Unforgettable (4 page)

Callie strode over to the window seat and turned on her iPod Sound Deck, then twirled the dial when the Donnas came screaming out. Through the thick glass windowpanes, she could see a bunch of girls in soccer uniforms scooping up the fallen leaves and making a giant pile. It looked like fun. It made her think of this time last year, when she and Easy were still new. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other and had to sneak to the stables every chance they got just to be alone. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass—in her black Calvin Klein push-up bra, she looked pallid and frail. Not the girl Easy would want to be with.

“I still can’t believe she’s a governor.” Jenny pulled out a bright yellow T-shirt with a giant smiley face on it from her drawer. “I know it’s probably a pain but it just sounds so … glamorous!” “It gets old fast.” Callie glanced over her shoulder at Jenny, whose back was to her as she struggled to pull her royal blue sports bra down over her massive chest. Callie looked down at her own barely-A’s. She’d never really been able to fill out the top of a bikini, but since last year ended, she’d lost some weight, and her breasts had sadly been the first thing to disappear. “Imagine every mistake you ever make becoming, like, public knowledge.”

“So, uh …” Jenny started, blushing a little as she pulled on a pair of black Adidas gym shorts. She reached up and tightened her ponytail, a few light freckles sprinkled across the pale skin on the underside of her thin arms. “I told Easy today that I kind of needed some time to, you know, figure things out.” “Really?” Callie stared at the bulletin board behind her desk, pretending to check the schedule of field-hockey games thumbtacked to it, unable to look into her roommate’s pure, honest eyes. She was proud of herself for telling Easy he had to stop messing around and make his choice—even though she couldn’t help wishing he’d just pick her already and get it over with—and wondered what that news meant for her.

“I just … feel like I never have any idea what’s going through his mind,” Jenny admitted, looking a little embarrassed.

“Yeah, no one does.” Callie picked up the sweater she’d dropped on the floor and turned to Jenny, tapping a perfectly polished fingernail against her temple. “He’s totally messed up.” Jenny giggled and grabbed her field-hockey stick from where she’d stashed it in the corner. “That’s one way of putting it.” When she glanced back at Callie, a smile was perched on her tiny pink lips.

Callie tossed the sweater onto the floor in front of her closet, where a pile was already building up. The memory of opening that door and finding Easy crouched on the floor in there, hiding, made her heart beat in her ears. Sliding in next to him in the dark, surrounded by her forest of expensive clothes, pulling the door closed, laughing, and then the kissing … it had probably been the best moment of Callie’s life so far.

She took a deep breath, wondering if maybe Jenny could hear her heart pounding across the room—what was that creepy Edgar Allan Poe story? Where the beating heart of the guy he’d killed ended up getting him busted by the police? Or was it his own guilt that got him in trouble? She should have paid more attention in Miss Rose’s lit class.

Callie quickly threw on a pair of black Nike capri pants, a plain white T-shirt, and her maroon Waverly sweatshirt, which was about three sizes too big. Jenny had one sneakered foot balanced on the top of her desk and was bent over her leg, stretching out her hamstring. In her gym shorts and faded gray Berkeley hoodie, her hair pulled back into a high ponytail, she looked cute and sweet, but about as much of a threat as vanilla yogurt.

“Wanna walk over to the fields together?” Callie asked, a little tentatively. Despite having been roommates for over a month now, they’d never once walked to practice together. Callie had always been too …
something
. But now she was feeling—what? Generous, maybe? She could afford to be a little kinder to her younger roomie.

After all, one of them was going to get her heart broken—and Callie was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be her.

Email Inbox

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Tuesday, October 8, 4:13 P.M.

Subject:
Your lucky day

Ferro:

Got a bunch of freebie kegs from a microbrewery that’s closing up shop and I’m willing to sell them to you at a severe discount.

Act fast—these will not last.

BD

Email Inbox

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Tuesday, October 8, 4:16 P.M.

Subject:
Re: Your lucky day

Dude—

Sounds tempting, but can’t risk having kegs on campus again. Cut it a little close last time …

H.F.

Email Inbox

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Tuesday, October 8, 4:17 P.M.

Subject:
Re: Re: Your lucky day

What about off campus then? My grandma’s got a giant barn right outside town and I wouldn’t charge you much to use it. Hay bales, corn stalks, smell of leaves in the air—and most important, cheap kegs of beer.

Whaddaya think?

Email Inbox

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Tuesday, October 8, 4:19 P.M.

Subject:
Re: Re: Re: Your lucky day

Intrigued …

Easy walked through the woods, his legs sore and tired beneath him after two hours of horseback riding. Whenever Easy had something on his mind, he rode Credo. Something about her enormous brown eyes, looking at him with such unabashed trust, made him feel like he was less of a shit. Because, for the past week, that’s how he’d felt. Every single time an image of Callie or Jenny would pop into his brain, he’d think miserably,
I’m an asshole
—which was every other fraction of a second. Credo didn’t care if he was an asshole, though. She still stomped her feet happily at the sight of him entering the stables, and she didn’t ask him where he’d been or who he’d been with or what he was thinking.

He’d headed to the stables right after talking to Jenny outside the art studio. Not that he’d done much talking—he couldn’t find the right thing to say. He couldn’t even find the
wrong
thing to say—he simply couldn’t think of anything to say. A long, hard ride was exactly what he needed to help him figure his shit out and make up his mind.

The only problem was, it hadn’t worked. So instead of having dinner in the dining hall and having eighty people ask him, for the millionth time, if he was with Jenny or Callie, he’d decided to hike to the rocky outcropping in the woods, the one off the boat path, near his secret painting spot. Easy sighed as he settled against a cold, dark rock, pulling a cigar from his pocket. He’d snitched two Cubans from his father’s black leather cigar pouch while he’d used the restroom last weekend at Le Petit Coq. It was the perfect occasion to light one and concentrate.

Maybe he should make a list. Like pros and cons? Wasn’t that what people did when they couldn’t make their minds up between two alternatives? But the idea of breaking Callie and Jenny, two living, breathing girls, down into lists made him want to shoot himself in the foot. Or the head. Okay, maybe not that.

Easy took a giant puff just as he heard a sound out on the path. He held the smoke in his lungs for a long moment, waiting to see if a teacher would appear to get him in trouble. But then a very red-faced Brandon Buchanan materialized, wearing a sweaty white shirt and black running shorts, his vinyl squash bag slung over one shoulder and silver cell phone in hand.

“Sorry, dude,” Brandon muttered, running a hand through his sweaty, disheveled hair. He gave Easy a little apology wave with the fingers of one hand and started to turn around.

Easy suddenly realized he didn’t really want to be alone. “You don’t have to go, man. You can, uh, sit down.” Brandon looked at him for a moment as if it might be a trap, but then he took a step forward and nodded in the direction of Easy’s cigar. “Got another?” Whenever Brandon spoke to him, Easy got the feeling he was trying to make his voice sound an octave deeper.

Easy unzipped the front pocket of his black Patagonia vest and pulled out the second Cuban. “It’s all yours.” “Light?” Easy handed him his cheap plastic lighter with the hula girl on it and Brandon nodded at it. “Nice.” He lit his cigar and leaned awkwardly back against one of the rocks. He glanced around rapidly, like he still wasn’t sure what he was doing here. “So …” Brandon inhaled deeply. “How’s it been?” he asked through a mouthful of smoke.

Easy sighed and stared at the trails of smoke leading up from their cigars, straight up at the patch of purpley sky visible through the crowd of trees surrounding them. It was more than a little fucked up that he was sitting back smoking stogies with Brandon, the guy whose girlfriend he’d stolen last year—the guy who always looked at him like he wanted to punch him out but never had the balls to do it. “I’ve been better,” Easy replied wryly.

Brandon nodded and propped his sneakers up on another rock. “So I’ve heard.” Easy stared at Brandon for a moment, trying to judge his capacity for empathy. What the fuck—why not just spill it?

“I’m just … all confused,” Easy stammered. “I have no fucking clue who I’m supposed to be with.” Easy’s free hand clenched at his shaggy hair, which was in desperate need of a cut. His father had just about had a coronary when he’d seen it last week.

“You want my opinion?” Brandon asked, his cigar hanging from his weirdly pink lips. He didn’t even sound like he wanted to murder Easy, for once. But then, Brandon
had
been all chummy on Saturday night with that mysterious, arty-looking St. Lucius girl—maybe she’d been able to chill him out a little, get him over Callie. Well, good for Brandon. The girl was hot.

“Uh, yeah.” Easy held his crappy lighter up to the end of his cigar to relight it. “I guess so.” “All right. Then I’m just going to be honest. I know Jenny is totally sensational and all, but didn’t it sort of happen really fast? I mean, she just got here, and suddenly you two were dating.” Brandon exhaled smoke straight into the dark evening air. Easy had suspected he’d had a thing for Jenny, too.

“Yeah, I guess it did happen fast.” Easy thought back to when he had first really talked to Jenny, that time he’d sneaked into Callie’s dorm room and then Callie had disappeared. He’d sat down on Jenny’s bed, and everything about her—her smell; her sleepy, makeup-less face; her hair going everywhere; her sweet, curious voice—seemed to be the exact opposite of Callie. “But we just, y’know, hit it off.” “I mean, I get that. Don’t get me wrong—I kind of think you’re an idiot for not being all completely in love with Jenny. She’s just so freaking
cute
.” Brandon spoke with the cigar in his mouth, so it was kind of hard to understand, but Easy was catching the drift of it. “But don’t you find it a little strange that you went from Callie to, like, the anti-Callie?” Easy tried to think about why that could be. His mind went immediately back to his ill-fated trip to Barcelona to visit Callie over the summer. A combination of things—the summer in fucking ass-dull Kentucky and his frustration at the thought of yet another full year at suffocating Waverly Academy—had made the trip a nightmare and made Easy dread returning to Waverly even more. And then when he’d gotten back to school, Callie had been even more smothering and bossier than usual, and out of nowhere, this new, cool girl had appeared on the horizon—a perfect way out.

Was that what had happened? Had he used Jenny as a way out of his relationship with Callie because Callie tried to push him too far? Because he wasn’t ready to say “I love you”? For the millionth time, he thought of the dinner he’d had with Callie and his father, and how Callie had stood up for him. Memories suddenly flooded his brain—Callie, in her deliciously inappropriate shoes, hiking out to the stables to sneak in an hour of making out before dinner; Callie surprising him with a first edition of William S. Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
for Valentine’s Day because she remembered him saying he wanted to read it; Callie, whose hazel eyes made him think of lazy summer days from his childhood and wish he’d known her all his life.

“That’s, like, the classic definition of ‘on the rebound,’ isn’t it?” Brandon continued, taking three quick puffs of his cigar and trying to exhale them into smoke rings the way tough guys always do in the movies. “As much as I hate to say it, there was something about you and Callie that just … made sense.” Brandon definitely hated to admit it, but it was true. Maybe because Easy and Callie were so clearly
not
suited for each other, they happened to magically be perfectly suited to each other—opposites attract and all that. Didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but nothing about love was supposed to.

“Yeah.” Easy nodded slowly.

“Go easy on Jenny, you know?” Brandon told him, feeling a little light-headed from the tobacco. Poor Jenny. Brandon could tell from just looking at Easy that he was already dreaming about Callie and that Jenny didn’t stand a chance. Brandon felt a stab of bitterness, but then he suddenly remembered why he had come out here in the first place. Elizabeth. He was over Callie, he was over Jenny. It was Elizabeth all the way.