“Why?” the genius inside me asked.
“Hell if I know,” was her immediate answer.
Roundabout as it was, I’d take any compliment aimed my way at this time in my life. “Thanks for that, Julia. Really. But how do I get the other girl to like me?”
“That’s the easy part,” she replied, taking a final chug of her sparkling water and launching the empty bottle under her bed. The garbage can was less than a foot away from her. “The hard part is getting her to admit it to herself.”
“Hold up.” I leapt up and squared myself in front of Julia. “Are you saying that Emma . . .
likes
me?” My bad day was threatening to take a turn for the best.
“Of course she does,” she answered, doling out a look like she thought I was the worst kind of clueless. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”
That jostle in my gut I just felt could have been my heart breaking loose. “Perfect,” I muttered, combing my fingers through my hair. “So she ‘likes me,’ she just doesn’t know it yet,”—I wasn’t muttering anymore, although I’d decided to add pacing to my emotional roller coaster—“and you know what? She’ll never know it because she has a boyfriend, she avoids me like I’m a walking freshman twenty, and as if those things aren’t convincing enough,” I said . . . I
yelled
, throwing my hands up in the air, “we have nothing in common.”
“You know what I hear when people say they have nothing in common with the person they want to be with?” she asked, her voice as calm as mine was crazed. She paused long enough for me to catch she was waiting for an answer. I shook my head, not trusting myself to open my mouth again. “A coward making chickenshit excuses.”
This conversation just pulled a brody on me.
“She’s got a boyfriend, she avoids me,” Julia was repeating my words in the same volume I’d employed, peppering it with a whiney voice. “We have nothing in common. Boo hoo,” she continued, wiping at the absent tears in her eyes. “Quit your whining and grow a pair.”
Under most circumstances, I would have had an insane comeback to this accusation, but arguing with a hardcore goth girl while Ozzy droned on in the background wasn’t normal circumstances.
“Her boyfriend is a tick that burrowed in six years ago and won’t go away,” Julia said, her hands flying about like she was juggling imaginary daggers. “She avoids you because she likes you—”
“She just doesn’t know it yet,” I said under my breath.
“And, and . . .” she repeated in a fury, searching around the room. Her eyes finally narrowed in on something and she was across the room after it in two lunges. “And sparkling water,” she shouted, throwing a heater straight towards my . . .
pair
.
I was taken by surprise, which was becoming a regular occurrence for me. Not by the bottle sailing at my man business, but by the violent change in conversation. Had I not already confirmed it, I would have said Julia was crazy. Bad crazy, not the cute, semi-amusing crazy.
“Wow,” I said, sliding my full-except-for-a-sip bottle into my jacket pocket, removing one weapon from her reach. “Detour much?” I asked, looking up at her.
She was the picture of calm now, arms crossed loosely and shoulders back. “Connect the dots much?” she threw back at me, trying on my voice for size. She must think I sounded like Sean Connery getting kicked in the nuts.
I opened my mouth, an automatic response to such a question, but no words came out. I tried again—still nothing. This thing with women striking me speechless was becoming a regular occurrence.
“There’s your one thing,” she said, thrusting her hands at where the bottle peeked out of my pocket. “You both hate sparkling water.”
I massaged my temples. “Life changing.”
“You made a claim that one of the reasons you two couldn’t be together was because you had nothing in common. Well,” she said, “I’ve proven that a lie. And who cares about how much they have in common when they love someone, tell me that? Do you think Mark Antony fell in love with Cleopatra because they both liked the color green? Did Tristan fall in love with Isolde because they were both morning people? Do you think Lancelot divided the freakin’ Knights of the Round Table because Guinevere shared his love of roast duck?” she continued on without taking a single breath, and I wasn’t going to interrupt. Don’t mess with a woman on a mission. I learned this lesson the hard way.
“Do you think Emma’s going to fall in love with you because you both like old movies?” she paused, sucking in a hard earned breath. “Well, do you?”
I knew I should tread lightly with Julia in her present scary-calm state, but I didn’t do what I knew I should very often. And this was one of those times.
“Let me take a three prong approach to my answer. One,” I listed, lifting my index finger, “those three lovely couples you aforementioned all died sad, miserable lives without the one they risked everything for as they gurgled their last words. And two,” I ignored Julia’s death glare and continued, lifting another finger, “are you implying that’s the bar Emma and I should strive for if, by some miracle, we end up together? And three,”—ring finger up to accompany the other two—“how does any of this help me?”
Clasping her hands in a prayer position against her face, she blew out a slow breath. I’d seen this nonverbal response dozens of times in my presence.
“Listen, I know you’re not a coward, but you’re scared of something,” she said, keeping her eyes closed and hands clasped. “Something is keeping you here when you should be charging through the doors of that Future Eunuchs of America clubhouse and carrying her off into the damn sunset.” Opening her eyes, she graced me with a second smile. “Or whatever it is you normal types do.”
Returning the sad smile, I answered. “I’m here—I’m
scared
,” I clarified, “because it’s like what you said earlier. If I care about her peace of mind, I need to leave her alone.” My head hung lower admitting it, but I knew she was right. Peace of mind and Patrick Hayward were mutually exclusive entities.
“That’s right, I did say that,” she said, walking towards me. “If you care about her peace of mind, you’ll leave her alone,” she said again, an undertone in her voice, some meaning I was meant to pick up on, but hadn’t yet. “But if you care about her
best interests
you’ll get your persistent little butt back to following her around like a little puppy.”
Julia was like the Buddha of clarity. Everything she’d said made sense and had cleared the fog that had been stalling me. I felt something for Emma, and she could avoid me as much as she wanted, but I wasn’t going away until I told her just how it was for me. I was done making chickenshit excuses, as master Julia had so eloquently put it.
“Which frat house is it?” I asked, my hand twisting open the doorknob.
Layering her hands over her heart, she fluttered her eyes. “There’s the man I’m going to still be doing dirty things to in my dreams fifty years from now.”
“Lucky me,” I said, not letting my mind go anywhere near that cringe fest.
Julia was off in some daydream or, maybe in her case, a nightmare, so before things got all hot and heavy with her and imaginary me, I cleared my throat. “Jules, focus,” I said, clapping my hands. “Where is Emma?”
She did a clearing shake of her head. “Just head out of the main road, and when you find the freshmen with water balloons for boobs puking in the front yard, you’ve found the place. Make sure you wear latex gloves if you touch anything. It turns out some new-found STDs devised in that house can be passed from surface to skin contact.”
My stomach clenched envisioning Emma in a place like that. I was halfway down the hall when Julia called down at me. “You called me Jules,” she said, her voice girly like I never imagined it could be. “Only my truest friends call me that.” Sticking two fingers in the air like a thin peace sign, she said, “There’s two things you have in common now.”
“Hey, that’s got to be better than one, right?” I called back to her, continuing down the hall, in a hurry to get to Emma.
Before I hit the stairs, I remembered my manners. Or at least what few I possessed.
“Jules?” I hollered.
Her dark head popped out the door.
“Thank you,” I said, my tone of sincerity hopefully demonstrating what two meager words couldn’t.
She grinned down at me. “I’m going to break tradition and make an expected, contrived response.” Pausing, she cleared her throat. “You’re welcome. Now, shoo,” she instructed, shooing with her hand as well. “Watch your back in there, Hayward. They’re animals,” she added as I charged down the stairs.
“Good thing I’m a hunter,” I said to myself, wrapping my fingers around the Mustang’s steering wheel a wink later.
It took me all of thirty seconds to hear the place once I’d pulled onto the main road off campus, but it was another thirty before it came into view. I shook my head, realizing that if these were the Ivy League youth of our future, I was going to be kept busy as a Guardian.
Julia had under-exaggerated. The front lawn was smothered with the puking “girls” like she’d said, but even more were passed out cold and, thankfully less, girls having clothed sex with guys spewed over crippled lawn furniture.
I was tempted to snap a picture and forward it to father to thank him for insisting I be put through the whole college experience thing, but calling upon a vast amount of willpower, I refrained. No father of a daughter should have to see another father’s daughter in such a state of disgrace.
Classy joint.
I wouldn’t have left my Mustang anywhere within a drunken mile of this place, but Emma was in there. My stomach twisted into an advanced yoga contortion when I pictured her in a place like that. Against every car worshipping bone in my body, I punched the Mustang over the curb and rolled it up on the grass since there was nowhere to park on the street. A fire marshal would have had a heyday if he’d been invited.
I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough and, once I made it through the maze of girls whose makeup had melted to Joker-scary, I bound up the stairs in one leap. The kid who was supposedly admitting would-be party goers was passed out cold on his stool in the doorway. A few phallic-esque caricatures had been sharpied on his face. Poor guy was going to wake up with more than a headache.
Squeezing by him, I took a survey of hedonism on earth. I couldn’t even imagine Emma squeezed into this seedy joint that was vibrating from the tasteless music and the bodies more-pounding-than-gyrating to the music. I had to find her and get her out of here, the mission impossible trained part of my mind repeated.
This wasn’t going into a country of hostiles armed with semi-automatics and desperation, this wasn’t infiltrating the world’s most dangerous Alliance of Inheritors, this wasn’t even going up against a man twice my size in a hand-to-hand battle, this was weaving my way through a bleary-eyed brood of Stanford’s finest and escorting a woman I cared about away from here.
This should be the easiest mission I’d undergone—in fact, it was laughable to consider it a mission, but something about the electric edge surging through me—like I was ready for a bullet to be fired at me from twenty different directions—was roaring to life.
I tried to coax my fists flat, my muscles smooth, my mind calm, but I was unsuccessful at any calming endeavor. If anyone tried to mess with me tonight, they’d be wearing a body cast for the better part of the year.
Tucking through the entry and into the room where most of the fumbling bodies were congregated, I wished I would have heeded Julia’s warning and worn gloves or, better yet, a radioactive resistant body suit. The place stunk of vomit, that goes without saying, but vomit that had been baking in the sun during the apocalypse and right alongside the tantalizing scent of puke was a tangy scent of undeodorized armpits. The hideousness of this stench would haunt me to the end of time.
Realizing my white-blond surfer hair, chiseled by the hand of God physique, and outfit that took a dump on the mall store jeans and branded t-shirts around me stood out, I knew I needed to make an effort to blend in with the rest of the genetically-impaired. Plus, I didn’t doubt that however drunk Ty was at this time on a Friday night, he’d have no trouble picking me out of the crowd.
Grabbing an un-manned red plastic cup teetering on a windowsill, I plucked a red Phillies baseball cap off a guy who was college boy bouncing his head to the wrong beat of the music. I was already halfway across the room when I heard him holler out, but I knew even despite the hat’s overt color, he wouldn’t be able to identify the thief. I was the Dalai Lama of blending into a crowd when I needed to be.
Not finding Emma in the main room, I slipped into a dark hallway. Between the coupled bodies and choppy breathing, I saw her. It was like the dark hallway was pointing at her, as if I needed any other hints that I needed to get her out of this place. She was sitting on a sofa arm, legs crossed, hands twisting around each other like they didn’t know what to do, shoulders slumped, eyes in that faraway place again.
I didn’t need a psych degree to diagnosis her with a bad case of get-me-the-hell-out-of-here. I’d shoved my way through most of the bodies when an arm snaked around her neck. An arm I wanted to dislocate from its socket.
Ty handed her a red cup. “Here, drink this.” Perhaps the only good thing about having heightened senses in a room like this was that I was able to zone in on his voice through the deafening drone surrounding me. “Is it too much to ask that you try to look like you’re having a good time? These are my friends, you know. Maybe you could show them the same amount of enthusiasm you like to show your asswipe friend.”
Emma took the cup from him, but made no other show of acknowledging him and, to my relief, he made no more attempts at acknowledging her presence. In fact, he turned to the girl glommed a little too close to him given his relationship status, the epitome of girl-you-don’t-take-home-to-mama, and bent his mouth down to her ear, whispering something in it that made her flick a wink his way.
Through this entire trash hits on trash transaction, Emma played oblivious, but Emma was not one of those oblivious girls. She was choosing to ignore it, for lord knows what reason, but it made me want to claim her girlfriend rights that she wasn’t and bitch-slap one and knee the other in the balls.