still took you out after seeing you dressed in that ratty sweatshirt and those faded jeans proves he’s into you, Maggie.” Her gaze scans me once more. “Believe me, this is not you at your best.”
I tug the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head, almost wishing the act would drown out Cora’s incessant chatter, but no such luck. She continues for the next hour—and the entire duration of our car ride back to Davis—talking about how I need to get some and ‘how long has it been since Brian, anyway?’ I tuned her out somewhere around exit 46B and forced myself to focus on other things while I faked sleeping in the passenger seat of her daddy’s BMW.
Unfortunately, the only images I could summon on the underside of my eyelids belonged to Ran: his nice face, lips, and newly discovered body art. Every time I closed my eyes, it was Ran I saw in my head. And it was his voice I heard rattling around in my brain, not Cora’s much too high tenor that sounded like it belonged to an eight-year-old girl.
“Maggie?” Something pushes my shoulder and my head wobbles unsteadily. “Maggie, we’re here.”
I blink rapidly, forcing the lingering effects of sleep away, and unbuckle my seatbelt. “Yeah. Yeah, I see.”
Slipping out of my seat, I unlock the passenger door. Cora’s already out of the car and pulling open the lid of the trunk to withdraw my suitcase from inside it.
“Sawyer!” She calls out to a black haired boy I recognize from one of the frat parties we’d attended the first week of school. “Help Maggie with her bags.”
Sawyer jogs over to us and scoops my luggage out of Cora’s grip. “Hey Maggie. Glad you’re back.” He flashes me a pearly smile, though his bottom lip is packed with dip.
“That crap will give you cancer, Sawyer,” Cora scolds, hiking her designer purse up her shoulder. Her three-inch heels click across the asphalt as she walks.
“Not the kind that will kill you.” The three of us skirt around the mad rush of bicycles and students scurrying across campus. For a Saturday, it’s unusually jam-packed.
“Any kind of cancer can kill you, moron.” Cora gives me a sympathetic look, but I wave her off. If coming back to school means being on the receiving end of insincere empathy and false compassion, then I’m ready to hop back in Cora’s car to drive ninety miles straight in the opposite direction. I came back to Davis to escape all that I’d left at home, pity being one of those many things.
“Sorry, Maggie. I heard about your brother.”
“It’s fine.” I hobble into the entry of our dorm lobby, wishing my stupid leg would stop giving me such grief. I know the original injury was bad, but I figured I’d be patched up and good as new by now.
The three of us ride the elevator to the fifth floor, and I’m grateful when Sawyer offers to carry my belongings all the way into our room. It’s taking all of my effort to walk without a noticeable limp, and being weighed down by a suitcase full of clothing probably wouldn’t make that any easier to do.
“You’ll be in O-Chem on Monday?” he asks, setting my bag onto my bed against the far wall. Our room isn’t big; Cora had arrived on campus a day before me and claimed the half closest to the long stretch of windows, leaving the bed against the cold, cinderblock wall for me. I didn’t complain at all, because truth be told, I’d figured I wouldn’t actually be spending much time in our dorm. I had assumed I’d be sleeping most nights over at Brian’s off-campus apartment. How wrong I’d been in that assumption.
“No.” I shake my head and unzip the luggage, pulling out my clothing and walking to the closet with them in hand. “I had to drop all my classes this quarter. All but Anthro—Professor Long did me a huge favor with that one.”
“Well, if you end up taking O-Chem again next quarter, chances are we can be lab partners because I’m currently failing.” Sawyer flashes another award winning smile, then reaches for an empty red cup on Cora’s desk and spits into it, throwing away any of the charm he might previously have exuded.
“You’re not going to fail,” I assure. “You’ll do great.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Sawyer says, stepping backward toward the door. “But I’ve got about 53% in there right now. So I’ll be seeing