He lost all expression, his mouth open just enough she knew he'd stopped thinking altogether. She felt a rush of power to have wiped the amusement from his eyes. And felt some surprise that she'd managed to do it and that he’d looked so much younger after she did. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, chin in her palms. "Does it fit?"
He swallowed. He swallowed again and nodded without even checking. Maybe the Dairy Haven girl could be someone different at Belmar. No one even knew her mother or all her mother’s exes, and a little adventure wasn’t going to derail her. Maybe Gwen would be a new Gwen. Bolder. The kind of girl who didn't dip cones so much as lick nuts. "I'm Gwen."
"You are." He seemed to gather himself and turn his attention to the hardware in his hand. He held the bolt and spun the nut right on. "Damn."
Gwen sat back in surprise. It had never crossed her mind that she had a match in the place. And when he looked at her, she saw something more than surprise. Interest, maybe. Worry for sure. But then he gave her the wolfy smile he'd sat down with. "I'm Max."
She laughed. "You are."
Back to U…
If the sound of someone vomiting hadn’t awakened her, the smell would have. It possessed the familiar awfulness of bile mixed with fake strawberry. She’d enjoyed a daiquiri or two on the deck of Steve’s favorite restaurant, but what kind of horrid beverages were minors being served that smelled like bad candy? She sat up on the bare mattress and swung her legs over the side. Rubbing her hands over her eyes, she smeared the remains of her make-up but could see better in the dim street light that came through the split in the curtain.
The girl who had run out of the room like a shot when she’d seen the age… maturity, of her new roommate, knelt on the floor with a metal garbage can obscuring most of her head. Apparently there had been a party at the sorority. "Can I get you anything? A glass of water maybe?"
The girl waved one arm in a no gesture and heaved again. It had twice the impact with the echo.
If Gwen stayed she would definitely get her own room and unpack the silver mesh garbage can from the car because she wasn’t going to use one somebody had thrown up in, and she wasn’t ever going to throw up in one herself. "Just let me know if there’s anything you need."
The girl lifted her arm…
The least she could do was put the girl a little out of her misery. "I’m going to move out."
The girl waved goodbye and threw up again.
The sun came through the curtain gap and ran in a strip across the built-in desk. In the daylight, Gwen didn’t want to even see the girl, poor thing, hair probably plastered to her face in some painful way. But a glance out of the corner of her eye assured her the girl was breathing. She rose and walked to the window, opening the drape just enough to see the campus she’d loved once, all green and early morning quiet. The criss-cross of sidewalks would fill soon enough. And there were squirrels. She was a squirrel. She shook her head, sad to think that she might have laughed six months ago when it seemed the world held things to be light about.
She spotted two college catalogs on the desk top like some tidy greeting from a recruiter and reached for hers. Not hers, the one meant for Missy. She sighed and sat in the molded plastic seat that tried to pass for an ergonomic desk chair, but she didn’t have an eighteen-year-old back anymore. Her back knew the difference. It was almost hard to believe she’d been eighteen once. She leafed through the catalog, scanned the smiling faces, the football team, the course requirements. She’d been an education major for reasons she couldn’t even recall, not that the declaring of it had changed much. The year and a half she’d been at Belmar, she’d taken what everyone had taken.
Turning to the list of general requirements, she remembered math, of course, and English. The rest had been listed differently when she’d checked them off, and they hadn’t been called Spheres of Study, which sounded a little fruity. Science was still science. She checked off Nutrition I and II. Social Sciences. She scanned the list of classes,