Deeper

The original post Nate put up is gone, but the photos keep popping up on different sites, and some of the posts still name my college, my hometown, me.

When I walk around Putnam now, I look at every guy I pass, and I think, What about you? Did you see me naked? Did you save my picture onto your phone? Do you whip it out and wank to it?

Do you hate me, too?

It makes it difficult to get excited about dancing with them at parties or cheering them on at a football game.

My phone vibrates in my back pocket. Bridget is texting to ask if I’m heading to lunch.

I type, Yes. You?

Yep! Gardiner?

I’m 5 min out.

Cool. Did u hear abt West?

I’m not sure how to answer that, so I type, Sort of.

She replies with *Swoon*.

Bridget likes to pretend West and I have a silent, simmering affair going on.

I like to pretend he and I are complete strangers.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

When I met West, it was move-in day for first-year students, and it was hot. Iowa hot, which means in the mid-nineties with 98 percent humidity. The best thing to do under those conditions is to lie on a couch in someone’s cold basement and watch TV while eating Cadbury eggs. Or, if you must be outside, to seek shade and ice cream. Not necessarily in that order.

Instead, I was carrying all my earthly possessions from my dad’s car up four flights of stairs to the room I would share with Bridget. I have a lot of possessions, it turns out. I’d gotten a little dizzy on the last trip up, and my dad had insisted I plant my butt on the step by the dorm entrance and sit this one out.

So at that particular moment he was on his way up to the room, Bridget hadn’t arrived yet, and Nate was off moving into his own room on the east side of campus. I was alone—sweaty and grimy and red-faced and hot. It’s possible that I was mentally griping a bit about my tired hamstrings and the lack of trained helper monkeys to do the moving work for me when the ugliest car I have ever seen rolled up.

The car was the color of sewage, dented and rusty, with a passenger-side door that had been duct-taped on. As I watched, it cut across an open parking space and slow-motion-bounced right up over the curb onto the manicured college lawn, rolling to a stop in front of my sneaker-clad feet.

I glanced around for the RA, good-girl radar pinging like mad. There were tire tracks in the grass! The car was farting out oily-looking clouds of noxious exhaust! This could not possibly be allowed!

No RA in sight.

The driver’s-side door opened, and a guy got out.

I forgot my own name.

Now, probably that was because I stood up too quickly. It was hot, and I’d only had a Pop-Tart for breakfast, too excited to eat the eggs and bacon my dad tried to push on me. I definitely didn’t get woozy because of how this guy looked.

I mean, yes, I’ll admit, the way he looked might have contributed. The lizard part of my brain greedily took in all the details of his height and build and that mouth and his face oh my God, and then the rational part of me filed them carefully away in the appropriate mental binder.

That would be the binder neatly labeled If You Weren’t with Nate.

But it wasn’t the way the guy looked that got me. It was the way he moved.

I want to say that he swaggered out of the car, except that makes it sound like he was trying too hard, and he just obviously wasn’t. He was naturally that graceful and loose-hipped and, God, I don’t even know. You’ll have to take my word for it.

He glanced all around. His gaze settled on me. “You the welcome wagon?”

“Sure,” I said.

He stepped closer and stuck out his hand. “I’m West Leavitt.”

“Caroline Piasecki.”

“Nice to meet you.”

His hand was warm and dry. It made me conscious of my clammy, gritty grip and of the sweat under my arms. My deodorant had failed hours ago, and I could smell myself. Awesome.

“Did you drive here?” I asked.

The corner of his mouth quirked up, but he sounded very serious when he said, “Yes.”

“From where?”

“Oregon.”

“Wow.”

That made his mouth hitch up a little more, almost into a smile.

“How far is that?”

“About two thousand miles.”

I looked at his car. I looked in his car.

Okay, so the truth is, I stepped closer to his car, away from him, and leaned over and peered inside. The backseat was crammed with camping gear and an aquarium full of lightbulbs and tangled electrical wire, plus a giant clear trash bag that was moist with condensation and contained what appeared to be dirt. There was also a huge box full of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and a few randomly flung shirts.

The car looked like a hobo lived in it. I was fascinated.

I was also kind of afraid to keep looking at him. I could see from his reflection in the car window that he was stretching his arms behind his back, which had the effect of tightening his T-shirt and putting things on display that I was probably better off not looking at.

“You drove by yourself?” I asked.

“Sure.”

He lifted his arms up into the air to stretch his shoulders. His shirt rode up, and I glanced away from his reflection, embarrassed. “With the windows down?”

I was just making words with my mouth at that point. All sense had abandoned me.

“Yeeeeeah,” he said slowly. When I snuck a look at him, his eyes were full of mischief. “Sometimes I even got crazy and stuck an arm out.”

I felt my throat flush hot. Returning to being unforgivably nosy about his car seemed the wisest course of action.

I noticed a sleeping bag on the front seat and wondered if he’d been using it right there where it lay. Did he just pull over on the side of the road, lower the passenger seat, and sleep? Did he eat cold stew out of cans? Because that was definitely a can opener in the cup holder.

And that was definitely a slightly crushed, open box of condoms on the passenger-bay floor.

“Don’t you worry about botulism?”

Now, in my defense, I actually did have a reason for the question. I saw the cans, noticed that a number of them were dented and dinged up, and then remembered this high school bio class where we learned about anaerobic bacteria and how they grow in airless places. Sometimes cans get dented and there’s a teensy tiny hole that you can’t even see, but bacteria get in and they go crazy replicating themselves. When you open the can, the food just looks normal, so you eat it, but then you die.

It all made sense in my head. It wasn’t until I straightened and turned around—which made me dizzy again, I guess because I’d been bent over too far, peering into his car like some kind of peep-show freak—that I realized it hadn’t made any sense to him. His eyebrows were all knit together.

“From the cans. With the dents,” I said.

No change in the eyebrows.

“Anaerobic bacteria? Gruesome, painful death?”

He shook his head slowly back and forth, and then he did the worst thing.

He grinned.

It was like a nuclear attack.

“You’re a weird one, aren’t you?” he asked.

I’m not the guy with condoms and beef stew in my car.

I didn’t say it, though. I was too busy smiling like a complete idiot.

West’s grin has that effect on me. He doesn’t deploy it often, but when he does, I go brain dead.

Also, the world had gotten kind of fuzzy and sideways at the edges. My hip hit something hard, which upon further investigation turned out to be his car door, and then I was sinking down, resting my forehead against the hot front tire and saying, “It’s because they don’t have helper monkeys.”

I don’t even know what I meant. I was all addled and sleepy suddenly, and he was really close, reaching for me. I felt his breath on my neck, heard him mumble something about get inside and you.

I liked the sound of that.

A heavy weight on my shoulders turned out to be his arm coming around me, easing me down onto my back. For one slow, perfect beat of my heart, he was poised on his elbows above me, his hips pressing into mine. He smelled good. Warm and rich, like something amazing to eat that would melt on my tongue.

Then he shifted away, and we were lying side by side on the ground. I wondered vaguely if my desire for him to climb back on top of me made me a bad girlfriend. Did it count as cheating? Because I liked his hands on me. I liked the smell of him.

I closed my eyes and breathed in West Leavitt and green grass and warm earth.

I’m pretty sure I was still smiling when I lost consciousness.

Bridget hails me from beside the glass-paned doors that mark the entry to the dining hall.

She’s beaming the whole time I cross the lobby, right up until I get close enough for her to see my face.

“What happened to your nose?”

“It collided with an elbow.”

“You’re going to have to explain that.”

“Yeah, I know. But give me a second.”

We go through the doors, grab trays, and wait for the handful of students in front of us to make their way down the line before I dive in. “You know the fight? West and Nate? I kind of got caught in the crossfire.”

“Nate hit you? Oh my gosh! That’s terrible. Did you call security? Because that’s serious, Caroline. I’m not even kidding, you can’t let this keep going on like it is, or—”

I touch her arm to stop the stream of words. Bridget talks like a faucet. She’s either on or she’s off. You have to interrupt the flow if you want to get a word in edgewise. “It wasn’t Nate. West elbowed me, I think. Neither of us was too sure, actually.”

Her eyes get huge. “You talked to him?”

I know what she’s imagining—West and me huddled somewhere private and intimate, and him holding a warm compress to my forehead. That’s how I met her, in fact. I had passed out next to West’s car, and I woke up on my dorm bed with a cold paper towel on my head and Bridget leaning over me, all forehead wrinkles and concerned blue eyes, like some kind of adorable red-haired, freckle-faced angel.

“Not really,” I say. “That’s a good color on you.”

It’s the truth: Bridget looks good in blue. But mostly I tell her because she’s a jock—a long-distance runner on the track team—and I make a habit of complimenting her whenever she wears normal clothes, just to encourage the practice.

We’re making our way down the hot-food line now. “Do you have chicken without the fried stuff on?” she asks the student worker.

“No, just what you see.”

“Okay, thanks.” She’s in training, so she’s super careful about what she eats.

I take a plate of chicken-patty parmesan and two chocolate mint brownies. I have bigger things to worry about at the moment than calories.

“Don’t even think I didn’t notice you changing the subject,” Bridget says when we’ve made our way from the line to the salad bar, where she loads up on hard-boiled eggs and greens. “I need to know what he said. Like, was he still mad from fighting, or was he nice? Did you guys go somewhere quiet, or were you in a crowd? How upset was he that he hit you? Because Krishna says—”

“He didn’t say anything,” I clarify. “He had to leave so he didn’t get caught and end up expelled or whatever.”

“But you said you talked to him.”

“No, I didn’t.”

She rolls her eyes. “You implied it, lawyer girl.”

“We exchanged a few sentences. He wanted to make sure I was okay.”

We’re on to drinks now. Bridget goes for the milk. I get myself a Coke with ice. “Did he say anything about why he did it?” she asks.

“No.”

“Did you ask? Did you hear them arguing? Give me something here. Only you could act like West and Nate hitting each other and you getting whacked in the face is no biggie. Hey, where’s your sweater?”