Beneath The Skin (A College Obsession Romance) (66 page)

On the last note of my song, my phone, quiet as a fly, buzzes.

CLAYTON

I stare at the text I just sent her.

My insides shiver. Every nerve in my body is all knotted up and shit.

Brant and Dmitri play Xbox on either side of me, sandwiching me on our couch, and I feel every shift and jerk and annoying jump of their bodies.

I take another long swig from my beer, then stare at the phone intently, desperate for a response.

Dmitri taps my arm and I ignore him. He tries to get his hands in my face, signing:
You want to take a turn? I need a break.
But the last thing I feel like doing is playing more Xbox against Brant; he’s a fucking prodigy at gaming and no one ever stands a chance.

Sunday was such a mess. Monday was no better. I knew I shouldn’t have let a girl do this to me. How many times did I warn myself?

That’s my best and worst quality: I never learn.

But Brant and Dmitri kept pushing me at her, as if they know what’s best for me. If they knew anything at all, they’d mind their own fucking business and let me suffer in peace.

I decide to text her again. I’ll text her until I get a damn response.

Over the course of the next hour, Brant goes off to bowl, which I learn through a few rushed signs from Dmitri after he gives up playing Xbox and tells me he has a short story due tomorrow that he needs to finish, then closes himself off in his room to jerk off; even without ears, I know what the fuck he’s really doing in there.

Or maybe I don’t know anything. Maybe I made a huge mistake by blowing Dessie off.

But when I woke up Sunday, reality had sat on my chest and made me its bitch. It wasn’t just the mild sting of a hangover; it was the feeling like I’d just woken up from an amazing dream that I couldn’t climb back into. I felt frustrated, lost, and obsessed.

I still feel frustrated, lost, and obsessed.

Suddenly I’m seventeen again and being laughed at by Lacy Torrington in the cafeteria when I tried to ask her to the homecoming dance. The dude she went with, some wrestling captain dickhead named Jerry, confronted me in the hall after fifth period. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but judging from the laughing faces that surrounded me in the hallway, he wasn’t complimenting my shoes. The confrontation ended with a coach pulling me off of Jerry’s bloodied, sputtering face. The hall wasn’t laughing anymore.

The interpreter in the principal’s office gave me all of Principal Harris’s words in a bunch of hand-shapes and finger wiggles that my parents were hearing. He tells my parents that I have an anger problem and they should consider routine counseling for me. I watch as the interpreter gives me my parents’ reply, my mom groaning about how the fuck they’re going to pay for something like that, and my dad pointing a finger at the principal, asking him what the hell he plans to do about Jerry and the other assholes who pick on his disabled son for being hard of hearing.

No matter how many times I tell my dad that “hard of hearing” isn’t the correct term and that I am, in fact, completely fucking deaf, he never learns.

But maybe that’s where I get it from. I never learn. My dad’s fucked enough random women during his marriage to give me seven hundred siblings. Every time he’d get caught in public going somewhere weird or playing peeping-tom at the pool or doing fuck-knows out in the city until three in the morning, he’d come home and give my mom the same remorseful rhetoric he’d given her since I was ten, and I’d be standing in my little Spiderman PJs in the hallway when they thought I was asleep, hearing every damn word.

He never learns. I never learn.

The next week, I was snuck up on by some idiot I didn’t even know during gym class who thought he’d make a joke out of me. I made a funnier one out of him when I slammed his face into the locker.

I clench shut my eyes, remembering the dazed, glassy look in his eyes when metal met skull.

I was not a monster. I felt remorse. I felt the pain of every fucker I beat up. I felt their pain because I could feel a little bit of my own leaving me with every swing, kick, and bloody nose. Still, no matter how many dumb kids I beat up, no matter if it was them provoking me or vice versa, the pain never went away.

Why is he so angry?
This was the lovely question the principal had for my mom and dad.
We need to get to the bottom of this. Clayton’s been suspended twice. I really don’t want to expel him.

The interpreter, some twenty-something college babe, looked sadder and sadder each time we had one of these meetings. She shifted so much in her seat. I would stare at her moving hands, watching her sharp green eyes, watching her cross and uncross those long, slender legs of hers.

Do you have anything to say for yourself?
I watch the interpreter’s smooth fingers, signing for the principal.

In response, I signed to her:
Want to fuck in the supply closet after this shit is over?

She swallowed hard, slowly faced Principal Harris, then said:
“He says he’s very sorry.”

An hour later, I showed the interpreter just how sorry I was by ramming her against a rack of shrink-wrapped sponges, scouring rags, and mop-heads, my jeans at my ankles and her skirt hiked halfway up her shuddering, porcelain back.

I am my father’s son.

Out of nowhere, Brant comes around the couch, the sight of him pulling me mercifully out of Yellow Mills High. I look up at him, confused.
“Forgot my lucky glove
,” he mouths, swiping it off the coffee table. He freezes, noting the expression on my face, if I had to guess.
“You alright?”
he asks, his brow furrowing.

I shake my head no.

Brant abandons his lucky bowling glove like it means nothing to him, plopping down on the couch.
“What’s going on?”
he asks.

“Dessie,” I mumble.

He swipes my phone away and types:

Didn’t you bang her

the other night?

I snort and grab my phone back, then shake my head no. “We talked,” I mumble sourly. “It was good.”

“Good??”
he asks, not caring to mask his disbelief.

To him, a night of sitting on the couch with a hot girl like Dessie and just …
talking
… is probably the most boring thing he’s ever heard.

“I’m tired of …” I start to say, then swallow my words. Something about remembering all the kids I’ve beaten up, all the girls I’ve dicked around with, all the mistakes of my parents I’ve blindly—or perhaps even freely—repeated … I feel so shitty suddenly.

Brant waves his hand, urging me to go on, his bright blue eyes flashing at me with urgency.

I try again, but with a different tack. “That anger problem my dad says won’t go away. My inner demon. My bitterness. I’m so tired of using it to … to just keep all the … to keep girls away, or …”

Brant slaps a hand on my shoulder, which shuts me up. He leans in and says something I don’t catch.

So I ignore the words and push on. “But I’m afraid I can’t help it. I feel like I piss on everything I care about. And I barely know her. We just started getting to know each other, but I feel … I feel like …”

Brant moves his lips again.
“You’re talking a lot,”
I think he says.

I am. I meet Brant’s eyes, realizing that he’s one of the only things that kept me sane during all of my worst years. Between those visits to the principal’s office, there was Brant throwing his arm over my back. Brant, telling people to fuck off. Brant, my pair of ears when I had none. Brant snuck into my house while I was suspended, even skipping a day to spend it with me behind my parents’ backs. Brant may very well be the reason I’m still alive.

If I didn’t have him in my life …

“I want … I want to talk more,” I push out. “I have a … I have a fucking voice.”

“You have a fucking voice!”
he repeats back, a smile spreading across his face as he grips my shoulders and shakes me.

Dmitri pokes his head out of his room, shirtless and sweaty. He signs at me:
What the fuck about a voice?

“Nothing,” I say back to him, pushing the words out despite my discomfort. “Just that I have one.”

Dmitri squints, confused, then signs:
Oh.

I smirk. “You can go back to jerking off, Dmitri.”

He flips me the finger, then shuts his door.

Brant slaps my thigh, bringing my attention back, and he tells me I’m not going to hurt her. Or maybe he’s trying to convince me that I won’t.
“You don’t piss on everything you care about
,” he tells me, mouthing the words so distinctly, it looks like he’s shouting. Maybe he is.
“Now message her and go get some dinner!”

I shake my phone. “I did. She won’t answer.”

Brant pats my leg, then flips on the TV and grabs an Xbox controller. I stare at him quizzically. He lifts a brow at me when he notices.
“What?”

“Your bowling thing,” I mumble at him.

“Fuck it,”
he says, then adds something about the team being doomed because the lesbians are going through something and are gonna break up any day. Or maybe that’s not what he said at all. He shrugs, then mentions something about catching one of them giving him
“the eyes”
and how he’s pretty sure she goes both ways.
“And also, I want to be here for you when Dessie answers
,” he says, nudging my phone with his elbow. Then, he faces the TV and starts playing.

I grab the other controller. When Brant notices, a grin spreads across his face.

“Oh, it’s going down,”
he says, his teeth flashing.

CLAYTON

An email from Dr. Thwaite puts some extra speed to my getting-ready routine early Tuesday morning.

Mr. Kellen Michael Wright, our Official Lighting Designer Douchebag, has flown in early from the big apple to work with us here in the rotted grapefruit and he wants me to meet him at seven at the theater.

So fucking blessed.

And still not a peep from Dessie.

My eyes half-open, I pull a shirt over my head before I’m completely dried off from my shower, droplets of water wetting down the back in spots. I’m racing to get ready not so that I’m punctual for this Wright fucker, but because I need to do this right to impress Dr. Thwaite. It’s
his
opinion that matters to me, and being late receiving this lighting designer will reflect poorly on the whole department.

But most of all, me.

I push through the doors of the theater in record time, even before the box office has opened. No one’s in the main office except for Ramon who answers the phones, so I assume the big shot isn’t here yet. I make a trip to the bathroom to check myself in the mirror, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and fixing my hair. I haven’t been to the gym in almost a week and I can tell; I get so irritable so quickly when I don’t go. All that aggression doesn’t take long at all to build up inside me, and add to that the frustration of how I’m fucking things up so bad with Dessie, it’s a wonder I haven’t busted a vein in my forehead.