“We’ll go now,” I said to Lucas. “It’s better this way.” Lucas stared at me, his expression shifting from disappointment into something harder to read. “Maybe it is.”
Neither of us knew quite what to say after that.
Balthazar, apparently too dazed to notice the tension between me and Lucas, opened the truck door. A gale of frigid air whipped into the cabin, blowing my hair in my eyes. Lucas already had turned his attention back to the road like a man plotting a getaway. When Balthazar held his hand out to steady me in the snow, I took it. “Good-bye, Lucas,” I said in a small voice.
Lucas leaned over to shut the truck door behind me. “See you one month from tonight. Amherst. Town square. Usual time. Okay?” Then he sighed once and gave me an uneven smile. “Love you.”
“I love you, too.” But for once, those words didn’t make everything okay.
Balthazar and I were both in such a terrible mood in the following days that I suggested we pretend that we were having an argument.
Walking around together pretending to be a happy couple—neither of us could do it. But after a week, we could pull ourselves together, pretend to make up.
That left me with more time on my own, though, and anxiety welled up to fill every spare second. Thinking about how Lucas and I had parted made me feel seasick inside, like the ground beneath my feet wasn’t steady any longer.
Vic noticed me brooding and tried to soothe my spirit by teaching me chess, but I was too fretful and distracted to keep the rules straight in my head, much less think about strategy.
“You are totally off your game these days,” he said to me one afternoon, as the two of us sorted through the weekly shipment of foodstuffs.
The human students apparently never noticed that a lot of their classmates didn’t ever show up for these; people were too busy gleefully grabbing the stuff they’d ordered—boxes of pasta, packages of cookies.
Vic put two bottles of orange soda in his canvas bag. “And I can’t help noticing that Balthazar is also one mopey dude right now.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Feeling awkward, I stared down at Raquel’s list. I’d volunteered to pick up her order along with mine.
“Balty came to our last classic film festival—Seven and The Usual Suspects. The theme was Kevin Spacey: Before the Fall. Awesome double feature, right? But Balthazar stared at the corner the whole time.”
“Vic, I know you mean well, but I don’t want to talk about it.” He shrugged as he selected a few cans of soup. “I was only wondering if this had anything to do with Lucas.”
“Maybe. Sort of. It’s complicated.”
“I guess Lucas is the kind of guy girls don’t get over. Stormy, broo-dy, all wild and stuff. Me, I can’t do that bad-boy thing,” Vic said.
“Mine is a more mellow path. Lucas, though—”
“He’s not doing a thing. He is who he is.”
Quietly he said, “I know that. And I know you two aren’t over.
Tough for Balthazar, but I gotta call it like I see it.” I hoped he was right, and that hope lifted my spirits. “You’re a lousy matchmaker, Vic.”
“Not as lousy as you. Seriously, me and Raquel?”
“That was more than a year ago!” Once we were done laughing, we went back to our “shopping” and stocked up. I wasn’t exactly in a good mood as I returned to my dorm room with my bags, but I felt better than I had in a long time.
Raquel turned out to be in the middle of one of her larger, messier art projects. This collage covered almost half our dorm room floor and smelled strongly of fresh glue and paint. “What is it?” I said, tiptoeing around damp newspaper and brushes.
“I call it Ode to Anarchy. See how the colors are in a constant state of collision?”
“Yeah, you can’t miss that.”
My halfhearted praise didn’t put a dent in Raquel’s enthusiasm. Paint striped her forearms, and she’d even gotten some orange in her hair, but she just kept grinning down at her work in progress while munching on a cookie. “You can walk around it, right?”
“Yeah, but I think tonight it might be better if I crashed with my parents.”
“Will they let you do that?”
“Not all the time, but I don’t think anybody will care about one night.”