When?
Oh, great. He’s not from Bristol, is he?
“You dropped your hat when you tripped over your own feet.” He gestures down on the floor between us but doesn’t budge move to pick it up.
I belatedly realize my wavy brown hair is everywhere, a frizzy mess obscuring parts of my face, and my hands fly up to smooth down the untamed locks. He’s watching me carefully, smiling like he knows a secret, which means I probably look like a certified dumbass.
“I’m pretty sure your feet tripped me,” I argue, but he moves his head from side to side.
“Right. It’s not like you were staring down at the floor—” He cocks his head to the side, squinting at my student ID dangling from an orange and blue lanyard I’m wearing around my neck. “—Evelyn.” Very few people other than my dad and a few of my former teachers have ever called me that, but hearing him do so sends a shiver coursing through me, despite the stifling late summer heat inside the dining hall.
Before I can move, he kneels, keeping his eyes fastened on mine. I should look away, at anything and everything else besides him, but I can’t. Why should I when he won’t stop staring?
“So I guess I just won the graceful freshman award, huh?” I question nervously.
“I’d blame it on your shoes, but it looks like they’re innocent.” His words cause my toes to curl in my flat sandals. Standing, he places my floppy fedora in my outstretched fingers, his thumbs skimming along my palms as he pulls away. When I dust the brown felt material off, my hands are trembling.
“I like you better without it,” he admits the moment I start to pull the fedora over my hair. “Like seeing your eyes.”
For a moment, I freeze.
I’ve always been pretty happy with my features—I’m tall with long legs, a small C-cup that I’m incredibly proud of, and clear olive skin—but my eyes have always been my favorite thing about myself. They were the only similarity I shared with my sister. My mom always claimed that it was like Lily and I were from completely different families because we were so different, but when she looked into our eyes, it was impossible to deny we were blood.
I tremble slightly because I can’t think of a moment since Lily’s death that my mother has looked at me, really looked into my eyes, for longer than a few seconds.
“And I like to hide my shitty hair days,” I finally tell him, dragging the hat over my head, and lowering my gaze so I won’t have to directly face his penetrating stare any longer. “And, you know, my clumsy shame face.”
He steps away from me, drawing his bottom lip between his straight white teeth like he’s fighting the urge to smile. Or laugh in my face. “If it makes you feel any better, I can name about ten people right off the top of my head that I’ve seen here over the last few years who’ve got you beat.”
The last few years. So what does that make him? A junior? Senior? Better yet, why do I care and where the hell have we met before? I cross my arms over my chest, and tilt my head to the side, sizing him up.
“It doesn’t help,” I let him know. “Not even a little.”
At last, he smiles—a crooked, sexy turn of his lips that probably draws this campus’ female population to him in droves—before taking another step away from me. “Try not to attack anyone else, Evelyn.”
“I’ll do my best.” I only make it a few feet before I turn back around, determined to ask him where we’ve met before. If I don’t, it’ll drive me up the wall trying to figure it out. “Hey, do you—.”
But I’m too late. He’s already ducking through the double doors and heading outside. All I see is the back of the plain gray t-shirt expertly hugging his ripped shoulders and biceps.
“Who are you?” I murmur.
At the bottom of the brick steps, a beautiful brunette girl flags him down, and he stops to talk to her in the courtyard. They go back and forth a few times before she says something to make him laugh and shake his head. He does that thing with his mouth—that smile that’s bound to screw with her breathing—and then he looks down at his watch. I watch as he sprints across the courtyard. Like me, the other girl doesn’t move until he’s out of sight.
Obviously I’m not the only one affected by him.
I inhale harshly, wait a few seconds, then exhale, irritated with myself. The first hot guy I run into, literally, and I fall all over the place thinking I somehow know him. I’m probably getting him confused with some actor I saw during one of my Netflix binges this summer—he did have that look. The only thing I know for sure is I can’t afford falling for anything this year.
“I can’t screw up. I won’t,” I mutter in a fierce voice. “I will not wreck things this time.”
I turn away from the doors before the brunette girl comes inside the D-hall, and finish cutting through the cafeteria and out the front of the building. Pulling my map out of my purse once again, I hurry to the music building, which ends up being a five-minute walk away. I’m sweaty and out-of-breath when I reach the third floor, but I have two minutes to spare. There’s an Advising - Please Sign In & Have a Seat sign hanging on Professor Cameron’s door, so I write my name on the clipboard and sit in the seat provided.
Whatever’s going on inside that office doesn’t sound good. I can hear raised voices, but I try to tune it out. After ten minutes of waiting, though, I fish my phone out of my purse and check my messages.
There’s one from my dad that, in less than a hundred characters, tells me that A) I shouldn’t avoid his calls because B) I’m at school on his dime this year, which really serves to remind me that C) he’s still livid that I blew the whistle on his affair five months ago, he doesn’t think I deserve shit, and I need to call and let him know that I made it to school in one piece.
I’m fine, I message to him.
“And you can wait until tonight for a phone call,” I say as I open my other text. A picture from my closest friend. With her nose wrinkled and her lips twisted down in a dramatic pout, I almost miss that Kendra’s holding up a flash card. The message she’s written on it is short, simple, but it makes my chest clench.
Miss you. Be good.
We hadn’t become close until our senior year of high school. Before then, she was my sister’s best friend, and we’d tolerated each other for Lily’s sake. But here’s the thing: Loss does one of two things to those it leaves behind—it meshes us together, forcing us to let go of every feel we know so we can try to form some semblance of existence again, or it tears open the wounds, widening the divide so much that we’ll do whatever it takes to try and pretend the pain’s not real.
Losing Lily had done both for me, but Kendra ... she was one of those things that had worked out.
Last year it was Kendra who talked me into pursuing the music degree. Even though my training before then consisted of a handful of private voice lessons and a few semesters in the honor’s choir—definitely not the makings of a voice major—she thought I’d make it. And then, when I started spiraling out of control, she was also the only person who told me to slow my roll.
I hadn’t listened. Which is why I’m here. Sitting outside of a new advisor’s office, listening to her rip another girl—someone who’s probably a classmate—to shreds.
My fingers feel wooden as I text my response to Kendra. Miss you, too.
Professor Cameron’s door creaks open, and I look up. A petite blonde who looks like she walked right out of Bring It On darts out of the office, bright patches of red blooming on her cheeks. She gives me a look that tells me I should probably escape while I can, and then she rounds the corner. Before I have a chance to consider taking her wordless advice, a bespectacled woman with a salt and pepper pixie cut pokes her head out the door and glances down at the clipboard.