BARRET
Barret wheeled the soundboard through a dark hallway and into a storage closet. He texted Libby one more time to see where she’d gone, though she didn’t respond. As he hung the headsets in a cabinet, he sensed someone approaching, and a shadow stretched across the floor beside him.
“Dude.”
Barret spun around to face Gavin Dean, who leaned into the doorjamb, blocking any retreat.
“What kind of name is Barret, anyway?” Gavin asked.
“Mine,” Barret said.
Gavin took out a billfold and counted five twenties. “Great job with the sound tonight. No feedback,” he said, folding the money into quarters and tucking it into Barret’s shirt pocket. “The way I like it. Quiet.”
The cash burned through Barret’s shirt.
“You’re a student here. We’ve met, right?” Gavin asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you’re a student, or you don’t know if we’ve met?”
Barret didn’t answer.
“It doesn’t matter. I have your name. I’ll look you up in the morning.”
As Barret tried to maneuver around him, Gavin put an arm across the doorway. “We’re good, right?” he asked.
The party seemed far away, the rumble of voices distant. Barret let his gaze fall to the floor and nodded. It was best not to engage.
“Good boy,” Gavin said, before returning to the party.
Barret wanted to take a bath. He remembered sitting in Gavin’s office in January, when he’d stopped in to talk about his housing situation. Gavin had listened, leaning forward, his blue eyes intent. At one point, he rested his dimpled chin on a fist.
“I hoped I might get a different room,” Barret said. “My roommates are . . . We don’t get along that well. They’d be happier with someone else.”
“I can’t imagine that!” Gavin said.
“It’d be easier if I had a single.”
Gavin stood suddenly and came around the desk. He had the lean body of a runner, and the confidence of someone who knew people looked at him. “Tell me where you’re from,” he said.
“Illinois,” Barret said.
“And your major?”
“Painting.”
“I can’t believe your roommates wouldn’t want you around. Someone like you.” Gavin leaned across Barret and tapped the office door closed. “We don’t usually move students around once the semester is under way,” he said. “Unless there’s a motivation.”
“It’s tight quarters,” Barret said. “Four of us in one room.”
Gavin was close, too close. His breath reeked of coffee. “Tight quarters,” he said. “I bet. We all have secrets we’d like to hide.”
Barret knew where the conversation could have gone. For a price he’d have gotten what he wanted. But even at nineteen, he had too much practice fending off threats far more dangerous than Gavin Dean. He excused himself and left before the suggestions turned real, before he allowed himself to become the hunted. Since then, he hadn’t returned to the housing office or reported the incident. And he still lived in the quad. What proof did he have, anyway?
Fuck you, Gavin Dean.
Barret finished putting the equipment away. Outside, he turned his gaze toward the sky and let the rain wash his face clean. Then he ripped his name tag off and threw it on the wet ground. He took out the five twenties and thought about tossing those too, but it was too much money to give up, too many art supplies to buy, and the only person he’d hurt would be himself. He tucked the wad into his wallet and headed toward Centre Street in downtown Jamaica Plain, toward Libby’s house.
* * *
Barret had met Libby Thomas the day he arrived at the school in January, after he’d left home for the first time ever, and had taken a bus to a train to a subway, and then walked through the ice-encased city toward freedom. On campus, he headed straight to the studios as soon as he could.
There, he found Libby.
She sat at a drafting table working through a design. Not till Barret dropped his bag on the floor did she look at him.
“Today’s my first day,” he said.
“This is my last semester,” Libby said. “I transferred here in the fall.”
“From where?”
Libby drew a line across the drafting paper. “Somewhere else,” she said.
“I’m a painter.”
“I’m an architect. Pull up a chair. Get to work. That’s why we’re here.”
At the end of that first day, when all Barret wanted was to heave his travel-worn body into the bottom bunk in his dorm room, he already called Libby a friend.
“Let’s hit the town,” she said, dragging him to her apartment to get ready.
“I don’t have an ID,” Barret said.
Libby had her back to him, wearing nothing but a pair of white, high-waisted underwear. Masses of curls spilled over her shoulders. “You won’t need one,” she said, as she squeezed a halter top over her head. “Not when I’m there to watch out for you.”
Since then, they’d spent nearly every free moment together. Recently, right before Spring Break, it had turned to something more.
* * *
Libby lived on the second floor of a run-down triple-decker with two roommates. Sasha and Emma. Emma and Sasha. Semma? Emasha? Barret couldn’t tell them apart. They walked through the long, railroad-style apartment in tandem, finishing each other’s sentences, wearing each other’s clothes. If they didn’t talk about boys one hundred percent of the time, Barret would have assumed they were a couple.
Libby didn’t like him to come over without an invitation. Even so, he found himself on her street, staring up through the rain at her darkened window. He must have stood there for a half hour before the bedroom light went on, and Libby walked into the room, laptop balanced on one arm. By then, Barret was soaked to the skin. He scaled the trellis that ran up the side of the house to the window. Through the rain-streaked glass, Libby worked feverishly on a design while simultaneously polishing off a family-sized bag of Cheetos. He texted her again. She checked the phone without picking it up, which could have fueled his insecurity, but one of the things he loved about Libby was the way she disappeared into her work. It was the same passion he brought to his own painting.
Eventually, she glanced up and jumped when she focused on him sitting outside. She opened the window and returned to work. Inside, he found a towel to dry off with, and sat, knowing enough not to say anything, not to disturb her thoughts. She changed out a window for a doorway in the design, and then clacked some notes into the file before scooching over in the twin bed, half an inch, but it was as much of an offer as Barret ever got. He lay beside her. She didn’t close the laptop or stop working. He touched her arm, and she recoiled and returned the touch at the same time, something he still hadn’t gotten used to, something that made him question what to do next. She was so different from Alice, his high school girlfriend, who’d been all stolen kisses and furtive touches in the hidden alcoves of the church. Alice was Father Todd’s daughter. She sat in the very first pew next to her sisters and brothers, hands folded in her lap, her skirts nearly falling to the floor, an example to be held up for the rest of the congregation. Barret wondered if Alice’s parents, with their guitars and homemade clothes, ever guessed that their little girl cornered him in a storage closet after the church coffee and kissed him till his lips felt raw. With Alice, he hadn’t wondered where he stood, not even at the end.
“Fine,” Libby said, kissing him, her eyes still on the screen.
Her mouth tasted of Cheetos. He pressed against her, and she gave in before shoving him away.
“With you,” she said, “it’s like I ordered French fries and got onion rings. You’re a lot to get used to.”
So was she.
“So are you.”
Barret rolled over and closed his eyes. He could fall asleep, wake up, and start a new day. He could spend the hundred bucks in his wallet and then pretend Gavin Dean didn’t exist.
“What were you doing there tonight?” he asked.
“What’s it matter?”
“You didn’t tell me you’d be there. You didn’t even talk to me. You only talked to Tucker Matson. How do you even know him?”
“You were working,” Libby said. “And I thought I’d get buzzed. Like I said, the wine was free.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
Barret hated the sound of those words as soon as they spilled from his mouth. Libby glared at him, put the laptop aside, and headed into the hallway. The sound of running water came from the bathroom as she brushed her teeth.
Her laptop sat on the bed, open and inviting. Libby hadn’t locked it when she left. Barret could view her search history. He could open her e-mail. He closed the computer before giving in to temptation and walked through the room, searching her shelves, her desk. The room was sparse, free of photos or other memorabilia, though she’d framed that drawing he’d given her, the one of his dog, Rusty, and hung it by her closet. As the water in the bathroom shut off, his gaze landed on a box of matches from Craigie on Main in Cambridge. He struck one of the matches and let it burn till the flame nearly reached his flesh. He struck another one, and when the bedroom door opened, he flicked it toward Libby, and struck a third.
“Stop,” she said.
“You went to Craigie.”
Barret didn’t talk about money with Libby. He didn’t have any to talk about, anyway, but he did know that Craigie was expensive and not the type of restaurant you went to on your own. It was a place for a date. He struck another match.
“You’ll start a fire,” Libby said, snatching the box from him. “I went there with a friend, okay?”
“You don’t have any friends. Not that I’ve ever met.”
“I told you from the start that I didn’t want anything serious. And things have changed, and I have something big to deal with, and it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Go paint or do whatever you do. Go to the dorm. I don’t care. But go someplace else.”
“It’s late. I’m tired.”
Libby got in bed, her back to the wall, her knees pulled to her chest. “I’m tired too,” she said. “Of you. Why do you think I ignored your texts? I forgot you were even working that event tonight. I wish I hadn’t seen you.”
Barret took a step toward Libby, to comfort her. But she scrambled away from him, pressing herself into the corner in a way that made him turn to the mirror and see his own face, twisted with rage.
In the hallway, one of the roommates made a noise.
“I love you,” Barret said.
“Get out,” Libby said, and when he didn’t move, she added. “I mean it.”
The roommate knocked. “Is everything okay in there?”
Barret wrenched open the door and passed Emma in the hall. Or maybe Sasha? She wore an oversized T-shirt and her dark cowlicked hair stood up in every direction. She watched silently till he’d left the apartment. He stood on the landing, long after the dead bolt slid into place.
* * *
Later, afterward, Barret wandered through Jamaica Plain, a densely populated, residential neighborhood in Boston with a thriving commercial area along Centre Street. He stopped by Dreamscapes, the café where he worked, where a poetry slam was finishing up and they were getting ready to close. He didn’t want to return to the dorm, so he walked till he found himself on the asphalt path surrounding Jamaica Pond. Here, during the day, people with dogs and strollers clogged the walkways, but tonight, in the rain, he nearly had the place to himself. He followed the path, to a Victorian-era boathouse and bandstand that sat on the banks.
He remembered coming here on a February night, his feet crunching through ice-crusted snow, his shoulder glancing off Libby’s. The winter air was so cold Barret could barely breathe. They stopped at the boathouse, and Libby spun him around, those curls streaming out from under her hat, her breath freezing in clouds. “So . . .” she said, her eyes shining in light from a street lamp.
“We’re here,” he said, anticipation building in his stomach.
The nylon edge of her glove brushed his jawline, the scratch burning cold-numbed skin. His lips parted. She ducked under his arm and dashed around the boathouse, and he closed his eyes, resting his forehead against the brick.
“Come,” she called. “Find me.”
He turned the corner, and she stood on the snow-covered ice, fifty yards from shore. Waiting. He slid toward her, across the frozen surface, his feet slipping as he reached her. They fell, together, their legs entangling, and yet he still didn’t dare make a move, not after what had happened with Alice, who he remembered hovering beside Father Todd at the end of the service and nodding at Barret as though they barely knew each other. Later, when he’d found her paging frantically through the Bible, she’d put her hands over her ears and refused to listen when he pleaded with her, till she finally stood and moved as far from him as she could. “It won’t work,” she’d said. “Not here! Not ever.”
Barret hadn’t dared believe that anyone could ever want him again. He lay beside Libby and faced the night sky. With nothing but the full moon to bear witness, he handed her the package. “I made it for you,” he said.
She ripped the paper and held it up to the light from her phone. It was the drawing of Rusty lying in the driveway, tail in midwag, the drawing she still had hanging on her wall, even now.
She rolled toward him, her elbow buried in snow. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Like you.”
She reached across the ice. The glove was gone.
“You don’t mind?” he asked.
She touched his lips and quieted his doubts.
“You wouldn’t like me,” she said, “if you knew my secrets.”
That’s how Barret had believed she’d feel about him, too.
* * *
He climbed the stairs to the bandstand and looked out over the pond. The ice was long gone, replaced by inky water. Across it, through a row of trees, lights in Pinebank Mansion shone through the night. The Matsons lived there, on the hill, overlooking the pond in that Queen Anne-style mansion straight from a fairy tale. Or a gothic novel.
What a difference a few weeks could make. What a difference a single night could make. He’d trusted Libby, like he’d trusted Alice. Now, Barret felt alone—abandoned—all over again. And he had no idea what to do next.