“I don’t care what you tell Cole after I leave. Just give this to Oliver,” I pleaded. “It’s only a piece of paper. You don’t even need to hand it to him, only slide it under the door of the bus when you get to the next venue. He’ll find it.”
“This is ridiculous. Why didn’t you give him your number at the hotel?”
“By the time I thought to do it, they had already checked out.” Around midday yesterday, we got an update from Ritual Disruption’s tour manager that Jamie was getting discharged from the hospital and that they were hopeful he’d be able to perform tomorrow night. When Cole had come to my room to tell me that hours after the fact, Ritual Disruption had already checked out.
“Can’t you find him online or something?”
“No!” I exclaimed. “I can’t find any of his personal social media accounts. He’s a celebrity, for God’s sake. I don’t know how else I’ll be able to track him down once I leave.”
Ran pushed his hands inside the pockets of his pants. “Your brother won’t want you to stay in touch. Getting involved with Oliver was a bad idea. He’s older than you, he’s not going to—”
“I’m eighteen,” I interrupted. “I’m officially an adult. Cole’s opinion is irrelevant.”
“Ivy…” He looked at me with a mixture of apprehension and pity.
Pity. I could exploit that. “Just humor me. I’m not an idiot. I know he’s probably going to forget about me.” I cast my gaze down. “He’ll probably never actually use the phone number. But I need to know that I’ve done everything in my power to make it work. Haven’t you ever felt this way?”
I lifted my eyes back up to his face, and I knew there were tears shining in them. That part wasn’t hard. I’d been crying all night.
Ran sighed, shaking his head. “Fine. Give it to me. All I’m going to do is slide it under the door of the bus, got it?”
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” I said, my voice trembling as I handed him the folded-up piece of paper with my phone number. That paper, soft and warm from being held in my hand, was my last desperate attempt to right all the things I’d screwed up.
7
TWO YEARS LATER
IVY
The auditorium echoedwith the furious clacking of laptop keys as my classmates apparently attempted to document every word coming out of the professor’s mouth. I sat in my usual spot at the back, occasionally participating in the clacking, but mostly doodling in a notebook I’d grown fond of this summer. I’d found it in a dollar shop back in River Valley. At the bottom of each dated page, printed in delicate pink ink, was a motivational quote. Today it said, “You must do the tings you think you cannot do”. The quote was attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but I was skeptical. If the manufacturer had managed to misspell “things”, what else had they gotten wrong?
I traced over the quote with my pencil while the professor intoned something about addiction being a pattern of learned behavior. The class was called “The Psychology of Addiction”, and the only reason I was taking it was because the other psych electives I’d been interested in had put me on wait-lists.
The freckled guy sitting a row ahead of me already had a wall of bullet points on his screen. I frowned. Had the professor really shared that much information already? It was the first lecture, and I’d started zoning out when it had become clear all he planned to do today was go over the curriculum. We’d gotten an email with all the information, so what was the point of writing it all down? Was I missing something?
I sniffed and told myself to relax. I’d hoped that by my third year at UCLA, I wouldn’t feel so on edge at the beginning of each semester, yet here I was. New year, new class, new batch of strangers. I could count on one hand everyone I knew in this auditorium from previous years, and I used the term “knew” loosely. Freckled guy and I may’ve exchanged a word or two in passing, and the blonde sitting at the front had definitely asked me for directions once.
Leaning back in my seat, I crossed my arms. To think that at one point, I had such high hopes of making a boatload of friends in college. Of course, that was beforethatsummer. The summer when I learned that stepping out of one’s comfort zone was not all it’s cracked up to be.
Yeah, I’d take being a loner over experiencing that all over again.
When the class ended, I was the first out the door—one of the many benefits of always sitting in the back. I didn’t get far before I heard my name.
Jack stood in the lobby of the building, waving at me with a big grin on his face. He wore his usual preppy uniform comprised of boat shoes, checkered shorts, and a pastel polo. His strong jaw and arresting-blue eyes made up for the fact that everything else about him screamed frat bro.
I waved and made my way over. We’d started fooling around last year, but the last time I’d seen him was before the final exams in March. I hadn’t thought of him much during the summer, and I wasn’t sure if he wanted to resume things now that we were both back at UCLA. His appearance outside my classroom during the first week of school may be a sign that he did.
“Hey, Ivy.” He pulled me into a tight hug and rubbed my back as if trying to comfort me. I was sure Jack thought I had some kind of a damaged past, because even though we’d technically been “fuck buddies”, there wasn’t any fucking going on. I’d let him go down on me and returned the favor, but when he’d tried to take things further, I’d told him in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t ready to have sex. He was understanding, but ever since, I’d often caught him looking at me with a thoughtful, pitiful expression, as if he were trying to guess what kind of terrible thing had happened to me. Telling him that I was still kind of, sort of, for no logical reason whatsoever “saving” myself for a man I’d spent less than two weeks with two years ago didn’t seem productive.
Jack pulled away, placed his palms on my biceps, and scanned my face. “I’ve missed you. How was your summer?”
“Fine.” I shrugged. “Nothing special.” Summers in River Valley rarely were.
“You’ve barely answered my messages,” he said, keeping his grin in place. “But no worries. I know you must have been busy with your folks.”
“Yeah, sorry,” I said, grimacing.
Jack wrapped an arm around my shoulders and led me outside. “It was a busy summer for me, too. I was down in New York for a good month, helping my sister move to a new apartment after she and her boyfriend broke up. The real-estate situation in that city is crazy. She managed to get a shoebox for three thousand a month. Can you believe it? All it would fit was her queen bed—not even a nightstand. The kitchen’s in the bedroom. It made me so glad that I’m living in LA.”
