the greatest. Sure, I usually slept through them, but that morning I woke up at 5:30 from a dream where I was running after Zach and calling his name, but he pretended not to hear me. God, my stupid subconscious. I opened the blinds and caught the first moments of a spectacular sunrise, like an exuberant art student had painted the sky with vivid reds and fluffy clouds. I put on my headphones and listened to Beyoncé while the sun came up.

Once it was a reasonable hour, I texted Zach and asked him to meet me at breakfast.
Sorry about last night,
he wrote back.
See you soon.

He showed up looking worn down, stubble etching his cheeks, shirt rumpled. Busy night, I guess. I didn’t hesitate. “What happened last night?”

“I know I said we were going to get together,” he said. “I had to go see my dad at the nursing home. They said he was yelling at one of the attendants, so I had to rush over there. Sorry I didn’t text you. I was really stressed out.”

I felt the anger welling up behind my eyes. “Playing the sick parent card,” I said. “That’s just embarrassing.”

He was doing his best to look puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw you with Professor Radford! You went off in her car.” I let my spoon clatter against the edge of my cereal bowl. “Just tell me. Are you having sex with her?”

Zach sat back in his chair and sighed. “Jesus Christ.” He rubbed his eyes. “Tara is my aunt.”

“She...what?”

“She’s my dad’s half-sister. A lot younger than him, obviously. She’s been living with us since Mom died. Having her in the house is the only way I’ve been able to go to school.”

“Oh, fuck.” I looked into my cereal bowl. The Cheerios had gotten soggy, and I couldn’t imagine eating another bite. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Zach ignored the question. “Brooke, after what happened to you, I can understand why you jumped to that conclusion. But I have enough stress in my life. I’m not going to waste my time on someone who doesn’t trust me.” He stood up, took his tray and walked away.

For the first time that semester, I skipped class. I just lay on my bed, my feelings raging all over the place like a pack of feral cats. This was all Zach’s fault. Why didn’t he just tell me? No, this was my fault. I wasn’t able to trust him for one damn day.

I dozed off for a while, and when I woke up, I looked at the clock and saw that I’d slept through lunch. After eating basically nothing all day, I was hungry, so I got my emergency trail mix stash out of my drawer and ate two big handfuls sitting on my bed. Nobody gives trail mix enough credit. This was my personal favorite, loaded with M&Ms
and
chocolate chips, and it could cure almost anything.

Almost.

Trail mix. What did that remind me of? Oh, the geology field trip. In just three days we were heading up to the research site at North Cascades to hike, look at rock strata, analyze minerals, sleep in cabins, and try to pretend that our gorgeous ex-sort-of-boyfriend wasn’t there. Great.

I had to give the Sierra the update. I picked up my phone to text her. Oh, come on, Brooke—you’re not that lazy. You live in the same damn building. So I headed over to Sierra’s room. As I walked down the hall, I saw Jillian emerge from the door to Sierra’s room. Oh, good, Sierra was home and presumably already in girl talk mode. (Okay, Sierra was
always
in girl talk mode.) I called out, “Hey, Jillian!”

Jillian looked up at me. She seemed a little flushed. “Oh, uh, hey, Brooke.” She hurried past me. “I’ll catch you later.”

Okay, whatever. Without knocking, I opened Sierra’s door and said, “Hey, I so need your adv—” Then my jaw dropped, because Sierra and Trevor were lying her bed, grinning at each other, with a top sheet doing a lousy job of concealing their nakedness. I started laughing so hard.

Sierra shrugged. “You see, she—”

“No explanation needed,” I said, fighting through the laughter. “Trevor, you’re smiling like I would be if just got into Harvard.”

“He just got into something,” said Sierra.

“Ew. Sierra, come by later. Clothed.”

Ah, second semester of senior year, when nothing interesting happens and everyone just gets high for a few months in a last gasp of slacker bliss before commencement and adulthood. Right?

Well, let’s do the math, I was taking (and probably, at this point, failing) one of the hardest classes of my college career, fell for and then chased away the most eligible guy on campus, and wandered into the aftermath of a three-way involving two of my best friends.

And there was still a month left.

Sierra came and found me after English class, and we went for coffee. Her cheeks were glowing. “So, are we talking about this or pretending it didn’t happen?” I said.

“Hey, no shame,” she said. “Are you mad that I went ahead and did it without you?”

“Not at all.” I stirred a little half-and-half into my Depth Charge. “I never thought you were serious, though.”

“I didn’t think I was, either,” Sierra admitted. “But Jillian came by and said she broke up with Brian, and I made a joke, and...well, I guess you know the rest. So how are you holding up?”

That’s never been an easy question for me in the best of times. I had a boyfriend in high school who would always ask me, “What’s on your mind?” Every time he did, so many worries would come flooding in that I wouldn’t know where to start, so I’d say, “Nothing.” And he’d get upset because I wasn’t communicating with him. How could I explain that
everything
was on my mind? The presidential election, and college applications, and whether my mom and I were ever going to get along again, and whether I needed a haircut. That would have sounded crazy, right?

“Fine, I think,” I told Sierra. “I need a new study group, and I need to avoid Zach on this camping trip, and I was expecting my letter from Harvard by now, but other than that, everything is awesome.”

“Good. Then we need to talk about what we’re doing for your birthday this year.”

Instant flashback. Evan and Ashley, naked and sweaty, in my room.

“How about nothing?” I suggested.

“Unacceptable,” said Sierra. “This is an important birthday for you. I’m not going to let you spend it alone.”

“Sierra, I’m turning twenty-two. Why is that important, exactly?”

She looked at me like I was a character in
The Hunger Games
who had forgotten about the upcoming Hunger Games. “Twenty-two is the transitional birthday,” she explained. “When you turn twenty-one, you have one mission: get wasted, legally. By the time you turn twenty-two, that’s boring. It’s your first birthday you get to spend as a real live grownup.”

“Where are you getting this?”

“It was on Oprah.”

“Okay, then what do you have in mind for this major milestone?”

Sierra stirred her coffee with the wooden stick and thought for a moment. “Let’s go out dancing.”

“I hate dancing.”

“It’s a good birthday for trying something new.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “You find someplace in the Cutlip area where we can go dancing without being molested by mountain men, and I’m in.”

“You’re the best,” said Sierra. “Although you say ‘molested by mountain men’ like that’s a bad thing.”

We walked back to the dorm together. The cherry trees already bare again. I never really understood why they chose trees for the quad that looked gorgeous for two weeks and then dead for the rest of the year. Maybe I was still thinking about Zach, about our brief, meaningless, delicious spring fling, about his magic tongue and the way he…. And then there he was, briefcase in hand, on the other side of the quad. Sierra had already spotted him and was about to say something when I shushed her. Have I mentioned that Cascade is a tiny college?

We stopped off at the mailboxes in the lobby, and I pulled out a wad of catalogs bound with a rubber band. Boston Proper, Club Monaco, Restoration Hardware. I’d never bought anything from any of these places, but if you have two X chromosomes and a pulse, they find you somehow. I was about to drop the whole bundle into the recycling when I noticed the envelope in the middle with the return address: Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. I held it up in front of Sierra and squealed like the kind of girl who shops at Restoration Hardware.

“Well, open it!” said Sierra.

“Just because it’s a fat envelope doesn’t mean it’s good news,” I said, running my finger along the flap. “Maybe they sent me a brochure about all the cool shit everyone else is going to be doing in Cambridge while I’m chilling at Western.”

Sierra rolled her eyes. “
Just do it.”

I tore open the envelope, and Sierra read over my shoulder.

Dear Brooke Shepard, We are pleased to offer you admission to the graduate program in sociology...