Page 17 of Try Me

And yet, here was my chance. It was such an easy fucking opening. I doubted it’d get him out of my life forever, but I wouldn’t have to stumble upon him walking around campus with those sharp, glinting smiles that were so adept at piercing me.

I stared at the phone, images from the other night whirling behind my eyelids in vivid detail. Heat rose to my cheeks with the memory of how I’d puked in the bushes. Classy. There was no denying thatnotseeing Chet around on campus would make things hella easier in my own life.

But apparently I hadn’t graduated to that level of assholery yet, because I just fucking couldn’t. Despite my weird mix of angst and frustration where Chet Pynchon was concerned, he’d already had too much taken away from him.

“I have no idea, sir, just some random guy I ran into on my way home from a party.” God, was he even going to swallow one line of that? His expression gave nothing away.

Nomes stared at me for a long handful of seconds before asking, “Who started the fight?”

“It wasn’t a—” I started, then stopped and reconsidered. “I did. I was running my mouth. Drunk, like I told you.” At least that part was mostly true. I’d started the whole thing back at Nate’s place, after all. So fucking stupid.

Nomes went quiet again, then huffed out a breath, his mouth pulling down in dissatisfaction. “Don’t let it happen again.”

“I won’t, sir.” When he pushed my phone across the desk, I took it with a grateful smile and tucked it into my back pocket.

I blazed across the campus and slammed through the front door of the house, in dire need of an outlet. I was pissed at myself, pissed at Nomes, and pissed at Chet.

I found Sam slumped on the couch with a bag of Funyuns open in his lap.

“Jesus, dude.”

He laughed at the face I made. “What? I take vegging seriously. Funyuns are gold standard hangover food.”

“God, that’s nasty. Get your ass up and let’s go to the gym.” Sam had taken Nate’s place in our house, transferring from the frat house because he said he had no self-control where partying was concerned and figured if he was out of sight of temptation, all the better. Judging by the way he was sprawled on the couch, I wasn’t sure his plan was working.

He protested with a groan but rolled up the bag and dropped it on the table, then dusted off his shirt. “Damn, that dude got you pretty good,” he said, eyeing my jaw. “I tried to give you a clean line, but fucking Eric—I swear, Nate’s a different dude now that he’s with him. I dunno.”

“I know. It’s fine. I was being a dumbass anyway.”

“He say something to you or what? We could pay him a solo visit.”

I chuckled in spite of myself. “What, like the frat mafia?”

Sam grinned and shrugged. “I’m just saying if that dude was messing with you, we’ve got your back.”

Sam meant well. He really wasn’t a fighter, just protective. And huge, which automatically intimidated most folks. But I knew better. The guy had once passed out in an empty bathtub at the frat house—nota place in the house you wanted to pass out—and when I’d gone to try to retrieve him, he’d pulled me in and wrapped his arms around me, saying he missed snuggling. We’d laughed our asses off about it the next day. He was loyal to a fault, and one of my closest friends next to Nate, who was more or less MIA now that Eric was in the picture. Most of the time I was able to convince myself I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t even know what the fuck it meant that I was jealous in the first place. It wasn’t like I wanted Eric. Or Nate.

Lonely. The word scratched its nails over the back of my mind, but I squashed the prickling sensation as Sam spoke again. “Lemme change my clothes and I’m down.”

I peeled my shirt off as I stopped in the kitchen for a Gatorade, then headed down the hall to change, too. An hour of mindless sweating would work out the mental kinks.

At least that was what I told myself.

7

Chet

By the time I dropped Carrie off, I had fifteen minutes to get downtown, find a spot in one of the public parking lots, and make it to the tenth floor of Preston, Beasley, and Waring for orientation. Probably they wouldn’t start on time, I tried to console myself. Lawyers were notorious for dragging things out. I’d witnessed it over and over during my dad’s trial.

But still.

I gunned my old Volvo down side streets, weaving through a maze I knew like the back of my hand. It’d have been a smoother ride in my Charger, and I felt a brief pang of longing. Not just for the car, which I’d fucking loved and babied above all else, but for the months and days that had preceded almost every fucking thing I’d owned getting carted off by men in jackets with letters on the backs I’d only ever seen in the movies.

A bitter taste filled the back of my throat as I caught sight of the grease stains under my nails. I brushed it off. Fuck it, no more pity parties. I’d already been through the worst, now I just had to keep moving forward—and all that happy unitarian bullshit the volunteer counselor my mom had dragged us to had told me.

But sometimes I wondered if happiness was recapturable, if it was fluid or if it was more solid state. Something you either had or didn’t, something that could be yanked away. That same counselor would’ve said it lived in us, I was sure, that we were each responsible for our own well-being. I wondered if he’d ever had everything he knew taken away, though, whether he’d ever felt like he was constantly trying to dig himself out of a hole someone else had dropped him into. And sometimes I wondered if I’d really been happy before, or if it was purely some comparative phenomenon based on what happened after my father’s arrest that made it seem that way.

Or maybe I’d just smoked too much weed in the past and none of this fucking mattered.