True Read Free Page B

If you find yourself in that situation again, punch him in the nuts. But you can do better than Grant, trust me.”
    “Yeah.” I wasn’t sure if it were true or not, but I did know that I would much rather be alone than have those wet, narrow lips anywhere on me, and that demanding grip on my arm, the back of my head.
    “I mean, you’ve waited this long to have sex, you shouldn’t waste your virginity on an Oxy junkie.”
    So he had heard me talking to Jessica and Kylie. I gripped my purse tighter in my lap, that churning sensation in my stomach starting again. The car was heaving and bucking as it struggled to make it up the steep hill, and the engine whined as Tyler gave it more gas. The street was empty, most of the houses darkened because it was after two, and I suddenly felt as trapped in the car as I had in the apartment. I didn’t want to talk about this with Tyler. Or anyone.
    “Oxy?” I asked, to buy time. Dodge and weave when the subject was uncomfortable. But I’d never been particularly good at dodging anything. I was the girl in grade school gym who didn’t move fast enough and took a rubber ball in the nose.
    “OxyContin. Grant likes to snort it. When he can’t get his hands on any for a while, he gets a little edgy. I told Nathan he shouldn’t let him come around anymore, but Nathan is loyal.”
    So Grant did drugs. I guess I wasn’t surprised, not really. He had the requisite dysfunctional family, the nervous twitch. It made sense. I was disappointed, though, because it meant that I had inaccurately assessed Grant. I had seen him as a male version of myself, quiet from a lack of social skills, nervous. But it wasn’t that at all, and I had projected what I wanted onto him.
    The thought made me want to cry again.
    “So you’re not?” I said, then immediately regretted it. It sounded almost accusatory, when the truth was, the silence was stretching out, a long rubber band that snapped with my unintentionally harsh words.
    “Not when you’re doing drugs and kicking girls.”
    That made sense to me.
    I didn’t really know Tyler at all, other than he was Jessica and Kylie’s party buddy, and on occasion, he and Jessica hooked up. He almost never came to our dorm room, and I had only been around him a few times at parties and at the apartment. We didn’t share any classes, and he’d never made much of an effort to talk to me.
    But suddenly I liked him a whole lot better.
    Unsure what to say, as usual, I tucked my hair behind my ear, but I was spared from having to answer by his phone ringing. He glanced at the screen and swore.
    “Yeah?” he said, after tapping the screen, turning the steering wheel with his left elbow, heading toward campus.
    I wondered if it were Jessica. But I realized that it couldn’t be Jessica, because she wouldn’t have called him. She was a texter and she always used an absurd shorthand with acronyms that no one but she understood, like LULB, which she insisted stood for
Love You Little Bitch
. Or my personal favorite,
W
? Jessica sometimes meant it as a general question, as in she didn’t understand what was happening, which most people would assume, or sometimes as
What Time?
though no one but her ever knew which one she intended.
    “No. In the kitchen. No,” he said into his phone, more emphatically. “I didn’t take it. The cat probably ate it.”
    The woman talking to him was so loud that I could hear her, though the words were garbled.
    “Well, stop leaving your shit laying around,” he said, and with a sound of disgust pulled the phone from his ear and dropped it into a dirty change compartment next to the gear shift. “Moms are a complete pain in the ass.”
    If I hadn’t been drunk, I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all. I would have just agreed or most likely, just nodded. But my mouth seemed to move faster than my brain. “I don’t remember my mom being a pain in the ass at all. She was always smiling.”
    Tyler glanced at me.