Slow Twitch - Реинхардт Лиз. Страница 15

  He didn’t look up from the screen of his computer as the soft lilac fabric puddled half over one of his knees and half on the floor. “Brenna sent me down the hall to check on you.”

  She clapped her hands to her chest and pulled the corners of her mouth down in a frown. “Y’all are the sweetest friends I ever had.” She dropped on her knees in front of Devon, leaned over his laptop screen and popped loud kisses all over his face while he tried to bat her away.

  “Stop! You are so fucking exhausting, Evan. Being with you is like having a pet monkey on speed.” He grabbed her face in his hands. “Stop. Stop right now. Tell me what you want, okay?”

  “I want…to dosomething!” She got up and sat next to me, swinging her arms around my shoulders in an easy hug. “Please help me help him before he has an aneurysm from staring at that damn screen all day.”

  I leaned my head on her shoulder and breathed in the clean, flowery smell of her. The smell of Evan was so different from Evan herself. She smelled light and freshly-scrubbed and delicately floral. She should have smelled like cotton candy, liquor, gasoline, and fire. “Did you finish your paper?” I asked her.

  She shook me back and forth until my brains felt blended. “How can I write a bildungsroman if I haven’t even fucking livedyet?”

  “I managed to write mine,” Devon said to his screen as his fingers clicked over the keys.

  Evan bounded across the bed and peeked over his shoulder. Her eyebrows knit and she moved her plush lips around like she was chewing on the flavor of certain words. After a few minutes, she put her hands up to rub her temples. “Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? Devon look up from that damn computer and tell me that this is a joke!”

  “This is an assignment,” he muttered stubbornly and turned the screen away from her even though she wasn’t looking anymore. “And it’s almost done.”

  “Almost done?” She grabbed a paperclip, a packet of sticky notes, a pen off my desk and tossed them at him in quick succession. “Almost done? You’re writing about the fucking birds? You’re writing about the ocean? You don’t give a single shit about birds or oceans!

  “So?” He did finally look up, and his hazel eyes were pink on either side from staring at the computer for so long. “I need to write this. I need to finish. Why go to all these classes for all these hours if you’re just going to blow off the final assignment?”

  “Blow it off?” Evan fell onto the bed and gave a long, exaggerated laugh. “You don’t think you’re, maybe, blowing it off in your own cowardly way by writing that inane crap?”

  “You don’t even have one word written yet,” he said in the long-suffering voice he’d honed around Evan.

  “And you have nothing but bullshit. That’s it. We’re going. Right now. Out! We’re going out to livefor a few hours. I promise I’ll get you back in time to write a new essay.” She pulled me by the hand, and I couldn’t help the laugh that burst out. She twirled me around and we were both laughing while Devon scowled.

  “I don’t need to write a new essay. Mine’s almost done.” He shut his laptop and placed it carefully on the desktop.

  Evan grabbed me around the waist and dipped me low. I looked at Devon from my upside-down vantage point while Evan shook her head. “Sorry, sweetie. I know you think I’m a world class slacker, but retiring to the ladies’ to chuck during Gorman’s lecture on Yeats is one thing. Turning in a steaming pile of turds like you’re about to? That’s a sad, sorry waste of intellect.” She righted me, kissed both my cheeks, and reached for Devon’s hand.

  “That essay is based on what we learned from reading all the greats of Irish literature. Oh, wait, you didn’t bother to read half of it, did you?” He curled his lip in her direction, and Evan’s happiness dropped like leaves drifting from an oak at the end of the autumn.

  It took her a long few seconds to string her words together. “I could recite Yeats in my sleep all night long, Devon.” Her voice was a mix of fist-hard and kiss-soft. “I’m telling you that your essay sucks because it sucks. You’re smart enough to know that imitating the greats doesn’t make you great. It just makes you a decent copycat.” She pressed her lips into a tiny hyphen. “Maybe you should listen to me sometime. You know how you got waitlisted?” He nodded, a quick jerk of his chin. “And most people applied?” I nodded, my breath held, waiting to hear what she’d say next. “Well, they sent me a letter of invitation, and it wasn’t because of my family’s shitty lace.”

  Devon’s eyes glinted with new respect, then he crossed his arms over his chest. “Why did you get an invitation?”

  She took a deep breath and pulled her hair over her shoulder, weaving a quick, distracted braid with her fingers. “You know how I drink?”

  He tapped his foot in an edgy, impatient rhythm. “Yep. Like a fish. You’re practically professional.”

  She shook her hair back out and her smile was like the first sip of icy lemonade on a dusty hot day. “I’m at least three times better at writing than I am at drinking.” She tugged at my hand. “Brenna? What say you?”

  “My essay is pure shit. I’m in.”

  She pulled me close and everything about her, her clean smell, her quick breathing, the cymbal crash of her heart, the energy that prickled off of her like live-wire electricity, everything made me feel like I had pure adrenaline running through my veins.

  “C’mon, Devon. Come with us.” I held my hand out.

  “Where?” he demanded, arms still crossed tight.

  “To make errors!” Evan’s laugh was inflating, and I suddenly knew exactly what it would feel like to be a balloon full of helium. “They are, after all, the portals of discovery.”

  “Joyce,” Devon griped following us as we tiptoed down the hall, past all the students bent over their laptops with their textbooks wide open in front of them. When we burst through the door and into the dimming late-afternoon sunshine, Evan gave a series of whoops and ran too fast on shoes that were basically begging fate to twist her ankle.

  She spun around in wide circles, arms flung out at her sides. “Devon! Don’t believe Joyce! Araby will be amazing when we get there! Mangan’s sister was worth the trip! Or, you know, Mangan himself, if you’d prefer.” She stopped spinning and stumbled towards him, grabbing his forearms, and laughed like a maniac. “We will find the bazaar and spend all our damn florins on gorgeous stuff, and we’ll give gifts to our sweethearts that will make them swoon, swoon with eternal love! What say you?”

  “I say you’d probably do really well in an insane asylum.” He tried to make the words hash out with clear aggravation, but he couldn’t disguise the blur of a smile.

  “Oh holy Jesus, he smiled. You saw it right, Brenna? Be careful, Captain Crabass. Didn’t your gramma tell you that your face will get stuck like that if the wind changes?” She tweaked his nose and he let out a long sigh.

  Evan pulled us into a dark, seedy pub and bought a round. She was always super generous with her money, and had insisted on buying us pretty much every meal we ate outside the cafeteria.

  We’d only had a few weeks together, but I felt like Evan was a missing piece to a puzzle I always thought was complete. She had been my constant confidante, along with Devon, and she’d crept into my room or I crept into hers every single night so we could stay up late and whisper about every detail of our lives, every hidden secret. Sometimes I fell asleep with her dark hair curled on my pillow, listening to her snores and dreaming about fields of violets and pansies and daisies with thorns like barbed wire.

  “Let’s truth toast,” Evan said as soon as the drinks got plunked on the greasy tabletop.

  “What’s that?” Devon asked with the careful reluctance he maintained like a shield around her.