Two Roads (6 page)

“And your eyes are like bullet holes.” He gives me a sweet smile, and my traitorous self can’t help but enjoy it. The intensity between us gets turned up as I step forward, eyes locked on his, and I can’t explain it but everything else seems to melt away.

“You disgust me,” I say.

“You make me weep for humanity,” he says right back.

“I hate your personality.”

“And I hate your lack of one.”

“Your parents hate you.”

“Your mother wishes you were dead.”

“You have friends who don’t even care about you.”

“And you have no one.”

Our back-and-forth keeps picking up speed, and I feel myself smile as I focus on him and his words and our mutual hate.

“You’re going to be a failure in life.”

“You’re going to spend yours cooped up in the basement of your mom’s house.”

“Your heart is going to be broken by a boy.”

“And no girl will ever go for you.”

“I hate you,” he says.

“I hate you more.”

“I wish you were dead.”

“And I wish I didn’t have to look at your horrible eyelashes all the time.”

“You make me miserable.”

“And that makes me happy.

I stop then, glaring at him, and he matches it. He cocks his head to the side, winks at me. “Aww I’m sorry, did I hurt your precious little feelings? I can go easier on you next time, if you want.”

I step toward him. “I was actually going to say I need a new enemy because you are too easy to beat.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

He yawns loudly, making sure I can hear it, and I just glare at him. We’re in each other’s face now, his jaw in front of mine, his face hard and determined. Our bodies feel on fire this close together, and suddenly all I want is to keep insulting and insulting him, because it makes everything feel right in the world again. I breathe slowly in and out, my eyes locked on his, my heart pounding in the best way possible.
Cute try, Logan
, I think, the resentment rolling off my tongue.

“So are you going to tell me why you’re here?” I fall into place against the side of this building. His arm rests beside mine, so close we’re practically touching, and I convince myself that the whole world will explode if his skin ever comes in contact with mine.

I lock eyes with him, and he gives me an innocent smile. “Can’t a guy just lean against a random building without a reason?”

“Nope. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is
always
reason.”

“Fine. You caught me. The truth is,” he says in a way that is both sweet and cold at the same time, and I seriously have to commend him on how awesomely intimidating it sounds. He moves his face closer to mine. “I have a crush on you,” he breathes. “Always have.”

I laugh at the ridiculousness of the idea. “Good, because I’ve always thought you were
so hot
with your nerd glasses and…”--I motion in his general direction, making the disgust clear as day--”whatever shirt you’re wearing.” It is seriously hard to compliment him, I realize, even if I’m just pretending.

He shrugs. “It’s all part of the college boy charm.” He flashes me a crooked smile.

“You’re pathetic,” I say.

“And I hate you with all of my heart.”

“So we finally agree on something.”

“That we do.”

A few students I recognize from my group but don’t know by name pass by us and wave at me, giggling like total idiots, and I just nod at them.

“So that was your best excuse for why you were here, waiting for me?” I say as soon as they leave, and it feels oddly relaxing to stand so close to Logan. I blame it on the contrast between him and Creeper Boy, because otherwise, if I hadn’t been so scared, Logan would disgust me just as much as the guy did.

He would.

I know he would.

“I can do much, much better. But I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I know how fragile you are,” he says, brushing my hair in an attempt to patronize me, so I shove him away. Hard.

“You have no morals. You deserve to rot in hell.”

Logan raises his eyebrow. “Sure, two years after the same fate becomes of you. And what’s so weird about me not telling you why I’m here?” he adds. “I can have secrets too.”

“No you can’t. You’re too”--I make a sweeping motion in front of his face--”…
you
,” I finally say.” You’re too you for secrets.”

He just looks amused. “I’m too me?”

“You’re too you,” I agree, nodding. But, I mean, it’s
Logan
for god sakes. The guy who spends his Saturday nights reading textbooks, the guy who critiques TV shows as everyone watches it, the guy who stays late at classes every day
just
to get on the professor’s good side.

He pushes himself off of the building so that he is facing me now, his body in front of mine, blocking the sunlight streaming down from above. He reaches out to me, and for a second, for one, long second, I think he’s going to touch me. I think he’s going to brush his hand to my arm, his skin to my skin, and I think he’s going to lean in toward me. But then he pulls back and I realize it was just part of my screwed-up imagination, and I wince, because how the hell could I think Logan Waters was going to touch me like…
that
? God, just the fact that he forces me to think it makes me hate him even more. Like, really really
really
hate him.

“Cali,” he says after a minute, “I may be a nerd, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have secret problems of my own.” He pauses. “It’s like how sometimes in math when you try to solve an equation and it ends up not working out immediately because there’s more to it than meets eye,” he continues, and I know I’ve triggered another Logan Tangent, “…and so I’m like an equation because you can never tell whether I’m simple or whether there’s a lot more to me you have to figure out and so you’re being stupid by assuming and you have to pay closer attention you asshole and--”

I raise an eyebrow. “Logan?” I say, cutting him off.

He pauses, takes a breath. “Yeah?”

“Please shut up.”

I can see him working not to blush, and I can’t help but let it amuse me. Reason three billion to hate Logan Waters: he rambles. A lot.

“So you’re trying to tell me that you--
you
--have secrets?” I could seriously laugh.

He nods.

“Like what?”

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be secrets, now would they?” he retorts.

I roll my eyes. This is all just a joke, right? Logan--freaking mega-geek
Logan
--does not have secrets. There is no way. He’s a pretty badass liar, though, I’ll give him that, because I’m seriously believing him right now. “Fair enough,” I say, purely to amuse myself.

A minute passes. Logan is still in front of me, watching me with those deep blue eyes of his, and I have to bite my lip to keep from insulting him some more. I run my hand through my hair instead, and I’m about to turn away and walk right back to my apartment when I notice that Logan’s eyes are locked on my arm. We’re still so close, and I can feel the tension in his body, the slight arch of his chest, the way his hands are hovering just by my side. “Cali,” Logan says quietly, “I know this is none of my business, but should I be concerned?” It takes me a minute to realize he’s talking about the bruise on my arm that Creeper Boy left. I flinch almost immediately and step back from him, but the genuine concern in Logan’s eyes almost makes me regret it. Almost.

“It’s nothing,” I say, and when he opens his mouth to argue, I just shake my head. He doesn’t press me.

We’re silent for a few minutes after that. I breathe in slowly, doing my best to look away from him, to stop wondering why he of all people seems to care about what happened to me. A breeze whistles past us, ruffling my hair, and I just sigh.

“Do you ever miss him?” I say after a while, eyes on my feet. The question comes out of nowhere, and it rolls off my tongue before I can stop it. But I know what it means and so does he, because I think we’ve both been thinking about it a lot since our rivalry began.

Logan pauses, shifts on his feet. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “I miss him a lot.”

“Me too,” I say. The distant burn of guilt returns, but I try to ignore it. “I wish we could know why it happened.”

Logan flinches as soon as the words leave my mouth. “Maybe, someday, we will,” he says. His voice is quiet and sad, and it almost makes me think he knows more about Ben’s death than he is letting on.

But before I have time to ask anything more, he starts walking away from me, until he turns the corner and disappears out of sight.

~

I don’t
think the confusion leaves me for a second as I make my way up the stairs to my room. Yeah, I’ve had weird conversations with Logan before, but this one takes the cake. We’ve never talked about Ben before, especially not in such a heartfelt way, and it feels inexplicably relieving to have admitted to him just how much I miss Ben. A part of me wonders if Logan feels guilty too, if he blames me as much as I blame him--he sure has reason to--and I wonder if I’ll ever get past what happened. But I don’t even know
why
it happened, and that’s the worst part: that I don’t have closure.

That I won’t ever have closure.

But then I think about what Logan said, and I can’t help but wonder… if he knows something I don’t.

I shake my head, pushing the thought away as I step onto my floor. Of course Logan doesn’t know why it happened. That’s ridiculous to think.
No one
knows why it happened. But I still wish I could know, wish I could find a way to forgive myself for not doing anything to stop what happened.

Sighing, I reach the door to my room, and the same loud rock music is playing inside. I roll my eyes.
Ruby again.
The beat has already started pulsing through me, seeping under the doorway and through the walls as I turn the knob. I start to step inside, to act normal and ask how her day was or whatever, when I nearly fall flat on my face.

Because the whole floor is filled with plastic cups.

Hundreds of plastic cups.

All in a line, all filled to the top with lemonade, all right in front of me.

I hold my breath, gasp, and nearly have a heart attack as I look around the room. There is not an inch of actual floor not covered by cups.

And then, immediately, I know who is behind this. My face flushes.
Logan
.

That bastard is so in for it.

I jerk my gaze around the room, looking for a way to step inside but finding none that doesn’t end in me tripping and falling into a pile of lemonade. Shit. Logan really outdid himself this time. I can’t even step inside my own room.

“Ruby?” I call, because I can still here her music on.

“Yeah?” she says back, calm as ever, like she doesn’t even notice the hundreds of filled lemonade cups covering our room. I peer around and see her lying on her bed.

“Was Logan here?”

She pauses. “Yeah.” Still no emotion.

I strain to get a good look at her face but it doesn’t help. “And you let him… do all this?” She is really not the best protector when it comes to my things.

“Pretty much,” she says like it’s nothing, but I can sense the smile behind her voice. She finds this whole thing funny. Of course she does.

I raise an eyebrow, trying to be angry at her but failing miserably. Unlike Logan, Ruby is difficult to hate. “…Why?” I manage to say.

“I’ve never claimed to have morals. Plus, your little rivalry entertains me.” She pauses and I know it’s to hide the amusement in her voice. “He left you a note in the doorway,” she adds after a minute.

Immediately, I glance down at my feet, and sure enough, I find a small piece of scrap paper lying there. I pick it up, recognizing Logan’s handwriting as soon as I see it. As I read the note, I wish like hell he were still here so I could kick him in the balls. “Just my friendly reminder that I hope you get abducted by witches and boiled into soup. Oh, and I hate you. -L”

I toss the note back to the ground immediately, hating that I find it kind of amusing, and I already start wondering what I’ll do to Logan in return for all of this. It will be bad--it
has
to be bad. I promise myself I’ll scare the crap out of him, so much that he won’t even know what hit him. But first, for the matter of figuring out how to get inside my own room.

The task is, unfortunately, much more difficult than it looks. If I take a step forward, I’m almost sure to trip on one of the cups and fall face-first into the hundred others and considering they’re filled with lemonade, the only place that will get me is possibly blinded and bathed in stickiness. Theoretically, I could pick each cup up one by one, but I’m really not in the mood for that.

I glance back up at Ruby, even though it’s only her feet I can see. “Any ideas for how I can get in?” I say, trying to make my voice sound as annoyed as possible.

“I’m going to leave this one to you. So basically, you’re screwed,” she says. Then, Ruby pops something into her mouth--popcorn, it sounds like. Ugh. I’m trapped outside of my room and she’s not only failing to help me, but she’s also eating
popcorn
. That evil, evil girl.

“Does this mean you give me permission to do whatever I want to get into our room?” I call from the doorway.

“Sure,” Ruby says, popping another piece of popcorn into her mouth. “Surprise me.”

I glance around at the legion of cups covering the floor in front of me and I sigh. It’s a good thing I’m not in a problem-solving mood today because I only see one solution to this problem and it’s not going to be pretty.

So with a deep breath, I stare down each and every cup, open and close my eyes, and then I swing my foot forward.

And kick the first ten in front of me to the ground.

Lemonade spills everywhere, flying at the walls, at my face, and soaking the rug as I kick the cups over. A small ring of actual floor forms in front of me where the cups were, and I take a step into it and keep on kicking around me. I kick and kick and cup after cup goes flying, lemonade spewing everywhere, and Ruby just watches me from her bed, eating popcorn like I’m some sort of crappy reality TV show, which, to be fair, I kind of am. I keep kicking my way through until almost the entire room is cleared, until my legs get sore and the walls are covered with lemonade spatter. Finally, after five minutes of cup-kicking, I tunnel my way to my bed. I collapse on the edge of my mattress, totally exhausted.

Freaking Logan.

“Wow,” Ruby says. She stops chewing to look at me. She’s wide-eyed but not angry. No--Ruby looks at me with total admiration. Here we are, our room covered with smashed plastic cups, our rugs and walls soaked with lemonade, and she’s looking at me with admiration.

This is why I like her.

“That was badass,” she continues. “I bet Logan would be totally turned on if he saw that.”

“Oh shut up,” I say. I hate that I almost smile.

I lie down on my bed, panting an embarrassing amount, and I lick the lemonade off of my lips. My shoes are still soaked from the liquid, and I promise myself I will force Ruby to help me clean up the mess as soon as I regain some energy.