Fangirl (33 page)

When they got back to her room, they both knew it was empty, and they both had keys.

Levi unwrapped her scarf and pulled her forward by the tails, briefly pressing his face into the top of her head.

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” he said.

*   *   *

He meant it.

He came to see her the next day. And the next. And after a week or so, Cath just expected Levi to insinuate himself into her day somehow. And to act like it had always been that way.

He never said,
Can I see you tomorrow?
Or,
Will I see you tomorrow?
It was always
When?
and
Where?

They met in the Union between classes. She met him at Starbucks on his breaks. He waited in the hallway for her or for Reagan to let him in.

They’d kept it from being weird so far between the three of them. Cath would sit at her desk, and Levi would sit on her bed and tell them both stories and tease them. Sometimes the intimacy and affection in his voice were too much for Cath. Sometimes she felt like he was talking to them like her dad talked to her and Wren. Like they were both
his girls.

Cath tried to shake it off. She tried to meet him other places if Reagan was in the room.

But when they were alone in the room without Reagan, they didn’t act much differently. Cath still sat at her desk. And Levi still sat on her bed with his feet on her chair, talking circles around her. Lazy, comforting circles.

He liked to talk about her dad and Wren. He thought the twin thing was fascinating.

He liked to talk about Simon Snow, too. He’d seen all the movies two or three times. Levi saw lots of movies—he liked anything with fantasy or adventure. Superheroes. Hobbits. Wizards. If only he were a better reader, Cath thought, he could have been a proper nerd.

Well … maybe.

To really be a nerd, she’d decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one. Cath would move into the World of Mages in a heartbeat. She’d felt almost despondent last year when she realized that, even if she discovered a magical wormhole into Simon’s world, she was too old now to go to the Watford School of Magicks.

Wren had been bummed, too, when Cath pointed it out. They were lying in bed on the morning of their eighteenth birthday.

“Cath, wake up, let’s go buy some cigarettes.”

“Can’t,” Cath said. “I’m going to watch an R-rated movie—in the theater. And then I’m gonna go get drafted.”

“Oh! Let’s skip class and go see
Five Hundred Days of Summer.
”

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Cath looked up at the giant map of Watford they’d taped to the ceiling. Their dad had paid one of the designers at work to draw it for them one year for Christmas. “It means we’re too old for Watford.”

Wren sat back against her headboard and looked up. “Oh. You’re right.”

“It’s not that I ever thought it was real,” Cath said after a minute, “even when we were kids, but still—”

“But still…” Wren sighed. “Now I’m too sad to start smoking.”

Wren was an actual nerd. Despite her fancy hair and her handsome boyfriends. If Cath had found that wormhole, that rabbit hole, that doorway in the back of the closet, Wren would have gone through with her.

Wren might still go through with her, even in their current state of estrangement. (That would be another good thing about finding a magic portal. She’d have an excuse to call Wren.)

But Levi wasn’t a nerd; he liked real life too much. For Levi, Simon Snow was just a story. And he loved stories.

Cath had fallen behind on
Carry On, Simon
since this thing with Levi started—which on the one hand, was perfectly okay; she wasn’t such a nerd that she’d rather make up love scenes with boys than be in one.

On the other hand …
Simon Snow and the Eighth Dance
was coming out in less than three months, and Cath had to finish
Carry On
by then. She had to.
The Eighth Dance
was the very end of the Simon Snow saga—it was going to settle everything—and Cath had to settle it her way first. Before Gemma T. Leslie closed the curtains.

Cath could study when Levi was in the room (he needed to study, too—he sat on her bed and listened to his lectures; sometimes he played solitaire at the same time), but she couldn’t write with him there. She couldn’t get lost in the World of Mages. She was too lost in Levi.

Levi was five-foot-eleven. She’d thought he was taller.

He was born on a ranch. Literally. His mom’s labor came on so fast that she sat down on the stairs and caught him herself. His dad cut the cord. (“I’m telling you,” Levi said, “it’s not that different from calving.”)

He lived with five other guys. He drove a truck because he thought everybody should drive a truck—that driving around in a car was like living with your hands tied behind your back. “What if you need to haul something?”

“I can’t think of a single time my family has needed a truck,” Cath said.

“That’s because you’ve got car blinders on. You don’t even allow yourself to see outsized opportunities.”

“Like what?”

“Free firewood.”

“We don’t have a fireplace.”

“Antlers,” he said.

Cath snorted.

“Antique couches.”

“Antique couches?”

“Cather, someday, when I get you up to my room, I will entertain you on my beautiful antique couch.”

When he talked about the ranch or his family or his truck, Levi’s voice slowed down, almost like he had an accent. A drawl. A drag on his vowel sounds. She couldn’t tell if it was for show or not.

“When I get you up to my room” had become a joke between them.

They didn’t
have
to meet at the Union or wait for Reagan to leave them alone in Cath’s room. They could hang out at Levi’s house anytime.

But, so far, Cath hadn’t let that happen. Levi lived in a
house,
like an adult. Cath lived in a dorm, like a young adult—like someone who was still on adulthood probation.

She could handle Levi here, in this room, where nothing was grown-up yet. Where there was a twin bed and posters of Simon Snow on the wall. Where Reagan could walk in at any minute.

Levi must feel like somebody’d pulled a bait-and-switch on him. Back when they were nothing to each other—back when she thought he belonged to somebody else—Cath had crawled into bed with him and fallen asleep mouth to mouth. Now that they were seeing each other (not really dating, but everyday seeing each other), they only sometimes held hands. And when they did, Cath sort of pretended that they weren’t—she just didn’t acknowledge it. And she never touched him first.

She
wanted
to.

God, she wanted to tackle him and roll around in him like a cat in a field of daisies.

Which is exactly why she didn’t. Because she was Little Red Riding Hood. She was a virgin and an idiot. And Levi could make her breathless in the elevator, just resting his hand—through her coat—on the small of her back.

This was something she might talk to Wren about, if she still had a Wren.

Wren would tell her not to be stupid—that boys wanted to touch you so badly, they didn’t care if you were good at it.

But Levi wasn’t a boy. He wasn’t panting to get up somebody’s shirt for the first time. Levi had been up shirts; he probably just took them off.

The thought made Cath shiver. And then she thought of Reagan, and it turned into more of a shudder.

Cath wasn’t planning to be a virgin forever. But she’d planned to do all this stuff with somebody like Abel. Somebody who was, if anything, more pathetic and inexperienced than she was. Somebody who didn’t make her feel so out of control.

If she thought about it objectively, Abel might actually be better looking than Levi in some ways. Abel was a swimmer. He had broad shoulders and thick arms. And he had hair like Frankie Avalon. (According to Cath’s grandma.)

Levi was thin and weedy, and his hair—well, his
hair
—but everything about him made Cath feel loose and immoral.

He had this thing where he bit his bottom lip and raised an eyebrow when he was trying to decide whether to laugh at something.…
Madness.

Then, if he decided to laugh, his shoulders would start shaking and his eyebrows would pull up in the middle—Levi’s eyebrows were pornographic. If Cath were making this decision just on eyebrows, she would have been “up to his room” a long time ago.

If she were being rational about this, there was a lot on the touching continuum between holding hands and eyebrow-driven sex.… But she wasn’t being rational. And Levi made Cath feel like her whole body was a slippery slope.

She sat at her desk. He sat on her bed and kicked her chair.

“Hey,” he said. “I was thinking that this weekend, we should go on a real date. We could go out to dinner, see a movie.…” He was smiling, so Cath smiled back. And then she stopped.

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You already have a date? Every night this weekend?”

“Sort of. I’m going home. I’ve been going home more this semester, to check on my dad.”

Levi’s smile dimmed, but he nodded, like he understood. “How’re you getting home?”

“This girl down the hall. Erin. She goes home every weekend to see her boyfriend—which is probably a good idea, because she’s boring and awful, and he’s bound to meet somebody better if she doesn’t keep an eye on him.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“On your white horse?”

“In my red truck.”

Cath rolled her eyes. “No. You’d have to make two round trips. It’d take a thousand dollars in gas.”

“I don’t care. I want to meet your dad. And I’ll get to hang out with you for a few hours in the truck—in a nonemergency situation.”

“It’s okay. I can ride with Erin. She’s not that bad.”

“You don’t want me to meet your dad?”

“I haven’t even thought about you meeting my dad.”

“You haven’t?” He sounded wounded. (Mildly wounded. Like, hangnail-wounded—but still.)

“Have you thought about introducing me to your parents?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I figured you’d go with me to my sister’s wedding.”

“When is it?”

“May.”

“We’ve only been dating for three and half weeks, right?”

“That’s six months in freshman time.”

“You’re not a freshman.”

“Cather…” Levi hooked his feet on her chair and pulled it closer to the bed. “I really like you.”

Cath took a deep breath. “I really like you, too.”

He grinned and raised a hand-drawn eyebrow. “Can I drive you to Omaha?”

Cath nodded.

“That does it,” Simon said, charging forward, climbing right over the long dinner table. Penelope grabbed the tail of his cape, and he nearly landed face-first on a bench. He recovered quickly—“Let
go,
Penny”—and ran hard at Basil, both fists raised and ready.

Basil didn’t move.
“Good fences make good neighbors,”
he whispered, just barely tipping his wand.

Simon’s fist slammed into a solid barrier just inches from the other boy’s unflinching jaw. He pulled his hand back, yelping, still stumbling against the spell.

This made Dev and Niall and all the rest of Basil’s cronies cackle like drunk hyenas. But Basil himself stayed still. When he spoke, it was so softly, only Simon could hear him. “Is that how you’re going to do it, Snow? Is that how you’re going to best your Humdrum?” He dropped the spell with a twitch of his wand, just as Simon regained his balance.
“Pathetic,”
Basil said, and walked away.

—from chapter 4,
Simon Snow and the Five Blades,
copyright © 2008 by Gemma T. Leslie

TWENTY-SIX

Professor Piper held out her arms when Cath walked in. “Cath, you’re
back.
I wish I could say that I knew you would be, but I wasn’t sure—I was hoping.”

Cath was back.

She’d come to tell Professor Piper that she’d made up her mind. Again. She wasn’t going to write this story. She had enough to write right now and enough to worry about. This project was leftover crappiness from first semester. Just thinking about it made Cath’s mouth taste like failure (like plagiarism and stupid Nick stealing her best lines); Cath wanted to put it behind her.

But once she was standing in Professor Piper’s office, and Professor Piper was Blue Fairy–smiling at her, Cath couldn’t say it out loud.

This is so obviously about me needing a mother figure,
she thought, disgusted with herself.
I wonder if I’m going to get swoony around middle-aged women until I am one.

“It was really kind of you to offer me a second chance,” Cath said, following the professor’s gesture to sit down. This is when she was supposed to say,
But I’m going to have to say no.

Instead she said, “I guess I’d be an idiot not to take it.”

Professor Piper beamed at her. She leaned forward with an elbow on the desktop, resting her cheek against her fist like she was posing for a senior picture. “So,” she said, “do you have an idea in mind for your story?”

“No.” Cath squeezed her fists shut and rubbed them into her thighs. “Every time I’ve tried to come up with something, I just feel … empty.”

Professor Piper nodded. “You said something last time that I’ve been thinking about—you said that you didn’t want to build your own world.”

Cath looked up. “Yes. Exactly. I don’t have brave new worlds inside of me begging to get out. I don’t want to start from nothing like that.”

“But Cath—most writers
don’t.
Most of us aren’t Gemma T. Leslie.” She waved a hand around the office. “We write about the worlds we already know. I’ve written four books, and they all take place within a hundred and twenty miles of my hometown. Most of them are about things that happened in my real life.”

“But you write historical novels—”

The professor nodded. “I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.”