Moving in Reverse Read Free Page B

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.
     
     
    Sometimes, when I was with Blake, it
felt like I was flying. Like I was untouchable, soaring from place
to place, light as a feather. Everything seemed to light up when he
was around, and there was something reassuring about how easily
everything came to him — as if it might just rub off on me, if I
stayed close enough.
    We reached my dorm in a few minutes,
and Blake hesitated at the door.
    “ I’ll wait here,” he said,
winking at me.
    Darby and Blake got along fine, but
having a boy unexpectedly walk into our shared double was pretty
high on the List of Things That Would Cause a Fight with Darby
Later. She was the kind of girl who wore make-up to the gym, and
didn’t appreciate being seen without it.
    Which was funny, because I saw Darby
without makeup on a regular basis, and she was beautiful either
way. Just not quite so preened. Which wasn’t always bad.
    On the other hand, sometimes I
wondered what she thought of me, tumbling out of bed and heading to
class nearly every morning in grubby jeans and my favorite Columbia
sweatshirt, the one that my parents had gotten me when I’d been
accepted early decision the year before. The first morning I’d
overslept, she’d raised an eyebrow at me.
    “ Isn’t Blake in your
English class?” she’d asked.
    She didn’t need to say anything
else.
    But Blake had spent the whole summer
seeing me first thing in the morning, sharing a bathroom with four
other people (only one of whom brought along a hair dryer — and I
wasn’t about to borrow it from April), on a few hours of sleep.
Granted, I’d been wearing borrowed designer clothes from Moving
Neutral’s drummer, Sophie, most of the time. But he didn’t seem to
mind my faded jeans, oversize t-shirts or messy ponytails.
Inexplicably, from day one, Blake just seemed to really like me.
And I hoped that a few morning classes without eyeshadow weren’t
going to put much of a dent in that.
    I left Blake outside reluctantly, and
took the elevator to our sixth floor room. The hallway billboards
were littered with fluorescent-colored flyers for events, speakers
and meetings for every student group you could imagine. I’d once
joked to Blake that I was going to start a student club for
brunette cello enthusiasts from Middlesex County, except he
reminded me gently that I couldn’t play the cello.
    Blake’s room wasn’t in my
dorm — he’d accepted his admission to Columbia at the last minute,
less than a week before freshman orientation, and he’d been
assigned the last available room on campus. Fortunately for him,
Columbia guaranteed housing for freshmen, so at least he had a
room. But he was sharing a double with a skinny guy from New Jersey
named Ethan who spent every free moment screaming into his
computer, playing World of Warcraft with people he listened to
through headphones. Blake told me he’d be drifting off to sleep at
night, when all of the sudden Ethan would scream at the top of his
lungs, “ I’m Polymorphed .”
    We spent an entire dinner trying to
figure out what that meant — finally we googled it, and it turned
out to be a spell that turned the