Love and Other Theories (28 page)

But it’s too late.

His eyes are pleading with me, his hand is tight around mine, and I know he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know the core of the problem—the tipping point—the detonator that was activated the night Chiffon gave Ronnie Adams her phone number. He doesn’t know because I never told him.

Instead we all did whatever we wanted, and didn’t talk about what we were doing or not doing, because none of it was supposed to matter. We all kept secrets. If we didn’t acknowledge our feelings, we couldn’t be hurt by them. But they were there all along, buried and rooted and growing every minute. We never guessed what kind of feat it would be to keep them concealed, what an effort it would take to keep up the smoke and mirrors of our tricks.

We can’t ignore this. We can’t erase it or what it might mean. The theories are bullshit. They don’t keep us from
getting hurt. They deprive us of the right to our own feelings.

So I say something to Nathan that I should have said the second he started to move in on my best friend.

“Fuck you.”

He drops my hand, but as soon as I take a step back he grabs my wrist.

“You realize I don’t have any control here?” His grip tightens but I can still feel him trembling. “If the test is positive . . . it’s not going to be up to me—I won’t have a choice—”

I pull back at the word
choice
. I’m backing up and walking down the driveway, away from him.

“Aubrey—” He takes two steps toward me, and I bolt before he can tell me again that it might be nothing.

Choice
. I know it’s not the
choice
he’s referring to, but all I can think about is Nathan’s choice to have sex with Shelby, and Shelby’s choice to have sex with Nathan, and my choice to think it wouldn’t matter. I get in my car and slam the door, and drive as far away from him as I can.

I
drive and drive and drive and keep driving until I reach State. I haven’t been here since I was thirteen and came on a field trip to see the greenhouse.

I park my car in the first available spot I find and call Trip. He doesn’t answer, so I call him again.

“Yeah?” He answers on my third attempt.

“I’m at State. Where are you?”

“You’re
here
?”

“Where’s your dorm? What’s your room number?”

He gives it to me and I hang up before he can ask any more questions.

The trees at State are tall and old, and the walking
paths are worn and cracked from where the roots have broken the surface. Redbrick buildings, coffee carts. Students carrying books, lounging on the grass, throwing Frisbees. It looks just like a college campus. I don’t know why I’m surprised.

Finding Trip’s dorm is easy. The girl sitting at the front desk in the lobby doesn’t blink twice when I walk past. I ride the elevator up to the third floor. It creaks, but no one else panics so I decide this is probably status quo. Everything in Herbert Hall is worn. The tiles are faded, the walls are dull, the wood on the doors is no longer shiny. It even smells shabby. In a way this is comforting. It says people have been here before.

The door to room 358 is ajar. There’s low music coming from inside, and low laughter. Trip is sitting in his desk chair, tipping it back so it’s only on two of its legs. There’s a girl in a red tank top with strawberry-blond hair sitting on the plaid comforter on Trip’s bed.

“Hey, you found it.” Trip greets me, both his hands in the air. The girl smiles at him, then at me. “Aubrey, this is Jill.” Jill reaches out so I reach back. I let her shake my hand.

“So you’re the reason Trip leaves us every weekend.” She stops smiling for just a second to pout as she says the words
every weekend.

“She’s the reason Trip’s no longer on academic probation,” Trip says.

“But not the reason Trip is speaking in third person,” I blurt out.

Jill and Trip laugh. I want to laugh with them, but I can still feel the tightening in my chest, the dip in my stomach.

Trip motions for me to take his seat so I don’t have to stand awkwardly in the middle of the room, and he moves next to Jill onto the bed.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Trip says. Jill giggles at this and Trip smiles. It makes me want to scream.

“I was just bored.”

“Then I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place,” Jill says. “This one thinks sipping warm beer in the alley behind the student union qualifies as entertainment.” She points to Trip when she says this to me. In case I didn’t understand who she meant by “this one.” In case I didn’t already know what Trip finds, or doesn’t find, entertaining.

Jill is sitting closest to me so I lean forward to look at Trip. “I need to talk to you,” I say.

I hate Jill. I’m glad when she gets up to leave. She springs off the bed gracefully, and I hate her for that, too.

“I better get studying for chem.
Au revoir.
” She waves at Trip, smiles at me, and leaves.

Jill speaks French and is taking chemistry. She finds Trip
funny.
All signs indicate that Jill is a nice girl. A nice girl who can fill out a tank top. A nice girl with hair the
color most people have to steal from a bottle. I hate her even more.

“So . . .” Trip leans back on his palms, stretches his legs out. “
You
want to talk? You never want to talk, Housing.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

He raises his eyebrows in surprise. “Then what—” but that’s all he can get out. One swift motion off the chair, my hands clinging to his shoulders for balance, and kissing him is easy. Kissing Trip has always been easy.

And Trip kisses me back because kissing me isn’t easy, and he knows he should be glad for it. He loses his balance holding himself up, or he lets go all on his own, and we topple back onto his bed. It’s irresistible, lying on top of each other like this, kissing. His hands are in my hair, then around my back, pulling me closer, holding me closer. I pull at his T-shirt until I get it over his head. Then he takes off my shirt too. When I finally feel his skin against mine, it’s such a relief. This is Trip, this is what he is good at. Everything that happens next is going to make me feel better. I’m creating Nathan’s worst nightmare, and that makes me happy too.

Then he’s gone. He kissing my neck and then he’s not. He’s sitting back, his hand on my stomach, holding me away. I put my hand over his to move it and lean in to kiss him.

“Damn it, Aubrey.” Trip turns his head. He puts his hand back on my stomach, firmer this time. “Stop for a
second. Tell me what this is about.”

“I don’t have to tell
you
, of all people, what
this
is about.”

“Tell me what’s really going on.” He sits up. My shirt is hanging off the edge of the bed. Trip grabs it but doesn’t toss it to me. Not right away. “Why are you here?”

“I didn’t think I needed a reason to see you.”

“You don’t, but if there is one, it’d be really shitty of you not to tell me.”

I sigh. “Forget it.”

Trip shakes his head. “You came all the way up here on a school night for
this
?” He gestures to us, the messy tangle of half-naked people on his bed.

“No.” I put my shirt back on.

“Then why? What are you doing here, Aubrey?”

There’s this feeling that I should go, that I’m supposed to leave. As angry as I feel right now at Trip for stopping us—something I didn’t even think he was capable of doing—I can’t make myself move. I don’t want to. Did I want to be with him because I needed proof there was someone in the world who didn’t want Shelby after they’d been with me? Did I want to be with him because I knew it would hurt Nathan? Did I want to remind him of all the reasons I was better than Jill? Yes. I wanted all those things, but before those thoughts entered my head, I came up here for one simple reason.

“I just needed a friend.”

He breathes out a quick, defeated sigh, and pulls me in,
wrapping his arms all the way around me in a hug. I’d always thought Trip was safe because of the theories. But I was wrong. What if some people don’t want to be erased or detached just as much as they don’t want to feel pressure or confinement? What if the theories were never what brought people to us? What if there’s something else inexplicable that puts people in our lives and keeps them there?

I wonder if Shelby has ever considered this possibility.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Trip whispers.

I stare at him. He holds the back of my head carefully, like he knows about the strain that comes from tilting my head to look at him when we’re this close.

I tell him everything: about Nathan and Shelby, about all the ways I’ve lied to him and to myself. I even admit that I wanted to hook up with him to chase away the pain of what Nathan and Shelby did, and to make myself feel like less of a reject.

And I’m crying. Just a few tears at first, but with every admission, I lose more and more control. Trip rubs my back as I let it all out. Embarrassing sobs that can’t be blamed on alcohol heave out of me. It’s breaking all the rules to cry like this in front of a guy, about a guy, but somehow that fact makes it feel right.

A
few hours later, when Trip is walking with me to my car, I get a phone call from Nathan. I ignore it.

“You sure you don’t want to answer that?” Trip says, nodding toward my phone. Trip insisted on driving me home. He made some joke about how it was too late and I was too emotional, though I’m not sure he was really kidding. He opens the passenger door for me. My phone rings again as we get in. Trip’s eyebrows go up. “Don’t you think you should find out what you’re actually dealing with?”

I already know what I’m dealing with.

The phone stops ringing and beeps to signal a voice mail. I listen to it because Trip has a point, and at least this way I won’t have to talk back. Trip puts his hand on my shoulder and rubs. He looks out the window.

It’s strange, but I don’t feel much relief as I listen to Nathan tell me that Shelby’s not pregnant and stumble over an apology about our fight this afternoon. Nathan doesn’t sound very relieved either, though I’m sure he is. His voice is lifeless. Maybe he knows there’s no going back. This pain was coming for us anyway.

“She’s not pregnant,” I tell Trip.

He turns to look at me, takes a moment to examine my face. He opens his mouth and I wait for him to tell me exactly what I need to hear, but he’s quiet. Maybe for once he doesn’t know what to say. Or maybe he knows there isn’t anything he can say. I finally feel a rush of relief.

We drive off into the dusk, and the night catches us before we make it back.

Ten minutes from my house Trip says, “I don’t know why you thought you could control anything.”

And I get what he’s saying to me, I really do, but still, there must be some things in life that we want and actually get to have. It’s hard for me to accept that there aren’t. Especially when I’ve got an acceptance letter to Barron hanging on my wall, and Trip sitting right beside me.

WHEN WE ARRIVE at my house a little after ten, my mother insists that Trip stay and eat something. When he’s done eating the tuna casserole she reheated for him, she insists that it’s too late for him to make his brother or his father come get him, and much too late to take the bus back to school tonight—which was his original plan.

“Aubrey, help me make up the bed in the guest room,” she says. “You’ll stay here tonight, Trip, and tomorrow I’ll buy you a bus ticket. I won’t take no for an answer.”

But Trip argues with her about the bus ticket anyway. Just enough to show he’s uncomfortable taking her money. In the end, she wins. As usual.

“Gregory, Jason, show Trip how to play your game.”

Being handed over to my brothers is the highest form of praise or approval a boy can get from my mother. Trip smiles as he joins them, like he knows this.
Trip is a good guy; he drove your sister home because it was late; this is the kind of guy you should grow up to be
—this is what she’s saying. Finally, he’s acting like the kind of guy she’d like me to date.

It makes me wonder if I’m the type of girl anyone should grow up to be. I used to be so sure that I was.

My mother tosses me the edge of the white fitted sheet in our beige guest room, and I fit it over the corner of the mattress. It’s so obviously neutral in here that I think it’s kind of insulting—the way the room is trying
so hard not to offend anyone.

“So do you want to tell me what’s going on?” she asks.

I’m an open book. Everyone can read me. Trip knew there was a messed-up reason I kissed him. And now my mother knows that something is going on.

“Not really.”

“I don’t think you have a choice, Aubrey.” She tugs the sheet and it falls out of my loose grip—as if to remind me who really holds the power in this situation. “Why did you drive all the way to State?”

“It’s only an hour away.”

“Aubrey.”

“I just needed to see him.” A half-truth.

“And why is that?”

“Trip is my best friend.”

But this doesn’t calm her. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “That boy is not your best friend.”

“Okay.”
I roll my eyes because
what does she know?

“Oh, don’t
okay
me. I’m not completely ignorant, Aubrey, come on,” she whispers, which makes her sound only more urgent. “Tell me what’s going on! I thought you were seeing Nathan.”

“I’m not seeing Nathan.” I tuck in the sheet. I concentrate on smoothing the edges. I had no idea I would feel so awful just saying his name. This sheet, its creases, the way it lies against the mattress, is all I want to think about.

“Well, that’s probably best, given that your ex-boyfriend just drove you home from his
dorm room
.” She says dorm room like it’s a dirty word.

“Mom . . .” I’m about to explain to her that Trip was never my boyfriend. That technically, neither was Nathan. But I can’t think of a way to do it that will make sense to her.

This won’t look good on paper. I stumbled upon my boyfriend and my best friend about to meet up to find out if the night they had unsafe sex resulted in a pregnancy. Even if I tried to explain that I’d been wrong anyway to think Nathan would last beyond high school, and that I hadn’t expected him to stay away from other girls, even Shelby, my mom would still only hear the betrayal. She wouldn’t be able to see past my hurt, and then I would have to face it again too. And I can’t bear to do that anymore tonight.

She walks into the linen closet. This conversation is not going to slow down her bed-making momentum.

“Well?” she says. “What happened? What happened with Nathan?”

It’s easier to give her the unfiltered truth with her back turned like this. I take a deep breath.

“Nathan thought he got someone pregnant.”

I think of Shelby standing outside my front door, spraying herself frantically with aerosol so my mother wouldn’t smell cigarette smoke on her, and decide to
leave her name out. “But it was a false alarm. I went to see Trip because I needed someone to talk to. Someone who might understand.”

Her face is uneven, drained, worried, when she comes out of the closet. She’s holding mismatching pillowcases.

“Aubrey—”

I hold up my hand and she stops talking, but it looks like it takes great restraint. I feel a twinge of guilt, having so much I haven’t told her. And I feel worse for telling her about this at all, sad she has to hear it. “I’m sorry. I just can’t talk about it anymore.”

She nods. “And Trip understands because of what Zane went through?”

“Trip understands because he understands me.” It’s true, and I don’t know when it became the truth—or if it’s always been the truth. There’s still a part of me that remembers when I thought there were never two people more alike than Nathan and me, and that we understood each other because we understood ourselves. But I don’t know if we really did or we just understood the people we thought we were, the people we wanted to be.

She nods again and something passes over her face. Relief, maybe. “I’m glad you have someone to talk to,” she says, but I know she’s not totally comforted, because that night Trip falls asleep on two different pillowcases: one beige, one white.