Undeclared Read Free Page A

but I just didn’t like Peter. He didn’t treat Lana right, and I didn’t like knowing they exchanged body fluids. She deserved better.
    Thankfully, interrupting their intimate moment managed to stop the cycling of crazy thoughts in my head. I felt almost foolish over the panic I had gotten into at the library. Looking down at my hands, I saw they were still trembling. I pressed my palms together as rational thoughts began filtering through my thick head.
    I went to the kitchen to grab a water bottle. I busied myself and tried to block out the kissing noises from the entryway that indicated an extended goodbye.
    “Even God rested on the seventh day,” I told Lana after she closed the door.
    She grinned unrepentantly at me and then laughed outright when I screwed my face into a fake offended expression.
    “Sorry, I figured you’d go out with the library crew tonight,” Lana said. My library crew consisted of my student supervisor Mike and two others. Ordinarily, I’d meet up with them to have a post-work drink and complain about all the dickheads who needed help in the library. I think a whole set of other library students drank on another night. I had no fake ID yet so I was limited to early hours at a diner that also just happened to serve liquor. “Or be hanging around to find out if the brown haired muscled guy is your fabled Noah.” Obviously Lana had noticed my reaction to the guys in the library.
    “It’s crazy, right?” I needed her reassurance. “I’m just imagining things.”
    She nodded slowly. “I would think so. What makes you think it was him?”
    I dragged myself over to the living room and sank into a side chair.
    “At first I convinced myself that it was just another pair of guys who looked like Noah and his buddy Bo. But later, Mike told me there were two junior college transfers from California who were fighters. Noah once wrote that he was interested in fighting after getting out.”
    “So you added up two guys, one blond, one dark, plus fighters from California, and got your Marine from high school?”
    The skepticism in Lana’s voice was exactly what I needed, and I mentally leaned into it, relaxing for the first time since I had spotted those two guys in the library.
    “I know, honestly. Only I could come up with such a thing,” I tried to make it sound like a joke, but I knew my tone was wrong. More hopeful than mocking.
    “Oh Grace,” Lana sat down on the edge of the chair and put her arm around me. “Don’t you worry that you aren’t open to new things here?”
    Was that what I was doing? Were my hopeful imaginings just a way to keep myself from getting close to others? Even if I could wish Noah into existence here at Central, I couldn’t make him love me. And if he had loved me, he would be here. Or I would be with him. I rubbed my forehead. I couldn’t even stand to think about all that now. Time to change the subject. “Have you talked with Amy about the picture?”
    Lana played along, sparing me any more potential humiliation. “Yeah, we want you to do one of those miniature pictures.”
    “The tilt shift?”
    Lana nodded. “That the kind that makes everyone look like little plastic figures or models?”
    I took out a pencil and paper and sketched out the front of the Alpha Phi house. “What do you want me to focus on? Are you going to stand outside and hold hands and sing?” I asked.
    “Not sure.” Lana was an apathetic sorority sister. “I’m going to be the photographer’s assistant and make sure the Delt’s house doesn’t swallow you whole.”
    “I thought you wanted me to be swallowed by a Delt,” I teased.
    “I think I said last year that a cure for one man was another. It was in an attempt to get you over the Noah phase.”
    “Thanks, Dr. Lana.”
    “I’m just a psychologist-in-training. I promise to give you free therapy sessions if I mess you up too bad during college.”
    “I’m holding you to that,” I said. “Guess I lucked out when we