Unspoken(26)

Never once did he bring up the commons incident and other than his watchfulness before, during, and after class, his treatment of me was quite ordinary. Whatever rumors he’d heard about me, he seemed to be saying silently, mattered not at all.

I could feel myself thawing toward him, yearning for him. I knew it was dangerous, but I needed something sweet in my life. If I didn’t act on my longings then I’d be safe. When he turned to share a smile at me over the nonstop innuendos during the discussion of fertilization and pollination, I felt hot and prickly. During the discussion of common parasites, we both grimaced. Bo whispered that there wasn’t a lot that put him off his feed, but tapeworms in the stomach might be it. He was charming and decent, and I could feel myself weakening with every minute that passed. But he also didn’t flirt with me, smell my hair, or make a suggestive comment, as he had in the past. More than once, I caught him staring hard at the lecture stage as if he were engaged in some internal struggle.

At the end of the week, Ellie met me for lunch at our usual place off campus with breathless news. “You want to see Bo fight?”

My eyes must have gotten as big as saucers because Ellie laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

As we stood in line to order, Ellie whispered the details to me. “I heard there’s a fight tonight in the warehouse district. Someone is supposed to text me directions.”

“Do you have to pay to get in?”

“When Tim and I went, the cover was twenty-five dollars per person and then there are bets made inside. I didn’t bet, but Tim did.”

I whistled. “Wow. That seems steep. No one complains?”

“Not yet, I guess. Who wants to be the person that shuts something like this down? It would be worse than your ordeal.”

“Worse than me?” I grimaced. “Thanks.”

“You know what I mean.” She lightly punched me on the shoulder. I did. No one welcomed that type of treatment. The guys on campus would be particularly rough. I think fight night was responsible for at least fifty percent of them getting laid.

“So I take it Bo said nothing about it in class yesterday?”

“No. We haven’t really talked about anything other than class stuff lately.”

“Like?”

“What’s more gross—tapeworms in the stomach or parasites in the ear?”

Ellie shuddered. “So glad I took Rocks for Jocks.”

“Yeah, that might have been a good decision.”

“So you and Bo, in class?”

“There just isn’t a ton of time to talk. Plus, he’s got more moods than a preteen who just got her period.”

“Really? I would never have guessed that.”

“I’ve decided that flirtatious is Bo’s default mode and his other setting is broody.”

“Still want to go?”

“Hell yeah.” When I was a kid, I’d asked my mom why the moths kept moving in droves toward the light, almost hugging the exterior despite witnessing the death of their fellow insects. Mom said that sometimes temptation was just too great to resist. Zzzzap. That was me. Bo was the light and I was the dumb moth.

Ellie was prattling about the details of the fight she’d gone to with Tim. We had to stick together, she said, because mini fights could break out in the crowd.

“Do you bring something to drink?”

“They don’t sell it, and Tim brought a flask when we went. No one’s doing a bag check there.”




I’M NOT SURE HOW BO SPOTTED Ellie and me in the crowd. People were packed into the space. I had a hard time believing something this well attended could remain a secret, but we were told nothing illegal was going on here. This was private property, and we were all invited to the party. The cover was actually a donation, per the bouncer’s instructions.

A stamp in the form of a clenched fist was slapped on the backs of our hands, but we were warned that if we left, we would have to repay the money if we wanted to come back inside. The point of the stamp was never explained, but I wasn’t going to ask anyone with arms the size of my thighs and no apparent neck why I needed a mark on my hand.

The fight was being held in the basement of a restaurant in the East Village. The owner was a friend of the guy who set up the fight and more than one underground shindig took place here, although never more than once in a month or even once every six months. The fights required some luck and coordination. Or at least that was what I gleaned from listening to the crowd around me.

I didn’t know when Bo was fighting or even if he was fighting. It was only rumor. Even tonight, inside the building, there were just hopeful mutterings. But rumor became reality when he walked in and his name was carried on a wave of whispers from one end of the long narrow room to the other. I saw him almost immediately, the bangs of his messy blond hair peeking out from the front of his sweatshirt hood. The basement was lit by a string of bare lightbulbs strung like hormonally enhanced Christmas lights along the sides of the rock walls. Toward one end, a number of what looked like halogen lights hung from the ceiling, brightly illuminating a single space. That must be the fight ring.