and accentuated by the tease of black liner. He looks twice as dangerous as he did before. “You are not what I expected,” she stammers.
“Good,” he whispers. Then he hands her the liner pencil and gets out of the car to put the gas cap back on.
A moment later they’re on the road again. Daphne had expected him to wipe the liner off. But he doesn’t bother. As they cruise up 91, he sticks an actual cassette tape into the dashboard stereo, and then sings along to Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You.”
The song seems fitting enough, so Daphne joins in.
Four
Rickie
The first restaurant on our list is a steak place outside of Burlington. And when I pull up behind the building, Daphne refuses to let me carry the crate of alcohol into the restaurant. She insists on doing it herself.
She’s in a mood today. I think she’d expected to spend the day alone. And she doesn’t trust me. She can’t believe I don’t remember meeting her that first time.
Girl, same, I think as I watch her disappear into the back door of the restaurant. My life has been a crazy ride since those days I spent in Connecticut. I don’t tell the people in my life the whole story, because I’m sick of being that guy who lost six months of his memories.
Honestly, it’s easier to be a rude asshole than a freak.
Something tells me I’m not the real root of Daphne’s unhappiness, either. Something else is bothering her, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with me.
I have a few ideas for cheering her up, if only she was open to it.
Daphne reappears just as I’m having this thought. She’s wearing a serious frown that doesn’t invite discussion. And I know how to read the room, so I stick to the business at hand. The moment she returns to the truck, I point us downtown.
Our second and final delivery is to a wine bar. Vino and Veritas is on Church Street, where cars aren’t allowed to go. But there’s an alleyway behind it that makes the drop-off easy enough. Daphne disappears again into the back door of the place and reemerges a minute later.
“Why are we delivering this stuff by hand?” I ask as I carefully back out of the alley. “Griffin has a distributor for his cider, no?”
“The applejack is a beta product,” she says. “He can’t make enough of it to meet the distributor’s minimum.”
“Oh. Your brother is a fun guy. He’s a tinkerer, right? Always experimenting with the chemistry behind various alcoholic beverages. What’s cooler than that?”
“So cool,” she mutters. “Can you drop me at the social sciences complex? I don’t want to be late for my first day.”
“Sure, gorgeous. No problem.”
I do even better. A few minutes later I pull up right in front of the School of Public Health. “I’m parking in that lot,” I say, pointing at the garage on the next block. “When do you want to meet me back there?”
“Um, is five o’clock too late?” She glances nervously at the building.
“No, that’s fine. I have errands. And I’ll kill some time in the coffee shop.”
“Uh, thanks.” She swallows hard, and I realize that even Daphne Shipley is capable of first-day jitters. Who knew? She shoulders her backpack and gets out of the truck.
I roll down the window. “Hey, Daphne?”
She turns back, a tiny crease of irritation on her forehead. “What?”
“You’re a badass.”
“What?” She blinks.
“A total rock star. Now go on. Be early. Impress the world of public health. You know you want to.”
“Thanks.” She gives me a smile so small that you’d practically need an electron microscope to find it. And then she strides off, long legs like honey in the sunshine, and disappears into the glass doors of the building.
And I just sit here like a bonehead, wishing I could have gotten a kiss goodbye.
The class I’m taking this summer is Ancient Philosophy, and the first lecture is a lot of fun.
After my injury, I lost two semesters of school. It took me a year to reboot my life, enroll at Moo U, and settle into Burlington. So even though I’m twenty-two, I’m not yet close to graduating.
But school has always appealed to me. And ninety minutes in a lecture hall listening to the professor explain Sophocles is entertaining.
Afterward, I spend some time in the bookstore before heading to the coffee shop like I said I would do. But only for a little while. I have another