In.
The locker-room door creaked on its hinges as Noah pushed his way in.
“Already done for the morning?” I asked in surprise.
“Just wanted to put my two cents in,” Noah said.
“How so?”
“Figure you’re trying to set up some fight this week because this morning’s rounds were so disappointing.”
I just shrugged in return. I wasn’t exaggerating about Noah’s familiarity with my behavior. More than a decade of friendship and four years of military service deployed together to Afghanistan made us tighter than an ass in spandex.
“Look, I don’t want to be the heavy, but one of these days you’re going to come out of these fights a vegetable.”
I scratched the back of my neck and took a deep breath to gather some patience. I didn’t want to say something that would end up pissing us both off. “Okay, Grandma. You’re one to talk.”
“It’s sort of a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ type of lecture,” he admitted sheepishly.
“You have other suggestions?”
“Not really. Just be careful. I think the crew back in San Diego would spit on your hospital bed if you ended up in a coma after you’d come back hale and hearty from deployment.”
He wasn’t wrong. No one liked to hear the news about a brother who survived the war only to come home and get fucked up in some random accident. It seemed pointless, a total waste of a good man, but I wouldn’t ever put myself in the “good man” category. “Yeah, got it.”
I stood and pulled the rest of my clothes from the locker. Jeans, ratty T-shirt, boots, and a heavy winter coat that weighed about ten pounds. I hated the cold. As I threw my clothes on the bench, the clink of metal sounded loud against the concrete floor.
Noah walked over and picked up the heavy coin that had fallen. “What do you think this guy would say about your fighting?”
The heavy coin with the emblem of the Medal of Honor stared up at me, almost as if it looked disappointed. Do the Corps proud, both in uniform and out.
I rubbed both hands over my face. “You’re a dirty fighter, Noah Jackson.” I snatched the coin from his hand and curled my fist around it until the rope-finished edges bit into my skin.
His response was to wrap his hand around my shoulder and squeeze it tight. “Semper Fi, brother.”
AM
YOU’RE GOING TO REGRET NOT being in biology with me, I texted Ellie Martin, my best friend since kindergarten and now college roommate. We were taking the dreaded science elective that every other student took their freshman year, but Ellie and I’d managed to duck the requirement until our second year. Our advisor, Dr. Highsmith, told us to get it over with or he would drop us. I thought it was an empty threat, but we both loved him as our academic advisor—hideous sweaters, tendency to spit, and all. Dr. Highsmith was considered one of the foremost economic thinkers in the country, and his chair was endowed by some bigwig alum who credited his post-college success to theories that Dr. Highsmith taught. I planned to be the CEO of my own insurance company someday and endow my own chair. The AM West Chair of Economics. That had a nice ring to it.
You’ll be the one with regrets when you have nightmares about flying monkeys.
Ellie had been afraid of tornadoes since she watched The Wizard of Oz when we were seven. She’d heard from someone that they watched storm chaser footage during biology class and she changed her science elective that same day. No amount of arguing with her about how biology had nothing to do with the weather could convince her otherwise, which was why I was walking into class by myself. I sent her a picture of the flying monkeys that I’d saved to my phone this morning for just such an occasion, grinning at her immediate curse in response. Getting the finger through text just has no power.
“You’re gonna run into that stage.”
My texting conversation with Ellie came to a halt at the softly drawled warning. About five inches from my shin was the front of the lecture stage in my Biology 101 class. The warning had saved me from sure embarrassment, but my cheeks heated anyway as I turned to see the person behind the voice. I’d an idea who it was, but I was two parts dismayed and two parts enthralled by the sight of him. Bo Randolph.
I knew of Beauregard Randolph. Everyone at Central did. Central College was one of the best liberal arts colleges in the nation, nestled in an urban area in the Midwest, but it was smaller than some city high schools. Gossip whispered at the start of morning classes at one end of campus was heard at the other by noon in the cafeteria. Or some version of the gossip, anyway.
I’d never envisioned attending any other college than Central, but one drunken party later and I wished for the anonymity of those public universities and their enormous student populations. So while I’d heard many rumors about Bo, I didn’t know how many of them were true. The rumors about me—that I was a slutty girl who’d banged the entire lacrosse team—had only a grain of truth. I’d given up my virginity after one fraternity party to some lacrosse player, who then bragged about it to his teammates.