The Bermudez Triangle (6 page)

Not too eager
, she told herself.
Don’t sound desperate. It’s only Avery. Don’t act like a freak
.

“Sure,” she said. “If your brothers are bothering you, you can come over here and we could hang in my room.”

Oh God. What was she saying?

She was saying what she’d said ten million times before, except in the last two hours the meaning had changed. She grasped a handful of hair in agony.

Like she could hide anything from Avery anyway. Avery had sixth and seventh and eighth senses and could tell more from the way someone stood or said “see you later” than Mel could if she stole the person’s diary and read it cover to cover.

Avery didn’t answer right away.

“Or something else,” Mel said.

“No. That sounds good.”

Avery’s tone didn’t give anything away, but Mel could tell. She was saying yes. Yes to coming back to Mel’s room. Yes to everything. Yes, yes, yes…

Mel jumped up and got a head rush, and for a moment she couldn’t tell if she was in the most bliss she’d ever experienced in her life or if it was just one of those things she got when she stood too fast. (Pale, redheaded, anemic—it all went together.)

“I have to practice for a few hours,” Avery said. “How about six?”

“Okay,” Mel said, sinking back onto the bed. “See you at six.”

When she hung up, she listened to her father moving around downstairs, turning on the television. She tried to peel herself off the bed to join him, but it was impossible. She was stuck there, heavy, dizzy—and she didn’t want to do anything that would make the feeling go away.

When Avery emerged from the bathroom with the phone, she found that two of her younger brothers were chasing their collie, Bandit, around the basement, banging into the piano bench in the process. No wonder the thing was starting to fall apart.

“Did you eat?” her mother shouted down from the kitchen. “I’m about to put this lunch meat away.”

Avery dodged the chase scene and headed upstairs.

“Okay,” her mom said, pointing at various square Tupperware
containers that were stacked on the table. “Turkey. Ham. Salami. Roast beef. Yellow cheese. Orange cheese.”

Avery popped open these last two containers and examined the cheeses. “Provolone and American,” she corrected. “Not yellow and orange.”

“Rolls are in the bag on the counter,” her mother went on. “There’s white bread in the freezer. You want mustard? I got the kind you like.”

Avery nodded, and her mother produced a jar of thick, grainy mustard from the refrigerator. Avery was a sucker for this mustard. She would eat it with anything.

“I’m taking these two to the mall for some sneakers,” her mom said. “Have fun last night?”

“Yeah …”

“Good. I have a chicken defrosting in some water in the sink. Can you check on it every once in a while and see how it’s coming? If it’s not totally defrosted by four, stick it in the microwave?”

As her mother corralled her two brothers, Avery got herself a roll and made a sandwich. The events of that morning still weren’t really sinking in. Making out with your best friend for an hour, making a turkey sandwich with provolone and mustard—these two concepts didn’t belong in the same universe. Avery felt lightweight. Her legs were still shaking, and she was smiling involuntarily.

When Mel had kissed her, Avery had first felt a rush just knowing that she had guessed correctly. But then they didn’t stop. Either of them. And though Avery had been curious the
night before, she didn’t expect for it to feel as comfortable or natural as it did. There were lots of little differences kissing a girl. Mel was smaller than she was, which felt kind of strange. Avery’s arms went around her completely, with arm to spare. There was never a point where Avery felt like she had to be careful or that things might go too far. It was fun, and Mel giggled a lot, and Avery was soon experiencing a stupefying out-of-time feeling that she still hadn’t recovered from.

She had, for instance, just used up about a fifth of the jar of mustard in quick, generous strokes. That was a lot, even for her. She put the lid back on the jar.

“I’m going now,” her mom said, poking her head into the kitchen. “All right?”

“Yeah.” Avery nodded. “It’s all good.”

Some facts.

Fact: It is difficult to commit microeconomic concepts to memory when your roommate’s cell phone goes off once every two minutes and then she screams
very intimate information
to friends in a loud enough voice to be heard across the country without the aid of the phone.

Fact: It is
impossible
when said roommate also scratches constantly. Soon scratching is all you can hear. Scratching takes over your world.

Fact: At nine o’clock in the morning Nina would sit down to take her first microeconomics test of the term, and she was definitely going to fail if this ringing and talking and scratching kept up. And it
was
going to keep up.

If she wanted to get anything done, she would have to disappear, go bury herself somewhere. She packed up her books and her water and headed to the library.

Nina spent the next five hours in a lonely corner of the twenty-four-hour study room until the humming of the lights and the general desolation finally got to her. By the time she emerged, it was three in the morning. The path was empty, lit up
brightly by the security lights. It was a gorgeous night, warm and fragrant. Nina took a deep breath, trying to revive herself a bit.

Behind her she heard a faint scraping noise. She turned around to see a bike turning around the corner of the path and coming right in her direction. Without thinking, Nina plunged her hand into her bag and grabbed for the pepper spray canister her mother had made her promise to buy on her arrival.

As it came closer, she saw it was just Steve. There was something weird about this—like déjà vu. Or maybe wish fulfillment.

“Hey, Nina. Where are you coming from?” he asked, coming up alongside her.

“I was at the library. Studying.”

“By yourself?” He glanced around at the shadowy buildings. Nina felt a rush of indignation, but then she realized that she was still holding the pepper spray canister. She released it and drew her hand from her bag casually.

“What are you doing out?” she asked.

He dismounted and leaned the bike against his hip. “I needed to get out. Being inside in nice weather feels really weird to me. My brother and I sleep outside for about half the year.”

“Outside where?”

“In hammocks, in the yard.”

“You sleep in your
yard?
“

“Sleeping outside is great. You feel different—you feel really good.”

“What if it rains during the night?” she asked.

“Then we go sleep on the porch. Sleeping in the rain is the best.”

“You ready for the test?” she asked.

“Kind of,” he said. “Not completely.”

“Me either.”

He rubbed his hair roughly, sending one chunk drooping over his eye. It was very cute. He seemed like an overgrown toddler. “Want to stay up? Only six hours to go.”

“You want to pull an all-nighter?”

“I have flash cards.” He pulled a stack of cards out of one of his cargo pockets.

“A man after my own heart,” she said.

They circled the campus for an hour, each taking turns quizzing from the cards. They wound up at the quad, the grand arcade of ornately decorated arches that bordered a wide plaza. It looked like an old monastery. They each sank to the ground and leaned up against a pole, facing each other.

“My brain is starting to go,” Nina said, closing her eyes.

“No!” Steve said. “You have to keep your eyes open. You’re dead if you close them.”

“Argh! I know.” Nina forced her eyes open wider than normal, but her eyelids were heavy. The test seemed distant and unimportant.

“Talk to me.” Steve said. “Tell me a story.”

“About what?” Nina yawned.

“Tell me about your home. Come on. Keep your brain on.”

“I live in a gingerbread house,” Nina said. “One of those Victorian houses, with the little peaks and the wraparound
porch. It’s green. It’s old. There’s a new part off to the side where my mom’s office is.”

“What does your mom do?”

“She’s a lawyer. My dad travels a lot. Pretty much all the time. My brother, Rob, is a doctor in Boston. He’s an intern, anyway. I never get to talk to him. He lives at the hospital. So it’s usually just me and my mom.”

“We always have people staying with us,” Steve said. “I don’t think we’ve ever had dinner with just the four of us. We had this one guy who went to college with my dad who stayed with us for about two weeks. Right after he left, these two guys in suits came to our house and asked my parents a lot of questions. It turns out that he was under investigation for grand larceny and racketeering, and my parents were being watched by the FBI.”

“You were harboring a fugitive? Sounds exciting.”

“Not really,” Steve said. “We didn’t know he was a fugitive. He was really boring. He used to hog the TV every night.”

“What do your parents do?” she asked.

“My mom runs a studio where people can come in and paint their own ceramics. My dad is an accountant, which is kind of weird, considering his background. I don’t think he’s really good at it, because he’s always out of work. I’m here on scholarship because there’s no way my parents could pay for this.”

Nina was kind of amazed that he would just come out and admit something like that. Steve had a strange brand of confidence that Nina had never seen before.

“You know what’s weird?” he said, looking over the archways
of the quad. “My parents always told me that people raised with a lot of money are obnoxious and spoiled and that they don’t care about important things. But that’s not true. I mean, you’re staying up all night to study. And when you talk in class, it’s obvious that you’re serious about the work you do.”

“I don’t come from
money
,” she said quickly.

“Compared to me you do,” he said plainly. “I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

Nina suddenly felt a bit odd about all the things she had at home. Her SUV, for a start. She quietly shuffled through her cards.

“I see sunlight,” he said. “It’s just starting.”

Nina looked up beyond the palm trees in the courtyard and saw that the sky had gone from black to gray to a vibrant shade of lilac.

“We made it,” she said, smiling.

“Yeah. See that? Feel awake now?”

“I’m getting there.”

By seven they were sitting together in the nearly empty dining hall, drinking coffee and laughing uncontrollably at the term
marginal product
. By eight they’d run through the definitions so many times that their responses took on a singsong rhythm.

They were the first to show up in class for the test. It wasn’t until she got there that Nina realized that both she and Steve were wearing the same clothes they’d worn the day before, but she didn’t really care.

It turned out that the test definitely didn’t merit staying up all night. It was really just a fancy quiz, which probably explained why no one else seemed excited about it. Steve finished first, and Nina looked up and found that she was upset to see him leaving and actually sped up and handed in the test without double-checking. It didn’t matter; he was waiting outside the door for her.

They looked at each other and laughed.

“That was ridiculous,” he said. “Good thing we stayed up, huh?”

When they got to Nina’s door, she wasn’t quite sure what to do. She didn’t really want him to go away, but they’d been together for hours and the whole point to their staying together had passed. Out of curiosity, though, she left her door hanging open to see what he would do. He stepped just inside of the doorway and leaned against the wall.

“You gave me the weirdest look when I was in your room that first time,” he said.

Nina felt a flush of embarrassment. She tried to cover it up with an overly dramatic yawn, then she began rummaging through her closet.

“No, I didn’t,” she said.

“Yeah, you did. You were staring at me like I was a nut. Do you know how long it took me to come up with an excuse to come down to your room?”

“Excuse?”

“An excuse to come talk to you. I’d been trying to figure out how to do it since the day we moved in. And you just stared at me like I was a mutant.”

Nina realized that her skin had broken out in goose pimples. Definitely not just the exhaustion kicking in.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“So,” he said, “I guess I have to ask.”

“Ask what?”

But Steve didn’t say anything. He seemed to be questioning her with his expression, asking if it was okay to come closer. Nina answered by staying right where she was and smiling. That’s when Steve bent down and kissed her.

For the first
few weeks it was like a game. Mel and Avery would “accidentally” find each other’s feet under the table at shift meetings or bump into each other in the pantry. They’d lean over to whisper something, and they’d brush the other’s ear-lobe with their lips. Everything was tiny and well disguised, but there were little electric moments everywhere.