“Yeah, okay,” Tank chuckled. I could tell he was throwing in the towel on this for the moment, and I could feel my shoulders sag in relief. “Look, I get it. You went to a small high school, in a small town. You probably feel a lot more comfortable with girls like the ones you grew up with instead of these fast gals like Vanessa and her cheerleader gal pals. There’s nothing that says you can’t take a walk on the tame side for a change.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so we walked the rest of the way back in silence. Back at our dorm, we both got ready for bed and when I came back from the can, Tank was already snoring in his bed. I laid there for a long time and thought about what he said. I had no idea that the attraction for Keira that I thought I had buried when I graduated from high school could be that obvious. And even if what Tank said was true, even if I did want to get to know Keira better, I couldn’t help but wonder if she would even be interested in me. I know what she thought of me in high school, which wasn’t much. I really hadn’t changed much, at least on the outside. Still a jock. Nothing was going to make me stop loving football. But there was room for more than that in my life. Hell, if I could make time for a girl like Vanessa, I could damn sure make time for a girl of beauty and substance like Keira. It was the first time I’d wanted that—wanted to think about a real relationship.
I was giving myself a headache and a hard-on both thinking about it, thinking about Keira, and when Kirby stumbled in at some ungodly hour, it came to me. I knew how I was going to win Keira over. Or at least how I was going to get to know her. It wasn’t going to be easy. It took me awhile to get up the courage to put my plan into motion. In the meantime, I found myself visiting Vanessa’s room a lot more often. That would have been fine if I ever planned on actually hooking up with her. All the while, I kept hoping to run into Keira again.
Chapter 2
Keira
For the next two weeks, I kept my head down, and tried to focus on school. Tried. It seemed like everywhere I went, I would see Nate. The posters and pep rally signs were bad enough. His picture was in the school paper, and even in the sports display in the student union. One day I just stood there and stared at his head shot, blown up full size next to the team picture in the display case, and a write-up about him on a white placard: “Nate Buckingham, unlikely small-town football hero to lead MSU to the championship for third year in a row.” It went on to quote all these stats and ended with something about his family. I snorted to myself and walked away. What the hell did they know about Nate Buckingham, whatever fanboy had written that hand job of description?
Like you know so much better, I thought to myself as I stomped out of the student union and headed to the library. It was true. I thought I had Nate pegged—or at least guys like him, irresponsible bonehead jocks who only cared about sports and popular girls, got terrible grades and didn’t care, and certainly weren’t interested in reading a good book, or dating any girl that wouldn’t automatically fall down at their feet and open her legs for them. Lately when I thought about Nate, which was a lot, I realized that i might not know all there was to him. Maybe he did care about something besides football. Maybe he wasn’t a big jerk after all. He’d actually never gone out of his way to be mean to me in high school, or to anyone for that matter. He had stuck up for me the other night in the dorm. If you could call his half-hearted scolding of Vanessa sticking up for me.
The truth was, I didn’t really know what kind of person Nate Buckingham was, and I wasn’t likely to find out. Because guys like Nate (there was that generalization again, but it was true) didn’t give girls like me—smart, intellectual, and not obsessed with sex and fashion—the time of day. I’d be better off not thinking about him at all anymore.
Fat chance, because even when I avoided his image plastered all over campus, I still managed to bump into him. On a huge campus with thousands of students, how I managed to find myself in close proximity to the football team’s star quarterback, when he was two years ahead of me, and we had no classes or friends in common, was fucking annoying. And then it hit me one day when I came out of the freshman English composition class. It was Vanessa. I did have some of the same classes with her, and although we didn’t have any friends in common either, Nate was always with her lately. He was waiting for her when I came out of English Comp class that morning. Apparently we had the same lunch period free too, because when I walked into the main cafeteria, Vanessa and the same crowd of cheerleaders that had been at her little Sunday night soirée were pretending to eat their food along with Nate and his football buddies. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, when I got to pottery class, my one elective this term, and yet another class I shared with Vanessa, Nate had escorted her there, and they were saying their long goodbye as I walked up to the classroom. Like an idiot I stood there and watched the two of them play tonsil hockey, and when they finally broke their kiss, Nate gave Vanessa’s ass a good squeeze. I hadn’t even realized I was gawking until Vanessa caught me.
“What gives, Wells? Put your eyes back in their sockets and pick your bottom lip up off the floor. Don’t you have some clay you can go play with?”
I could feel my face heat with embarrassment and rage. Nate looked at my like he wanted to apologize, and I hated the pity in his eyes. Whatever he was going to say was cut off when Vanessa grabbed his chin and forced him to look back down at her. “See you later, Buck,” she cooed at him.
I wanted to run far away, but I wasn’t going to let Vanessa and her slutty ways keep me out of class. We hadn’t started learning the wheel yet, so I grabbed a huge hunk of clay and pounded the shit out of it for the first half of class. Only when I’d finally calmed down did I make something that resembled a slab pot. I set it on the shelf with a paper towel that had my name on it to dry. I was pretty sure that I would enjoy smashing it against a rock at some point, and I wasn’t going to wait for chuck day at the end of the semester.
Even though I was supposed to meet my own friends from the honor society for dinner, my desire to avoid seeing Vanessa and Nate had me heading back to my dorm. I had just settled down with a cup of microwaved tomato soup and a packet of Ritz crackers when Gwen walked in.
“Hey, stranger,” she said cheerfully. “I thought you were having dinner with the rest of the smart kids.” I was actually relieved to see her. Gwen’s company over a bowl of soup beat eating alone any day.
“Yeah, I was. I just didn’t feel like eating in the dining hall tonight.”
“What, you couldn’t convince them to go out for pizza or Chinese or something fun?”
“I didn’t think of that, I just didn’t show. It’s cool, they know I’m taking extra classes. They’ll just figure I had too much work to do.”
“And do you, or is there something else bothering you?” I bit into a cracker and considered my options. Along with some of the other “smart kids” as she called them, Gwen really was one of the best friends I had here.
“Well, yeah there is,” I began, and the floodgates opened. “I can’t seem to take twenty steps in any direction without running into Vanessa Fisher, and her boyfriend, that meathead Nate. He’s either waiting for her after every fucking class or escorting her to them, because somehow, I ended up in two of the same classes with that twit. I can’t even get away from them at lunch time—I walk into the dining room and there they all are, the cheerleader princesses and the jocks, just one big happy fucking family. It’s bad enough that she has him skulking around the dorm like a lost puppy dog, I mean why don’t they just get an apartment together already!” Every other time I opened the damn door to leave our room, Nate was knocking on Vanessa’s door, or coming out of Vanessa’s room. There was no getting away from him, and I was just about say as much to Gwen when I looked at her. She stared back at me with a strange mixture of understanding and pity.