I blush but throw him a don’t push it glance. “Okay, well, I won’t be completely annoyed when I remember the night a boy I barely knew brought me onto a rooftop in the freezing cold. Better?”
Fitz smiles, his gaze traveling off the roof and toward the city.
“Better.”
Fitz
IT WAS HER idea. While we sat on the rooftop, Juniper took the dictionary from where she’d put it down between us and flipped the book open. I turned to her, questioning. “Lissome,” she read, then let the word sit in the empty night. “I think that’s a good one,” she commented.
Then she dropped the book on my chest. “Your turn.”
We read each other our spontaneous favorites for I don’t know how long. Halcyon. Referring to times of idyllic happiness and tranquility. Bucolic. In a pleasant, often rural place. Propinquity. The property of being close to someone. I feel her shoulder edging nearer to mine, and whether it’s conscious or unconscious, it’s hard not to hope she’ll close the distance. Shoulders brushing through three layers of clothing is practically nothing, but it’s a nothing I really, really want.
I underline one of my early favorites with the pen I keep with me, which I got from the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. Juniper notices. From then on, we exchange the pen with every entry, each underlining our choices.
Hours pass. We only head inside when the temperature inches into the bitterly uncomfortable and we fumble to note our entries with numb fingers. While I follow her down the fire escape, Juniper checks her phone. She’s texted a couple times while we’ve flipped through the dictionary, presumably with Matt.
The party is still going strong when we get inside. The hallway is empty except for one obviously miserable student walking into the bathroom in pajamas. It’s whiplash, the contrast of this poorly lit, utterly normal hallway with the intimate vastness of the rooftop. Whatever I had with Juniper up there, it’s a firmly closed book now.
Right before we head downstairs—to the party, to Lewis, to Matt, to diverging roads and different colleges—I pause. “Maybe we’ll see each other again on this trip,” I offer.
“Impossible to say,” she replies without a second’s pause. She smiles, and I know she knows she’s repeating my words from our first conversation, yesterday in Boston.
I watch her walk downstairs—her hips swaying with each step, her brown curls shimmering bronze in the light—committing every detail of her to memory. Memory is likely the only thing she’ll ever be to me.
In an explosion of clarity, I realize I get girls. I understand Lewis’s infatuation with Prisha, with the girls he dated before her, with the girls he’s wanted to date but couldn’t. I even fucking understand the Nicole Kepler thing. If having a girlfriend means nights like this one, conversations in moonlight, quirks and family histories exchanged—not to mention the holy hell rush of her chest brushing my arm and the shampoo-plus-indefinable-girl-ether scent of her body beside me—I definitely understand wanting a girlfriend. I’m ready to go downstairs, find my brother, and admit I’ve been an idiot.
It’s strange, this feeling of understanding a piece of Lewis, of maybe even having something in common with him.
I head down to the basement, searching for signs of him. He isn’t in the hallway of significantly sweatier and sloppier guys clustered around the Ping-Pong tables where I left him. Even if Lewis isn’t exactly the most attentive brother in the universe, I don’t figure he would have left without me. Unless he got very drunk.
On second thought, it’s entirely possible he left without me.
But when I pass by the taproom, I see him. Immediately, I wish he had left me. He’s on the dance floor, swaying side to side with a tall girl in a crop top and tight jeans. They’re pressed together, facing each other, Lewis’s hand resting so low on her back that it’s arguably her butt. He whispers something in her ear, and she laughs. I notice her fingers trailing down his chest.
My stomach turns. I don’t know how I could have thought he and I had anything in common.
It’s classic Lewis. I should’ve known his feelings on girls and relationships would be the furthest thing from the perfect night I had with Juniper. Instead, he’s found one more way to avoid his commitments and forget his life. He has a girlfriend. Yet here he is, in this random fraternity, his hands practically in the jeans of a girl he doesn’t even know. He couldn’t care less about having a connection. For him, it’s nothing except drinking and dancing and hooking up. It’s the curdled-milk version of what I felt on the rooftop, the unpleasant aftertaste.
I’m suddenly sick of it. I liked Prisha. Despite his carefree manner, I even got the feeling Lewis does too. I won’t watch him openly disrespecting her. Disrespecting the entire institution of romance and rooftops and exchanging favorite words in starlight.
I walk right up to them. “Time to leave,” I tell Lewis, pulling him by the arm. “You seem nice,” I say apologetically to the girl. “He has a girlfriend, though.” I haul my incoherently protesting brother from the room, Lewis fumbling over his feet the whole way.
I usher him out the front door. Finally, he pushes me off when we’re crossing the quad.
“I’m fine,” he spits. “Fuck.”
“You’re not fine,” I reply, reaching for him. He fends me off with both hands.
“I was just drying,” he slurs, breathing hard. His brows furrow, like he knows that last word wasn’t the one he meant. “With the music . . . and the songs.”
“You mean dancing.”
“Fitz,” Lewis declares. “You always have the big words.”
Rolling my eyes, I direct us through the campus and toward the hill back to the bed-and-breakfast. It’s a miracle I hold Lewis upright the entire trip, but the miracle doesn’t extend to him holding on to the contents of his stomach. Three bushes bear the consequences.
By the time we’ve returned to the room, I’m thoroughly through with this night. In the doorway, Lewis awkwardly shoves me off. “I’m good,” he says heatedly, his words heavy. “I can take care of myself.”
“Really?” I snap. I don’t know why I don’t hold in my resentment the way I usually do. I guess Lewis’s drunken lack of inhibition is rubbing off on me, or maybe I just know he won’t remember this in the morning. “Did you not notice me carrying you here?” I drop my jacket on the bed. “Thanks for a wonderful first taste of college.”
“No problem.” He waves emptily in my direction and stumbles toward the bathroom. I shake my head, blood pounding in my face. I don’t know what I expected him to say. I don’t know why I expected him to care. If he’d cared, we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.