I shrugged, thrown off by the out-of-the-blue question. “I don’t know. She liked it, I guess.”
“Do you like your name?” She inquired, crossing her legs and leaning forward.
Before I could respond, another guy chimed in. I couldn’t remember his name, but I recognized him as one of my teammates.
“Do you have a sibling named something like Lake or Ocean?” he asked.
The room erupted with laughter, though I didn’t find it to be all that funny. It was an unoriginal joke that I had been hearing since I understood the English language. Ironically, my mom used to say that if she ever had a daughter, her name would be Rain.
I sipped the cold beer in my hand. “I was an only child until I met Carson.”
A smile spread across Carson’s face. “I’m the fourth Moore.”
My parents certainly saw him as their son, and Car viewed them as his parents. Even without official adoption, the love was still there. He listened in school, never lied, and helped my mom with the dishes. Basically, he was the less chaotic and slightly more focused version of me. A good influence.
A slew of giggles followed Carson’s statement. Not sure I’d ever met more giggly people than these.
“Riv, did you know that guy in the hallway?” Another teammate, Trevor, asked me.
I kept my eyes on Trevor, trying to ignore the intense stare from Carson beside me. He'd been trying to get me to tell him what my deal was with “the kid you can’t stop staring at like a freak,” but I refused to give him any details other than saying we used to know each other.
“Uh…” I muttered. “No. Why?”
“It seemed like you knew each other,” Trevor spoke lightly. He took a large swig of his beer, finishing the bottle and tossing it into the trash can.
“That’s Salem’s roommate,” Trevor’s girlfriend spoke, twirling her hair around her finger as she sat comfortably on her boyfriend’s lap. Then she gasped. “We should’ve invited Salem tonight.”
I wish we had invited Alex, too.
“Poor guy has to share an apartment with Salem?” Lola asked, her tone bitter and somewhat repulsed. “I would hate my life.”
Carson, always ready to hear the drama, perked up. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s a slob that doesn’t care about anyone but himself,” she declared as a matter of fact. “And I know he’s your teammate, so I don’t care if you tell him I said that. I’m sure his roommate is stuck picking up after him like he’s his maid.”
After Lola calmed down, the conversation shifted to a cheerleader-versus-basketball-player debate. The girls claimed cheer was ten times more difficult than “tossing balls into circles,” as Lola called it. The guys obviously disagreed, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to the conversation to chime in. My mind was elsewhere.
I’d bet it’s easy to guess where that elsewhere was.
I made it to communications on time. I would’ve said it was because I cared about my education and was eager to learn, but I’d be lying.
I had already settled in my seat when Alex arrived, hair tousled and clothes twisted like he got dressed in the dark. He glued his eyes to the ground, avoiding accidental eye contact with me.
My eyes followed him to his usual seat on the opposite side of the room from me. He sat with the same two guys in the same spot each class.
The professor began lecturing for a long, grueling twenty minutes. Lola and I whispered back and forth the majority of the time—she was good company. Eventually, she took out her notes, accusing me of distracting her when she needed to pay attention. I let her listen since I was going to need someone to give me the notes later.
“Now that I’ve finished the lesson, I will give you a couple of minutes to choose your groups,” the professor said.
Get into groups?Dammit, I should have been listening.
Lola couldn’t stop herself from laughing at my confusion. Her manicured hand rubbed my shoulder condescendingly. “We have a group assignment, and he’s letting us choose who we want to be with.”
“Oh, I forgot about the group project,” I said as if it weren’t the only reason I started showing up to class again in the first place.
Classmates began conversing and finding each other. Lola leaned over to me. “It’s groups of three, so we need one more.”
My eyes fell on Alex like clockwork. I knew he’d end up in a group with his friends, but the stupid side of me had hoped he would join mine. Who was I kidding? Even if he didn’t have his friends, a group with me would be thelasthe would consider.
