Chapter Three

Emmett

I walked inside The Music Room and Coffee House and was met with the welcomed sound of Tchaikovsky streaming through the speakers, the scent of brewed coffee and the mish-mash of college and high school students. This place was becoming my refuge. It was an old two-story house next to the music theater, converted into an artsy coffee shop. It had a creaky upstairs mezzanine where I could sit above the fray, but still see the action below.

Most athletes hung out at the McClain center. An entire floor of studying tables and tutoring groups were dedicated to keeping student athletes academically eligible to play sports. It was not an easy task.

I handed the barista my two dollars and glanced around the packed room, looking for an open table when I saw the last person I had ever expected to see in this sanctum. The girl with the scar, that definable lightning bolt that made her stand out, whether she wanted it to or not. She walked downstairs, wearing jeans and a white tank top. Her hair was dark and wet, like it was recently washed. It fell long past her shoulders. When she turned, it suddenly registered this was the girl I had seen during practice—the one in the baseball cap. I watched her pass the other customers and head toward the counter. There was no doubt it was her. She had the same focused, purposeful movements. The same unwavering attention. I watched her while the two girls in my head metamorphosed into one.

“Double-double mocha, CeCe,” the barista called out while I was filling my thermos.

She walked up and grabbed a drink, topped off with whipped cream.

“Thanks, Maggie,” she said. I raised my eyebrows. So, apparently, this was her usual hangout. She set her cell and earphones on the counter to get a better grip on her drink. I walked up to her.

“Hey,” I said.

She looked equally surprised to see me, even a little guarded, like I had walked into her house without knocking.

“CeCe,” I said, acknowledging that I finally knew her name. “It’s short for—?”

“Sparkles,” she said.

Smart-ass. A smile tugged at my lips. I studied her mammoth sized coffee cup and raised my eyebrows.

“Coffee enhances mental performance,” she stated. “Twenty ounces of the lightest roast contains 425 milligrams of caffeine. It’s a studying miracle.”

She reached for a lid and while she was distracted, I swiped her cell and earphones. I slipped them into my ears and looked around for her telltale red Adidas bag. I figured she had a table, and now she was going to share it.

She covered the lid over her cup and followed me.

“Hey. That’s stealing.”

I ignored her and scrolled through her playlists, listening to Jurassic 5’s Jurass Finish First while I browsed.

“It’s borrowing,” I said casually, and headed up the stairs. I looked around and saw her bag. She had scored my second favorite spot: a well-lit corner table, beneath a pop-art rendering of the Mona Lisa in cyan, magenta, and yellow.

I tossed my backpack next to an open chair and sat down.

“You could get your hands cut off in some countries for that, you know.”

I turned the volume down and looked up at her.

“For borrowing?”

She grabbed her backpack off the chair and sat down. I kept scrolling.

“Are you one of those ungodly organized people?” I asked.

She took a long sip of her drink and sighed happily, like her brain had suddenly snapped on. “What do you mean?”

“Your playlist titles,” I said. “Classic 90’s melodramatic ballads? Late millennial female vocalists?”

“I like to be organized.” As she said this, she opened a binder labeled Organic Chemistry. The pages inside were color coordinated and labeled in neat, block letters with file headings. She frowned at a clear transparency, which had bent a little in one corner and she tried to smooth it down. She looked up and caught me watching her.

“You better stay away from my bedroom,” I warned her. “Piles of clothes everywhere. Mostly organized by least-offensive odor.”

She shuddered at the image. “Then don’t come in mine,” she said. “The clothes in my closet are organized by season first, color second, and fabric material third.”

I looked as put off by that information as she was by my odorous piles.

I glanced down at her phone and caught another title.

“Stripper Mix?” I clicked on it with interest and read the titles out loud: “‘Doves Cry.’ ‘Amber.’ ‘Fever for the Flava’—” I started to laugh, and she grabbed her cell out of my hand. I pulled the earphones out before they were yanked away.

“It was a joke for a volleyball practice,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

“Every girl has a stripper mix. Even the wholesome ones,” she defended herself.

“You don’t know how happy I am to hear that.”

My smile only seemed to irritate her. She shoved her phone in her backpack. Her dark eyes scrutinized me. They stood out against her flushed cheeks. “What are you doing here? I actually come here to study.”

I picked up my backpack and unzipped it. “They have classical piano players a couple nights a week.”

She nodded. “And you know this, why?” she asked.

“Some of the Edgelake music students play here to log practice hours. We have a recital festival at the end of the semester.”

She watched me, curiously.

“It’s studying music at its best,” she said.

I nodded. “I’m pretty sure Bach and Beethoven are the reason I’m making it through school.”

“Why don’t you study at McClain’s,” she asked, like I had stumbled into her territory and she was defending it.

I shook my head. “I can’t study at McClain’s. Too many distractions.” One distraction in particular. A distraction dressed in spandex shorts with legs that reached up to the ceiling. Bryn DeNeuville’s name bounced around the football locker room like a relentless echo. I hadn’t met her yet. We made eye contact once, briefly at the stadium, but she bolted for the weight room before I could introduce myself.

CeCe took a sip of her drink and nodded. “The overhead music they play is painful,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows in mocked surprise. “You mean you don’t enjoy the 50,000 different classical renditions of Billy Joel?”

CeCe belted out a laugh and a few people sitting in our proximity turned around to stare.

“You should try the Memorial Library,” she said. “It’s famous for its ‘stacks.’”

“As in their wide selection?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“As in their well-endowed librarians?”

She smiled. “Ha. No. They have these old metal cages that students can lock themselves in all day.”

“What? Why?” I asked.

“To force themselves to study.”

“That sounds morbid,” I said.

CeCe nodded in agreement. “There is something morbidly romantic about it. I wouldn’t mind being caged in with all my books and my music. If I died, at least I’d be surrounded by the things I love.”

She opened an organic chemistry binder and I studied her, bent over the binder, her hair spilling over the handouts and falling across the paper like music notes.

…

CeCe

Emmett’s comments from the coffee shop came back to me and left an involuntary smile on my face while I walked to practice. I hardly got any studying accomplished. With Emmett sitting right next to me, his hands merely inches away, and the music igniting the air around us like an electric charge, concentrating on organic chemistry was an impossible feat.

I hadn’t really minded the distraction. Usually guys didn’t just invite themselves to sit down at my table and stay all evening long. It would look like we were on a date and most guys, in my experience, couldn’t stomach that kind of public display of affection.

I had spent most of my time glancing at his sheet music, scribbled messily with notes, some crossed out, others underlined. I was fascinated by its secret language. I wanted to ask him to translate the notes into words.

My phone buzzed and when I looked at the screen a tinge of panic balled up in my stomach, like a tightening fist. My dad always checked in after volleyball games. It was our routine to discuss game highlights. But when he called out of the blue, it was usually about one thing.

“Dad?” I answered.

“Hey, CeCe.” I tried to read his voice for signs of distress, but then I reminded myself it was Dad. His emotions fluctuated between two levels: positive and mindful. The Buddha would be impressed.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“I’m taking a few days off of work. Your mom and I are headed to Duluth.”

I saw red flags in my head. It was still tourist season. My dad wouldn’t miss an opportunity for a charter fishing trip, a business he started fifteen years ago in Northern Wisconsin. My mom rarely drove more than thirty miles from home, and Duluth was across the state line, in Northern Minnesota. This wasn’t a vacation.

“What happened to mom?”

“She’s fine. You know your mom.”

No, I thought. I really don’t.

“She tends to overdo things,” he said. This much I could agree on. After the car accident, doctors were skeptical she would walk again, with broken bones in her back and leg. Between my mom’s surgeries and my treatments, we had to borrow money from friends and family and our church to get by. When I was in middle school, my mom worked two jobs so my parents could pay for club sports, school tutors, and extracurriculars. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate it. But, it also burdened me with the pressure to never let them down.

Edmonds didn’t complain. They persevered.

We didn’t talk about the accident. We overcame it.

“Her back has been bothering her again,” my dad said. “We’re meeting with a specialist. I’m sure the doctor’s advice is going to be to take it easy.” He laughed, trying to make light of it. Sometimes my dad’s eternal optimism was like emotional armor. I was never quite sure what his thoughts looked like underneath, if he was a little more bruised than he let on.

I smirked into the phone. We both knew that relaxing was my mom’s arch enemy.

“I wanted you to know we’ll be gone a few days, in case anything comes up.” His voice picked up speed. “I’ve gotta go. You don’t have to mention this to your mom. She doesn’t like to make things all about her.”

We tiptoed around what he really meant. Edmonds didn’t show weakness.

“I’ll talk to you soon,” I said. “Drive safe.”

I hung up the phone and slid it in my pocket. I wasn’t happy with the way my relationship with Mom had deteriorated over the years. She was there for me, in a sense, the way a rock is there and will never budge from its grounded place. But we couldn’t sit down and have hour-long conversations. I couldn’t pour out my heart to her. We didn’t cry together, but we rarely laughed.

Watching my family drift apart made my world feel as unstable as if the ground was shifting under my feet. I had just gotten used to ignoring the tremors.

...

In the weight room, I scrolled through my playlists, looking for warm-up music. I pressed play on the iPod dock and “One Way Trigger” by The Strokes flooded through the room. Lately, I always had this song on repeat. The indecipherable lyrics could mean anything, or could just blend into the background like a synthesized instrument. The tempo and energy changed without a warning. It had surprising, unexpected turns. So true to life.

I opened up my weight lifting file and sat down on the black vinyl bench cushion that lined the walls of the weight room. I scanned the spreadsheet for my daily workout plan. We each had our own lifting schedule and weekly goals, based on our height, weight, and BMI. I looked over the chart as other players trickled in.

Bryn walked over to the stereo.

“What is this?” she asked me over her shoulder. She laughed and tried to dance to the unorthodox rhythm. It wasn’t a typical dance song, more like a song you needed to savor, slowly, beat by beat. I caught movement behind me and I noticed Emmett pass by the glass partition outside the weight room. He stopped when he saw Bryn, taking in her long mane of wild hair that swept the air to her movements. His foot hesitated, half in and half out of the door. Bryn didn’t notice him. Her back was turned to the door while she danced. He looked between her and the stereo. In that brief moment, it was clear the pull she had on him. I leaned back and imagined what it would be like to have someone look at me that way, like shooting sparks followed my movements.

After he walked away, Bryn headed over to the iPod dock and turned off the song.

“Ech. Let’s put in something I can actually dance to,” she said, looking over her shoulder at me. “Do you have any Katy Perry?”

I looked up at Bryn. She failed a very important test. I avoided judging people externally, for obvious reasons, so I had devised my own system that had been proven accurate over the years. I judged people based on three important tastes: music, movies, and books. I had cultivated lifelong friendships based on a simple connection to a favorite band, a favorite scene in a movie, or a character in a book. Friendships had severed and fizzled that lacked these crucial similarities. Synchronicity is a powerful bond.

After lifting weights and having to endure an hour of Katy Perry, I needed some serious R&R. I headed into the locker room, grabbed my backpack, and pulled out a copy of Sandman. I ran my hands over the glossy cover. The comic series had become my latest walking material.

In some cities it was illegal to text while crossing the street—or even while walking down the sidewalk. I couldn’t imagine my habit of reading books while walking was any safer with my attention in my characters’ world, spying on their movements and listening in on their conversations. I had fallen off the curb more times than I could count and had collided with street signs, fire hydrants, and the mutually distracted pedestrian. Still, the mishaps hadn’t stopped my habit. The benefit outweighed the risk.

I didn’t read to escape. I didn’t even read to be entertained. It was more elemental, more essential than that. I read because imagination was the only thing that elevated me beyond my own reality. To look at my world as my only plane of existence was so limiting, and a little depressing. I needed the boundless worlds I found in good fiction. I could stare at the characters and obsess over them. But they couldn’t stare back. They couldn’t ask me any questions, or know me. They couldn’t ever love me but they couldn’t judge or reject me, either. They couldn’t react to me. It was kind of like stalking, but a character in a novel can’t get a restraining order.

Bryn walked out of the locker room a few steps behind me. We turned down the maze of cinderblock hallways that combined the locker rooms, weight rooms, and training offices. When we turned the corner, we spotted Emmett with a couple of ropy armed football players walking toward us, helmets in hands. Their eyes traced Bryn as if she was a dessert cart. When they met my eyes, they lifted their chins in acknowledgement. That was possibly the one nice thing about having my face. I didn’t get the ogling. A guy would have to look at me too long for his own comfort.

My stomach knotted when I saw Emmett and I pressed my hand over my abdomen, embarrassed, as if he could see my muscles contract. But he didn’t notice. He was too busy drinking in Bryn, as if he could touch her with his gaze.

…

Emmett

I sucked in a breath and held it. From a distance, Bryn’s beauty had been obvious and notorious. But up close she was even more stunning. I had to make an effort not to lean closer to her, just like you would lean close to examine a painting or photograph—something that stops and catches you because you feel a pull, a desire to know more, to admire it, to savor it.

Bryn turned and subjected me to the full force of her smile. I looked at the outline of her heart-shaped lips. Oh my God, I was staring. In one look I was caught. One second, that’s all it can take for the axis of your life to shift. My heart was flailing like a fish on a hook, caught between a fight for freedom and an inevitable surrender.

There was more than a physical connection happening. It was an energy, an aura, like she dipped the molecules of oxygen in the air around us in an addictive stimulant.

And that’s when I noticed CeCe standing next to Bryn, watching us watch each other. Her lips curled up in a knowing smile and it made me realize how hard I was staring. Aaron and Scott continued past us. Scott gave my back an encouraging nudge. The concrete corridor echoed their footsteps, lapping away.

A few seconds ticked by and it occurred to me no one was talking. CeCe poked Bryn’s side and it made her jump. She giggled, a nervous giggle. The noise surprised me since she seemed too stoic, too confident in her poise, too suggestive in the way she stood with her breasts and hips aimed in my direction to be something as uncanny as nervous.

“I’m Emmett,” I said to Bryn.

“I know,” she said. I waited for something more, but her eyes were pulled down to the ground. Her teeth tugged at her bottom lip.

“Are you guys eating at McClain tonight?” I asked. I looked directly at Bryn.

She glanced sideways at me and her eyelashes swept over the glint of her blue eyes. That look killed me. I knew I would be fantasizing over that teasing glance for weeks. She looked over at CeCe. “Are you going to be there?” she asked.

CeCe patted the comic book pressed against her chest. “I can’t tonight,” she said. “I have a date with Neil Gaiman. He’s my boyfriend, these days.”

I glanced at the cover of Sandman. I had read the entire series my freshman year. I got heckled for it on the bus, when all the other guys preferred to Snapchat with their girlfriends.

“CeCe, you have a boyfriend?” Bryn said in an unbelieving voice. “Since when?”

CeCe looked up at the ceiling as if she was contemplating this question. “Neil and I have been involved off and on for years, when I can make time for him. He’s very accommodating to my schedule.”

“That name sounds familiar,” Bryn said. “How do I know him?”

CeCe drummed the cover of her book, hinting.

“I hear he’s into comic books,” I helped.

“How is that supposed to help me?” Bryn said. “Is he on the basketball team?” she asked, and we both shook our heads. “Soccer?”

CeCe stared helplessly at Bryn.

“You don’t know who Neil Gaiman is?” I asked Bryn.

She lifted her shoulder with a seductive roll. My eyes were temporarily distracted, lingering on the curve of her neck, the swanlike slope of her shoulder. “This is a big campus and I’m new. I don’t know everyone.”

CeCe gave her a pained look.

“What? What’s the big deal?” Bryn asked.

“He’s just this really famous author,” I said.

Bryn blinked at CeCe. “You’re dating a really famous author?”

I laughed and CeCe stepped around us.

“I better get going,” she said. “I don’t want to keep Neil waiting. Have fun at the study tables,” she said over her shoulder as she headed through the tunnel.

“Wait,” Bryn said after her, her voice panicked. “I’m going to get lost in here without you.”

CeCe looked back at us over her shoulder.

“Just avoid the morgue in the basement—it’s haunted,” she said. “And watch out for the trolls that live in the walls, oh, and the Minotaur, but you’ll hear him before you see him.”

“See you later, CeCe,” I shouted after her. Her face looked a little put-off by my smile before she turned away.

Her footsteps echoed down the tunnel until they disappeared. I looked back at Bryn. Her eyes were downcast, focusing on her tennis shoes.

“Well, I have class. So…” She turned and started to walk toward the red exit sign.

Before I knew what I was doing, I fell into step next to her. I couldn’t pull myself away. My steps matched her long strides. I took in her profile, the soft slope of her nose. The pale pink outline of her lips. Her perfect lips.

She glanced at me with surprise and her feet faltered.

“Oh. You’re headed this way?” she asked. “I thought you had practice?”

“I’m off,” I said, hinting. I was about to offer to walk her to class. Was that old fashioned? Creepy? Lame? What if I asked her out right now? Desperate, or romantic? God, I needed to get a grip. This girl was making my head spin.

“Oh.” Her eyes widened. Her teeth tugged at her bottom lip. “Well, actually, I forgot, I have to talk to Coach. About. Something. He’s waiting.”

She flipped her purple tote bag around and opened the front flap. She pulled out a pen and grabbed my hand. She was writing something, scribbling quickly. I wasn’t looking at the writing—I was concentrating on her long, sinewy fingers. My skin heated up under her touch and I had to fight the urge to pull her fingers back when they slipped away.

“Message me,” she said.

She bolted into the locker room, and I watched her disappear behind the door. It shut with an echoing slam. I looked around the empty hallway and stared down at my hand, mesmerized by the ten digits splayed there in large, loopy writing. I tucked my fingers around the numbers and squeezed. The hook went deeper.