Moving in Reverse (2 page)

Besides, if anyone had heard anything
about me this summer, shy was probably the last adjective on their
mind.

So I was really making an effort to do
things that weren’t just a continuation of everything I’d done
before. Which meant lip gloss and cupcakes and cocktail party
conversation, at least today.

A blonde girl walked up to us just as
we’d started to discuss which dining hall had the best frozen
yogurt, and I was starting to actually enjoy myself a
little.

The girl whispered something into
Jen’s ear, holding a folded sheet of paper in her hand that I
guessed was some sort of schedule. She looked at me with wide,
curious blue eyes over Jen’s shoulder.

“
I’ve got to go get ready
for the skit,” Jen said, holding out her hand. “Hopefully we’ll get
to talk more tomorrow,” she smiled at me. “Mandy,” she said to the
girl who’d come up to us, “this is Casey Snow. Take good care of
her.”

I watched as she walked away. Her back
was turned to me, but I could have sworn that she’d
winked.

The other girl looked at me curiously,
as if she couldn’t figure out what to say.

“
So, where are you from?”
she finally asked me, her fingers fidgeting on the folded sheet of
paper she was carrying.

“
Connecticut,” I tried to
smile.

We fell into silence.

“
What about you?” I
finally asked, trying my best to keep the conversation
going.

“
San Diego,” Mandy glanced
over my shoulder at the cupcake table. “Have you been
there?”

A year ago, I hadn’t been anywhere — I
could have answered her question in a heartbeat. Things were
different now, and I smiled, thinking to myself. “Nope,” I said,
shifting onto one foot nervously. “But my boyfriend lives in
L.A.”

“
Oh,” she grinned at me,
like we were in on some kind of a secret, lowering her voice
conspiratorially. “I know. They said we shouldn’t mention it, but
please,” she pursed her lips, as if she was almost too excited to
form the words. “If I were dating Blake Parker, I’d be screaming it
from the rooftop. I’d probably have t-shirts made up.”

I felt my smile waver,
shrugging my shoulders in what I hoped looked like modesty, as if
having a boyfriend were something to be modest about. But I knew
the drill – having
my
boyfriend sort of was.

Fortunately for me, the conversations
died down a moment later, as Jen and two other girls motioned for
all the freshmen to sit down.

I don’t know why I thought I could
reinvent myself in college.

I’d already been reinvented the summer
before. And a phoenix doesn’t rise twice.

Chapter Three

Darby gripped my hand tightly as we
walked out of the last sorority house, pumped with sugar and
sticky-sweet politeness.

“
What did you think?” she
asked me confidently, tossing her highlighted hair over one
shoulder and grinning.

“
I think I’m freezing,” I
said, trying to change the subject. The sun had set and I was still
wearing Darby’s thin dress in the middle of October. “And hungry
for something that isn’t a cupcake.”

Darby didn’t let me change the subject
that easily. “I saw you talking with Jen Miller,” she said. “You
know she’s the Kappa president, right?”

I looked at her curiously. “No,” I
said. “She didn’t tell me.”

The afternoon had been a repeat of the
same conversation over and over — at each house, the girls either
tried to pretend like I was just like every other freshman, or
giddily explained how much they loved Moving Neutral, how cute
Blake was, how they’d been totally hoping to meet me ever since
seeing us in US Weekly all summer.

It was the kind of thing that happened
when you were dating the lead guitarist for your favorite
band.

Except that Blake wasn’t the Moving
Neutral guitarist anymore, not since he’d quit the band to join me
as a freshman at Columbia two months before. We’d been trying to be
normal college students ever since the day he’d surprised me at
freshman move-in, but stuff like this kept happening. It was never
going to be as easy as I’d imagined it would be.

“
Well, she clearly liked
you,” Darby said, shivering under her pale pink cardigan. “I can’t
wait for this week to be over and for us to be in,” she giggled.
“My mom’s going to want to know everything the second I get back to
the dorm.”

I hadn’t told my mom that I’d even
been thinking about joining a sorority. I had a pretty likely guess
as to what she’d say if I did — that I should focus, that it was
silly, that if my grades didn’t stay as high in college as they’d
been in high school, I’d be “disappointed with my options.” That
was one of her phrases. Whenever she said it, I thought about three
mystery doors on a game show. Behind one, life as a janitor. Behind
the other, flipping burgers at McDonalds. According to my mom,
those were likely to be my options if I wasn’t extraordinarily
focused.

Maybe she was right. I mean, they’d be
pretty disappointing, as options go.

Behind the third door, though, was
what I’d been wondering about. What if behind the third door was
just a never-ending highway, all open road and new cities and
everything moving, never staying put. Maybe I would have picked
that third door, in retrospect. If I’d realized it was a choice,
when I’d made it.

“
Are you coming, space
cadet?” Darby asked me, pausing outside the student center and
smiling thinly, as if she’d realized I’d stopped paying attention
to whatever she’d been saying about Rush today.

“
I’m going to get a
coffee,” I said. “I’ve still got a ton of work to do tonight,” I
felt my shoulders start to slump, thinking about the stack of books
waiting in our dorm room, the hundreds of pages of reading I was
supposed to complete just to keep up in my classes.

In high school, we’d taken a month to
read a novel — here, it was a week. The professor would lecture
twice on each book, and then we’d discuss it in smaller classes,
most of the time led by a grad student who would actually be the
one reading and grading all of our work.

Except that I’d signed up for the
single discussion section that the actual professor taught for one
of my English classes, in contemporary fiction. It seemed, at least
to my overeager freshman mind, like a great way to take advantage
of Columbia, to learn from the best in the field in what I thought
would be my favorite subject.

What I didn’t realize was that when
you were in the Professor’s discussion session, you had to read
every page of every book. Twice. Because if every word out of your
mouth didn’t sound like a crafted, researched dissertation, he
looked at you as if you should just get up and leave the room,
thank you very much, because you were wasting his time.

The worst part was that Blake was in
the class with me. And every time he opened his mouth, it sounded
like he was reading the professor’s mind. He was eloquent,
thoughtful and confident.

And then there was me. I sometimes
felt like I was lucky if I could get through a whole sentence
without saying ‘like.’ At Prospect Academy, where I’d gone to high
school, I was the top student in every class — here, every single
student had been the top student in their high school class. So I
worked harder, every day, than I ever had before — because in some
ways, my mom was right. That door with the janitor job behind it
wasn’t exactly appealing.

But also I worried. Blake
and I had met in this whirlwind, fairy-tale summer, and now that
we’d settled into real life, nothing seemed quite as special. Most
of all, I worried that
I
didn’t seem quite as special, grounded in
homework and roommates and freshman awkwardness.

Blake had fallen in love with me
because I seemed so different from everyone else he knew. But here,
I was exactly the same as everyone around us. If anything, compared
to the people around us, I came up short.

It had become my worst fear. That he
would follow me to Columbia and finally realize how utterly
ordinary I really was.

I said good-bye to Darby and opened
the heavy glass doors to our student center, squinting down to
check my watch. It was only seven o’clock. I had plenty of time to
study.

I pulled open the double doors,
mentally outlining the work I had to get through in the next few
hours. Walking through the entryway, I squeezed into a crowded
elevator and hit the button for the eighth floor.

Everything in New York was vertical —
people built up, not out, so while our student center was enormous,
especially by New York standards, it never felt that way. Always a
little bit crowded, a little bit cramped. I didn’t really mind — at
the very least, you were guaranteed to see someone you
knew.

Walking over to one of the
dining-hall-run cafes, I stood in line behind some upperclassmen I
didn’t recognize, listening to snippets of their conversations as
they discussed a party that weekend. I ordered a drink, eyeing a
tray of biscotti that would probably end up tasting like cardboard.
As if I hadn’t already eaten enough sugar today to last me the rest
of the month.

I smiled at the girl behind the
counter, a pretty brunette in a ponytail, as she handed me my
coffee wrapped in a slip of cardboard. “Careful,” she warned,
grinning at someone behind me. “It’s hot.”

I felt Blake’s arms around me just as
I started to turn around, catching me from behind and almost
spilling the coffee all over the counter.

“
Not the best time to
sneak up on me,” I said, my lips forming an involuntary smile.
“Unless you’re trying to put me in the hospital.”

“
Please,” Blake grinned,
handing his student ID to the girl to pay for my drink. “The coffee
here is never that hot.”

I gripped my own ID in protest and
then sighed, surrendering to the whirlwind that was Blake Parker,
and put it back into my bag. I held the coffee to my mouth, sipping
the spilled drops off the lid.

“
Case,” his face turned
serious, looking at me with an alarmed expression.

I looked back at him nervously.
“What?”

“
Just curious,” he said,
taking a step back and looking me up and down. His face broke into
a sarcastic grin. “What, exactly, are you wearing?”

I snorted my sip of coffee,
remembering the monstrosity of an outfit Darby had dressed me in.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I glared at him,
blushing.

“
Did you decide to spend
the weekend in the Hamptons?” he grinned. “Because it would have
been nice if you’d invited me along.”

“
I don’t want to talk
about it,” I repeated, trying to push the image of pink-frosted
cupcakes out of my head. “It was Darby’s idea.”

Blake brushed a lock of brown hair out
of his eyes, looking down at me as we moved away from the café
line. His eyes were the brightest blue I’d ever seen on a person in
real life, and tonight they were sparkling with excitement that
didn’t bode well for the evening of studying I’d
planned.

“
What’s up?” I asked him,
wondering if he’d come looking for me or if we’d just ended up by
luck in the same place at the same moment. It wouldn’t have been
the first time.

“
Fall Guy are playing at
Irving Place tonight — you want to go?”

I looked at Blake, trying not to sigh.
Sometimes it was frustrating to explain to him that I actually
needed to study on a regular basis — unlike him, it seemed. He’d
already read most of the books we’d been assigned for our class
together, a lot of them more than once.

“
Haven’t you?” he’d asked
me, wide-eyed, as he looked over our syllabus for the semester. I
knew from experience that lying to Blake got me into more trouble
than it was worth. Even if it was sometimes tempting in the moment
to keep up his pedestal version of me. “A few,” I’d stretched the
truth a little. A white lie.

“
Just come for an hour,”
he grinned at me, running his fingers up my arm and making me
shiver. “It’ll be fun — you met Nate, remember? In
Vermont?”

I remembered Nate, I thought with a
sigh. At the outdoor festival in Burlington that had been one of my
first stops on the Moving Neutral tour. I’d spoken to Nate for all
of forty five seconds, and in that time, he’d managed to witness
the first public jab that April, the lead singer of Blake’s band,
had taken at me.

The first. Not the last. Not by
far.

I looked up at Blake, trying to quell
the nervousness that took over every time I thought about April.
She was gone now — it was just me and Blake and this whole wide
city, waiting for us.

Who was I kidding, really? I’d follow
Blake off a cliff if he asked me nicely, eyes piercing and eager.
I’d already followed him across the whole country. And it was only
Monday — I had the whole week to finish these
assignments.

“
One hour,” I grinned,
both of us knowing I didn’t mean it, not a bit.