I give him the finger.
He gives me two—placed over his mouth with his tongue wiggling between them.
Good ol’ Brant.
It isn’t until Monday after my acting class that I run into Victoria and Chloe in the lobby. Chloe’s face is a mess of black ink running from her eyes to her chin. Victoria sits next to her with a consoling hand on her back, and the moment she sees me, her eyes turn dark.
I come up to the pair of them, undaunted by Victoria’s coldness. “Chloe?”
Chloe gives one short look at me, then sniffles. “That fucker.”
“What fucker?” I prompt her.
Victoria sighs, long and dramatically, then says, “Can you give us space, Desdemona? Chloe’s having troubles and her friend here is trying to console her.” She rubs Chloe’s back in little circles with one hand, clenching her thigh with the other.
I ignore Victoria’s snark. “What happened?” I ask Chloe gently, crouching down by her side.
“That male slut,” she spits out, sniffling. “Ugh. I’m such a stupid mess. I never get this way over a boy. I am such an idiot.”
“No, you’re not,” murmurs Victoria, rubbing her back with mounting zest, as if she were trying to scrub the glass off of a window. “You’re smart and you’re full of love. That ass is just a good-for-nothing womanizer.”
“Brant?” I say suddenly. “Are we talking about—?”
“Don’t fucking say his name,” groans Chloe. She practically snarls, her teeth bared. “I could kill him. He doesn’t have any feelings. He just uses girls like, like, like, like rags and … and then he just …”
“We don’t have to rehash it all,” murmurs Victoria soothingly, and I get the impression that what she really means is: Don’t bother letting Dessie into any of this. I’m your real friend. I’m here. Dessie is a bitch.
I sigh. “I’m so sorry, Chloe.”
“None of them are any good,” Chloe spits back, her eyes sharp as needles. “Those boys all deserve each other, those woman-using chauvinists.”
Is she talking about Clayton now, too? “Wait a minute,” I start.
“I warned you,” Chloe goes on, looking up at me with those two wet paths of darkness down her face. “I said you should stay away from him. None of them are any good. They’re a pack of pricks and always were.”
“Chloe,” I press on, getting annoyed.
“He’s going to fuck you over, too. They’re best friends, two peanuts in a shell. When he’s bored of you, he’ll dump your ass—”
“Chloe!”
“And he and Brant will laugh about you,” she goes on, “and share stories about you behind your back. You’ll just be another dent on the headboard. Wait for it.”
“You don’t know a damn thing about Clayton at all,” I shout at her, furious.
Something is being rehearsed at the other end of the lobby—six freshmen working on a group project—and they go silent at my outburst. Chloe glares at me from her seat and Victoria, all too ready for another excuse to hate me, just looks up at me with a pained sort of put-on sympathetic expression.
“I think you should go,” Victoria quietly suggests.
“I think I will,” I respond just as stingingly.
The glass doors shut softly at my back, despite my effort to slam them. I feel everyone’s eyes staring at me through the windows as I pass through the courtyard. If I’m honest, Chloe and I weren’t really super close to begin with, but I could not just stand by while she poured all her resentment on both Clayton and Brant. I mean, sure, Brant’s a total player; I called it the moment I met him at the bowling alley. But if she’s mad at him, why did she have to bring up Clayton and pull him into the mix? They might be best friends, but they’re nothing alike.
Still, even just thinking that, a seed of doubt has planted itself in my already unrested stomach.
It isn’t until I get back to my dorm that I take a glance at the calendar and realize opening night is this Friday.
Of course I knew already, but the days still somehow snuck up on me. I knew it was coming for weeks, but seeing it in black and white makes it a reality.
Too much of a reality.
I throw myself into the bathroom just in time to cling to the rim of the toilet, then proceed to ungently turn myself inside-out.
Kellen Michael Wright says some scholarly know-it-all bullshit to me in the lighting booth when we’re alone. I nod, pretending I heard him.
I didn’t hear a fucking word.
People don’t realize how much we speak with our bodies. You don’t need lips or words to communicate. The flick of an eye says so much more. The tensing of the shoulders. The bend of a back.